Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry will meet his Ethiopian counterpart Workneh Gebeyehu in Cairo on Wednesday, MENA state agency has reported.
According to MENA, the two foreign ministers will meet at Cairo’s Tahrir Palace, which is owned by the foreign affairs ministry, to discuss bilateral relations and issues of mutual interest issues, chiefly the Nile water file.
Following the talks, Shoukry and Gebeyehu will hold a joint press conference.
There has been tension between Egypt and Ethiopia in recent years over the construction of Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam, a project which Cairo fears will negatively affect Egypt's Nile water share.
Addis Ababa maintains that the dam project, which Ethiopia needs to generate electricity, will not harm downstream countries.
In recent months, relations between Cairo and Addis have improved, especially after Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan in September signed the final contracts for long-awaited technical studies on the potential impact of the dam on downstream countries. Read more here
Gitem Demissie, 41, was shot and killed inside Ibex Ethiopian Bar and Restaurant in the 2500 block of Murfreesboro Pike on March 19.
One other person was in the restaurant when the murder happened but was unharmed.
Surveillance video of the attack shows a man lurking outside the business for about three to five minutes before walking into the bar and opening fire on Demissie. He shot the owner multiple times and left through the front door.
The witness told police the man did not say anything during the shooting. He described the killer as a slender man, light-skinned and about 5 feet 7 inches tall. The witness could not tell police the killers’ race.
“I hope the killer will be found one way or another and justice will be served,” friend Yirga Alem Bellchew told News 2. “When something like this happens, we question ourselves and ask what we can do.”
Bellchew immigrated to the United States 40 years ago and is a well-respected member of the close knit Ethiopian community of Nashville.
Many people call her “mother” or “sister” because of her welcoming and nurturing nature.
Bellchew said she met Demissie at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church where he worshipped.
“The community is disturbed, especially our children,” Father Mesfin Tesemma said. “I did not expect them to be as concerned, but they are horrified that something might happen one day.”
Metro police have interviewed multiple people within the Ethiopian community, including Demissie’s business partner, Ashenafe Atlaw.
“We were doing well,” Atlaw said. “With the help of God, we progressed.”
He continued, “We were working hard to make our lives better seven days a week 24 hours a day.”
Detectives have had a lot of cooperation from the Ethiopian community, but they have not been able to give the information police need to figure out who killed Demissie.
(Photo: WKRN)
“I can’t find anyone who can definitively say anything bad about the victim,” Detective Derry Baltimore said. “What I am getting from the community was he was hard working, respected, and very religious.”
He continued, “He did right by people, went to work and did his job.”
The Ethiopian community has taken on the mission of seeking justice for Desmissie. His family is still in Ethiopia and heartbroken, according to friends.
“Losing Gitem is like our brother,” Tewodros Manaye said. “It is like losing a family member, and that leaves everybody in distress.”
Anyone with information about the murder of Demissie is asked to call Detective Baltimore at the South Precinct at 615-880-3816 or Nashville Crime Stoppers at 615-74-CRIME.
BADME, ALONG THE ERITREAN-ETHIOPIAN BORDER—When Yordanos and her two young children slipped safely across the Mereb riverbed between Eritrea and Ethiopia late one recent night, they thought the worst of their journey into exile was over. The smuggler had done his job, and they were safely over the border.
Then they heard the hyenas.
Yordanos and her children began to yell for help, their panicked calls fading into the solid darkness. Suddenly, she saw a group of Ethiopian soldiers coming towards them. The men comforted the young families, and then escorted them to the nearby town of Badme. “They were like brothers to us,” says Yordanos, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of reprisals from the Eritrean government against her relatives at home.
In some regards, Ethiopia – and in particular this sliver of Ethiopia’s arid north – is the last place you might expect an Eritrean refugee like Yordanos to receive a warm welcome. In 1998, after all, an Eritrean invasion of this sleepy border town touched off a two-year war between the two countries that cost tens of thousands of lives and more than $4.5 billion, along with destroying most of the then-flourishing network of trade between the two countries. And before that conflict, Eritreans fought a 30-year civil war for independence from Ethiopia, which ended only in 1991.
Even today, the ashes of those conflicts still smolder. The internationally-brokered peace settlement ending the 1998-2000 war decreed that Ethiopia should give this region of the country back to Eritrea, which claims it as historical land. But Ethiopia never did, and border clashes between the two countries’ militaries continue into the present.
Still, Yordanos’ story is not uncommon. Fleeing enforced, indefinite military service, illegal imprisonment, and torture, about 165,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers currently live in Ethiopia, according to the United Nations. Upon arrival and registration, they are automatically granted refugee status, and the country continues to welcome more. In February of this year alone, 3,367 new Eritrean refugees arrived in the country, according to Ethiopia’s Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA).
“We differentiate between the government and its people,” says Estifanos Gebremedhin, the head of the legal and protection department at ARRA. “We are the same people, we share the same blood, even the same grandfathers.”
The reasons for that openness, indeed, owe much to shared history.As in many parts of Africa, colonialism sliced much of this region apart in illogical ways (though Ethiopia itself was never colonized), sowing political conflicts between members of the same community that have persisted to the present day. For much of the roughly 600-mile Ethiopian-Eritrean border, people on both sides share the same language – Tigrinya – as well as Orthodox religion and cultural traditions.
