He who hasn’t seen Kebri Dahar hasn’t seen anything!

My title is certainly due to the Spanish proverbial expression "el que no ha visto Granada no ha visto" (he who hasn’t seen Granada hasn’t seen anything), which is part of the great antagonism between the two great centers of Islamic Andalusia, Granada and Seville, as the inhabitants of the latter used to respond to the aforementioned by saying "el que no ha visto Sevilla no ha visto maravilla" (he who hasn’t seen Seville hasn’t seen a marvel).

Leave Spain and the Islamic greatness of Western Europe and fly to Harar, in Ogaden - Eastern Africa, Islam’s holiest city in Africa that is the most suitable historical counterweight of Granada; proceed further to the South. There you will find Qabridahare, which is also known as Kebri Dahar, one of occupied Ogaden’s most tyrannized places (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kebri_Dahar).

Kebri Dahar is a wonderful place whereby it rained … fish a few years ago; this is not however what you will come to see right now in Kebri Dahar. If you haven’t visited Ogaden’s high place of martyrdom, you certainly know little of our world’s unrest, pain, trouble, grief, torment and sufferings.

If you haven’t seen Kebri Dahar, you haven’t seen human skeletons walking around you in the midst of a premeditated campaign of starvation and genocide that the world’s most appalling gangster, the Abyssinian tyrant Zenawi and his racist Amhara and Tigray Monophysite Abyssinians have intentionally and inhumanely imposed on the quasi-isolated but rich in natural resources Ogaden.

Our world takes its real dimensions in Kebri Dahar; there you find heroism and intrepidness – among the starving Ogadeni Somalis; there you see the evil face to face, in the eyes of the Amhara and Tigray soldiers who hours earlier may have raped an Ogadeni lady who was unluckily walking alone in the streets or may have killed an elder who was living alone in his poor house.

The Angelic and the Satanic Eyes

In Kebri Dahar, one encounters the Angelic eyes of the Ogadeni skeleton-like children and the Satanic eyes of the Amhara and Tigray paramilitary gangsters.

Every Ogadeni child’s eyes are our Gates of Paradise, and every Amhara and Tigray cruel soldier’s eyes are abysmal maelstroms of hatred, racism, inhumanity at the bottom of the Hell.

In Kebri Dahar, you can see what is the Empire of Evil , which is named ‘Ethiopia’ and takes the form of an immense cemetery of peoples and nations.

In Kebri Dahar, you can also meet the Great Expectations for a world devoid of Evil with the Ogadenis free and independent, healthy and debonair – as they have always been until the moment the Bubonic Plague "Ethiopia" and the Satanic tyrant Haile Selassie took control over the vast land.

Several journalists focused on or traveled to Kebri Dahar recently; their reports have been added to earlier publications, and started thus influencing the international decision-making. For a first time, the Minister for International Cooperation of the United Kingdom, Mr. Douglas Alexander, announced that Britain will withhold future aid commitments to Ethiopia due to the Ethiopian regimes obstructions of such aid.

The event is expected to generate an avalanche that will devastate the illegal present regime, and progressively break the evil state of Abyssinia (fallaciously re-baptized Ethiopia) to ten – twelve independent states.

The Ogaden National Liberation Front issued a statement in this regard; I republish the statement, and two features on Ogaden, Catherine Philp’s ‘British minister withholds aid as Ethiopia hides famine victims’ (in the Times Online) and Damien McElroy’s ‘Bleak Scenes as Ethiopia Puts War Before Famine’ (in the Telegraph). At the end, I republish a report about the extraordinary event that took place at Kebri Dahar a few years ago, when it rained …. fish!

ONLF Statement Welcoming the UK's Decision to Withhold Aid to the Ethiopian Regime

http://www.onlf.org/onlfpressoct182008.html

18 October 2008

The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) welcomes the announcement by the Minister for International Cooperation of the United Kingdom, Mr. Douglas Alexander, that Britain will withhold future aid commitments to Ethiopia due to the Ethiopian regimes obstructions of such aid.

