Egypt: African migrants’ murder on border reveals growing problem

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Egypt: African migrants’ murder on border reveals growing problem

Bikya Masr

10 September 2009

Is Israel the only hope for Egypt's Africans? -T.A.
CAIRO: At least four Ethiopians were killed and three others were in serious condition as of Wednesday evening, reports revealed from al-Arish, some 30 minutes from the Egypt-Gaza border. They had been shot dead by Egyptian border security after they attempted to cross the largely unprotected Sinai border into Israel.

The killings are the deadliest reported incident on the border and come only days before Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is expected to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Cairo on Sunday.

International rights groups have been up in arms over the increasing violence along the border in the past two years.

“Enough is enough. This incident is further proof, if any should be needed, that the Egyptian authorities have yet to direct their forces on how to avoid killing migrants trying to cross the border,” said Malcolm Smart, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Amnesty International. “They must assert greater control over their forces at the border and take away their license to kill.”

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a detailed report last year that criticized the Egyptian government’s “shoot-to-stop” policy that has left scores of Africans dead.

Since May, Egypt has killed at least 12 Africans along the border and an end to the killings seems as distant as ever.

The Egyptian government claims the use of force along the lengthy desert border in the Sinai Peninsula is part of its counter terror strategy against smuggling, but HRW said in its 90-page report published last year, titled “Sinai Perils: Risks to Migrants, Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Egypt and Israel,” that the migrants killed on the 266-kilometer (130-mile) border pose no threat to the border guards that have opened fire.
Israel has long called on Cairo to do more in inhibiting the movement of people across their border, but HRW was critical of the Jewish state, saying that potential asylum-seekers should not be immediately returned to Egypt where they could face deportation to nations with well-documented human rights violations.

“Both Egypt and Israel have responded to this cross-border flow with policies that violate fundamental rights,” said the report.

In Israel, many activists have started questioning the government’s policy of return, suggesting that as Jews those seeking a reprieve from genocide should be given the opportunity to remain.

The most recent incident, with Ethiopian migrants, has highlighted the difficult lives that African refugees often find in Egypt.

Many Africans in Cairo boast of friends who have succeeded in making the border gauntlet into Israel. Ahmed admits that despite turning back from his own plans to cross into Israel, he knows that success in the Jewish state can be a reality.

“I have a number of friends who have told me of the joy they are having in Israel, where they work and have a life again,” says Somali refugee Ali Ahmed.

But that hope has been dashed for dozens of Africans who have been met with bullets.

One of the reasons Africans living in Egypt seek Israel is the poor conditions they experience in the country. Ranging from unemployment, racism and lack of funds, the Africans are distraught at their lives, unable to find a niche in Egypt.

Many of Egypt’s tens of thousands of refugees are Sudanese. Since 2003, nearly all the Sudanese coming into the North African nation are from the war-torn Western Sudan region of Darfur, but thousands of other Africans, including a few thousands from Somalia have attempted to make Egypt their temporary residence.

Tawer Ali, Secretary-General at the Cairo-based New Sudan Research and Strategic Studies Center and community leader in the refugee dominated town Arba’a wa Nos(Four and a Half), believes that the situation facing the refugee population in Egypt has driven many to seek a better life in Israel.

“Refugees are very frustrated with the formalities of the UNHCR [because] they are slow moving. Some of them [refugees] have had eight years here, some seven years,” Ali, a refugee himself, told Bikya Masr.

The UNHCR has officially stopped granting refugee status as per a request from the Egyptian government, which has made the living situation extremely difficult for Africans. Without UN refugee status, the likelihood of gaining asylum in a third nation is becoming almost nonexistent for thousands of refugees.

“People are losing hope,” began Abdullahi Osman, a Somali refugee and head of the NGO SOMO, “I have gone to a number of embassies with people to try an get them resettled, but without the proper documentation, many countries are not willing to give people asylum. It is frustrating.”

“Without a place to call home, many have decided to find a way to get to Israel to start over.”

Israeli Government Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

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The Israeli government has launched a television and Internet advertising campaign urging Israelis to inform on Jewish friends and relatives abroad who may be in danger of marrying non-Jews.

The advertisements, employing what the Israeli media described as "scare tactics," are designed to stop assimilation through intermarriage among young Diaspora Jews by encouraging their move to Israel.

The campaign, which cost $800,000, was created in response to reports that half of all Jews outside Israel marry non-Jews. It is just one of several initiatives by the Israeli state and private organizations to try to increase the size of Israel's Jewish population.

