Ethiopian rebels deny that their aim is to take over the capital

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Ethiopian rebels deny that their aim is to take over the capital | Africanews

Ethiopian rebels, TPLF, deny that their presence in the capital, Addis Ababa, would cause a bloodbath

Source: Africanews | Latest breaking news, daily news and African news from Africa

[HRW] Nairobi -- The Ethiopian government and Tigray regional authorities should protect people and property at risk from the fighting, Human Rights Watch said today. Amid credible reports of increasing casualties, the authorities on both sides should facilitate access for humanitarian groups, stop interrupting essential services, and immediately restore communication services in the region.

Morocco, about one-tenth larger than California, lies across the Strait of Gibraltar on the Mediterranean and looks out on the Atlantic from the northwest shoulder of Africa. Algeria is to the east and Mauritania to the south. On the Atlantic coast there is a fertile plain. The Mediterranean coast is mountainous. The Atlas Mountains, running northeastward from the south to the Algerian frontier, average 11,000 ft (3,353 m) in elevation.

Morocco has been the home of the Berbers since the second millennium B.C. In A.D. 46, Morocco was annexed by Rome as part of the province of Mauritania until the Vandals overran this portion of the declining empire in the 5th century. The Arabs invaded circa 685, bringing Islam. The Berbers joined them in invading Spain in 711, but then they revolted against the Arabs, resenting their secondary status. In 1086, Berbers took control of large areas of Moorish Spain until they were expelled in the 13th century.

The land was rarely unified and was usually ruled by small tribal states. Conflicts between Berbers and Arabs were chronic. Portugal and Spain began invading Morocco, which helped to unify the land in defense. In 1660, Morocco came under the control of the Alawite dynasty. It is a sherif dynasty—descended from the prophet Muhammad—and rules Morocco to this day.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Morocco was one of the Barbary States, the headquarters of pirates who pillaged Mediterranean traders. European powers showed interest in colonizing the country beginning in 1840, and there were frequent clashes with the French and Spanish. Finally, in 1904, France and Spain concluded a secret agreement that divided Morocco into zones of French and Spanish influence, with France controlling almost all of Morocco and Spain controlling the small southwest portion, which became known as Spanish Sahara. Morocco grew into an even greater object of European rivalry by the turn of the century, almost leading to a European war in 1905 when Germany attempted to gain

In particular, the Tigray People's Liberation Front, a regional political organisation that had major dominance over the old revolutionary front, has now emerged as a major political foe to Abiy's Prosperity Party.

As a result, Ethiopia's road to democracy and national elections, which were due to be held in August, is now facing two challenges: a global pandemic, and deteriorating relations between the Tigray regional state and the Prosperity Party, which is in charge of the federal government, and the remaining eight regions and two city administrations.

By holding an election without the supervision of the National Electoral Board, the Tigray People's Liberation Front is undermining Ethiopia's federal constitutional system.

Finally, unless addressed, the deteriorating relations between the federal government and the Tigray region could further unravel Ethiopia's dangerously designed federal system that in any case, is in need of major revision.

For democracy to take root in Ethiopia, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front's defiance to the country's constitutional order must resolved.

Guest Column - The Trump administration's decision to suspend and delay development assistance to Ethiopia over the filling of the new Grand Renaissance Dam (GERD) is misguided and shortsighted. The move will undermine Washington's relations and influence in one of Africa's most significant states.

[Ethiopian Herald] ADDIS ABABA: Ethiopia deserves and should claim payment for ecosystem services from other Nile riparian countries, said Girmachew Addisu Hydrologist and Former Irrigation and Drainage Monitoring Specialist at Abbay Basin Authority.

April 2007 national elections—the country’s first transition from one democratically elected president to another—were marred by widespread allegations of fraud, ballot stuffing, violence, and chaos. Just days before the election, the Supreme Court ruled that the election commission’s decision to remove from the ballot Vice President Atiku Abubakar, a leading candidate and a bitter rival of President Olusegun Obsanjo, was illegal. Ballots were reprinted, but they only showed party symbols rather than the names of candidates. Umaru Yar’Adua, the candidate of the governing party, won the election in a landslide, taking more than 24.6 million votes. Second-place candidate Muhammadu Buhari tallied only about 6 million votes. International observers called the vote flawed and illegitimate. The chief observer for the European Union said the results “cannot be considered to have been credible.” An election tribunal ruled in Feb. 2008 that although the election was indeed flawed, the evidence of rigging was not substantial enough to overturn the election results.

