Millennial Challenges: Managing Misrepresentations with accurate facts and transparency!

<em>Global Strategic Enterprises, Inc for Peace and Prosperity- www.globalbelai4u.blogspot.com; www.SolomonicCrown.org; globalbelai@yahoo.com


Dear Patriotic Global Citizens and Friends of Ethiopia:


Comparing Apples with Oranges to push "ones opinion" against the facts
Who do we believe? The World Bank or some outfit called Global Reserach?

Misrepresentation or propaganda has been and continues to be a very powerful tool to influence others both local and international communities whenever highly objectionable or questionable actions are taken, especially under the wrong premises of a just cause of justification any sort of criminal activities that does not stand the rule of law and good governance scrutiny.

The recent campaign of comparing apples with oranges to justify some criminal activities in one part of the globe with impunity is becoming the new propaganda war or misrepresentation of the facts.

There is a very interesting and rather troubling article that compares Zimbabwe with Ethiopia. The only connection is these two countries have is there is a criminal fugitive by the name of Mengistu Haile Mariam, that created genocide and state organized crime in his native place in Ethiopia and is now hiding in Zimbabwe and was the National Security Advisor of President Mugabe when Mugabe began the infamous criminal terror on his own people in the poorer sector of Harare just few years back.

Comparing Zimbabwe with Ethiopia in any other way is intentionally misleading the public against well established facts.

Zimbabwe was the Switzerland of Africa, one of the most well developed country that is now run down to the one of the most chaotic and conflictual countries in the continent by the action of one single person and his cronies. Prime Minister Bishop Abel Muzerewa, the first post colonial leader is alive and well and can be contacted for further information. I had the privilege of staying with him for a week in Seoul, South Korea at the recent Universal Peace Federation Conference and was shocked to learn how his beautiful country is converted into a mess by Mugabe.

Ethiopia was run down by Mengistu and his Military junta between 1973-1991 for seventeen years and the image of Ethiopia today under the Multiparty Government is far different of what it was during the Emperor for 50 years or with the Military Junta for 17 years.

One cannot just compare Apples and Oranges and get away with it. We are all alive and well informed to testify that you can call a spade a spade when you see one. This is beyond a spade it is a willful malicious propaganda of the loony left intellectuals who are crying for long lost Communist Paradise of Mass scale genocide and terror in the name of the masses. Sorry, the masses are well informed and well connected and no fools can change this reality of 21st Century globalization and instant communication.

As to the world's center of Genocide and terror list, perhaps there are more countries on the list again which this writer selectively omitted. These include: Eritrea, Somalia, the Sudan, the Congo, Burma, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Algeria, UK, Spain and world class cities such as Addism London, New York, and all major cosmopolitan metropolitan cities where violence is common and that includes those cities in China, India, Europe and North America.


Now the analysis of the Somalia fiasco is rather interesting. This foolish writer wants us to believe that Ethiopia invaded Somalia with no cause or imminent danger to its national security and geographical integrity, where facts show that the idiotic so called Jihadists but extermist terrorists to be exact who abuse the great faith of Islam, have been burning Ethiopian flags weekly at an international press briefing with threats to Ethiopia. They did not stop there, but they came to Baidowa and surrounded the duly elected government after attempting a series of suicidal missions on the person of the President. This is in addition to the suicidal and criminal activities in Addis, Jimma, Ogaden and other parts of Ethiopia. Ofcourse, this fool wants the world to forget that the extermist Jihad was declared for over six months by inciting trouble in Jijiga,Jimma where Christians and Muslims were slaughtered within Ethiopia. The fools travelled from all over the world to Somalia and joined the insurrection and global terror.

This disasterous perverted propaganda does not see an eminent dangerous activity such as hooligans converging in Somalia to create havoc as a cause for Ethiopia to protect its national interest and just be a prey. The worst part of the analysis is that the image projected that Ethiopia can do nothing and should do nothing to protect her legitimate interests. Imagine, this is not a country of some 50 years existence as most African nation state or merely 400 years as some of the current Great Countries such as the USA. This is a nation that has stood the test of time with over 7,500 years of recorded governance. The new Millennium is a recognition of this recorded history as evidenced by African Union and UN Security Council recognition.

