Ethiopian Action for Unity and Democracy

We have been informed that distinguished Ethiopian historian and political science scholar Professor Aleme Eshete has passed away. Prof. Aleme has been living in Italy for the past several years. He has published several influential papers on Ethiopian history, including The Cultural Situation in Socialist Ethiopia (1982); The Role and Position of Foreign-Educated Interpreters in Ethiopia – 1880-1889; European Political Adventurers in Ethiopia at the Turn of the 20th Century; A Page in the History of Posts and Telegraphs in Ethiopia: 1899-1903; La Cia in Africa.

The Ethiopian Review staff extends its condolences to the family of Prof. Aleme Eshete.

VIDEO: Prof. Aleme Eshete on Ethiopian history

PRESS RELEASE
Global Civic Movement for Change in Ethiopia

This is a call to all patriotic Ethiopians to say No to the TPLF/EPRDF officials’ visit to North America searching for investment from the Diaspora community. We are not against investing and helping our country and people. On the other hand, we believe we should have a clear understanding of where our money goes and for what purpose it will be used. TPLF/EPRDF officials are asking us to invest under the following circumstances best suited to their perpetuation of their power and not the national interest of Ethiopia.

* Today, all land belongs to the government and we are supposed to lease our own ancestral land. The Ethiopian farmer is at the mercy of TPLF/EPRDF officials in his own land. As a result of these and the overall ill devised policies of the regime, millions of Ethiopians depend on donor food aid; millions of Ethiopians still live in grinding and abject poverty. While the kleptocrats of the ruling regime’s ethnic and political cronies gloat with opulence and decadence.
* Today TPLF/EPRDF officials and EFFORT (Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigrai) are the largest owners of the major industries in Ethiopia including Banking, Construction, Agribusiness, Mining, Communication, Insurance and other pillars of the economy that are vital to the well-being and development of the country. Meanwhile, Ethiopian business owners are being pushed out of the market due to a lack of a level playing field. While the regime penalizes these business owners with trumped up charges of tax evasion etc., business owners affiliated with the regime due to their ethnicity or political loyalty are made to thrive and prosper.
* Today TPLF/EPRDF controls the rubber stamping parliament using illegal and bogus elections as we witnessed a few months back “winning” 99.6% of the seats; thus effectively turning Ethiopia into a one-party state. Meles has been in power for 20 years. He has been a cause of death and destruction. He has stolen the election in 2005, and massacred unarmed civilians. He imprisoned close to 50 000 people. At present the brutal regime is imprisoning our people in Gambela, Oromo, Ogaden, Southern Ethiopia and elsewhere.
* Today TPLF/EPRDF controls the military, security service, and the police leaving our people at the mercy of a few sick and selfish individuals. The North Africa and Middle East democratic revolutions are forcing the regime to panic. In desperation it is looking for Diaspora money.
* Today TPLF/EPRDF is selling our land to foreign investors at the expense of Ethiopian farmers and the fragile ecology of these places. Thus transferring this problem for generations to come. Our most fertile land and forest resources are being cleared to feed foreigners without regard to the grave consequences to the people of Ethiopia.
* Today we are made to be by-standers and strangers in our own land with the ruling regime working day and night to create animosity, division, confusion and hatred among Ethiopians based on ethnic background and religious affiliation.

Dear fellow Ethiopians, what we are being asked is to go against our own interest. They want us to invest our hard earned money so that TPLF/EPRDF officials and their families can reinvest it outside of our country by buying properties in Europe and America and on shopping sprees. As you are all aware, we work hard for our money. We left our homeland without anything and through hard work and perseverance we have managed to build a decent living wherever we reside.

TPLF/EPRDF and their cohorts have used and abused our people for the last twenty years. They have committed untold crimes against the people of Ethiopia. Now they want us to be part of their criminal empire. We ask you to look at this situation soberly and choose the welfare of your Motherland and your people over empty promises and shameful acts.

Washington DC, New York, NY, Dallas, TX, Seattle, WA, Las Vegas, NV, Atlanta, GA, San Josea , CA , Los Angeles, CA , Ottawa, Canada, Toronto, Canada, Denver, CO, Minneapolis, MN organizing groups and Taskforces.

It time to say no! Enough is enough! Beka! Geye! Yaekel! Aloni! Wetandem! Gides! Bass! Diiteh!

