Somalia's identity stolen by Colonial Europeans now busy terrorizing each other!
www.eastafricaforum.net http://africa.reuters.com/country/ET/news/usnWAL570560.html Nearly 9,500 Somalis dead in insurgency Tue 16 Sep 2008Abdi SheikhMOGADISHU (Reuters) -
Fighting in Somalia has killed 838 people since June, local rights activists said on Tuesday, bringing the total to have died in an insurgency that began early last year to 9,474.
The Mogadishu-based Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation has been tracking the casualties since Islamist fighters launched an Iraq-style rebellion against the Western-backed interim government and its Ethiopian military allies early in 2007.
"We have recorded 838 civilian deaths between June and today, with 1,329 injured," Elman's vice chairman, Yasin Ali Gedi, told Reuters in an interview.
"Fifty-three people have been abducted in that time, all of them aid workers except for two foreign journalists."
More than 100 women are known to have been raped since June, he said, but the real number is thought to be much higher.
Tens of thousands more families had been added to the 1 million people already uprooted by the fighting.
Aid workers say the violence has cut their access to increasingly desperate communities, and that drought, hyper-inflation and high fuel and food costs are stoking the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa.
Last month, a report for the United Nations said the number of Somalis needing aid had leapt 77 percent since January to more than 3.2 million, or over a third of the population.
It said the Horn of Africa nation was suffering the worst insecurity it had seen since the early 1990s when Somalia collapsed into anarchy following the toppling of a dictator.
A tentative peace deal that was agreed between the government and part of the opposition in June at U.N.-led talks in Djibouti has had little impact on the ground.
A small African Union peacekeeping force of 2,200 Ugandan and Burundian troops has been unable to stem the chaos.
Two Ugandan soldiers were killed in separate roadside bombings in the capital on Sunday and Monday.
One hardline Islamist group, al Shabaab, has vowed to stop planes landing at the city's airport after midnight on Tuesday.
The group, which Washington says has close ties to al Qaeda, appears to have stepped up its attacks, and widened its range of targets, since being officially listed as a terrorist organisation by the United States earlier this year.
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http://www.modernghana.com/news/182461/1/
Ethiopia: Stolen treasures but its identity is being challenged today!
when-will-western-nations-return-ethiopias-stolen-.html
ModernGhana.com, Ghana WHEN WILL WESTERN NATIONS RETURN ETHIOPIA'S STOLEN TREASURES?Kwame Opoku, Dr. Sept 16, 2008
Obelisk from Axum was in Rome for decades before returning home. Probably very few countries have been so systematically and intensively deprived of their cultural objects with tremendous violence by Western European countries as Ethiopia has been. First, the British under Queen Victoria sent an army in 1868 to conquer the African country under Emperor Tewodros.
The Ethiopian ruler committed suicide in Magdala, the capital, with a gun given to him previously as a gift by Queen Victoria rather than let himself be captured and humiliated by the invading British Army. The barbarous behaviour of the invading army after conquer and loot has been described many times.
The list of objects stolen by the British, including processional crosses, imperial gold and silver crowns, historical and religious illustrated manuscripts and other objects from Ethiopia will fill pages. Ethiopia became Christian in the 4th Century, long before many in Europe had heard of Christianity.
The second military invasion and despoliation of Ethiopia was in 1936 by the Italians under the fascist leadership of Benito Mussolini who with his soldiers took, among other things, the obelisk at Axum, now returned. But there are still other objects such as works of art, archives, library of Haile Selassie, objects of religious and cultural significance, and the plane of the daughter of the Emperor held by the Italians from their occupation of the land of Emperor Haile Selassie.
Italy has returned the heavy obelisk and can be expected to return the various stolen crosses and manuscripts it still holds. If the recent impressive historic action of Italy paying compensation to Libya for colonization is any indication of its future policy, we can expect Italy to pay also compensation for the colonial occupation of Ethiopia. Furthermore, the return of the Venus of Cyrene to Tripoli should facilitate the return of stolen Ethiopian artifacts in Italy.
During all these historic gestures of compensation and reconciliation, including apologies for wrongful historical acts, we have not heard from the British that they have also understood the necessity for such gestures and restitution.