Unfortunately, Ethiopia did not last for over 8,000 years of recorded history by allowing a group of hooligans, masquerading as Muslims whern in effect they are criminal gangs led by the former Communist Colonel Husein Tahir who invaded Ethiopia all the way to Addis in 1977. There is track record and justifiable evidence of potential threats that is accumulating to critical levels that needed interventiion.

When Ethiopia in good faith began withdrawing up to two-thirds of the troups, the criminals who agreed to sort out their differences began insurgent activities and then when the Ethiopian returned fire with fire, the propaganda machines goes wild with rumors of civilian casuality. Who is the insurgent in the first place. The Civilians by day and the terrorists by night.


These misguided hooligans collected from all over the world aggregated to create havoc in the region. Now when they are caught red handed and are facing justice, the same type of sloopy journalism tells us that the rights of global terrorists is not respected, and they should go scott free. Not in Ethiopia or any where in the world where there is justice and rule of law.


Yes the violence and terror including genocide that is perpetrated around the world has different reasons, context and players, and all need to be investigated and prosecuted with local and international courts of justice. Most importantly, there should be an active pre-emptive strategy to prevent any sort of violence, terror and genocide any where in the world. This is a great shame for humanity.

The first step is never to condone any sort of violence, terror and genocide. What ever the cause and perspective, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia are polls apart in their political, social and civic developments.

One does not need Ethiopia to be dragged into every criminal activities around the world to justify any sort of terror, and genocide.

Let us all work for a better world where good governance is the order of the day, no amount of justification and naming and blaming is helpful to make a progress towards a just, fair and accountable governance across the world.

Please read on this interesting article from Steven Gowns of ? Global Research and make your considered judgements and better still write, comment and develop an active campaign against misinformation.

Please read the World Bank, article I and Global Research, article II for your review and comparisons.


with regards

Belai Habte-Jesus, MD, MPH
Global Strategic Enterprises for Peace and Prosperity
www.SoloomonicCrown.org, www.globalbelai4u.blogspot.com


Article I

Ethiopia: Country Improving in Governance, Political Stability Still a Challenge - WB



Daily Monitor (Addis Ababa)

12 July 2007
Posted to the web 12 July 2007

Addis Ababa

Governance has improved in Ethiopia as in a number of African countries, according to a report released by the World Bank, Tuesday.

The report, "Governance Matters, 2007: Worldwide Governance and Indicators, 1996-2006", found that Ethiopia had made strides toward cutting corruption and improving governance, but political stability and voice and accountability remain to be tremendous challenges.


It measured six components of good governance: Voice and Accountability, Political stability, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law and Control of Corruption.

According to the report, Ethiopia improved its Government Effectiveness component scoring 25 to 50 percentile between 1996 to 2006.

Significant improvement has also been registered in curbing corruption.

Fighting corruption has been seen to subside recently, though, the report found.

The Rule of Law was another component where the country was said to be improving in.

But the Political Stability component was seen to be deteriorating: It went down from little less than 25 percentile in 1996, to around 15 percentile in 2002, to 10 percentile in 2006.

Percentile rank (0-100) indicates rank of country among all countries in the world.

0 corresponds to lowest rank and 100 corresponds to highest rank.

The report measured governance in 212 countries and territories using a comprehensive set of indicators developed over the past decade.

The report found that improving governance was important to development and to fighting poverty.

"The hopeful news is that a considerable number of countries, including in Africa, are showing that it is possible to make significant governance progress in a relatively short period of time," Daniel Kaufmann, a co-author of the report, said.