According to one ad, voiced over by one of the country's leading news anchors, assimilation is "a strategic national threat," warning: "More than 50 percent of Diaspora youth assimilate and are lost to us."

Adam Keller, of Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group, said this was a reference both to a general fear in Israel that the Jewish people may one day disappear through assimilation and to a more specific concern that, if it is to survive, Israel must recruit more Jews to its "demographic war" against Palestinians.

The issue of assimilation has been thrust into the limelight by a series of surveys over several years carried out by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, a think tank established in Jerusalem in 2002 comprising leading Israeli and Diaspora officials.

The institute's research has shown that Israel is the only country in the world with a significant Jewish population not decreasing in size. The decline elsewhere is ascribed both to low birth rates and to widespread intermarriage.

According to the institute, about half of all Jews in Western Europe and the United States assimilate by intermarrying, while the figure for the former Soviet Jewry is reported to reach 80 percent.

Israel, whose Jewish population of 5.6 million accounts for 41 percent of worldwide Jewry, has obstructed intermarriage between its Jewish and Arab citizens by refusing to recognize such marriages unless they are performed abroad.

The advertising campaign is directed particularly at Jews in the United States and Canada, whose combined 5.7 million Jews constitute the world's largest Jewish population. Most belong to the liberal Reform stream of Judaism that, unlike Orthodoxy, does not oppose intermarriage.

One-third of Jews in the Diaspora are believed to have relatives in Israel.

According to the campaign's organizers, more than 200 Israelis rang a hot line to report names of Jews living abroad after the first TV advertisement was run on Wednesday. Callers left details of e-mail addresses and Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The 30-second clip featured a series of missing-persons posters on street corners, in subways and on telephone boxes showing images of Jewish youths above the word "Lost" in different languages. A voiceover asks anyone who "knows a young Jew living abroad" to call the hot line: "Together, we will strengthen their connection to Israel, so that we don't lose them."

The campaign supports a government-backed program, Masa, that subsidizes stays and courses in Israel of up to one year in a bid to persuade Jews to immigrate and become citizens. About 8,000 Diaspora Jews attend its program each year.

The government has been trying to develop Masa alongside a rival program, Birthright Israel, which brings nearly 20,000 Diaspora youngsters to Israel each year on sponsored 10-day trips to meet Israeli soldiers and visit sites in Israel and the West Bank that are promoted as important to the Jewish people.

Although Birthright is regarded as useful in encouraging a positive image of Israel, officials fear it has only a limited effect on attracting its mainly North American participants to move to Israel. Many regard it as an all-paid holiday.

Differences in the approach of the two programs were underlined in July when a Birthright director, Shlomo Lifshittz, resigned and moved to Masa after telling the Israeli media he had been forbidden from urging Birthright participants to migrate to Israel and shun intermarriage.

In launching the campaign, Masa's chief executive, Ayelet Shilo-Tamir, warned that assimilation worldwide was putting Jews "on the verge of negative growth."

Masa officials said young Jews who participate in their projects strengthened their Jewish identity and were more likely to become politically and socially active on behalf of Israel-related issues.

The campaign quickly provoked a storm of debate on Jewish blogs, especially in the United States, with some terming it "divisive" and an insult to Jewish offspring of intermarriage. A link to Masa's "Lost" campaign had been dropped from the front page of its Web site yesterday, possibly in response to the backlash.

The campaign will probably strike a chord in Israel, however, where a poll in 2007 found that 46 percent of Israeli Jews believed all Jews should live in Israel because it was "the only way Israel and the Jewish people will be strengthened."

That position has been echoed by Israel's leaders, although most have been careful not to upset the delicate balance of relations with Diaspora communities.

Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was widely regarded as having overstepped those bounds in 2004 during a visit to France when he urged French Jews to come to Israel because France was experiencing "the spread of the wildest anti-Semitism."

Sharon had been outspoken in wanting 1 million Jews to immigrate to Israel to counter a "demographic threat" from the rapid growth of the Palestinian populations in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Numerical parity between Jews and Palestinians living in the region is expected to be reached within a decade.

That theme has been picked up by his successors, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu.

There is growing concern in Israel that immigration rates have steadily declined since a large wave of 1 million Jews arrived from the former Soviet Union through the 1990s. The absorption figure for last year -- 16,500 -- was the lowest since the 1980s. It is also believed that there is a growing trend of better-off Jews leaving Israel to live abroad, although figures are not publicized.