Freedom, justice, equality for the People of Ethiopia! Victory to the people of Ethiopia!

For more information contact: Ethiopians.say.beka@gmail.com

(VOA) — Syria’s state media say the government of Prime Minister Mohammed Naji al-Otari has resigned and the country’s president has accepted the resignations.

The reports say President Bashar al-Assad accepted the Cabinet resignations on Tuesday, following more than a week of anti-government protests.

The Associated Press says the 32-member Cabinet will continue running the country’s affairs until President Assad forms a new government.

News reports say President Assad could announce an end to Syria’s nearly 50-year-old emergency laws when he addresses the nation in the coming days.

The opposition protests represent the most serious threat to President Assad’s 11-year-rule and the long-standing authority of his family.

Syrian security officials have cracked down on the demonstrations, firing tear gas and live ammunition to disperse protesters. The U.S.-based rights group Human Rights Watch says at least 61 people have been killed since the unrest began.

Syrian officials say at least 12 people were killed in unrest in the port of Latakia on Friday and Saturday. Witnesses and human rights groups say security forces fired on protesters. Authorities blame armed extremists and foreign powers for inciting the violence.

The southern city of Daraa has been the focal point of the demonstrations.

(Washington Post) — The cabinet resignation, reported on state TV, marks the latest concession by Assad since protesters forced a string of political promises from his government, including a pledge to lift a 48-year-old emergency law. On Saturday, Assad released hundreds of political prisoners and pulled back security forces from the southwestern city where Syria’s burgeoning unrest began earlier this month.

Along with those concessions, anti-government activists are calling on Assad to rescind limits on civil rights, including the right to free assembly.

Opposition members say talk is no longer enough to appease the protesters.

“The issue is not what Assad will say, it is what will he apply?” said Ammar Qurabi, who head Syria’s National Organization for Human Rights. “We are tired of all this talk that the Syrian people have heard from the government for 11 years.”

PRESS RELEASE

Tinsae Ethiopia calls for the end of Meles Zenawi’s regime

By Teodros Kiros

The miserable life of Ethiopians is replete with facts such as:

Ethiopian girl looks for food at a city dump in Addis Ababa

1. Ethiopia is ranked at 210th out of a total of 210 countries.
2. That Ethiopia by any measure is the 2nd poorest nation in the world.
3. That it is at the bottom of the list of the three weighed indicators of well-being.
4. That 64.9% of school children are not enrolled.
5. In health, child mortality, it stands at 38%.
6. 85.7% lack electricity.
7. 54% do not get any cleaning water.
8. 89.5% do not have any cooking oil.
9. It has one of the smallest economies in Africa inspite of its population, accounting only for the continent’s 1% National domestic product.
10. 90% of the nation’s 77 million people live beyond the poverty line (Getachew Begashaw, “Acute Poverty amidst “Double Digit Economic Growth”: Contradiction in Terms, Addis Voice, 2010)

Yet the regime is daring us, when it has selected Boston and Los Angeles as cities in which to display its vacuous new five-year plan.

The gruesome facts above should have been attended to twenty years ago, and by now nine of the points above could have been reduced to at least one half and yet twenty years later Ethiopians are still saddled with this primitive existence unfit for animals. The Prime Minister is more concerned to clean his legacy in four more years and fool the Ethiopian people, again and shamelessly with false promises.

Which transformational strategy is going to make Ethiopia free of famine in five years, when the regime had twenty long years of attending to them slowly, carefully and intelligently? Instead, the reality on the ground can be changed only by a total regime change, consisting of new faces, new thoughts, and new transformational strategies.

The new plan may aim at embarrassing the Diaspora opposition but the regime forgets that it will only embarrass itself when its plans are logically attacked by those who know and by those who see through the aim of the caravan of another five year plan and will subject it to a vigorous scrutiny and demand that the regime gives a regime change a real chance for the love and respect of the Ethiopian people.

The new plan does not address the existential and political rights of the people, the violation of their dignities and economic opportunities. Only a civilized uprising can change the reality on the ground, with a new vision of the Ethiopian person, a new political party and most importantly replacing ethnocracy with Ethiopianity.

(Teodros Kiros, PhD, can be reached at kiros@fas.harvard.edu)

The Deal of the Century

Supposing someone offered you the following land deal, would you take it or walk away believing it is too good to be true?