The ONLF has maintained for some time that the Regime of Melez Zenawi has been engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to obstruct much needed food aid to our civilian population while using what little aid that manages to get through for political purposes. The regime has repeatedly threatened our people in village after village that they will not receive food aid unless they cooperate with the regime in their campaign against the ONLF. The regime has also routinely concealed famine victims from diplomats and international delegations in an attempt to conceal the extent of the made humanitarian catastrophe in Ogaden. The ONLF has called upon the international community to realize an internationally monitored humanitarian aid corridor into Ogaden as the Zenawi regime simply cannot be trusted with any form of aid.

This decision by the United Kingdom serves as an example to other Donor nations who continue to provide aid to a regime engaged in war crimes and acts tantamount to genocide against our people. It is time for the world community to take a bold stand against the deliberate attempt by the Ethiopian regime to starve our people to death.

The ONLF affirms that we will cooperate fully with the international community in efforts to facilitate the direct delivery of humanitarian assistance to our people. We will honor the terms of any agreement seeking to realize an internationally monitored humanitarian aid corridor into Ogaden free of the regimes obstructions.

Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF)

British minister withholds aid as Ethiopia hides famine victims
By Catherine Philp

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article4965305.ece

Britain is to withhold future aid commitments to Ethiopia over concerns that its Government is obstructing efforts to help millions at risk of famine in the drought-stricken Somali region in the east of the country.

Douglas Alexander, the Minister for International Development, flew to Ethiopia on Thursday with a proposal committing millions in funds to the vast African nation over several years.

After visiting the Somali region and hearing the testimony of aid organisations as well as evidence of attempts by the authorities to hide the scale of the crisis, Mr Alexander told the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, that he had reconsidered. "In light of our continued concerns, I said I was now not prepared to make a multi-annual commitment," Mr Alexander said.

At the moment Britain gives Ethiopia £130 million a year in aid.

He characterised the Government's reaction to the crisis as "deny and delay," fuelled in part by Ethiopia's extreme sensitivity to its global image as a famine-stricken nation, which the Government views as an impediment to foreign investment.

Mr Alexander saw the sensitivity at first-hand on his trip to Somali when he was taken to the infant malnutrition ward in Kebri Dehar hospital to see seriously ill mothers and babies being treated.

Aid workers were surprised to find that the most severely malnourished babies and their mothers had vanished from the ward where they had been for several days, leaving only one mother and her fast-recovering child.

The health worker who had taken them to the hospital expressed fears that the children had been spirited away before the minister's arrival to avoid "embarrassing" press pictures of starving Ethiopian babies.

"I come here every day and they are always here," the health worker said. "I don't know where they are now."

"They've hidden them," an international aid worker with a lot of experience in the region said.

"The Government doesn't want to acknowledge this crisis because it's bad for their image. It's not the image of Ethiopia they want to project. It doesn't encourage investment."

Mr Alexander raised the incident later in his meeting with Mr Zenawi. "If it's true that they moved severely malnourished children, that is unconscionable," he said. Mr Zenawi promised to investigate, calling the incident "despicable".

In Kebri Dehar, Mr Alexander also heard concerns from local and international aid workers that the Ethiopian Government was actively frustrating efforts to reach the worst-affected areas of the region, using the insurgency as an excuse - an allegation that Mr Zenawi denied.

Aid agencies are unable to conduct surveys into the scale of need in the region because they require government permission and military escorts, which the Government is failing to provide.

Bleak scenes as Ethiopia puts war before famine
By Damien McElroy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/ethiopia/3219159/Bleak-scenes-as-Ethiopia-puts-war-before-famine.html

On the front line of an invisible Ethiopian famine, government forces stand between the dying tribes scattered across a closed hinterland and outside aid.

The restrictive Ethiopian security regime hiding the worsening crisis in the country's southern Somali region has infuriated important donors. Western officials privately warn that a damaging stand-off with the country is unfolding.
International relief agencies should be celebrating notable breakthroughs in the rush to stop a fresh wave of mass starvation in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa this week conceded that 6.4 million people were on the brink of death and agreed to open up the worst hit parts of the country to shipments of outside assistance.