“It’s only the Eritrean government creating problems, not the people,” says Benyamin, a resident of Axum, a town in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, who didn’t give his last name. “I haven’t got relatives in Eritrea but many people here do. Some from the refugee camps go to the university here.”
But there may also be more strategic reasons for Ethiopia’s open-door policy, experts say.
“Ethiopia strongly believes that generous hosting of refugees will be good for regional relationships down the road,” says Jennifer Riggan, an associate professor of international studies at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania, who studies Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia.
There’s also an increasing amount of money in hosting refugees, some highlight,as the international community tries to block secondary migration to Europe. One recent example was thejoint initiative announced by Britain, the European Union, and the World Bank to fund the building of two industrial parks in Ethiopia to generate about 100,000 jobs, at a cost of $500 million, with Ethiopia required to grant employment rights to 30,000 refugees as part of the deal.
It might also be a way of countering international controversyabout the Oromo protestsand shoring up Ethiopia’s standing in the world, according to Milena Belloni, a researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, who is currently writing a book about Eritrean refugees. The protests, which roiled the country's largest region throughout 2016, have prompted a government crackdown that left hundreds of Ethiopians dead and sharply curtailed basic freedoms, according to human rights groups.
Either way, Ethiopia’s approach is in marked contrast to the strategies of reducing migrant flows that are being adopted in much of the West, Dr. Riggan says.
“Ethiopia's response is to manage the gate, and figure out how it can benefit from these inevitable flows of people,” she notes. “I definitely think Ethiopia's approach is the wiser and more realistic one.”
After Yordanos, her children, and another mother and her two children who crossed with them were collected by the soldiers near Badme, they were taken into town and left at a so-called “entry point,” a cluster of disheveled government buildings. From there, refugees join the bureaucratic and logistic conveyor belt that assigns them asylum status and moves them to one of four refugee camps in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.
There, relationships between refugees and locals do sometimes grow strained, particularly as both groups compete for scarce shared resources like firewood and cattle pastures. And many Eritrean refugees regard Ethiopia as only a stopover point on their journey to the West. In 2013, there was unrest in all four camps, with riots in two camps, Adi Harush and Mai Aini, when refugees demanded more opportunities for international resettlement and protested authorities' alleged corruption.
“People recognize the shared culture and ethnic background, and that helps for many things, but there’s still distrust because of the 30-year-war [for independence], and mostly due to 1998-2000 border conflict and related mass displacement,” says Dr. Belloni. “There’s a double narrative.”
In addition to the camps, meanwhile, thousands more Eritreans live in Ethiopia outside the asylum system, both legally and illegally. About 650 miles south of the border, in the capital Addis Ababa, whole neighborhoods function as Eritrean enclaves, where the distinctive, guttural sounds of Tigrinya pour out of cafes with Italian-sounding names like Lattria Piccolo, a nod to Eritrea’s history as an Italian colony. Read more here
I’m no great singer, but Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou only really trusted me after I had sung to her. “Something from your country,” she instructed. So I found myself in the tiny bedroom of this 93-year-old Ethiopian composer-pianist-nun, croaking my way through the verses of a Robert Burns song.
Given she does not agree to most interviews, I felt I should do what I was told. The room, at the Ethiopian Orthodox church in Jerusalem, was cramped and sweltering. In it was a small bed, an upright piano draped in Ethiopian flags, stacks of reel-to-reel and cassette tapes, and a jumble of handwritten manuscripts. On the walls were portraits of Emperor Haile Selassie – Emahoy knew him in the 1930s – and her own paintings of religious icons. The door was propped open and, from the courtyard, came smells of food and the sound of monks chanting.
Emahoy is fluent in seven languages, but when I finished the Burns song (Ae Fond Kiss) she admitted the old Scots lyrics had been tricky to decipher. I gave her a potted translation – lovers meet, lovers part, lovers feel brokenhearted – and she gripped my arm and fixed me with one of her deep stares. “We can’t always choose what life brings,” she said. “But we can choose how to respond.”
If anyone is qualified to dish out such wisdom, it’s a woman whose choices were determined by religious self-exile, maverick gender struggles and Ethiopia’s dramatic 20th-century political history – and who became a singular artist in the process.
Most people familiar with Emahoy’s music come across it via her solo piano album released in 2006, as part of the Éthiopiques collection. That series put her poised, bluesy, freewheeling waltzes together with the Ethio-jazz that emerged out of Addis Ababa in the 1960s – and although she smiles fondly at the mention of fellow Éthiopiques musicians such as Mulatu Astatke and Alemayehu Eshete, she insists she’s not a jazz artist. Her training is purely western classical; her inspiration comes from the ancient modal chants of the Orthodox church. It’s a unique fusion and it sounds like nothing else.
