September 6, 2010

Tesfa-Alem Tekle

(ADDIS ABABA) – Some 1,458 Eritrean refugees from various camps in Ethiopia were resettled to the United States (US) recently, the Ethiopian State Administration for Refugees and Returnees Affairs (ARRA) disclosed.

Last week, a group of 130 Eritrean refugees, after years of exile in Ethiopia, were flown to the US as part of the ongoing resettlement operation. They are among of the 6,800 Eritrean refugees, the US accepted to receive.

Ethiopia’s ARRA, an implementing partner of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), had plans to resettle 3,100 Eritrean refugees to a third country for the current Ethiopian year (which ends on 11 September) but has so far managed to resettle less than half of them.

The Ethiopian Administration’s Law and Protection Head, Estifanos Gebremedhin said that “the Ethiopian Government is providing all the necessary assistance to the refugees, due the firm stance it has for peace and its commitment to build positive ties with its neighbors.” He expressed his hope for the day when Eritreans would no longer have to flee their country and would be reunited with loved ones.

The third-country resettlement operation is being carried out by the Ethiopian Government in collaboration with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the UNHCR.

Since the program began in 2006, 7,280 Eritrean refugees have been resettled in different western countries where they have begun new lives.

Currently there are 51,700 Eritrean refugees in five Ethiopia camps near the border with their homeland. Sudan Tribune learnt that on average, every month 1,800 Eritreans cross border to Ethiopia. 45% of them are members of the Eritrean Defense Force (EDF) and the majority of them are young.

According to the United Nations, the tiny Red Sea nation of Eritrea, with a population of around 5 million, has same the proportion of its citizens as refugees as can only be found in countries at war.

According to a state ARRA report received by Sudan Tribune a few months ago, despite tight border controls, which, according to arrivals in Ethiopia includes a shoot-to-kill policy, last year 11,653 Eritreans made it to Ethiopia. Among these, over 4,000 were soldiers from the EDF.

Reports indicate that, the influx of Eritreans to neighboring countries has sharply increased in the the past few years due to repression, gross human rights violations and forced conscription.

Recently the Ethiopian government reviewed its refugee policy and allowed Eritrean refugees to live outside refugee camps and settlements.

The newly introduced scheme, which came into force after talks between the Ethiopian government and the UNHCR, allows Eritrean refugees residing in camps to live anywhere they chose in Ethiopia, provided that they can sustain themselves financially.

The move was lauded by Eritrean refugees and exiled political groups who said “it opens a new chapter in mending people to people ties between the two countries.”

Ties between Ethiopia and Eritrea remain at tense after the 1998 border war, in which 70,000 people were killed.

August 30, 2010

Photo: Wikimedia Commons
A boy carries water at the Shimelba refugee camp in northern Ethiopia

ADDIS ABABA – Kibrom Sebhatu, 45, is among hundreds of Eritreans expected to benefit from a recent Ethiopian government ruling allowing Eritrean refugees to live outside the camps.

“I am happy that UNHCR [the UN Refugee Agency] and the government of Ethiopia agreed to let us live outside the camps. I hope this will open a new era in Ethiopia-Eritrea relations,” Sebhatu said. He joined the Shimelba Refugee camp, along the border with Eritrea, in 2006, after serving in the Eritrean army.

The new policy will allow Eritrean refugees to live in urban areas, improving their access to services and helping to build stronger ties with Ethiopians, the legal and protection officer at the agency for the Administration of Refugees and Returnees’ Affairs, Estifanos Gebremedhin, told IRIN.

Under the “out-of-camp” scheme, Eritrean refugees can live in any part of the country, provided they are able to sustain themselves financially or have a relative or friend who commits to supporting them. Sebhatu is relying on support from relatives living in the US.

Critics have warned that the move may pose a risk to peace in Ethiopia but the government disagrees. “We are not worried that the Eritrean government will use the refugees to infiltrate Ethiopia for two reasons. Firstly, we will do proper screening of the refugees before we let them out of the refugee camps.