Keller, of Gush Shalom, said few Jews in the United States or Europe, the main target of the campaign, needed to come to Israel for material reasons.

"They come from ideological motives, and many of them are right-wing nationalists who can be encouraged to settle in the West Bank."

The Israeli government and various organizations subsidize the immigration of Diaspora Jews to Israel.

Last year, the Jewish Agency handed over responsibility for locating new immigrants to Nefesh B'Nefesh, a private organization that promotes on its Web site a dozen settlements in the West Bank, including hard-line communities such as Kedumim, near Nablus, and Efrat, near Bethlehem.

"Last week, Israeli TV showed a group of immigrants arriving in Israel to go to Efrat," Keller said. "They were shown being greeted at the airport by a large clapping crowds of Israelis waving flags in support."

SOMALIA: Street children "becoming the new gangsters"

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HARGEISA, 10 September 2009 (IRIN) - The number of street children in Hargeisa, capital of secessionist Somaliland, is on the rise as more Ethiopian children cross the border in search of a better life.

The immigrant children are adding to the burden of local street children, most of whom have been forced on to the streets by drought and insecurity within Somaliland and further south, in Somalia.

“You can see old women accompanying about 20 children, of different ages, crossing the border into Somaliland from Ethiopia. These women may be their grandmothers, aunts or mothers,” Khadar Nour, chairman of the Hargeisa Child Protection Network (HCPN), told IRIN.

"The children, who are mainly from the Oromo [region of Ethiopia], beg in the streets of Hargeisa with their mothers," Nour said. Some work as shoe shiners, sending their earnings to relatives in Ethiopia.

Hargeisa is also a popular transit point for those seeking to travel further. “About 100 to 200 immigrant children cross the border from Ethiopia into Somaliland [annually] on their way to [the self-declared autonomous region of] Puntland, or to Yemen,” he said.

Poverty and family break-ups have also fuelled the rise in numbers. There are about 3,000 children, most of them boys between five and 18, living on Hargeisa's streets.
Crime threat


With the rising numbers, officials are concerned about an upsurge in crime. “They [the street children] are becoming a threat to the town's stability,” said Nour.

“When they grow up, they still find themselves living in difficult conditions; it is for this reason that they grab mobile phones."

Consequently, a number of the children are now in conflict with the law. In August, Nour said, a 16-year-old was sentenced to death in a Berbera regional court after being found guilty of murder.

Photo: Mohamed Amin Jibril/IRIN
A young boy makes a living polishing shoes on the streets of Hargeisa, Somaliland (file photo): Immigrant children are working in Hargeisa to support their families

"The grown-up street children have become the new gangsters," Mohamed Ismail Hirsi, Hargeisa's Central Police Station commander, told IRIN.

"In the last 72 hours, we have arrested more than 30 street children who have committed crimes such as stealing mobile phones in different parts of the town."

In the past two years, some 5,000 knives and other weapons, which are commonly used in robberies, have been recovered from the street children, prompting calls for more focused interventions.

"People say good words in workshops, but few interventions for street children have been [implemented]," said Nour of HCPN, which recently started providing food and education support for the children.

Once arrested, the children are charged as adults because a 2008 juvenile justice law has yet to be implemented.

Glue sniffing

The children living rough are turning to drugs. "I use glue because when first I came to the streets I saw my friends sniffing it," Ahmed Omar, 12, told IRIN. "Whenever I use it, I am able to survive a difficult situation."

The lack of a family support system also means more children may end up on the streets, as Abdi-Qani Ahmed’s experience illustrates. "When my mother and father divorced, there was no one left to take care of me," Ahmed, 11, said. "I used to get my food from restaurants in Hargeisa where I fed on leftovers.”

During Ramadan, however, few if any restaurants are open. "I have to wait to see if someone gives me something to eat or not," he said.

Living on the streets puts the children at risk of abuse from other street children as well as strangers. For protection, the children often seek refuge outside the police station at night.

Kenenisa Bekele plans to invest his IAAF jackpot in Ethiopia

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According to Addis Fortune magazine, Kenenisa Bekele has specific plans on how he will spend his share of the jackpot earned in the IAAF Golden League events. Bekele won all six of his events in the Golden League series, which earned him a $333,333 check. The jackpot is $1 million, but the total was divided among three athletes who won their events -- Bekele, sprinter Sanya Richards and pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva.