For £150 a week (USD$245), you can lease more than 2,500 sq km (1,000 sq miles) of virgin, fertile land – an area the size of Dorset, England – for 50 years, plus generous tax breaks.

If you walked away from it, you would have lost out on “the deal of the century”, perhaps the millennium. If you think this is a joke or some sort of wild and crazy exaggeration, see this Guardian (U.K.) report and video on an incredible international land giveaway that is taking place in Gambella in Western Ethiopia and judge for yourself.

Ethiopia on the Chopping Block

The Indian agribusiness giant Karuturi Global is today the proud owner of 1,000 sq. miles of virgin Ethiopian land. Karuturi did not ask for the land and did not even see it when a signed 50-year “lease” was delivered to it on a golden platter in Bangalore, India by Meles Zenawi, the dictator-in-chief in Ethiopia. Karuturi Project Manager in Ethiopia Karmjeet Sekhon laughed euphorically as he explained what happened to Guardian reporter John Vidal:

We never saw the land. They gave it to us and we took it. Seriously, we did. We did not even see the land. (Triumphantly cackling laughter) They offered it. That’s all.

It’s very good land. It’s quite cheap. In fact it is very cheap. We have no land like this in India. There [India] you are lucky to get 1% of organic matter in the soil. Here it is more than 5%. We don’t need fertiliser or herbicides. There is absolutely nothing that will not grow on it. To start with there will be 20,000 hectares of oil palm, 15,000 hectares of sugar cane and 40,000 hectares of rice, edible oils and maize and cotton. We are building reservoirs, dykes, roads, towns of 15,000 people. This is phase one. In three years time we will have 300,000 hectares cultivated and maybe 60,000 workers. We could feed a nation here.

Ethiopia is on fire sale. Everybody is getting a piece of her. For next to nothing. The land vultures are swooping down on Gambella from all parts of the world. Zenawi proudly claims “36 countries including India, China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have leased farm land.” The Guardian reported that “foreign investors” have snagged

1.1 million hectares in Gambella, nearly a quarter of its best farmland, and 896 companies have come to the region in the last three years…. This month [March 2011] the concessions are being worked at a breakneck pace, with giant tractors and heavy machinery clearing trees, draining swamps and ploughing the land in time to catch the next growing season. Forests across hundreds of square km are being clear-felled and burned to the dismay of locals and environmentalists concerned about the fate of the region’s rich wildlife.

Karuturi, “one of the world’s top 25 agri-businesses” plans to “export palm oil, sugar, rice and other foods from Gambella province to world markets.”

Villagization of Gambella and the Irony of History

To make way for Karuturi and the 896 investors, the people of Gambella must be removed permanently from their ancestral lands. Over the past three years, tens of thousands of villagers have been forced to move as part of a so-called villagization program. Zenawi’s agriculture official said “there is no movement of population” in Gambella. It is the “choice” of the people to move to “villagized” centers where they can get basic services. Once they move, the official said, “they have to abandon their previous way of life, and they can’t ever go back to their villages”. Simply stated, Zenawi has imposed a contract on the indigenous people of Gambella: They will “voluntarily” choose to give up their ancestral lands, their culture and their community in exchange for a clinic, a school and a road.

“Villagization” (sefera) has a sinister and ugly history in Ethiopia. In the iron fists of the military junta (Derg) that ruled Ethiopia from the mid-1970s until 1991, “villagization” was a political and tactical counter-insurgency weapon. The Derg “villagized” and “resettled” populations in rebel-controlled areas to deny local support to rebels and create buffer zones. The Derg, like Zenawi’s regime today, justified its “villagization” program as a “development” and humanitarian effort aimed at providing food, clean water, health and educational services to needy populations.

At the onset of the 1984 famine, the Derg sought to resettle 1.5 million people from insurgent-controlled and drought-affected northern regions to the south and southwest of the country. The Derg said the people were relocating voluntarily. The northern insurgents, who now wield power, told the Derg victims of resettlement  that they were being moved to concentration camps and will never return to the land where they were born (“where their umbilical cord was buried” to use the local metaphor in translation).  It is an irony of history that in 2011 we hear the same old story: The people of Gambella are “voluntarily” leaving their ancestral lands and abandoning their traditional way of life in exchange for  “clean water, health and educational services” in villagized centers.