“Secondly, the infiltration of Ethiopia by Eritrean [refugees] is not the most cost-effective or efficient way to infiltrate Ethiopia and the Eritrean government knows that,” Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told journalists recently.

The UNHCR representative to Ethiopia, Moses Okello, said: “Refugees are not subversive people. The issue related to security is one for government to deal with.

“We look at refugees as persons who need international protection. There is no reason why Eritrean, Sudanese, or Somali refugees should be seen in any other light other than that they are refugees. Branding them in one way or another is not fair. We have lived with them, we know them; they are refugees and nothing else.”

Eritrean refugees in Ethiopian camps without a criminal record are eligible under the policy, which according to UNHCR, “is also a response to refugees’ wishes and needs for strengthened… relations between the two countries”.

Eritrea and Ethiopia were a single political entity before a 1993 referendum in which Eritreans voted almost unanimously for independence. A 1998-2000 border conflict led to the displacement of thousands of civilians in both countries. Ethiopia expelled an estimated 77,000 Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean origin it deemed to be a security risk, while Eritrea interned around 7,500 Ethiopians living there and deported thousands more.

At least 60,000 Eritrean refugees have crossed into Ethiopia since the border conflict, with more than 36,000 living in three camps and two community centres, according to UNHCR.

Sebhatu said: “Now my dream has come true, God is so gracious. We [Ethiopians and Eritreans] are relatives. We were brothers and sisters but we killed each other for nothing… Thanks to the government of Ethiopia and donors, I am enjoying life in Addis.”

August 24, 2010

* Buys out royalty stake in Africa mine for C$18.5 mln

* Sees mine starting in Q4, commercial production in Q1

Nevsun Resources said it bought out a third party royalty on its flagship mine in the horn of Africa for C$18.5 million, and said the increased stake would add to earnings.

The royalty buy out of the Bisha project in Eritrea, whose government has a 40 percent interest in the project, is expected to add at least 20 Canadian cents a share to earnings, Nevsun said in a statement.

The 1.5 percent net smelter royalty on the gold, copper and zinc deposit was previously held by an arm’s length private company, Nevsun said.

The project continues on time and on budget and operations are expected to start in the fourth quarter, with commercial production before the end of the first quarter of 2011.

Shares of Nevsun, which have risen about 186 percent in the past year, closed at C$4.78 on the Toronto Stock Exchange. (Reporting by Savio D’Souza in Bangalore; Editing by Vyas Mohan)

August 12, 2010

Desalegn Sisay

A coalition of ten opposition parties from Eritrea have made a resolution to form a parliament in exile at their just ended assembly in Ethiopia’s Capital, Addis Ababa.

For nine days, over 300 members of the coalition gathered in Addis Ababa to find a lasting solution to their political quagmire: How to make the Esayas Afwerke led Eritrean government step down from power.

Tuesday, August 11, the coalition issued a statement, immediately after the conclusion of the Addis Ababa meeting, on what they deem as a major decision to establish a parliament in exile within a one year period.

The parliament in exile along with the Eritrean political struggle will organize themselves to be able to take over as transitional government in the neighboring country after they have achieved their goal to remove the sitting Eritrean government.

The group has also expressed strong doubts over the strength of the Eritrean government which has been under targeted United Nations sanctions and arms embargo. Esayas Afwerke’s government which has had a longstanding border dispute with Djibouti is also believed to have furnished rebel groups in Somalia with arms.

And the group believes that the current Eritrean government does not have what it takes to withstand the ongoing pressure from the international community. According to them, the dictatorship in Eritrea is close to collapse.

The statement released by the coalition also indicated that they have reached an agreement to mobilize all Eritreans and also plan to use all techniques of struggle to reach their goal. The release failed to mention what techniques the group intends to apply.

This meeting marks the first time the Coalition has come together following its creation in Addis Ababa two years ago with the assistance of the Ethiopian government.