Elshadai Negash at Addis Fortune has a lengthy look at Bekele's earnings over the year, and how one of the greatest distance runners of all time earns significantly less than other superstar athletes. According to Negash, Bekele will earn approximately $1.141 million dollars in 2009, including the IAAF jackpot and other appearance fees and prizes.

Bekele told Addis Fortune that he plans to invest the money in several projects he is working on, saying: “I am building a hotel and a modern athletics centre. These two projects need a total investment of about 15 million dollars. These prizes will go towards that.” Bekele also acknowledges that world-class runners still earn significantly less than athletes in other sports.

Kenenisa Bekele has certainly had an amazing season, and he tells the Team Ethiopia website that he has some special people to thank for his victories. Number one on his list? His wife, Danawit Gebregziabher. He tells the site, "She gives me psychological and morale support. Sometimes you need to be told that you are the best in the world and that no one will beat you." He also credits his manager, brother, father-in-law and physio with helping him finish out an incredible season.

Ethiopia opposition says its members being jailed

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By Barry Malone

ADDIS ABABA, Sept 10 (Reuters) - A coalition of opposition parties accused the Ethiopian authorities on Thursday of arresting some of its members on trumped up charges to stop them running in an election scheduled for next May.

Eight parties have allied under the banner of the Forum for Democratic Dialogue in Ethiopia (FDDE) to contest the 2010 polls, which analysts say the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) is likely to win.

Opposition figures say they have been hamstrung by a campaign of arrests and intimidation. The EPRDF denies it.

"Ruling party cadres throughout the country are jailing our potential candidates on false charges," Bulcha Demeksa, leader of the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement, one of the parties in the opposition coalition, told reporters in Addis Ababa.

"We want to negotiate with the government and ask them to stop arresting and jailing our potential candidates."

The parties that make up the alliance hold just 80 of parliament's 547 seats, but still represent the most significant opposition to a government that is a close ally of Washington.

Bereket Simon, the Ethiopian government's head of information, told Reuters that since none of the parties had yet named their candidates, the opposition's claims were baseless. "Nobody is being jailed for being a politician," he said.



TALKS WALK-OUT

Ethiopia's last elections in 2005 were hailed as the country's first fully democratic polls, but they ended in bloodshed after the government declared victory and the opposition said the result had been rigged. Police and soldiers killed about 200 people who took to the streets in protest.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi accused the demonstrators of trying to topple his government, and more than 100 opposition leaders, journalists and aid workers were later jailed.

Those detainees were pardoned and freed in 2007, but rights groups say the government is cracking down on dissent again. One opposition party leader is in jail and a group of former military officers have been convicted of plotting to oust Meles.

Meles has set up talks with the opposition about drawing up a code of conduct for next year. But the FDDE said on Thursday that its members had walked out of discussions.

"The code of conduct assumes a context where there will be independent administration of elections, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, no intervention by security forces," said Seye Abraha, a former defence minister who is now in the FDDE.

"We want these issues discussed alongside the code of conduct, not assumed."

Bereket dismissed FDDE claims the code was undemocratic: "This code of conduct is being drawn up by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, not the Ethiopian government ... To walk away from it is disastrous and is to walk away from democracy." (Editing by Daniel Wallis

Ethiopia: Green shoots of optimism

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When I first went to Ethiopia I only knew three things about the country.

It’s famous for marathon runners, it suffers from periodic famines (or at least it did when I was growing up), and its leader used to be Emperor Haile Selassie, who was made into a God by the Rastafarians in Jamaica, believing he embodied Christ’s second coming.

Now, at least, I know something about its history.

But what caused the famine that was on our European TVs in 1984-85 and brought about Band Aid and Live Aid? Three things: poverty, war and drought.

Tigray was the base from which the 17-year civil war was launched against the communist government of Mengistu and the Derg (military junta). The other region to rebel was Eritrea, which got independence in 1994.

Tigray, meanwhile, has supplied the Ethiopian government with many members, including its Prime Minister, who has won the last three elections.

The war is over, and seventeen years on the country seems to be building its capitalist economy – Mekelle has a shop selling organic Tigrayan honey, for example.

Drought, however, is an annual problem. It only rains for three months and estimates say up to a million people in Tigray are still affected each year. This year’s rain has been small.

But there are some communities working together to conserve water in the highlands, build irrigation channels and reservoirs, dig springs, and produce crops.