The Derg never asked people (plebiscite) if they wanted to be resettled or remain on their ancestral land. Zenawi’s regime did not ask the indigenous people of Gambella if they want to be permanently uprooted from their ancestral lands and be “villagized” or corralled into reservations. The Derg could not have cared less about the people it was resettling as long as the resettlement policy advanced its counter-insurgency strategy. Zenawi could not care less about the indigenous people of Gambella as long it advanced his investment strategy. It is all about war or money. The Derg never did an environmental and human ecological impact study before it moved masses of people from the north to the southern part of the country.  Zenawi’s regime never did a credible ecological study before uprooting the indigenous people of Gambella. Tens of thousands of people died in the Derg’s resettlement program from illness and starvation. Families were separated as people fled the ill-equipped and ill-managed resettlement centers. But the indigenous people of Gambella face extinction as a minority in Ethiopian society. So says a 2006 UNICEF field study:

The deracination [uprooting from ancestral lands] of indigenous people that is evident in rural areas of Gambella is extreme. It is very likely that Anuak (and possibly other indigenous minorities) culture will completely disappear in the not-so-distant future. Cultural survival, autonomy, rights of self-determination and self-governance are all legitimate issues for these indigenous groups, and these are all enshrined by international covenants and United Nations bodies—but all are meaningless in Gambella today.

It is true that history repeats itself over and over again!

When the Derg implemented its “villagization” and “resettlement” programs in the 1980s as a counterinsurgency strategy, it was not only morally wrong, it was criminal. It is no different for Zenawi in 2011 to “villagize” the indigenous people of Gambella and give away their ancestral lands for free to foreign investors who did not even ask for it. If it was a crime against humanity for Derg leader Mengistu to depopulate the northern rebel-controlled regions as part of his counterinsurgency strategy, it is no less a crime against humanity for Zenawi to depopulate Gambella to make way for his “investments.”  Mengistu was convicted of genocide by Zenawi in substantial part for Mengistu’s use of “resettlement” and “villagization” as a tool of counterinsurgency. Mengistu never believed he would be held accountable; and today Zenawi similarly believes he will never be held accountable. But sometimes “justice is like a train that always arrives late.” Justice will soon arrive for the indigenous people of Gambella.

The Gambella Gambit

History shows that the indigenous people of Gambella have been neglected, discriminated and exploited over centuries of successive administrations in Ethiopia. But it was in December 2003 that the public rape of Gambella became known to the whole world. Before taking Gambella’s “best farmland”, they took the lives of hundreds of Gambella’s best and brightest over a three-day period that December. As Obang Metho, the tireless and tenacious young Ethiopian human rights advocate who was born in Gambella described it:

They targeted those individuals who were the voices of the community and have a say in the exploration and development of oil on their land. The killing squads went through Gambella town looking for the next Anuak to brutally kill, they chanted, ‘Today there will be no more Anuak.’ ‘Today there will be no more Anuak land.’ As they raped the women they said, ‘Today there will be no more Anuak babies.’ Within three days, 424 Anuak were dead.

When I received news, it was the darkest day of my life. My world was turned upside down. Among the 424 Anuak killed, I personally knew 317 of them. They were my family, my classmates and many others with whom I had been working to bring development not just to the Anuak, but to the region. Most were educated and outspoken. I have no doubts that I would have been one of the victims had I been living there at the time.

Genocide Watch described this massacre as a “major pogrom of terror and repression against the Anuak minority carried out by EPRDF soldiers and Highlander militias.” Human Rights Watch concluded: “Since late 2003, the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) has committed numerous human rights violations against Anuak communities in the Gambella region of southwestern Ethiopia that may amount to crimes against humanity.” The Anuak Justice Council reported “genocide and crimes against humanity have continued, raising the death toll between 1,500 and 2,500, and causing more than 50,000 Anuak to flee.”

Ethiopian Developers are Criminals, Indian Investors are Heroes?

A couple of weeks ago, Zenawi condemned Ethiopian developers who were transferring their leaseholds in  urban land in Addis Ababa as “land grabbers” and “speculators” who should be “locked up”. He said “developers were grabbing land that does not belong to them in any legal sense and misusing the land lease rights they were given for personal profit and speculation.”  In Zenawi’s eyes, Ethiopian developers are low-down, no good, two-bit cheaters, scammers and profiteers; but Indian investors who are given millions of hectares of the “best land” in the country without asking and for nothing are heroes and saviors.