Initially, the Ethiopian government supported the coalition by offering them air time on the state run television network to broadcast their political programs. But the practice has since been discontinued for unspecified reasons.

August 19, 2010

Megan Wait

Gold producer Sunridge Gold has completed a strategic production study that examined the metallurgical characteristics of four resources at its wholly owned Asmara mine, in Eritrea.

The study, carried out by consultancy PEG Mining Consultants, included a high-level evaluation of the economics and the possibilities of combining the development of the deposits. Further, it also focused on examin-
ing the possibility of fast-tracking a high-grade portion of the copper supergene zone at the Debarwa deposit, in the southern part of the project area, into production by selective mining and direct shipping of the material to a smelter.

The results of the study will serve as a road map for Sunridge for future engineering studies 
and project development. As a result of the positive conclusions of the study, the company 
intends to start prefeasibility studies for the Emba Derho, Adi Nefas and Debarwa deposits in the near future.

The three mineral deposits held by Sunridge together contain indicated resources of 580 000 t 
of copper, 1,13-million tons of zinc, 1,05-million ounces of gold and 31.8 million ounces of 
silver. Further, the Gupo Gold deposit contains 189 000 oz of gold in the inferred category.

Further, the study also examined the concept of the combined development of the Debarwa deposit and the other three properties to the north, all located within about 
7 km of one another.

PEG has found that it is possible to selectively mine a high-grade, 15%-copper portion of the Debarwa copper supergene zone for direct shipping to a smelter, known as a direct shipping option (DSO), thus eliminating the need for a process plant facility early in the mine life.

Following the DSO start-up period, a flotation plant and further mine development would be required to exploit the remaining transition, supergene and primary zones at Debarwa.

Further, this nine-year-term production 
scenario improves the economics of the deposit. 
Trade-off studies by PEG mining engineers have also concluded that underground mining using a ramp, as opposed to using the existing vertical shaft, is the preferred method of access 
to the mineralised material at Debarwa.

Meanwhile, recent mineralogy and metallurgical testwork indicates that copper and zinc mineralisation from the Emba Derho, Debarwa and Adi Nefas deposits all respond to extraction by froth flotation in a similar manner and, therefore, coprocessing these materials in a single flotation process plant is deemed feasible. 

The company also reports that oxide gold mineralisation from all four deposits 
responds well to gold recovery by cyanidation, which means that this material could be copro-
cessed in a single central cyanide leach plant.

The company also points out that a central 
process facility for both base metals and gold at Emba Derho will provide significant economic 
benefits for the other three deposits through capital cost synergies for items such as process 
plant equipment, infrastructure and tailings 
disposal facilities.

Edited by: Martin Zhuwakinyu

August 18, 2010

Seth J. Frantzman

The Egyptian territory has become a human prison for African migrants.

They are hung from trees by metal chains attached to their arms and provided with plastic bags to collect their urine to drink when they are thirsty. They are gang raped, tortured with electricity and held prisoner in desert camps. When they escape they are shot, either by their Beduin captors or by Egyptian police. These savage and disturbing details, published piecemeal over the years, are just a part of the picture of what is being done in Egypt’s Sinai desert to African migrants.

The story probably begins with the end of the Ethiopia-Eritrea War in 2000, the beginning of the Darfur genocide in 2003 and the end of the war in South Sudan in 2005, each of which in its own way created numerous refugees. In December 2005, Egypt began cracking down on African migrants, in one infamous incident many (between 10 and 60) were massacred by police attempting to clear a park of their encampments.

This helped provide incentive to travel further afield, with Europe a tough destination, they trickled into Sinai and thence to Israel. Eritreans, who now make up the majority of refugees (10,000+), have been arriving in Israel since 2007. In that year it was reported that 48 African refugees deported to Egypt by Israel had been abused and then disappeared. One migrant claimed Egyptians imprisoned him and “poured boiling water on his body.”