The rebel group in Nigerias oil-producing region, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, declared a cease-fire in September. Since the insurgency broke out in 2004, Nigerias oil production has been significantly reduced, from about 2.5 million barrels a day to 1.5 million.

Deadly violence broke out in July 2009 in northeastern Nigeria between government troops and an obscure fundamentalist sect, Boko Haram, which is opposed to Western education and seeks to have Sharia law implemented throughout the country. The groups name translates to Western education is sinful. As many as 1,000 civilians died in the battles. The fighting began after militants attacked police stations and seemed to be preparing for a pitched religious war against the government. The police, followed by the army, retaliated and unleashed a five-day assault against the sect. The groups leader, Mohammed Yusuf, was killed in the campaign and the group was nearly decimated.

Ethiopia's confirmed Covid-19 cases on Sunday reached 582 after 88 more infections were confirmed, the Ethiopian Ministry of Health said in a statement.

This is so far the highest daily increase in the Horn of Africa country, which on Saturday reported 61 new confirmed Covid-19 cases.

The Ministry of Health said all 88 new Covid-19 cases are Ethiopian nationals – 51 males and 37 females – with their ages ranging between 8 to 75 years.

The Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health also said that 152 patients who tested positive for Covid-19 have so far recovered from the virus.

Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous nation with about 107 million people, confirmed its first case of Covid-19 on March 13.

[ENA] Addis Ababa -- Heavy rainfall above 200 mm is expected in parts of Ethiopia, South Sudan and Kenya in the coming eight days, according to Inter-governmental Authority on Development (IGAD).

[ENA] Addis Ababa -- A new round of tripartite negotiation between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) will resume today, according to Ministry of Water, Irrigation, and Energy.

African leaders have lauded the launch of the continent's first medical supplies platform as the \"jewel in the crown of Pan-African cooperation\".

On Thursday, African Union (AU) chairperson President Cyril Ramaphosa, AU Commission chairperson Moussa Faki and the director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) Dr John Nkengasong held a media briefing, giving an update on the platform.

Zimbabwean businessman Strive Masiyiwa, who was appointed as the AU special envoy leading global mobilisation of medical test kits and protective equipment for the continent this month, gave a brief presentation of how the Africa medical supplies platform would operate.

Vera Songwe, the executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, said the platform was initially developed to assist with maternal and childcare in a bid to connect mothers to women pharmaceutical producers on the continent as big pharmaceutical companies refuse to deliver to small islands with ports that are seen as too small.

The Africa CDC director said the organisation regularly engaged with African countries seeking data on the spread of the pandemic, and the approach was to emphasise cooperation and the sharing of information in a timely fashion.

Cindy Lou Courville is an American diplomat and expert on Africa. Born in Opelousas, Louisiana, to Earnest and Mar Courville in 1954, she grew up attending segregated schools until the eighth grade when she was among the first groups of African American children who began to integrate the local schools.

Courville received a bachelor of arts and a master’s degree in political science from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and then enrolled at the University of Denver in Colorado where she received a master’s (1980) and doctorate (1988) from its Josef Korbel School of International Studies. While studying in Denver, Courville took an interest in the liberation struggles in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), drawing comparisons to the segregated South where she had grown up. This interest started her down the path of African scholarship and policy engagement.

After Denver, Dr. Courville pursued an academic career for ten years, first as a member of the political science faculty at Hanover College in Indiana, and then at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. Her attempt at a tenured academic post at Occidental failed, and later she would refer back to that disappointment as a hidden blessing because she eventually found herself at the center of policy and decision-making on African issues.

In the late 1990s, Dr. Courville began working as a political-military analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Washington, D.C. From 1997 to 2001, she also served as policy staff director for Africa in the Directorate of Operations and later as deputy assistant defense intelligence officer for Africa policy in the office of the secretary of defense for Africa. In these roles, she coordinated U.S. military and security policy in East Africa and the Horn of Africa and helped develop policies on U.S.-Africa engagement.

In 2001 Dr. Courville moved to the White House, joining the National Security Council (NSC) and her former University of Denver classmate, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, who was President George W.

The BBC is reporting that the burial of famed Ethiopian singer Hachalu Hundessa will take place in the town of Ambo in the Oromia region on Thursday, July 2.

The musician was assassinated in Addis Ababa according to police in his car, federal police chief Endeshaw Tasew is quoted to have said the assailants followed him and entered his car where they shot him. It was “well organized & sophisticated.”

He stressed that the aim of the act was “plunging” the country “into chaos.” A joint task-force between Addis Ababa and federal police is handling the investigation, he added.