But this is not about Ethiopian developers against Indian investors. It is not about the rights of local against international investors. It is about fairness and equity. It is about official wrongs and the human rights of some of the poorest, historically oppressed, discriminated and exploited indigenous minorities in Ethiopia. It is about a land giveaway of mind-boggling proportions to a foreign company to raise rice, edible oils, maize and cotton for export while millions of Ethiopians are starving and living on international food handouts. (In 2010, Ethiopia “received more than 700,000 tonnes of food and £1.8bn in aid, but has offered three million hectares (7.4 million acres) of virgin land to foreign corporations such as Karuturi.”) It is about making “land deals of the century” without accountability, transparency, public debate, discussion and, above all, the consent of the people who will be permanently displaced from their ancestral lands. It is about how a whole country became the personal investment property of one man and his syndicate!

Karuturi, Beware of Those Bearing Free Gifts

I will never forget the giddy, bearded-face of Karuturi Project Manager in Gambella, Karmjeet Sekhon, in the Guardian video giggling ecstatically and telling John Vidal about the free land his company got: “We never saw the land. They gave it to us and we took it. Seriously, we did. We did not even see the land. They offered it. That’s all.”

Sorry, Karuturi and Mr. Sekhon, “that is not all.” You ain’t seen nothing yet!

Of course, Karuturi is free to indulge in the proverbial fantasy about a free lunch, free money and free land. Just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is no such thing as free land. After Karturi spends millions to clear the forest, bring in expensive agricultural equipment, build infrastructure and get the farms humming, it will find out “that’s not all”. Mr. Sekhon will wake up one fine Gambella morning and find out that the free land his company got without asking ain’t free after all. Karuturi will find out that it has failed to get this or that permit, or is in violation of this or that part of the 50-year lease. It did not build this school or that clinic, and the ones it built are not big enough or good enough. It will find out that it did not build this road or that town center the right way, and the ones it built are inadequate and more need to be built. Karuturi will suddenly find out that foreign investment law that gave them  millions of hectares of free land has been reinterpreted to mean whatever the free land-givers want it to mean, just like the urban land law was interpreted to mean that developers could be “locked up” for trying to transfer their leaseholds for profit or pay “hefty fines” to avoid jail time. In the end, Mr. Sekhon’s words will come back to haunt him and his company: “The hand that gaveth the free land is the hand that taketh away the fine, well-developed farmland!”

Karuturi and the rest of the “investors” have no idea how cunning, shrewd, tricky, wily and crafty the free land-givers are; and they do not learn from self-evident facts. Those who are handing out free land understand the power of greed in the hearts and minds of the greedy. Mr. Sekhon was as giddy and merry as a five-year old child who was just got handed a bagful of candy. All of the investors salivate at the idea of grabbing millions of hectares of free land. Their greed blinds them to a self-evident truth: It is impossible to get a whole lot of something (1,000 sq miles of virgin, fertile land) for a whole lot of nothing ($245 a week for 50 years, plus generous tax breaks).

In the end, all of the investors will lose. In the end, the free land-givers will have it all. Over the decades, we have seen free-land-for-nothing type of scams from Angola to Zimbabwe. On March 27, 2011, Robert Mugabe told foreign investors straight-up that he is going to muscle in on their mining operations in Zimbabwe:

We are taking over. Listen Britain and America: this is our country. If you have companies which would want to work in our mining sector, they are welcome to come and join us, but we must have our people as the major shareholders. Those whites who want to be with us, those outsiders who want to work with us fine, they come in as partners, we are the senior partner, no more the junior partner.

Like Mugabe, Ethiopia’s free land-givers will watch the international investors pour their money, hearts and skills into the lands. They will study every move the investors make, and then make their own move. Soon enough, Karuturi and Mr. Sekhon and the rest of them will figure out that they are “outsiders” (not investors) and the free land-givers will “take over” the farming operations, or at least become “senior partners” for giving them free land in the first place. That’s how it will all play out. It has happened time and again all over Africa. Any written lease contract with Karuturi and the rest of them will not be worth the paper it is written on. Whatever unwritten agreements there may be, they will be conveniently forgotten. By the time the investors figure out that they had been taken to the cleaners, it would too late. Mr. Sekhon, who giggled uncontrollably for getting hundreds of thousands of hectares of free land will cry uncontrollably all the way back to Bangalore, India to tell his bosses: “We should have known it was too good to be true! We should have….” The guys who gave out millions of free hectares without anyone asking them for it will be laughing all the way to the bank in London, New York and Zurich.