At the time Egypt was busy trying to get rid of the refugees, sending them back to Sudan if possible. Criticism about the “disappearances” was raised by activists in 2007 mostly to complain that Israel should stop its “hot return” policy of immediately returning refugees to Egypt. One report alleged that 139 refugees had disappeared.

What the disappearances highlight is the increasing brutalization meted out to Africans in Sinai beginning in 2007.

Between July 2007 and October 2008, the media reported that 33 Africans were shot in Sinai while trying to cross the border into Israel. By March of 2010 more than sixty had been killed. The man charged with implementing the policy is General Muhammad Shousha, governor of north Sinai. For him it is quite clear; “of course it’s not a mistake that we shoot them, it’s necessary to shoot them. To deal with an infiltrator, he has to be fired at.” The migrants reported that the Egyptian border guards shot at women and children and that if they were captured alive they were then subjected to beatings and insults; “you are a Jew” and “you are the enemy of the Arabs and of Islam.”

They also claimed that the Egyptians wanted to know who trafficked them.

Suspicion of the Africans is part of a larger story. Some Egyptians argue that the smuggling is bad because it strengthens Israel; one Sinai resident claims “we are helping Israel. These migrants will go, take away Arabs’ jobs, work in agriculture and construction and it will all contribute to Israel’s plans.”

The privately owned, independent Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm has done some intrepid reporting on other horrors experienced by the migrants while in Sinai. An Ethiopian named Youssef related that he had gone to Khartoum in Sudan to work in a hotel and was approached by a Sudanese man who promised him a job in Egypt. He boarded a truck with others from Sudan and Eritrea and was transported in five days to Sinai. There he discovered the lure of a job was a scam and instead he was imprisoned by his Beduin smugglers. They demanded $3,000 and told him they would then take him to the Israeli border. Another man named Ali, also from Ethiopia, experienced a similar bait-and-switch.

He was beaten daily and told to phone family and raise money for his release.

IN JANUARY the Israeli police arrested an Ethiopian and two Eritrean migrants for involvement in extortion and human smuggling. The three men had been hired by Beduin in Sinai to contact families of imprisoned Africans in Israel and extort money for the release of their family members being held in Sinai.

When arrested the men had $100,000, evidently collected to be sent on to Sinai for the release of African refugees. The stories coming out of Sinai are horrifying.

Migrants speak of desert camps run by the Rashida Beduin tribe. They are watched over by armed guards and tortured by being scalded with heated metal bars.

Modern day slavery exists. One woman, Wizar Tasapai from Eritrea, was tied up and kept in a fuel tank and told her kidneys would be sold if her family in Israel didn’t pay $2,800. The Beduin told her cousin “the girl is in a bad condition.

She is beaten and raped.” Her family paid the ransom to an Eritrean at the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv and he transferred it to Beduin. The woman eventually made it to Israel. Rape seems to be a typical brutality carried out by the Beduin smugglers against African women. An Eritrean woman reported to the Israeli authorities in February 2010 that she had been raped by eight Beduin men in Sinai.

A July 2010 report noted that women were often separated from the men and that they were all held in prisons underground.

In the same month the bodies of 10 African migrants were found mutilated in Sinai.

According to the Beduin of northern Sinai, the Egyptian security forces arrest them on smuggling charges.

But a recent incident seems to contradict those claims. On August 14th it was reported that 300 Africans were being held prisoner at a Beduin camp. One of them managed to steal a weapon and free several others. In an ensuing gun battle six Eritreans were killed. Egyptian police fanned out from al-Mahdeyya village, south of Rafah and shot two fleeing Eritreans and arrested 17 others.

There was no report that the Egyptians tried in any way to free those migrants being held captive. The Egyptian police seem primarily interested in killing or expelling the migrants.

Today Sinai has become a human prison, a place of death, gang rape and murder. While initially many of the Africans were refugees it seems now that, as with the sex slave trade in Eastern European women that was a staple of the 1990s in Sinai, the slave trade in Africans in Sinai has become a business – one where victims are recruited and then transported to Israel only as a way to get rid of the human cargo.