Once water is conserved, there are more harvests each year, which means more money and more possibility of young people continuing their education, and not having to turn to the streets.

But such projects, although successful in themselves, can make only small incursions into the tyrannous regime of drought. It is hoped that the Ethiopian government will learn from them and take these successes onto a grander scale.

And when that learning is truly widespread, indigenous trees will return in numbers, and the natural balance will take over again. Or so it is hoped. If climate change, war or any other natural or manmade disaster doesn’t wipe it out first.

It’s precarious, but there is some hope. Bob Geldof and the rest of them sang: “Where nothing ever grows, no rains or rivers flow.” Not true in a few places I visited, and I have the photos to prove it.

So that only leaves poverty. Tekeste, aged somewhere around 13 to 15, is one of the children at the project where I’ve worked for the last month and a half. Last week he lost his mother.

It was difficult to find out what had been wrong with her – the other children said it was cancer and her face had been disfigured with large swellings.

Tekeste had already lost his father, so he will probably have to leave the project and full-time education and look for work to help support himself and his family.

These statements are understood with little or no passion, it seems. Perhpas, he thinks he’s had his chance, and two years of education is better than none.

There are hundreds of other kids the same as him who don’t even get that, including his siblings. It’s just one of those things.

A billboard in Mekelle for the imaginatively named ‘Magic Carpet School’, says they will ‘quench the thirst for knowledge’ of the young people of Mekelle.

Every person I met seemed to be still in education, whatever their age – high school, kindergarten, university – and desperate to learn. There was great optimism and hard work wherever I went.

OK, there are still beggars and street-children, and electricity only on alternate days, and it will take continued years of peace and development to make a difference.

And it’s true that in that time, a lot of people will not see much change in their personal difficulties. There are, however, some green shoots to be optimistic about.

Posted by GedN

Posted by GedN

Ethiopian Opposition Cries Foul as Campaign Season Opens

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By Peter Heinlein
Addis Ababa
10 September 2009

Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi, (file photo)

Eight Ethiopian opposition parties and two prominent independent politicians are joining forces to try to unseat Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's government in next year's elections. But the coalition is complaining they have no chance under current rules.

Ethiopia's 2010 election campaign roared to life this week as the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front chose Prime Minister Meles as its leader for another five years. The EPRDF has held power since its forerunner, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front ousted a Marxist dictator in a bloodless coup 18 years ago.

Most political analysts say the decision of the ruling party's central committee practically ensures Mr. Meles will remain in office through 2015.

But a collection of opposition groups, joined by two of Mr. Meles' former close allies, is demanding changes in the electoral rules to ensure the vote is fair. The coalition, calling itself the Forum for Democratic Dialogue, is asking for measures to ensure the impartiality of the electoral commission, greater access to the state-run media, and the presence of international observers.

Beyene Petros leads one faction of the Forum. He points to local council elections held last year, in which opposition candidates won only three of more than 3.5 million contested seats, as evidence of the lack of a level playing field.

"We have [the] bitter experience of last year's local and bi-elections where the opposition parties were totally blocked from fielding candidates, and doing their constitutional privilege of conducting campaign within the population. So we have challenged [the] ruling party to negotiate the upcoming electoral landscape," he said.

Another Forum member, Bulcha Demeksa, a leader of a party representing Ethiopia's largest ethnic group, the Oromos, said EPRDF officials are arresting opposition politicians and producing, what he says are, fake documents linking them to outlawed Oromo rebel groups.

"EPRDF cadres ... simply find all kinds of excuses to put people in jail. One of the most interesting ways is when they go to search the house of a potential candidate, they take with them a piece of paper that incriminates the gentleman they are going to search. And that becomes the basis of incrimination. We are asking the government, please, if you are going to conduct free and fair election, do not do this," he said.

Negasso Gidada was once part of the the EPRDF inner circle. He was Ethiopia's first president under the current constitution, but was ousted in 2001 and is now an independent member of parliament. He says revolutionary democracy is a cover for dictatorship.

"The major issue is the ideology which EPRDF follows. EPRDF from its name is a so-called revolutionary democracy, which is actually a concept of Marxist-Leninist, which was formulated by Lenin, is following that. It is a one party dictatorship ... and our forum is totally against this and is a liberal democratic, free-market oriented policy," he said.