Cry for the Beloved Country

When hundreds of Anuaks were massacred in Gambella in 2003, the international human rights organizations stepped forward to let the world know what happened there. In 2011, the Guardian newspaper bared to the world the imminent danger facing the indigenous people of Gambella. Over the years, I have tried to offer my voice of support to the cause of Anuak human rights and condemned the giveaway of the ancestral lands for nothing to foreign investors. I shall cry for all the people of Gambella. I shall cry for the Anuak because I fear, as does UNICEF, that they are undergoing a slow genocide by cultural annihilation and dispossession of ancestral lands. The indigenous people of Gambella will forever lose their pastoral way of life, and the new generation of young Gambellans who will never know the traditional ways of their forefathers. I shall cry for the precious wild life that will never return because their habitat has been permanently destroyed and for the  bountiful forests that are burned to ashes and the rivers and fishes that will be poisoned with pesticide and herbicide to grow rice and cotton for export. I shall cry out to the heavens for Ethiopia, for she has become the personal investment property of Meles Zenawi, just like the Congo was the personal investment property of King Leopold II of Belgium in the late 1800s.

But this is no time to despair and submit to the arrogance of power and the power of arrogance. The trials and tribulations of the indigenous people of Gambella and their 80 million compatriots shall come to pass soon; and the bright sun that is lifting the darkness over North Africa and the Middle East is dawning just over the horizon over the land of 13 months of sunshine. Let them all stand up, hold hands, march together and cast away their fears into the fierce blowing winds of change.

Enough!                    Beka!                    Gaye!                    Bass!                    Yiakel!

Previous commentaries by the author are available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alemayehu-g-mariam/

Libyan freedom fighters retook the strategic eastern town of Ajdabiya which they lost over a week ago, as air strikes by coalition warplanes pound forces loyal to Gaddafi.

(VOA) — Libyan rebels chanted and fired their automatic rifles into the air after capturing the strategic town of Ajdabiya, which controls key roadways into eastern Libya. Coalition warplanes earlier had bombed Gaddafi’s military targets in Ajdabiya, destroying several tanks. A rebel spokesman said African mercenaries were killed in the fighting. Al-Arabiya TV showed several dozen African mercenaries, captured by the rebels.

(Al Jazeera) — Libyan rebels are advancing westwards after recapturing the strategic eastern town of Ajdabiya from government controls with the help of coalition airstrikes.

Reports on Saturday afternoon suggested rebels had already pressed onto the oil-port town of Brega, 80 kilometres to the west.

“We are in the centre of Brega,” rebel fighter Abdelsalam al-Maadani told the AFP news agency by telephone.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ethiopian Review is one of the victims of the U.K.’s anti-press freedom law that the new prime minister is trying to abolish. (See here).

New York Times Editorial

The British government is, at last, moving to reform the country’s notorious libel law, which has long made London a magnet for frivolous lawsuits. The reform proposal presented to Parliament last week by Kenneth Clarke, the justice secretary, is far from perfect but represents a reasonable first effort to change a law regarded as so unfair that it has been condemned by the United Nations. Last summer, President Obama signed a bill blocking enforcement of British libel judgments in American courts.

Under British libel law, a defendant is guilty until proved innocent. A plaintiff does not have to show damage to his reputation. Further, under the 1849 Duke of Brunswick rule, each individual newspaper sale — or hit on a Web site — counts as a new publication and thus another libel. The law also treats opinion, however measured, just as it treats tabloid gossip until a defendant convinces a court it should be accepted as fair comment.

As a result, London has become, in effect, a center of libel tourism, and the Royal Courts of Justice favored tribunal for what a House of Commons report called “blatantly inappropriate cases, involving foreigners suing foreigners.”

The new American law — the Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act — bars American courts from recognizing defamation judgments by foreign courts if they are inconsistent with First Amendment protections. But it is no way an answer to problems of British libel law itself.

