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BLOGGING in the VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

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Let’s start with the numbers : In a country of 73 million only 113,000 or (0.2%) of Ethiopians have access to the internet ( 2005 figures ). Compare this number with another African country with an almost identical population—Egypt: population—72 million, internet users—5,000,000 (21.1%). Other African countries with pathetic Ethiopia-like numbers include the Democratic Republic of Congo (58 million; 50,000 users (0.2%), Tanzania (38M, 333,000 users (1.5%); Eritrea, well, you can check the numbers at the Internet World Stats site. The company provides interesting and at times surprising breakdowns of internet users in every country in the world. Meles Zenawi apparently experiences digital dreams . As recently as August 2005 cyber cracker Zenawi sounded like Bill Gates: I want to see ICT [information communications technology] pervade all our activities as a government, not just in the urban areas. We want to connect all our villages in two to three years. All education services, l...
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Consent of the Governed (repost)

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We will return with new postings. We repost an earlier piece, The Consent of the Governed. Our muted puzzlement in December 2005 following the EPRDF’s announcement it would charge the leaders and members of the opposition with the crime of genocide is now turning into a deranged retroactive scream in our heads. Five months in politics is a lifetime. Since December, Berhanu Nega and his fellow political dissenters now rendered criminal defendants have decided not to fight the EPRDF’s charges in court. By filing incendiary charges impossible to fight in a Third World courtroom, the EPRDF seems bent on sending the nation on a historical collision course. Unfortunately for Ethiopia, an entire people’s outcry—in the country and abroad—has not forced a reckoning in the rank and file of the EPRDF. But how does one defend against the charge of genocide? All precedent tells us is that those who commit genocide—the Hitlers, Stalins, Pol Pots, and Milosovics have never been tried, foun...
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Bealu Girma: Now, at this Moment

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He came to class reeking of the brothel where he had spent the night and of the Katikala that still sloshed in his body. He was a drunk fool, my history teacher, a man small both in stature and in mind and prone to hurling insults at his students in the cruelest words he could conjure in the Amharic language. He was unashamed to discharge audible bodily vapors so putrid those of us condemned to his class learned to hate our own language. But then there were those rare moments of sobriety that more than made up for the daily gaseous inferno. A lucid clear-eyed man would bounce from the door to his desk in his heavy platform shoes and bark a perky " endimin aderachuh !" to a room of adolescents who never figured how to deal with the malevolent moods of an alcoholic teacher. A torturous gilmiCHa -filled roll-call later, the tiny man would ceremoniously reach for a crumpled paperback from a crumpled overworn jacket. He would then launch into a dramatic reading from Oro...
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