EPRDF spokesman Hailemariam Dessalegn scoffed at Negasso's charges, saying his record as president had shown him to be neither a liberal nor a democrat. He said the ruling party is committed to free-market economic principles, but said the government has had to intervene in cases where markets have failed.

Hailemariam also rejected charges that election rules favor the ruling party. He said all parties in parliament had approved the members of the National Election Board. And he denied any intimidation of potential candidates is taking place.

A round of talks between the ruling party and opposition groups is set for Saturday on a code of conduct for the elections. Members of the Forum for Democratic Dialogue say they will not participate unless the talks are broadened to include electoral fairness issues.

Ruling party spokesman Hailemarian says the talks will go on with or without the Forum. He says the Forum represents only a handful of Ethiopia's 91 registered opposition parties.

Detained: Three days in Ethiopia

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On an early July morning in Awwadaay, Ethiopia, senior Emma McCormick was sick and contemplating the cancellation of her morning's English class. As she lay on her bed in the eastern part of the country where she and six other GW students were volunteering for the summer, she heard a knock at the gate.

Knowing that her host mother was an important figure in the town and often received visitors, McCormick never paused to wonder who might have knocked.

Greeting her at the door were men with assault rifles.

Three Ethiopian military police officers stood in front of her, commanding McCormick to gather all her belongings - she was being detained.

Outside, a military bus decked with more soldiers waited, and other volunteers that McCormick had come to Ethiopia to teach English with were there as well. A 10-hour journey to the country's capital, three days of detainment, and, finally, a return flight, lay ahead.

McCormick and the other GW students were among 15 Americans detained in and deported from Ethiopia this summer, after volunteering as part of Learning Enterprises - a nonprofit, U.S.-based and student-run organization dedicated to sending college students to teach English to children in developing areas around the world.

Field, jail, or hotel

After rounding up the volunteers in McCormick's town, the soldiers continued to round up the volunteers stationed in the towns of Haramaya, Gobboo, Chelenqo and Deder, all in eastern Ethiopia, and not far from the Somalian border.

Having spent the night in a village next to that of his host family, sophomore Tim Savoy woke up to a call demanding he return to his original place of stay, Chelenqo - where the Ethiopian police were already waiting.

Savoy remembers no one having "any idea, none whatsoever" as to the reason of their arrest. That includes the LE staff member that was detained along with the volunteers.

Stripped of their cell phones, their bags searched, and escorted by Ethiopian soldiers, the volunteers spent the next 10 hours traveling to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, where they were questioned at the city's main immigration center.

"(The soldiers) declined to tell us anything," McCormick said. "It's like they couldn't say anything, or like they didn't know of anything to say."

Sophomore Chelsea Millar had already been in detainment for six hours at a local police station in her town before joining the others for the 10-hour ride.

"The whole (drive) we were under police observation with guns, AK-47s, we weren't fed," Millar said.

For the next two days, the students were given the option of sleeping in fields or jail for the night, or paying for their own hotels.

While in custody, the volunteers were prohibited from calling their families or even the U.S. Embassy.

"I tried to sneak away and call home, tell them to call the embassy," Savoy said, but an officer followed him without his knowledge, "ripped the phone out of the wall," and told him that outside communication was not allowed.

Once in Addis Ababa, their passports were confiscated and the volunteers were each questioned separately, and as the list of volunteers to be interrogated grew shorter, the inventory of the possible reasons for their detainment grew longer.

According to the students interviewed, reasons for their detainment ranged from, at first, being a possible security threat to having the wrong visa.

"By the time they got around to me, they had formed this idea that... we weren't there to start a revolution, weren't teaching political propaganda. They decided to deport us on a technicality regarding our visas," Millar said.

The students said Ethiopian government officials informed them that their tourist visas were illegal because they were teaching English, a service, which, under a tourist visa, was not permissible. Despite the fact that some of the students did have business visas, the Ethiopian officials were deaf to the claims that no money was being exchanged.

Having had their visas revoked, the government officials ushered them to the airport, where the volunteers remained without their passports.

Finally, only hours before some of their flights were set to take off, the volunteers spied the sight that McCormick called "the best moment of my life."

U.S. Embassy officials finally appeared at the scene, carrying with them the volunteers' passports.

"I don't think anyone in that room had been so overjoyed, so overwhelmed and over-enthusiastic over anything as when we saw the people from the embassy," Millar said. After being under police supervision for 60 hours, "it was just an awesome feeling to be able to have some freedom back."

