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Analysis - Despite some delays, 21 June saw Ethiopia hold its sixth national elections since the downfall of the Derg regime and the reconfiguration of the state along ethno-regional lines in 1991. Although the 2005 polls had an element of competitiveness, none of the past five elections was free, fair and competitive.
He replaces Debretsion Gebremichael, whose immunity from prosecution was removed Thursday.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International said Thursday that scores of civilians were killed in a \"massacre\" in the Tigray region, that witnesses blamed on forces backing the local ruling party.
The \"massacre\" is the first reported incident of large-scale civilian fatalities in a week-old conflict between the regional ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), and the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize.
\"Amnesty International can today confirm... that scores, and likely hundreds, of people were stabbed or hacked to death in Mai-Kadra (May Cadera) town in the southwest of Ethiopia's Tigray Region on the night of 9 November,\" the rights group said in a report.
Amnesty said it had \"digitally verified gruesome photographs and videos of bodies strewn across the town or being carried away on stretchers.\"
The dead \"had gaping wounds that appear to have been inflicted by sharp weapons such as knives and machetes,\" Amnesty said, citing witness accounts.
Witnesses said the attack was carried out by TPLF-aligned forces after a defeat at the hands of the Ethiopian military, though Amnesty said it \"has not been able to confirm who was responsible for the killings\".
It nonetheless called on TPLF commanders and officials to \"make clear to their forces and their supporters that deliberate attacks on civilians are absolutely prohibited and constitute war crimes\".
Abiy ordered military operations in Tigray on November 4, saying they were prompted by a TPLF attack on federal military camps -- a claim the party denies.
The region has been under a communications blackout ever since, making it difficult to verify competing claims on the ground.
Abiy said Thursday his army had made major gains in western Tigray.
Thousands of Ethiopians have fled across the border into neighboring Sudan, and the UN is sounding the alarm about a humanitarian crisis in Tigray.
[Addis Standard] Addis Abeba -- Reports of an attack on the residence of the chairman of Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) Dawud Ibsa have been coming out since last night. Addis Standard received footage of the incident where huge bangs on the gate could be heard. This comes hours after the OLF released a statement rejecting the resolution by the council of ministers designating \"TPLF\" & \"Shene\" as terrorist organizations. In its statement the OLF called the resolution a deliberate move to block the peaceful process and to sabotage polit
June 24: Tigray ‘warned’ against holding polls
The National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) has said it lacks the capacity to oversee regional elections in the northern Tigray regional state. The body said the state’s council had officially notified them of plans to delayed elections.
In an official statement, the board reiterated that it will not conduct election in any part of the country until a re-assessment of COVID-19 pandemic.
Keenly awaited national and regional polls slated for May were postponed over the virus as federal government imposed a fine-month state of emergency.
Tigray requested for necessary support to conduct its elections: but NEBE responded that: “it has no legal ground to deploy manpower and provide logistics and other materials support for the election”.
The body led by Birtukan Mideksa also approved a recommendation by lawmakers weeks ago that the general elections be held within 9 months to a year after the pandemic is no longer a threat to public health.
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June 12: Tigray ‘rejects’ HoF mandate extension, vows to hold polls
Tigray regional state has all but rejected the regional parliament’s mandate extension granted by the House of Federation earlier this week.
The regional council has subsequently announced today that it planned to go ahead with regional elections, Getachew Reda, Executive Member of the governing Tigray Peoples Liberation Front, confirmed to privately-owned Addis Standard portal.
The council’s decision this morning followed earlier decision both by TPLF’s Executive Committee (EC), and its Central Committee (CC) to hold the election, the portal further reported. The exact role of the elections body in the process has yet to be known.
The council also extended regional COVID-19 State of Emergency by two-and-half months. This is despite there being a similar federal virus containment measure with a five-month duration starting April 10.
The details of the regional election indicate that it will be held before September 11 or latest before the end of the Ethiopian year. Mandates from 2015 polls expire in October but polls were delayed due to the coronavirus outbreak.
TPLF leadership have repeatedly insisted that irrespective of federal directives, it was going ahead with polls in what analysts say could signal a confrontation with the federal government led by PM Abiy Ahmed.
A number of opposition parties in Oromia and Somali regions have denounced the manner and scope of the mandate extension. A key pro-democracy activist turned politician Jawar Mohammed said the government was exploiting the virus outbreak to extend its stay in power indefinitely.