‘She raced a horse and trap around the city’ … Emahoy Tsegué Maryam Guèbrou, aged 23. Photograph: Kate Molleson
I was in Jerusalem to make a documentary about Emahoy. Born in 1923, she grew up in one of the country’s most privileged families. She and her sister were the first girls to be sent abroad for their education – she remembers travelling by train, aged six, from the highlands of Addis to the port of Djibouti then onwards by boat to Marseille, en route to a Swiss boarding school. That’s where she first encountered western classical music. She took piano and violin lessons and turned out to be a special talent.
In the 1930s, she returned to Addis: portraits from this period show a gorgeous young woman with a wry smile and a bold fashion sense. She went to high-society parties and sang for Haile Selassie. She had a car and raced a horse and trap around the city. She was a feminist: the first woman to work for the Ethiopian civil service, the first to sing in an Ethiopian Orthodox church, the first to work as a translator for the Orthodox Patriarch in Jerusalem. “Even as a teenager I was always asking, ‘What is the difference between boys and girls?’” she told me. “We are equal!”
That life was brutally disrupted when Benito Mussolini, with an eye on a potential colony, invaded Ethiopia in 1936 and three members of Emahoy’s family were killed. She was evacuated to Europe, but she was unfazed in her determination to become a musician and eventually found her way to Cairo to study with esteemed Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz. She practiced for nine hours a day and remembers it as a happy time, but the Egyptian heat got to her and she was sent home to recover in the high-altitude, more temperate climate of the Ethiopian capital.
Emahoy told me all this from her bed last summer, intent on communicating the details with precision and clarity. At the end of each day’s interview, she insisted on listening to it to make sure she had articulated her thoughts in just the way she wanted. She was fierce, alert, giggly, excellent company. She quizzed my producer and me about global politics: what did we make of the policies of Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel? (She herself quite likes Merkel; she does not like Trump.)
When we arrived at the next part of her story, something didn’t add up. After her time in Cairo, 23-year-old Emahoy set her sights on London and was offered a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. But for reasons that she couldn’t or wouldn’t disclose, she was refused permission to go. Whether it was a bureaucratic glitch or something closer to the lyrics of my Burns song, we will probably never know. The disappointment made her give up the classical piano and turn to God. “It was His willing,” is all she would say when I asked what had prevented her from pursuing her studies. “We can choose how to respond.”
Emahoy never rekindled her nascent career as a classical concert pianist; instead she invented her own musical language. After becoming a nun, she spent a decade living barefoot in a hilltop monastery in northern Ethiopia, and when she eventually returned to music, she wrote her own compositions, infusing the classical training of her youth with the pentatonic chants she was singing in church. There’s a stunning timelessness to her music: the ornaments are virtuosic and the chords lilt like a Chopin waltz – almost, but not quite. With Emahoy, nothing is regular. No fixed metre, no pulse that can be set in notation, no strict adherence to any one scale system. Her melodies flit between traditions; they float on their own axis.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Emahoy by Maya Dunietz – an Israeli musician who helped Emahoy publish her work for the first time. The resulting volume contains 12 pieces, but there are dozens of other compositions yet to be published and dozens more Emahoy has yet to finish.
As well as my singing ordeal, I was put through a sight-reading test in that tiny bedroom in Jerusalem, having to prove my worth by picking my way through one of Emahoy’s latest compositions. “No pressure,” my producer whispered, helpfully. Before we left, Emahoy fixed me with that stare again. She told me to go through life fighting for equality. She said she’s working on another album. Even from her bed, she’s still choosing how to respond. Read more here
India likely to vote in favour of Ethiopia’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in the upcoming election of the next Director General of global public health body World Health Organization.
The crucial election will decide the fate of the public health body which has suffered after gross mishandling of the Ebola outbreak, where WHO was too slow and ineffective to respond the outbreak, leading to 11,000 preventable deaths.
After closed door sessions at the WHO Executive Board meeting in January, WHO released names of three director-general nominees: Ethiopia’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Pakistan’s Sania Nishtar, and Britain’s David Nabarro.
Dr. Ghebreyesus is the former foreign affairs and health minister, Ethiopia. David Nabarro, was the special advisor to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on sustainable development, United Kingdom and third candidate Dr. Nishtar is the former health minister of Pakistan.
The WHO DG election is an important geo-political race as it comes at a time when there is concern over slashing of global aid and multilateral funding. According to a article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the Ebola epidemic brought ‘unprecedented attention’ to the WHO and its deficiencies- and the “fundamental challenges in terms of structure, governance and prioritisation of political considerations”.
“India has been in support of the Ethiopian candidate for a while. It helps that Dr. Tedros has been coming toIndia and has a good relationship with Indian counterparts,” said a source in the health ministry on the condition of anonymity. This has been confirmed by a second source.
While the Pakistani candidate is most suitable in terms of her understanding of the health challenges in the sub-continent, tensions along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan has made it unlikely that India will vote for Dr Nishtar.
The WHO DG is selected by a secret, one-country one-vote system. This will be the first time the election of WHO DG will be open to all 194 member states instead of just the executive board. The contest is being closely followed by the global public health community has Margaret Chan’s successor will face tough challenges to maintain WHO’s leadership with shrinking funds and political commitment.
At the Seventieth World Health Assembly, Member States will vote in a new Director-General, who will take office on 1 July 2017. Read more here
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