"The burden of corruption," he added, "falls disproportionately on the bottom billion people living in extreme poverty." "Such improvements in governance are critical for aid effectiveness and for sustained long-run growth." Dealing with global trends, Mr Kaufman said that bribery around the world was estimated about $1 trillion dollars.

Kenya, Niger and Sierra Leone have improved their voice and accountability component, which measures citizen participation in government and press freedom, and Algeria and Liberia have strengthened the rule of law, according to the report.

Relevant Links

East Africa
North Africa
Ethiopia
International Organizations and Africa
Sudan



The report also found that Algeria, Angola, Libya, Rwanda and Sierra Leone were more politically stable.

Tanzania was one of only two countries worldwide where progress in combating corruption was judged to be significant.

In some African countries, however, the quality of governance had deteriorated. The World Bank report highlights Cote d'Ivoire and Zimbabwe as two countries that performed poorly in that regard.




Article II

Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the "politics of naming"
By Stephen Gowans, Global Research
July 10, 2007

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Africa scholar Mahmoud Mandani looks at the slaughter and displacement of civilians in Darfur he notices something odd. The mass death of civilians in Darfur has been called a genocide, but slaughters of civilians of similar magnitude in Iraq and on a larger scale in Congo have not.

According to the World Food Program, about 200,000 civilians have died in Darfur, 80 percent from starvation and disease, and 20 percent from violence. Close to 700,000 have been displaced(1). This, the US government, calls a genocide.

But 600,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 as a result of violence related to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq (2) and 3.7 million have either fled to neighboring countries or are internally displaced (3).

“I read about all sorts of violence against civilians,” says Mamdani, “and there are two places that I read about – one is Iraq, and one is Darfur … And I’m struck by the fact that the largest political movement against mass violence on US campuses is on Darfur and not on Iraq.” (4)

If Darfur is modest in comparison to Iraq, both are pipsqueeks compared to Congo. There, some four million civilians have been slaughtered over several years, largely as a result of intervention by US proxies, Uganda and Rwanda.

In Somalia, 460,000 civilians have been displaced by fighting sparked by a US-backed and assisted invasion by Ethiopia (5). That invasion was aimed at ousting the popularly-backed Islamic Courts Union, which had brought a measure of stability to Somalia. “In the six months the Islamic courts (governed Somalia), less than 20 people lost their lives through violence. Now, that many die in 10 minutes,” observes Hussein Adow, a Mogadishu businessman (6).

Why is there is a Save Darfur Campaign, but no Save Congo Campaign and no Save Somalia Campaign?

Mamdani says that people in the West don’t react to the mass slaughter of civilians but to the labels their governments and media attach to them.

“Genocide is being instrumentalized by … the United States,” he explains. “It is being instrumentalized in a way that mass slaughters which implicate its adversaries are being named as genocide and those which implicate its friends or its proxies are not being named as genocide.”

Mandani calls this “the politics of naming.”

The politics of naming isn’t limited to the question of which slaughters are named genocide and which aren’t. It applies too to the question of which regimes are called dictatorial, repressive and brutal (and so must be changed), and which are not (and so should be left in peace.)

Take the case of Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. Tons of printer’s ink have been consumed by Western newspapers denouncing Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe. According to the Western narrative, he is as a dictator who steals elections, represses the opposition and cracks heads to stay in power.

But Mugabe’s government, in view of concerted efforts from outside and within to overthrow it, is remarkably restrained. Archbishop Pious Ncube, one of the government’s most vociferous critics, recently called on Zimbabwe’s former colonial master, Britain, to remove Mugabe through military means.

“We should do it ourselves,” he added, “but there’s too much fear. I’m ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready.” (7) (Imagine Noam Chomsky calling for a coalition of Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran and north Korea to invade the US to force Washington to end its occupation of Iraq. “I’m ready to lead the people, guns blazing,” he might say, “but the people are not ready.” How long would it be before Chomsky was hustled off to jail?)

Ncube isn’t the first government opponent to threaten a campaign of violence to oust Mugabe. And yet Ncube and others remain at liberty to call for sanctions, outside military intervention and insurrection to depose the government.