Israel has decent relations with Egypt’s security forces in Sinai. It is time to send the message that only a massive and coordinated crackdown on the Beduin smugglers will stop the flow of illegal immigrants, help Egypt’s image and end the hell that Sinai has become.

The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

August 18, 2010

Alister Doyle

* Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa top food security risks

* Nordic nations, led by Finland, least at risk -Maplecroft

OSLO – Afghanistan and nations in sub-Saharan Africa are most at risk from shocks to food supplies such as droughts or floods while Nordic countries are least vulnerable, according to an index released on Thursday.

“Of 50 nations most at risk, 36 are located in Africa,” said Fiona Place, an environmental analyst at British-based consultancy Maplecroft, which compiled the 163-nation food security risk index.

Maplecroft said that it hoped the index could help in directing food aid or to guide investments in food production.

Upheavals in 2010 include Russia’s grain export ban from Aug. 15 spurred by the country’s worst drought in more than a century.

Afghanistan’s food supplies were most precarious, based on factors such as rates of malnutrition, cereal production and imports, gross domestic product per capita, natural disasters, conflicts and the effectiveness of government.

It was followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola, Liberia, Chad and Zimbabwe, all of which suffer from poverty and risk ever more extreme weather because of climate change.

At the other end of the scale, the survey said that Finland had the most secure food supplies, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Canada and the United States.

Among nations with unreliable supplies, Pakistan — which ranked 30th most at risk on the list — is struggling with floods that have killed 1,600 people and badly damaged its agriculture-based economy.

“Pakistan and sub-Saharan Africa which are dependent on food imports are going to be all the more vulnerable,” Alyson Warhurst, head of Maplecroft, told Reuters.

She said the Russian export ban would add pressure on China to supply more food to world markets at a time when its domestic wheat and meat consumption were rising.

Chicago Board of Trade wheat futures Wc1 hit a 2-year in early August on worries about Russia’s drought. Prices have since fallen more than 20 percent but are still well above levels before the surge. (Editing by Maria Golovnina)

August 14, 2010

EL-ARISH, Egypt — Smugglers and police have shot dead six Eritreans near the Israeli border, in the latest case of illegal crossings that have become perilous, an Egyptian security official said on Saturday.

The deadly clashes took place late on Friday after the African migrants seized the weapons of the people traffickers in a bid to escape, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

He said four Eritreans — three men and a woman — were killed in an exchange of fire between the migrants and smugglers, and police shot dead two Eritreans from the same group as they tried to cross illegally into Israel.

The police detained 22 migrants, five of whom were wounded in the violence, and were still searching for the smugglers as well as for other members of the group estimated to number 60, the security official said.

After a failed attempt to smuggle the migrants into Israel, the traffickers had demanded money for their release, migrants told the police.

The deaths bring to 28 the number of African migrants killed so far this year in attempts to cross to Israel in search of a better life and job prospects, 24 of them by Egypt’s police, according to the security services.

The figure compares with 19 migrants killed last year in Egypt, a country with a 1979 peace treaty with Israel which has called for stricter border controls. Most of the migrants hail from Eritrea, Sudan and Ethiopia.

Cairo has rejected harsh criticism from human rights groups of its policy of using potentially lethal force against migrants along its 250-kilometre (150-mile) border with Israel.

The Sinai desert border has become a major trafficking route for African migrants seeking jobs and for east European women headed for the sex trade.

July 28, 2010

Genetic investigators say the partnership between people and the ancestors of today’s donkeys was sealed not by monarchs trying to establish kingdoms, but by mobile, pastoral people who had to recruit animals to help them survive the harsh Saharan landscape in northern Africa more than 5,000 years ago. The findings, reported today by an international research team in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, paint a surprising picture of what small, isolated groups of people were able to accomplish when confronted with unpredictable storms and expanding desert.