June 10: MPs back extending Abiy’s term amid election delay
Ethiopia’s upper parliamentary chamber, House of Federation (HoF), has appro
In 1895 T. Thomas Fortune, then editor of the New York Age, and founder of the Afro-American League in 1890, was considered one of the leaders of African America. That year he gave an address at the Congress on Africa which met in Atlanta in connection with the Cotton States Exposition. His address appears below.
Mr. President, and Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congress:
The map of Africa is no longer a Chinese puzzle. Its geographical mysteries have been solved. Its mighty lakes and rivers have been traced to their source, and fiction and cupidity have unlocked hordes of treasure by the side of which that of King Solomon’s mines was as the vastness of the Atlantic’s waste of waters to the smallest stream that, like a silver thread, wanders down the mountain side and sighs itself away into the sands of the desert. Railroads are spanning its immense distances, steamboats are navigating its waterways, and the electric wire has brought it into talking distance with Europe and America. Its limitless agricultural and mineral resources are being developed for the comfort and the happiness of mankind. Vast States have sprung into being, as if by magic, controlled by European colonists, so that already a South African confederacy has worked its way into the brain of Cecil Rhodes, whose empire is cemented with more human blood and tears than the East Indian empire wrenched into the British Government by the crimes of Lord Clive and Warren Hastings.
Never in the history of mankind has a continent been so rapidly subdued and its waste places made the habitation of civilized governments and its savage inhabitants brought into contact and under the control of civilization. More has been accomplished along these lines in Africa in the past quarter of a century than was accomplished by European colonists in America in the first one hundred and fifty years of their desperate struggles here to subdue the aborigines. Steam and electricity and gunpowder are responsible for this phenomenon. They are conquering forces against
[ENA] Addis Ababa -- Attempting to grab political power by attacking the Ethiopian National Defense Force and expanding conflicts to other regions of the country is playing with fire, President Sahlework Zewde said.
[New Zimbabwe] Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi has dismissed as malicious, claims by opposition parties and civil society organisations that Zanu PF was planning to create a one-party state in Zimbabwe.
Thousands of Ethiopian Orthodox believers dressed in white celebrate the anniversary of Saint Michael in Bahir Dar, the capital city of the Amhara region, the second-largest, in northern Ethiopia.
PRINCIPALS, who form the MDC Alliance, yesterday said they would demand the reinstatement of recalled MPs, senators and councillors as part of conditions for comprehensive dialogue with the Douglas Mwonzora-led MDC-T, it has emerged.
The post MDC Alliance gets tough on Mwonzora appeared first on NewsDay Zimbabwe.
[Ethiopian Herald] The Ethiopian diaspora residing in the United States and Europe have been gravely concerned about the external pressures on the Ethiopian internal affairs and the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). As the pressures increased, they added their efforts and carried on a webinar discussion on the current situation in Ethiopia that was held under the coordination of Ethiopian Diaspora members residing in US and Europe on May 11. The discussion in the United States was held under the coo
Meanwhile, in South Africa the death is reported of a two-day-old baby after being born prematurely to a coronavirus positive mother.
The case becomes the country’s first neonatal coronavirus death since the pandemic hit the Rainbow Nation.
Explaining the circumstances leading to the baby’s death, health minister Zweli Mkhize said the premature baby’s condition was critical including lung problems and after birth.
This was a two-day-old baby that was born prematurely and therefore had lung difficulties, which required ventilation support immediately after birth,” the BBC quoted Mkhize at a press briefing.
“The mother had tested positive for Covid-19 and the child subsequently tested positive for Covid-19 as well.
Ethiopia's upper house speaker has resigned in apparent protest at the postponement of planned elections in the Horn of Africa country over the coronavirus, a sign of growing tension between her party and the government.
Keria Ibrahim's resignation came in protest against the postponement of elections in the country over the coronavirus.
Speaker Keria Ibrahim is also a top official in Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), one of the country's major political parties that have opposed the postponement.
Last month, TPLF, which is also the governing party for the country's Tigray region, threatened to organise polls for the area in defiance of the postponement, potentially setting the region on a collision course with the federal government.
Keria's resignation underscored the deteriorating relationship between Abiy and his ruling Prosperity Party and the TPLF, said Kjetil Tronvoll, professor of peace and conflict studies at Bjorknes University in Oslo.
