Millennial Challenges: Making the Horn a viable region?

Global Strategic Enterprises, Inc for Peace and Prosperity- www.globalbelai4u.blogspot.com


Re: Contents: Who is for life and who is for genocide? A sample horn news-

1. The Somali Terrorists hold an overt sleeper cell terrorists conference
2. Ethiopia detains over 107 terrorists caught red-handed
3. Ethiopia boosts universal primary health care while the terrorists boost universal genocide and mayham.

At the dawn of the Millennium, it is becoming apparent who is for sustaining life and health in the Horn and who is creating genocide and death and destruction without impunity.

It is not funny any more. This is a serious business. The BBC NPR at 16:00 on 06 Sep 2007 declares that there is a potential war in Asmara.

The once beautiful and productive city of Asmara is now converted into a den of thieves, murderers and terrorists declaring war every other day just before Mogadisho was liberated six months ago at the beginning of the year. They even hold conferences on how to organize their deadly blow to the region.

It is time for a serious reconsideration of what is sacred, noble and newsworthy conversation. The people of the Horn deserve better and we should demand nothing less.

The so called Eritrean President, a one time Imperial Ethiopia Counter Intelligence Officer turned rebel leader is today hosting a series of terrorist network meetings just as the Taliban used to do in Afghanistan.

All thee criminal activities is beneing continously denied and the jerks are demanding for a proof and evidence from the US for their series of overt terrorist camp training and distribution of deadly weapons.

The headlines of regular news report who is the cuase of destruction and terrorism and who is building life and infrastructure to sustain life.

Please read the attached and see why the US and UN are toothless in the face of such bravado and outright criminal activities.





Sources:
1. http://africa.reuters.com/country/ER/news/usnL06461747.html

2. http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-09-05-ethiopia-arrests_N.htm

3. http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74131


1. Militant Somali Islamist at Eritrea talks
Thu 6 Sep 2007
Jack Kimball

ASMARA, Sept 6 (Reuters) - Militant Somali Islamist leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, in hiding since a war drove his sharia courts movement out of south Somalia at the end of 2006, appeared on Thursday at an opposition conference in Eritrea.

The bespectacled cleric, who some believe is behind an anti-government insurgency in Mogadishu, sat in a grey suit at the front at the opening of the meeting of Somali opposition figures in a conference hall in Asmara.

As the talks began with Koranic prayers, Aweys -- who is on U.S. and U.N. lists of al Qaeda suspects -- was flanked by another Islamist leader, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the former Somali parliamentary speaker and Somalia's former interior minister.

Ahmed called on Washington to engage with the Somali opposition, and rejected charges of terrorism he said had been fabricated by Ethiopia.

"There were a lot of accusations thrown at us, false accusations designed to implement a half-finished project, which was to invade Somalia," Ahmed said.

"We call upon the United States to play a more positive role in the Somali conflict ... U.S. foreign policy towards Somalia has been a strangely confrontational one."

Some 300 guests, including representatives of the United Nations, France, Israel and the European Commission, were present at the start of the meeting in Asmara, where many Somali Islamists and political opposition leaders have been based in recent months.


JIHADISTS "DELIGHTED"

Aweys, seen as more hardline than Ahmed, did not speak.

A U.N. report last year accused the 72-year-old of running militant training camps and of receiving weapons from Eritrea, which was hoping to frustrate its arch-foe Ethiopia.

Ethiopia supports Somalia's interim government, which held its own peace conference that ended last week. Experts said Aweys' appearance in Asmara would infuriate Addis Ababa.

"This will make the Ethiopians ballistic," said one Somali analyst who asked not to be named.

"The jihadists will be delighted to see him there ... These two conferences seem to be polarising the situation, making it worse, rather than bringing people together."

Aweys, whose beard is coloured orange with henna like many Somali elders, is one of the country's survivors. He was a colonel in the army of former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and was decorated for bravery in a war against Ethiopia in 1977.

By the 1990s, he was leading Somalia's biggest militant Islamist group, al-Ittihad al-Islami. But he was defeated by Ethiopian forces and Somalia warlords backed by Addis Ababa, among them Somalia's current interim president, Abdullahi Yusuf.