Mr. Clarke introduced the bill with lofty rhetoric. “The right to freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our Constitution,” he said. “It is essential to the health of our democracy that people should be free to debate issues and challenge authority.”

The bill includes a requirement that statements must cause the plaintiff “substantial harm” in order to be considered defamatory. The bill would allow defendants to claim “responsible publication on matters of public interest” as an argument in their favor. It does away with multiple libels and reduces London’s attractiveness as a lawsuit destination by requiring plaintiffs to prove that England or Wales is “clearly the most appropriate place” to sue someone who doesn’t live in Europe.

The proposed barrier against jurisdiction is significant and a welcome change. In most other respects, the bill is not nearly as protective of speech as American law, and the burden remains on the defendant. Still, the bill has the potential to bury London’s deserved reputation as the world’s libel capital. It deserves the measured praise it is drawing.

A member of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, Mr Thilo Hoppe, has asked his government to review its policy toward Ethiopia. The following is the statement he released:

Development cooperation with Ethiopia should be reviewed

Thilo Hoppe, Member of the German Bundestag, has issued the following statement on the human-
rights situation in Ethiopia:

It is not only in the Arab world that the voices of those who are no longer willing to accept a lack of democracy and a disregard for human rights are growing louder; this is also happening in Ethiopia.

The German Bundestag’s Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development met with opposition politicians and human-rights activists from Ethiopia, who reported on the suppression of protests in Addis Ababa and the imprisonment of journalists, politicians and NGO representatives critical of the regime.

The Federal Government should follow up on these reports and also raise the critical human-rights situation in negotiations with Ethiopia on development cooperation.

Development cooperation with the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi should be reviewed.

The review must examine what kind of assistance reaches the poorest of the poor and fosters sustainable development – and what forms of cooperation may be misused by the government and may even hinder democratic development. It must be made clear to the Ethiopian government that, in Germany’s view, development cooperation cannot be separated from the realization of human rights.

Thilo Hoppe
Mitglied des Deutschen Bundestages
Stv. Vorsitzender des Ausschusses für wirtschaftliche
Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung
E-Mail: Thilo.hoppe@wk.bundestag.de

SYRIA (BBC) — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad later ordered the release of everyone arrested during the “recent events”, state media said.

Assad’s regime have also pledged to introduce reforms to meet the demands of protesters, after days of violence in the southern city of Deraa, promised to study the need for lifting the state of emergency, in place since 1963, and bring to trial those suspected of killing several protesters in Deraa.

Presidential spokeswoman Bouthaina Shaaban blamed outside agitators for whipping up trouble, and denied that the government had ordered security forces to open fire on protesters.

But she said this “did not mean mistakes had not been made”.

“We should not confuse the behaviour of an individual, and the desire and determination of President Bashar al-Assad to move Syria to more prosperity,” she told a news conference in Damascus.

Relaxing restrictions?

A committee would be set up to talk to “our brothers in Deraa” and bring to justice those responsible for killing protesters, Ms Shaaban said.

She also said the government would raise workers’ wages, introduce health reforms, allow more political parties to compete in elections, relax media restrictions and establish a new mechanism for fighting corruption.

Ms Shaaban announced a similar package of reforms in 2005, but critics say her pledges were never enacted.

Opposition groups reacted to the news conference immediately, telling Reuters news agency that the Deraa committee would do nothing to meet the aspirations of the people.

Reuters reported that dissidents in Syria and in exile dismissed the reforms, calling for the immediate scrapping of the state of emergency and freeing of thousands of political prisoners.

Abdul-Karim Rihawi, who heads the Syrian Human Rights League, later said authorities had released several activists including prominent journalist Mazen Darwish and writer Louay Husein.

Ms Shaaban accused international media, including the BBC and CNN, of exaggerating the crackdown on the protesters.

Estimates vary as to how many people were killed in Wednesday’s unrest.

Some reports quoting witnesses and activists have put the figure as high as 100; others have claimed about 15 people were killed.

The government said 10 people had died.

Security forces opened fired on crowds three times in Deraa on Wednesday, activists and witnesses said.

The first clashes took place in the early hours outside a mosque. Later, witnesses said crowds at a funeral for those who were killed were themselves fired on.

President Assad succeeded his father in 2000 and has tolerated little dissent.