Day: September 1, 2021

Four civilians were killed and dozens were taken hostage Wednesday in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo when suspected Islamist militants ambushed a convoy and set fire to the vehicles, the government said.

Congo’s army has freed more than 50 of the hostages in Ituri province and operations are underway to recover the remaining captives from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan Islamist group, the communications ministry said on Twitter.

The ministry did not say how many people were still being held hostage. A local lawmaker said earlier that about 80 people were believed to be missing after the attack on a convoy of about 100 vehicles that was traveling with army protection on the road between the cities of Beni and Butembo.

Attacks by the armed groups operating in eastern Congo’s borderlands with Rwanda and Uganda have continued unabated despite the government’s imposition of martial law in Ituri and North Kivu province at the beginning of May.

The installation of army generals as provincial governors was meant to quell a surge in violence that the military largely attributes to the ADF.

But the number of civilians killed in such attacks has increased, according to the Kivu Security Tracker. Survivors of Wednesday’s attack recalled a hail of gunfire as the convoy passed near the village of Ofaye.

“Bullets started flying in every direction,” one of the survivors, Malanda Dague, told Reuters. “Some vehicles were hit and then burned.”

Jean-Paul Ngahangondi, a member of parliament in North Kivu province, where the convoy started, criticized what he said was the army’s slow response, a frequent complaint of local people.

“The army just waits for the rebels to kill the population and only then pursues them without any positive results,” he said.

Eastern Congo has been plagued by violence since regional wars around the turn of the century. Islamic State has claimed dozens of killings blamed on the ADF, although U.N. experts say they have not found conclusive evidence that IS has control over ADF operations.

Source: Voice of America

You can genuinely like and respect yourself only when you know, deep in your heart, that you are re¬ally good at what you do. Achieving your full potential requires high levels of courage and confidence. Great success requires continuous willingness to move out of your comfort zone, and to break the bonds of learned helplessness that hold many people back. Merry Gebru, who is in her early twenties, is a young female designer who has been working hard to achieve her goals and is still working harder to get to the top in the world of fashion.

• Would you introduce yourself?

My name is Merry Gebru. I was born in 1998. I started working as a model at the age of fifteen. I was trained with senior mod¬els like Martha. When I started working as a model no one knew except my mom. Then my inter¬est shifted to designing.

• Was there any specific reason for you to shift to designing?

Well, my family was totally against my work¬ing as a model because of people’s perception about the profession. Like many elders in our coun¬try, my father also thought that working as a model was some sort of profession where you need to sacrifice yourself to get to the top. Of course, I can’t deny that there are some models like that in the world.

It makes me sad to hear people judge models based on some sort of weird rumors. To get back to your question, I was unable to continue as a model because my family was against it, especially my father, and at the same time I didn’t want to totally divorce myself from the profession. I thought that I had to be around and I chose designing and make-up. When I started designing, physically I was a designer but mentally I was a model. How¬ever, with time my father started to understand and allowed me to live my dream. Now I’m working as a makeup artist and a model, and focus more on designing.

• How do you come up with ideas for your designs?

I never tried hard to come up with an idea. While I walk, eat, hang out with friends, and sleep something comes on my mind and I always rush to sketch it before I forget it. When it comes to colors, my mom has always b e e n my best a d v i ¬sor in choosing a color. So, ideas come to me on their own because they know I would want them so badly and that they would be in good hands.

• As a designer, tell us one of the memories that you hold dearly?

Well, I have had many good and bad memories in my jour¬ney. My happiest memory was the day my design got first place at my first fashion show which happens to be my graduation day at the designing school. My brother likes birds a lot. So one day he brought a dead pigeon to the house and put it on top of the cupboard. I was mad and yelled at him. However, despite its aw¬ful smell the dead bird brought some kind of picture on my mind. It felt like it was there to let me know that I should design a cloth with the same shape. Right at that moment I sketched the design that came on my mind and took it on my graduation day. As a rule you are supposed to bring a new cloth by the end of your design¬ing classes and we organized a show more like a compe¬tition. That is when I be¬came very grateful to my brother for bringing the dead bird to the house. As I said, I won in the competition.

• Saddest moment in your journey?

The saddest part was when the cloth I was telling you about got stolen. On my graduation day my logo “yoyo fashions” was not prepared yet and at the same time many people took pictures of that cloth when I won. However, after two weeks I saw my de¬sign on a different model with an Ethiopian flag posted on social media. I was really heartbro¬ken to see my work posted like that. I was the original designer but it was posted as if the origi¬nal designer was an Ethiopian. Someone plagiarized my design and used it in an Ethiopian fash¬ion show. Strangely they took permission from a designer here who claimed the design was hers. I can’t sue her nor make an argu¬ment because I didn’t even have a logo back then. Eventually the woman called to apologize but that never changed the fact that I was heartbroken. It became a lesson and from that day onwards I have never shown my designs to another designer. That was the most heartbreaking moment for me.

• What makes your designs unique?

Well, I do the designs with all my heart and soul. When I knit I think of the clothes as my children. I like it and I enjoy it. So whenever I knit I think of a way of making it look beautiful. I love so many colors, so I keep adding colors that make the cloth unique. Another thing is the fact that I use African fabrics. We are Africans so we have to be proud of it. As I stated it earlier, our clothes represent us. So wearing those clothes along with the Habesha clothes will show the world that we, as Eritre¬ans, are proud to be Afri¬cans.

• Any final remarks?

I’m twenty three years old. This alone is tell¬ing me that I have got a lot more to do. I’m just starting and I have a long journey waiting for me. My plan is to continue designing and make sure to be someone big in the near future. To rep¬resent myself and my country throughout the world. For the ones who are starters, I would like to say that designing is not only about knitting clothes and selling them to earn money. It has got a bigger meaning. It is something that should never be taken lightly.

Source: Ministry of Information Eritrea

The Embassy of Eritrea to the US is utterly dismayed by the Opinion of the Editorial Board published on August 27 that blindly endorses the unwarranted US sanctions imposed on Eritrea without rudimentary scrutiny and knowledge of the underlying facts. The Embassy is indeed appalled at multiple, gratuitous, assertions that the WP makes and which are grossly at variance with actual facts.

1. The Washington Post oddly attributes the genesis and eruption of the conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia in early November last year to “a civil dispute turned bloody”. This is astounding and discredits, by and in itself, the whole article. The war started on the night of November 3 when the TPLF launched massive, premeditated, assaults across the entire contingent of Ethiopia’s Northern Command. This War of Insurrection was characterized, by the TPLF itself, as a “blitzkrieg” to neutralize the Northern Command and capture its weaponry which consisted almost 80% of the total arsenal of the Ethiopia’s National Defense Forces (ENDF). The pronounced aims of the TPLF were to then topple the Federal Government. Subsequent acts of aggression against Eritrea were part and parcel of this scheme. The TPLF fielded its 250,000 militias and Special Forces. A misrepresentation of facts on this scale is both inexplicable and inexcusable.

2. The allegations of rape and massacres are, again, untrue and recycled by Amnesty International and other actors on the basis of “testimonies” collected through distant phone interviews without rigorous substation and due validation. This is precisely why, in responding to the unwarranted sanctions imposed on Eritrea’s Chief of Staff, Eritrea’s Foreign Ministry requested the US Administration “to bring the case to independent adjudication if it indeed has facts to prove its false allegations”, (Full Press Release is attached).

3. The Washington Post claims that “the UN sanctioned Eritrea for nine years, in part for refusing to withdraw troops from neighboring Djibouti, and the country did not relent’’. Again this is utterly false. The UN Security Council imposed unjust resolutions against Eritrea because Eritrea strongly opposed TPLF-led Ethiopia’s military intervention in Somalia in 2006, under the prodding of the US Administration, to topple the Union of Islamic Courts. Eritrea strongly opposed the wrong labeling of the UIC and Somalia at the time as the “epicenter of terrorism in the Horn’’. US Assistant Secretary for Africa, Jendayi Fraser, then vowed that “Eritrea will be punished for its stand’’. In retrospect, and years later, even US Administration officials have admitted the folly of those policies. Nonetheless Eritrea was victimized and the US invoked all its diplomatic clout to impose sanctions on Eritrea under the trumped-up charges of supporting “Al-Shebaab” that really came to life after the misguided ousting of the Union of Islamic Courts. In as far as the border dispute between Eritrea and Djibouti is concerned; Eritrean troops never crossed their border.

To conclude, the Washington Post is evidently entitled to take certain positions on the conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. But, it cannot, in all honesty, twist facts and events to create a fictitious narrative.

Source: Ministry of Information Eritrea