Aweys' fighters seized Mogadishu and much of the south last year, and the remnants of his movement are now blamed for an Iraq-style insurgency targeting government and Ethiopian forces, mostly with roadside bombs. He denies links to terrorism.

U.S. officials in the region had no immediate comment on the re-emergence of Aweys, who is thought to have spent most of this year hiding in remote southern Somalia, near the Kenyan border.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Cawthorne in Nairobi)

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2. Ethiopia detains 107 people over the past 2 months


ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — Ethiopia has detained 107 of its citizens over the past two months without charge, according to an opposition lawmaker who said he believed the detainees were suspected of links to a southern insurgency.

Opposition lawmaker Bulcha Demeksa said Wednesday he had compiled the figure of those detained since July in Addis Ababa and southern Ethiopia from reports from family members.

Ethiopian law provides that any one arrested should appear in court within 48 hours and be charged.

Federal police officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday and repeated calls to other government officials went unanswered.

Bulcha said his total of 107 included three staff members of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council in Nekemte, 220 kilometers (137 miles) west of the capital, that the council said were arrested on Aug. 23 and had not been taken to court since.

Hiwot Emishaw, an official of the group, said, "They were allegedly arrested for disseminating papers to incite violence. Our organization is saying they have not been engaged in such an act."

Bulcha told The Associated Press he suspected the detainees have been held on suspicion of belonging to the Oromo Liberation Front, which has been fighting for greater autonomy in southern Ethiopia. One of the detainees, he said, was a 63-year-old man.

The Oromo make up a third of Ethiopia's 77 million people, and have been the center of dissent against the ruling Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front.

Bulcha, whose Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement party is a minority in parliament, said that he had complained to government officials, but has not received any response.

The Somali State Regional government said Wednesday that an aid agency's observations about human rights violations in eastern Ethiopia were "distorted."

On Tuesday, officials of Doctors Without Borders said they had seen Ethiopian soldiers chase women and children from wells in the desert and block civilians from getting medical care in the Ogaden region, where a rebellion is brewing.

"These distorted and unrealistic reports are certainly in violation of the code of ethics they are committed to in their line of duty as neutral bodies," the regional state government said in a statement posted on the Foreign Affairs Ministry website.

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5 September 2007

3. ETHIOPIA: Government boost for universal primary healthcare

Photo: IRIN
Ethiopia says it has made progress against some killer diseases
ADDIS ABABA, 5 September 2007 (IRIN) - Ethiopia has stepped up recruitment and training of primary healthcare providers and is building more health centres in an effort to make such care available for all by 2010, health minister Tewodros Adhanom said.

"The target of 2010 is fast approaching," the minister told reporters in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa on 4 September. "But it is possible to achieve this [the universal provision of primary healthcare]," he added.

Ethiopia has employed 17,000 health extension workers countrywide and their number is expected to rise to 24,000 - 80 percent of the required 30,000 - by December 2007, under the country's health extension programme.

About 3,200 health centres are needed - one for 25,000 people. There are only 635 health centres at present.

"We have secured the finance for the construction of 1,000 health centres which will be built next year," said Tewodros. "The regions will build an additional 1,000. That will make the target reality," he added.

Most of the resources for the expanded healthcare improvement programme will come from donors, the minister said. "But because donors have different and often complex rules and reporting requirements for the projects they offer to fund, and because we lack the staff to manage projects in accordance with their rules and requirements, we cannot actually make use of all the health funding that donors offer us," he added.

The Ethiopian programme falls under the International Health Partnership, officially launched by the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown on 5 September, whereby aid donors have committed themselves to fund health programmes in developing countries to help them achieve three key Millennium Development Goals – cutting childhood and maternal mortality rates and fighting disease, including malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS.

Paul Ackroyd, representative of Britain's Department for International Development in Ethiopia, lauded the country's healthcare plan.

"Ethiopia has a very good plan for health and is making spectacular progress against some of the biggest killers," he said. "In two years it has distributed over 90 percent of the 20 million bed nets needed to protect all of those who are at risk of malaria," said Ackroyd.