There is no indication that Great Britain, which started the looting of African cultural objects with military force, has any intention of following the path opened by Italy. The British Museum has thousands of very precious Ethiopian manuscripts and objects. The Universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester and others all have their share of these stolen precious manuscripts and objects.
The British Museum pretends to respect the religious objects such as the holy tabots. With all due respect to Neil MacGregor, respect for objects does not replace respect for the rights of ownership and the freedom of religion and religious practice.
How long are the British going to refuse to do the right thing? How can Christians steal the crosses, Bibles and other religious objects that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church needs for its religious practice and refuse to return them? Where then is the belief in democracy and the freedom of religion and religious practice which the British are always preaching to the rest of the world?
(See Afromet homepage for what has so far been returned. http://www.afromet.org)
The hope of many who are holding onto stolen cultural objects may be that time will obliterate the painful memories of such wrongful acts. Experience however has shown that no people ever forget such historical injustices and the Ethiopians have shown enough that they intend to recover their cultural treasures however long this may take.
The article below shows the determination of the Ethiopians to keep on fighting for their rights. How long are the Western Europeans going to pretend not to hear the painful but courageous cries of the Ethiopians?
Is the present generation of Europeans as rapacious, aggressive, insensitive and brutal as their forefathers?
Are they going to condone the crimes and wrongdoings of the past generations? Only time will tell but they should make no mistake: the issue of restitution of stolen or looted objects will not disappear from our world.
____________ http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-09-15-voa51.cfm VOA September 15, 2008 Two Ugandan Peacekeepers Killed in Somalia
Alisha Ryu
Another Ugandan peacekeeper has been killed by Islamist insurgents in the Somali capital Mogadishu, the second soldier to die there in as many days.
A militant Somali Islamist group called the Shabab has taken responsibility for the latest attacks on Ugandan peacekeeping troops, who make up the bulk of the African Union mission in Somalia.
As VOA Correspondent Alisha Ryu reports from our East Africa Bureau in Nairobi, the Shabab has also threatened to shut down the main airport in the capital.
The spokesman for the African Union mission in Somalia Barigye Ba-Hoku says the latest attack on Ugandan peacekeepers took place early Monday near the international airport, where the majority of Uganda's contingent of about 1,600 troops has been based since they arrived in Mogadishu in March, 2007.
"This morning, Monday, at about 7:45, a small group of our field engineers moved out and they were hit by an improvised explosive device, which claimed the life of one of our soldiers and injured two," he said.
The roadside bombing followed Sunday's deadly clash with Islamist insurgents on a road the Ugandans regularly patrol in south Mogadishu. Insurgents using small arms opened fire on a military convoy from the rooftops of civilian homes, triggering a firefight in a heavily-populated area.
One Ugandan soldier died and two others were wounded. Local media reports say as many as 25 people were also hit by stray bullets.
Shabab militants, whose leaders have boasted of having ties to the al-Qaida terror network, took responsibility for Sunday's attack and is thought to have carried out Monday's roadside bombing. The group has claimed responsibility for several other Iraq-style attacks on African Union troops.
Last month, Shabab spokesman Sheikh Muktar Rowbow warned that his fighters were planning to attack African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and another smaller group of peacekeepers from Burundi. Robow accused them of acting as mercenaries for Somalia's transitional federal government and for the government's chief backer, Ethiopia.
In June, Shabab fighters and other Islamist hardliners rejected a U.N.-sponsored peace deal signed between the Somali government and an Islamist-led opposition faction led by Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed. Like the Shabab, Ahmed's group wants a complete withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from the country, but unlike the Shabab, it supports African Union and United Nations intervention in Somalia.
Since the signing of the accord, cracks that appeared earlier in the alliance between Islamist insurgents loyal to Ahmed and the hardliners seem to have deepened.
On Saturday, the Shabab issued an ultimatum to the Somali government to close down the main airport in Mogadishu by Tuesday or face an unspecified threat. The group claimed the airport generates money for Ethiopia and is being used by American and Israeli spies.
A day later, a spokesman for insurgents loyal to Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed said the airport was too vital to the Somali people to be shut down and vowed to keep it open.
Somalia's insurgency began shortly after Ethiopian troops launched a military campaign in late 2006 to oust the Islamic Courts Union from power. The fighting has claimed the lives of thousands of people and has left several million others in dire need of humanitarian assistance.
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