Hachalu, famed for his political songs critical of the government, will receive a hero’s farewell, with flags flying half-mast for five days in the region, the BBC report added.

A Reuters report said the death toll as of late Tuesday was 10 with over 80 others wounded from the protests. PM in a televised address Tuesday night called the killing of musician “an evil act.”

“This is an act committed and inspired by domestic and foreign enemies in order to destabilise our peace and to stop us from achieving things that we started,” he said.

Meanwhile Committee for the Protection of Journalists, CPJ; and Amnesty International are calling on the government to turn on the internet on one hand and to fully investigate the assassination.

“Amnesty International is also calling for the security forces to exercise restraint when managing the ongoing protests and refrain from the use of excessive force.”

“Ethiopian authorities’ persistence of old patterns of censorship in response to crises, when the public most needs access to timely news and information, is deeply disappointing,” CPJ’s sub-Saharn Africa lead Muthoki Mumo said in a June 30 statement.

There are differing reports of deaths arising from protests across Ethiopia due to the killing of Hachalu Hundessa, the iconic Oromo artiste.

The BBC Africa LIVE page reported two deaths earlier in the day. Privately-owned Addis Standard portal reported that “At least seven people killed in Adama, Chiro as protests engulf Oromia regional state. A Reuters report put the death toll at eight.

At least eight people have been killed and 80 injured in protests in the Ethiopian town of Adam, the Reuters report said citing a doctor. Adama is about 90 km (56 miles) southeast of the capital, Addis Ababa.

Six people died on their way to hospital and two died in intensive care, said Dr Mekonnen Feyissa, the medical director of Adama’s main hospital. The hospital received around 80 injured patients, he said. Most had been shot but some had been hit with rocks or stabbed.

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\tBut the journey to the May 15 status lasted roughly two months (exactly 55 days) from the day an index case was recorded and reported by the ministry.

\tBy May 8th, case tally had reached 39 but the good news from the Health Ministry was the recovery of 37 out of the number.

Two days on, the 38th recovery was recorded before the final on May 15 meant that there was no active case in the country.

Mauritius was the second to declare virus-free status with 332 cases, 322 recoveries and 10 deaths as of May 11, a case stat that remains valid as of May 17 according to tallies from the John Hopkins University portal.

The Health Ministry delivered virus updates – cases, recoveries and directives; whiles the Task Force came in with the guidelines relative to containment measures and other fine details.

For the past three years, Ethiopia was the talk of town, with leading institutions terming it one of Africa’s fastest rising economies.

The Ethiopian Economic Association in its preliminary projections recently said that Ethiopia’s GDP will drop by 10 per cent if the pandemic persists for at least for six months.

The UNECA estimates that Covid-19 will “shave 2.9 percentage points off this fiscal year’s economic growth in Ethiopia”.

As response, experts from the Ethiopia Economics Association say commercial banks need to reschedule loan repayments and write off interest payments for severely affected sectors until the shock is abated.

The National Bank of Ethiopia, the Association suggests, needs to consider reserve rate relaxation to enhance banking liquidity and discuss reducing interest rates to stimulate the economy.

The Second Liberian Civil War was an intense four-year conflict that involved child soldiers on all sides and extensive civilian casualties. It was also one of the few civil wars that spread into neighboring countries, in this case, Guinea and Sierra Leone. The conflict began in April 1999 when a rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), with the support of the government of neighboring Guinea, began a military offensive to topple the government of President Charles Taylor. They quickly gained control over much of Northern Liberia.

The origin of the second civil war was rooted in the previous conflict waged between 1989 and 1996 which saw former rebel leader Charles Taylor become president of the entire nation, following UN-monitored elections in 1997. The country remained at peace only two years before LURD began its military campaign. Most of LURD were Mandingo and Krahn fighters led by Sekou Conneh. Many of them had been part of the rebel group, United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), which had fought in the first Liberian civil war against Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) as well as the government of President Samuel Doe.

In September 2000, to weaken support for the rebels from the government of Guinea and Sierra Leone which was now also supporting LURD, Taylor persuaded anti-government dissidents in both nations to form the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). They along with some of his paramilitary supporters began insurgencies and thus expanded the conflict to three nations. His action drew condemnation and opposition from the UN as well as support for Guinea and Sierra Leone from Great Britain and the United States.

By early 2002, LURD troops had outmaneuvered Taylor’s forces and were only about twenty-seven miles from Monrovia, the capital. Under leaders Conneh and Thomas Nimely, LURD troops mounted successful raids that bypassed government strongholds, and in May, they staged a bold attack on Arthington, less than twelve miles from