What the embassy never knew

The embassy and the participants' parents had been aware of the situation from the day they were first detained. The students would later learn that part of their problems stemmed from the fact that LE never required them to register with the U.S. Embassy before they traveled to Ethiopia.

The organization recommends students register with the U.S. Embassy before entering the country, but does not require it, Director of Programming Katrina Shankland said.

"This is completely unprecedented," Shankland said. "The prior two summers of our involvement (in Ethiopia) had absolutely no problem. Of course we're baffled and a little bit shocked but we're happy the participants are home."

Millar said that when embassy officials came to their aid, they told the participants that if they had informed the U.S. officials of where they were planning on working, they would have been warned about going there.

"The area we were in was closer to the Somalian side, it was just an area of the country we weren't necessarily supposed to be in," Millar said. "That was something that we didn't even realize when we had left."

Specific information about the incident cannot be divulged because of privacy laws, State Department spokesperson Laura Tischler said. Information and travel warnings about the region are on the State Department's Web site, she said.

The site reminds American citizens that the U.S. Embassy strongly discourages travel to Ethiopia's Somali region. The students were in the Oromiya region, where the Web site states that armed insurgent groups operate.

"Now after coming back I've looked in books that talk about traveling to Ethiopia and in those books they say making sure you have the right visa," Millar said.

Masked by speculation and confusion, the true nature of the July arrest still remains without official Ethiopian explanation. Neither Ethiopian Embassy in D.C. nor the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia returned multiple requests for comment.

After being told that they had been followed for an extended period of time without their knowledge - a surprise that would shock them over a month after the arrest - Savoy and McCormick both suspected the true motive of their arrest was political.

Millar said that LE's country coordinator in Ethiopia, Mahdi Ibrahim, is a member of the Oromo, a minority group. In the past, she said, he had been a political activist and speaker for the Oromo people, who live in the villages where the volunteers were working. Shankland said she could not confirm whether or not Ibrahim had worked as an activist.

"It makes sense," Savoy said. "They said it was a security threat, then a wrong visa... but they would not have brought guns if it was something that minor."

Although absolutely frustrated, the students said their experience, while shorter than intended, was worth the distress.

"I don't necessarily hold LE accountable," Millar said. "It's a new organization and it's student-run. They weren't really ready to handle it. It's a learning experience for them. Now they know."

Amnesty to Egypt: Stop shooting at refugees on Israeli border

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Human rights group, Amnesty International, called upon Egypt to restrain its defense forces station along with the border with Israel so that they will not shoot African refugees trying to cross the border.


Amnesty's statement follows the fatal shooting of four Ethiopian citizens Wednesday along the border with Israel. Amnesty Israel reported, "The unbridled violence Egypt shows is a result of pressure exerted by Israel." (Ynet)

Republic of Hunger, Ethiopia heading for another famine

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A quarter century after a million Ethiopians died in the great hunger of 1984-85, the country is heading into another famine. The spring rains failed, and the summer rains were three weeks late. But why is famine stalking Ethiopia again?

The Ethiopian government is authoritarian but isn't bad or incompetent. It gives fertilizer to the farmers and teaches best practices. By the late 1990s, Ethiopia was self-sufficient in food in good years, and the government had created a strategic food reserve for the bad years.

At present infant deaths are already over two per 10,000 per day in Somali, the worst hit region in Ethiopia (Four per day counts as full-scale famine). Country-wide 20% of the population already depends on the dwindling flow of foreign aid, and it will get worse for many months yet. So what have the Ethiopians done wrong?

The real answer is that they have had too many babies. Ethiopia's population at the time of the last famine was 40 million. Twenty-five years later, it is 80 million. You can do everything else right - give your farmers new tools and skills, fight erosion, create food reserves - but if you don't control the population, you are just spitting into the wind.

Even if the coming famine kills a million people, the population will keep growing. So the next famine, 10-15 years from now, will hit a country of a 100 million people trying to make a living from farming on land where only 40 million faced starvation in the 1980s. The whole question of population, instead of being central to the debate about development, food and climate change, has been put on ice. At its current rate of growth, Ethiopia's population will double again in just 32 years. Famine will become normal in Ethiopia well before that. No combination of wise domestic policies and no amount of foreign aid can stop it.

History is unfair. Conversations between those who got lucky and those left holding the other end of the stick are awkward. But we cannot go on ignoring the elephant in the room. We have to start talking about population again.