But hard-won access to the bleak garrison town of Kebri Dehar in the Somali region, also known as the Ogaden, has unveiled the harsh realities of a regime determined to crush a rebel army.

The government strives to proclaim it has the upper-hand against the vicious insurgency waged by the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The desert raiders have waged a war of ethnic separation from Christian-dominated highlands since peace talks broken down in 2005.

In efforts to bolster its claims to have crushed the group, the government has staged Potemkin scenes in Kebri Dehar. Half-filled hospitals are marshalled by clean but uncrowded schools with plasma screen televisions. Meanwhile the streets appeared to have been emptied.

"The groups have been eradicated and the food is now moving freely," declared local administrator, Bashir Ahmed Abdi.

Nothing rings true in the boast. Two aid workers were kidnapped near Kebri Dehar just this month and are thought to have been spirited over the border to Somalia. British officials in the town reported it was flooded with Kalashnikov-carrying soldiers as recently as Wednesday. Skirmishes between the army and rebel fighters take place with regularity in the surrounding bush.

Five brigades of the Ethiopian army are based in Kebri Dehar's garrisons. Those caught in the middle of the war are too afraid to speak out against the government line.

School teacher Abdi Wahadi tried vainly to hide his embarrassment that his class size had been reduced to just six pupils, claiming that 70 were expected to enrol by the end of the week, even though the year started in September.

At the hospital the reluctance to acknowledge the impact of the war was clear in the maternity ward. One lone woman sat with a baby. An aid worker shamefacedly explained that two other women with far more malnourished children had disappeared.

"The others must be taken out," she said. "I'm not sure where they could have gone because the children are severely malnourished. I hope they are within the city limits".

A UN official went further. "The people's movements are severely restricted by the government," the official said. "If they are starving they get past the roadblocks to get into town; if they have any goats left they don't go to the watering hole because the army targets these; if they are ill they can't get into the hospitals to be treated".

In the town's market, there are hardly any goods. A diplomat in Addis Ababa said the overstretched Ethiopian army, which maintains an expeditionary force in neighbouring Somalia, has indiscriminately blocked movements in the region.
A government ban on truck has stopped food distribution efforts, according to World Food Programme officials. But it has also cut off supplies of consumer goods and durables that used to be imported from Somalia. "It's difficult to come here," said nomad Mohammad Farah, "when we get here we have nothing to sell and nothing to buy".

Oxfam reported this week that two million people are on the brink of starvation in Ethiopia's Somali region and that the long-term prospects of recovery were blighted by the loss of 60 per cent of cattle and 50 per cent of goats.

Frustrations over the Ethiopian government's refusal to throw open the doors to foreign assistance threaten a schism between Addis Ababa and its Western allies. "The events in Somali demonstrate too clearly the flaws in Ethiopia's willingness to engage with us as government and its actions on the ground," said a European diplomat. "A lot of governments are awkward on both fronts but by mixing its messages Ethiopia has got away with too much, for too long".

Millions of Fish Fall from the Sky

http://www.ufoinfo.com/roundup/v05/rnd05_23.shtml

According to the weekly newspaper Amharic for Wednesday, May 31, 2000, "millions of fish fell from the sky" in the Ogaden, the drought-stricken region of southern Ethiopia.

The unusual fish fall occurred near Kebri Dahar, located about 720 kilometers (450 miles) southeast of Addis Ababa, the national capital.

"Drought-stricken farmers tending their fields in southern Ethiopia got a nasty shock when the heavens opened and they were pelted by fish..."

"The unusual rain of fish had dropped in millions from the air--some dead and others still struggling--and created panic among the mostly religious farmers."

"Saloto Sodoro, a fish expert in the region, attributes the phenomenon to heavy storms in the Indian Ocean, which swept up the fish before shedding them on the unsuspecting farmers."

(Editor's Note: The Times of India weather maps for May 25 through June 1, 2000 show no large cyclonic systems in that stretch of the Indian Ocean

Note
Picture: Aid agencies are unable to conduct surveys into the scale of need in the region because they require government permission and military escorts. From:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article4965305.ece