“It says those early people were quite innovative, more so than many people today give them credit for,” said senior author Connie J. Mulligan, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Florida and associate director of the UF Genetics Institute. “The domestication of a wild animal was quite an intellectual breakthrough, and we have provided solid evidence that donkey domestication happened first in northern Africa and happened there more than once.”

Sorting through the most comprehensive sampling of mitochondrial DNA ever assembled from ancient, historic and living specimens, scientists determined that the critically endangered African wild ass — which today exists only in small numbers in eastern Africa, zoos and wildlife preserves — is the living ancestor of the modern donkey.

What’s more, researchers found evidence to suggest that a subspecies called the Nubian wild ass, presumed vanished late in the 20th century, is not only a direct ancestor of the donkey — it may still exist.

The ancestors of the domestic donkey were considered vital for collecting water, moving desert households and creating the first land-based trade routes between the ancient Egyptians and the Sumerians, according to study co-author Fiona B. Marshall, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.

An Old World prehistorian, Marshall has documented evidence of the donkey’s domestic service by looking at skeletal wear and tear of animal remains found entombed near Egyptian pharaohs.

In the new study, scientists traced the family trees of the domestic donkey using samples from living animals, skeletons of African wild ass held in museums worldwide and isolated donkey bones from African archaeological sites.

“These were the first transport animals, the steam engines of their day,” Marshall said. “Today domestic donkeys are often conceived of as animals of poor people, and little is known about their breeding. This is the first study to determine the African wild ass, which includes the Nubian strain, is the ancestor of the domestic donkey. That’s important to know for efforts to preserve the species.”

There are small numbers of the Somali subspecies of the African wild ass in zoos and wildlife preserves, and about 600 still exist in the wild in Eritrea and Ethiopia, but the Nubian subspecies was last seen in the Red Sea Hills of Sudan late in the 20th century.

Hope for its continued existence springs from a sample collected in northern Africa in the mid-1990s by co-author and biologist Albano Beja-Pereira of the University of Porto, Portugal. If any Nubian survivors are found, the possibility remains that the animals could be bred and reintroduced into the wild. The evidence reinforces the need for surveys and wildlife management plans in eastern Sudan and northern Eritrea, researchers say.

“The whole idea behind conservation is the need to maintain genetic variation,” Mulligan said. “We don’t know which elements are more or less important, but we think the whole range of diversity is important to the health of the species. Knowing the genetic makeup of the animals is essential to protect that diversity.”

In addition, placing the domestication of the donkey in northern Africa helps scientists better understand the archaeological record and early culture of the area, researchers say.

“Knowing where a domestication event first occurred is important, because there are always cultural ramifications from being first,” said Sandra Olsen, Ph.D., curator of anthropology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who did not participate in the research. “With a nucleus of animals that can serve as either a food source, transportation or some other purpose, particular cultures acquire advantages that make them more successful than their neighbors. Consider that animals like the horse and the donkey were used for military purposes.

“From the point of view of a biologist or someone who studies animal husbandry, it is interesting to find the source for a species because it can even have veterinary ramifications,” she said. “The work done in this project is extraordinary. They located very hard to find samples not common at all in museums, and the archeological specimens are difficult to obtain positive results from because the heat often destroys the organic material. They’ve made some considerable advances.”

Besides revealing that the African wild ass is the living ancestor of today’s domestic donkeys, the genetic evidence also reveals that the Somali wild ass is not a living ancestor as once suspected, but closer akin to a more modern cousin.

That leaves a question of a remaining, yet unidentified ancestor of modern donkeys believed to have sprung from a different branch of the family. Researchers suspect that ancestors of this animal are extinct, but they may have roamed the Maghreb of northeastern Africa, and possibly the coast of Yemen.

The research was initiated by funding from the National Science Foundation and also supported by the Wildlife Trust, St. Louis Zoo, Basel Zoo, Liberec Zoo and the Sea World and Busch Gardens Conservation Fund.

Conservation samples were collected by co-authors Patricia D. Moehlman of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Hagos Yohannes of the Eritrea Ministry of Agriculture and Fanuel Kebede of the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority.