Eritrea Wire

The letter delivered to Måns Clausen brought startling news. It advised the Swedish actor that his biological mother in Ethiopia, long presumed dead, was alive and searching for him.

After a few months of correspondence and phone calls with newfound relatives, the actor flew from Stockholm to Addis Ababa to see his birth mother for the first time since his adoption as a baby by a Swedish couple.

“That was a surrealistic experience! It was wonderful, of course,” Clausen said of their reunion three years ago, starting at the airport in Addis Ababa. Now 46, he recalled his mother “was a stranger to me. But for her, I was, of course, her child. She had been looking for me for years.”

That revelatory letter to Clausen came from Beteseb Felega-Ethiopian Adoption Connection (BF-EAC). The nonprofit organization operates a program, including a website, that reunites Ethiopian-born adoptees with their biological relatives. Clausen’s younger half-brother saw its online search database and contacted the organization on his mother’s behalf; he also was at the airport when they reunited.

BF-EAC is the idea by Andrea Kelley, an American. She and her husband, who live just outside Kansas City, Missouri, adopted their two children from Ethiopia, bringing home a son in 2000 and a daughter in 2002.

Over time, Kelley became aware that many birth families “were searching for their children, but there was no way for us both to meet,” she said in a phone interview. She and her husband were able to find their daughter’s biological family in 2004 and have visited several times. They have not had success with their son’s, whose “mother could have been searching for him and I would have no way of knowing it,” Kelley said.

Accustomed to adoption search databases in the United States, “I just decided to make one for Ethiopia,” she said.

Helped by an adoptive mom with strong tech skills, Kelley invested countless hours and $3,000 to launch BF-EAC in 2014. Since then, the organization – registered with the Ethiopian government as a nonprofit – has reconnected more than 200 adoptees with their Ethiopian relatives. More than 1,000 other cases remain active in the registry, with adoptees or their birth relatives seeking connections.

The database posts information – such as birth dates, names of the children or relatives, photos – provided by Ethiopian birth families, adoptive parents or adoptees themselves. Once a likely identification is made, Beteseb Felega contacts the subject of the search – as it did with adoptee Clausen. If that person confirms a match, he or she can provide a letter and photos for Beteseb Felega to deliver. The organization will interview the Ethiopian family, providing a detailed report to the adoptee and providing follow-up as needed.

Access to the online database is free. Sometimes, an adoptee or adoptive family will want an on-the-ground search in Ethiopia, for which Beteseb Felega charges the adoptive side. There is no cost to Ethiopian families, Kelley stressed.

“Most of the people that did give up their kids were the poorest,” she said. Many were told, by adoption agencies and intermediaries, that their children were being sent abroad to get an education and other opportunities and would return as adults.

Foreign adoptions banned

Ethiopia banned adoptions by foreigners in early 2018, citing concerns about mistreatment of children abroad – including the 2011 death of an Ethiopian child at the hands of her adoptive U.S. mother. In recent decades, the Horn of Africa nation has become one of the biggest source countries for international adoption – including to the United States. Many children have also found homes in western European countries and Canada.

With the ban, “the issues of Ethiopian children adopted abroad were sidelined and no one was concerned about sustainable communication and the connection between birth families and adoptees,” said Wubshet, one of Beteseb Felega’s three social workers in the Horn of Africa country. He asked that his full name not to publicly disclosed, so that he could speak more freely and avoid extra pressure on searches. Wubshet said federal and local governments, along with police, decline requests for most files.

“The bureaucracy is tough,” added Habtamu, another social worker. “Some institutions did not want to collaborate with us” in providing documents vital to a search, even when the social workers provided letters of legal authorization from adoptive parents or adoptees. But, he added, “I also need to acknowledge those who helped us” in the government and adoption agencies.

An official with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Women, Children and Youth Affairs told VOA that the ministry and other governmental organizations are doing the best they can to help with reconnections.

“When people from foreign countries ask us for help, we usually look into our record vault and provide them with the needed information,” said Belete Dagne, director of child protection. “When Ethiopian families request us about adoptees, we also try to help them by collaborating with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ethiopian embassies based in foreign countries.”

He estimated that some 70,000 Ethiopian children had been adopted by foreigners since the 1960s, many in the 1990s after HIV-AIDS ravaged the country and left many without parents. Dagne said up to 2,000 children are adopted each year by Ethiopian families.

Dagne also said his office has received requests about adopting children orphaned in conflicts in Tigray and other parts of Ethiopia. “It is our responsibility to protect the safety of these children,” he said. “We are discussing how to support the children with regional governments.”

Some resistance

Challenges with reconnection go beyond governmental institutions and missing documentation. Sometimes, adoptive parents or adoption agencies don’t want to help, Kelley said. “They do not support the child’s right to know his/her history and the Ethiopian family’s right to know that their child is alive.”

Amarech Kebede Richmond hopes to change that thinking. She was adopted in 2010, along with a younger biological sister, by a family in the U.S. mid-Atlantic state of North Carolina. With her parents’ support, she was reconnected to her birth family through Beteseb Felega and visited them in Ethiopia in 2016. Now she serves on the organization’s adoptee advisory board.

“I encourage adoptees to look for their families,” said Richmond, a 22-year-old student at the University of North Carolina’s Greensboro campus. She acknowledged risks of frustration and disappointment, but added, “It’s a process that’s worth it” in terms of identity.

Clausen, in Sweden, said he keeps in touch with his biological family through periodic phone calls.

Reconnecting families can be life-changing, Habtamu said.

He spoke of Ethiopian women who, after giving up their children, were “living in shame.” Reunification made them feel “like they are new moms. Some of them even told us that they feel like they are revived from the dead.”

Beteseb Felega plans to expand its services. Those include introducing a DNA database to speed identification so other adoptees can experience the “surrealistic” feeling of a reunion.

Source: Voice of America

A promise Monday by Mali’s new interim president to hold democratic elections by early next year appears to meet some conditions set by France to resume recently suspended cooperation with Malian forces. But some hope Paris is slowly heading for the exit when it comes to its yearslong Barkhane anti-terrorist operation in the Sahel.

France’s announcement last week that it was halting counterinsurgency cooperation with Malian forces followed Mali’s second coup in less than a year. President Emmanuel Macron denounced the power grab as unacceptable, warning also he would pull French troops from Mali altogether if it tipped to radical Islam.?

Sworn in as Mali’s latest interim president days later, junta leader Assimi Goita vowed to preserve his country’s democratic gains and meet promises to hold elections by next February. Not everyone believes him.?

“I think Goita is trying to reassure the international public opinion and international partners,” Sambe said. “But in the meantime, since the first transition, we see the military tried to keep themselves in power. And the last coup is an illustration of this.”?

Bakary Sambe is director of the Timbuktu Institute research group. He said while Goita and his military junta are under pressure, so, too, is Macron, as he eyes next year’s presidential elections at home and sharpens his anti-terrorism rhetoric. Support for keeping France’s eight-year-old, 5,100-man Barkhane anti-terrorism operation in the Sahel is fading — both in France and in the countries where it operates, as anti-French sentiment is mounting. ?

Meanwhile, Sambe said some Malians support Goita and the idea of holding talks with at least some armed groups in the country, which France rejects.?

“Venturing sanctions against the junta will be perceived as a double punishment against the Malians, who already doubt the effectiveness of the action of the international community which has neither defeated terrorism nor stabilized Mali,” Sambe said.?

Meanwhile, here in France, some hope the suspension of cooperation with Mali’s army will be a first step to a bigger drawdown and eventual French military exit from the Sahel — a vast area edging the Sahara Desert that is rife with instability. Others said they aren’t sure of what will happen.?

French anti-terrorism specialist Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos said no other forces in the region can take France’s place. Meanwhile, he told France’s TV5 Monde channel that militants are profiting from the security void. And, he notes, Mali isn’t France’s only partner in the Sahel counterinsurgency effort. A broader, so-called G-5 Sahel coalition also includes Mauritania, Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso.?

A case in point is Burkina Faso, where suspected Islamist militants killed at least 160 people early Saturday. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian heads to Ouagadougou this week to show France’s solidarity — illustrating the bigger ties binding France to a complicated conflict.

Source: Voice of America

Western military experts are assessing whether an autonomous drone operated by artificial intelligence, or AI, killed people — in Libya last year — for the first time without a human controller directing it remotely to do so.

A report by a United Nations panel of experts issued last week that concluded an advanced drone deployed in Libya “hunted down and remotely engaged” soldiers fighting for Libyan general Khalifa Haftar has prompted a frenetic debate among Western security officials and analysts.

Governments at the United Nations have been debating for months whether a global pact should be agreed on the use of armed drones, autonomous and otherwise, and what restrictions should be placed on them. The U.N.’s Libya report is adding urgency to the debate. Drone advances have “a lot of implications regionally and globally,” says Ziya Meral of the Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank.

“It is time to assess where things are with Turkish drones and advanced warfare technology and what this means for the region and what it means for NATO,” he said at a RUSI-hosted event in London.

According to the U.N. report, Turkish-made Kargu-2 lethal autonomous aircraft launched so-called swarm attacks, likely on behalf of Libya’s Government of National Accord, against the warlord Haftar’s militias in March last year, marking the first time AI-equipped drones accomplished a successful attack. Remnants of a Kargu-2 were recovered later.

The use of autonomous drones that do not require human operators to guide them remotely once they have been programmed is opposed by many human rights organizations. There were rumors that Turkish-supplied AI drones, alongside remote-guided ones, were used last year by Azerbaijani forces in their clashes with Armenia in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and its surrounding territories.

Myriad of dilemmas

If AI drones did launch lethal swarm attacks it would mark a “new chapter in autonomous weapons,” worries the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Critics of AI drones, which can use facial-recognition technology, say they raise a number of moral, ethical and legal dilemmas.

“These types of weapons operate on software-based algorithms ‘taught’ through large training datasets to, for example, classify various objects. Computer vision programs can be trained to identify school buses, tractors, and tanks. But the datasets they train on may not be sufficiently complex or robust, and an artificial intelligence (AI) may ‘learn’ the wrong lesson,” the non-profit Bulletin warns.

The manufacturer of the Kargu-2, Defense Technologies and Trade (STM), told Turkish media last year that their drones are equipped with facial-recognition technology, allowing individual targets to be identified and neutralized without having to deploy ground forces. And company executives say Kargu-2 drones can swarm together overwhelming defenses.

Last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lauded the success of Turkish unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), saying the results they had produced “require war strategies to be rewritten.” Turkey has deployed them in military operations in northern Syria, Turkish officials have acknowledged.

Speaking at a parliamentary meeting of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara, Erdogan said Turkey plans to go further and is aiming to be among the first countries to develop an AI-managed warplane. Recently the chief technology officer of Baykar, a major Turkish drone manufacturer, announced the company had slated 2023 for the maiden flight of its prototype unmanned fighter jet.

‘A significant player’

Sanctions and embargoes on Turkey in recent years have been a major driving force behind Ankara pressing ahead to develop a new generation of unconventional weapons, says Ulrike Franke of the European Council for Foreign Relations. “Turkey has become a significant player in the global drone market,” she said at the RUSI event. When it comes to armed drones, she noted, there are four states dominating drone development — the U.S., Israel, China and Turkey. The latter pair, the “new kids on the block,” are driving drone proliferation because unlike the U.S. they are not reticent about export sales, she said.

“Turkey has shown that a mid-sized power, when it puts its mind and money behind it, can develop very sophisticated armed drones,” says Franke.

Last October when the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh saw the worst fighting there since 1994, Turkish drones were assessed as having given Azerbaijan a key edge over the Armenians. Turkish drones sliced through Armenia’s air defenses and pummeled its Russian-made tanks.

Analysts calculate around 90 countries have military drones for reconnaissance and intelligence missions and at least a dozen states have armed drones. Britain is believed to have ten; Turkey around 140. The U.S. air force has around 300 Reaper drones alone. The deployment of armed drones to conduct targeted killings outside formal war zones has been highly contentious. But AI drone development is adding to global alarm.

“With more and more countries acquiring armed drones, there is a risk that the controversies surrounding how drones are used and the challenges these pose to international legal frameworks, as well as to democratic values such as transparency, accountability and the rule of law, could also increase,” Britain’s Chatham House noted in a research paper published in April.

“This is accentuated further, given that the use of drones continues to expand and to evolve in new ways, and in the absence of a distinct legal framework to regulate such use,” say the paper’s authors Jessica Dorsey and Nilza Amaral.

Source: Voice of America

Thousands of Sudanese civilians held rallies in Khartoum on the second anniversary of the military’s bloody crackdown on a huge pro-democracy sit-in, demanding justice for their loved ones killed during and after the June 3, 2019, crackdown. Some said they are tired of hearing promises from government officials after nothing has been done and no one has been brought to justice.

Waleed Ihab of Omdurman said that ever since security forces shot him in the leg during the crackdown, he has suffered in pain and has received no compensation from the government.

He told South Sudan in Focus that the transitional government is weak and should hand over power to others.

“This government doesn’t represent us anymore. That is why we are demanding for them to leave. Justice has not been served for our loved ones and the ongoing deteriorating economy in the country. They are unable to solve anything,” Ihab said.

The military’s crackdown on the sit-in in Khartoum and other protests around the country occurred several weeks after the military ousted longtime President Omar al-Bashir. At least 120 people were killed, and dozens of others were wounded.

Last month, Sudanese soldiers killed two peaceful protesters and wounded 37 others who were commemorating the same event on the 29th day of the fasting month of Ramadan.

Zainab Abdeen said her family was traumatized after security forces shot and killed her brother Osman Abdeen on the day of the sit-in. She said family members tried pursuing the case in local courts but have been disappointed in Sudan’s justice system. The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, may be their only avenue for justice, she said.

“We are tired of this situation, and we are now planning to seek international intervention,” Abdeen told South Sudan in Focus.

Protester Najat Yousif Hamid, 20, cradled a picture of her older brother Hamad, who was killed by security forces in 2019 in Khartoum.

Hamid said the government has failed to achieve the objectives of the revolution.

“Freedom has not yet been achieved. We don’t see justice and the country has not experienced any peace. Since they stayed in power for two years and did nothing about these issues, they must go,” Hamid told South Sudan in Focus.

Nabil Adeeb, who heads a Sudanese investigative panel looking into the crackdown, said that two years after the crimes were committed, his office still lacks the necessary technical and human resources it needs to complete the investigation.

“We need technical assistance with the criminal laboratory for verification. We need to review the video footage and audio from that day. We also need expertise in exhuming graves and the specialized tools for that, and we need to examine the bodies to know the cause and time of death,” Adeeb told South Sudan in Focus.

Chapter 2 of Sudan’s constitutional charter states that the government must “form a national independent investigation committee … to conduct a transparent, detailed investigation of violations committed on June 3rd, 2019, and events and incidents where violations of the rights and dignity of civilians and military citizens were committed.”

The investigation is complex, involving multiple crimes that include killings, rapes and aggravated assaults, and some security agencies have not been cooperative, Adeeb said.

“The economic situation is not good right now, so not all the necessary resources can be availed,” Adeeb said.

In a Thursday statement, the Washington-based think tank Freedom House said it “stands in solidarity with the victims and survivors of the June 3rd massacre” and called for the “prompt conclusion” to the investigation, which it said should be shared with the public.

Freedom House adviser Quscondy Abdulshafi says a lack of resources is not a strong reason for what he calls the “failure” of Adeeb’s team to deliver justice.

“The event was documented by different media, including … aired live by Al-Jazeera TV with a hidden camera, so this is a very well-documented crime that happened in front of millions,” Abdulshafi told VOA. The military’s lack of cooperation is a “strong obstacle” to achieving justice, he said.

The head of Sudan’s sovereign council, General Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and the head of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, “are solely responsible,” Abdulshafi said, as they were in charge of “the whole security sector” when the attack happened.

He said Adeeb must communicate openly and transparently to the Sudanese people about how the investigation is going and report the names of those who are obstructing it.

Despite a few incidents of violence and the use of tear gas, Thursday’s protests were mostly peaceful, according to Abdulshafi.

Source: Voice of America