Ethiopia, on the other hand, is a cipher. It receives little coverage from the Western media, and even less attention from people who routinely denounce the Sudanese and Zimbabwean governments from the left.

That’s odd, for the Ethiopian government has all the flaws the Zimbabwean government is said to have that arouse so much moral indignation.

Ethiopia “jails it citizens without reason or trial, tortures many of them, and habitually violates its own laws.

“The government was … severely criticized for a 2005 crackdown in which tens of thousands of opposition members were jailed and nearly 200 people killed after elections in which the opposition made major gains.

“Ethiopian officials … have expelled many foreign journalists and representatives of human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.” (9)

Disputed elections, crackdowns on the opposition, expulsion of journalists: this resembles the charge sheet against Mugabe. So why isn’t Melawi as thoroughly excoriated as Mugabe is?

A July 9th Reuters’ report says, “Ethiopian prosecutors demanded the death penalty for 38 opposition officials convicted of trying to overthrow the government, treason and inciting violence.

“The officials were convicted last month of charges relating to violent protests over disputed elections in 2005 that the opposition says were rigged.

“Nearly 200 people were killed in clashes between protestors and security forces over the vote.

“Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said he regretted the post-poll violence, but blamed it on opportunistic rioters and an opposition conspiracy to topple him by force.”

I read the Reuters’ article to a friend, but replaced Ethiopia with Zimbabwe and Zenawi with Mugabe. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary to her. And indeed, it’s likely that most people in the West would not have detected the deception. It meshes with the Western narrative on Zimbabwe. If you’ve been reading Western press accounts, you would expect Mugabe to round up the opposition (whose leaders have long threatened the violent overthrow of the government), charge them with treason, and seek their execution. But hehasn’t.

Had he, a storm of indignation would have swept the Western world. Yet Zenawi does the same, and no politician works himself up into high moral dudgeon, no calls are made for sanctions or Western military intervention, and no emergency meeting of the UN Security Council is convoked. Just a solitary Reuters’ dispatch. Why?

The answer is that Ethiopia is fully within Washington’s orbit, acting as a reliable proxy enforcing US geopolitical interests in the resource-rich Horn of Africa. Zimbabwe, by contrast, pursues the opposite tact, implementing policies that seek to free itself from Western domination and to frustrate US imperial designs on the continent.

Zimbabwe indigenizes its agriculture and economy; Ethiopia intervenes militarily in Somalia at the behest of Washington, to restore a US-puppet government.

Weeks before Ethiopia invaded Somalia, US General John P. Abizaid flew to Addis Ababa to arrange for Zenawi to unleash the US-trained Ethiopian military on Somalia. Washington even went so far as to shelter Ethiopia, whose military relies on equipment made in north Korea, from penalty for violating UN-sanctions against north Korean arms sales. Ethiopia needed to import replacement parts from north Korea if the invasion was to go ahead without a hitch. Washington, which championed the sanctions, said “go ahead.” (9)

Numberless people are being manipulated by Western governments and media, their outrage harnessed to achieve geopolitical goals that have nothing whatever to do with human rights and democracy, and everything to do with the question of who gets to control the oil spigot, mining concessions and vast tracts of fertile land.

Mamdani calls those caught up in the Save Darfur Campaign innocents. The same could be said of those caught up in the dump Mugabe campaign.

Notes


UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimate, cited in The Guardian, June 20, 2007.
Johns Hopkins study, published online by The Lancet, cited in The Guardian October 12, 2006.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees, cited in Workers World, February 15, 2007.
Interview with Mahmoud Mandani, Democracy Now! June 4, 2007.
According to the UN High Commission for Refugees (Guardian, June 20, 2007).
Quoted in the The London Times, cited in Party for Socialism and Liberation, July 3, 2007.
The Sunday Times, July 1, 2007.
The Globe and Mail, May 29, 2007.
The New York Times, April 8, 2007<