As Ethiopia and United States coffee shop giant Starbucks fight it out in a high-profile trademark dispute, little notice is being taken of another potential row brewing in the backstreets of a highland town. Owner of a small business Ambes Tewelde has a roaring trade selling about 400 cups a day of fine Ethiopian coffee in a perpetually packed coffee shop named … Starbucks!
Ethiopia said on Saturday it was in contact with an armed group that kidnapped five Europeans and eight locals in a remote northern region, but ruled out a military operation to rescue them. ”Those who are responsible are being reached through different channels, and we are hoping that these people would be freed unharmed and safe,” Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin said.
The mysterious kidnapping of five Europeans and eight locals has put the international spotlight on a remote, barren and searingly hot corner of Ethiopia left behind by the modern world. The Afar region’s 1,4-million inhabitants — mainly nomads — occupy one of the Earth’s harshest terrains.
Security forces searching for five people linked to the British embassy, who were kidnapped in Ethiopia’s remote Afar region, said on Tuesday their captors had taken them across the border into Eritrea. Asmara has vehemently denied charges by regional officials that Eritrean soldiers were responsible for last week’s abduction.
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/ 9 February 2007
It’s the de rigueur stop off for caring foreign dignitaries. It reached a worldwide audience as a backdrop to the British blockbuster The Constant Gardener. Any journalist wanting a quick Africa poverty story can find it there in half an hour. And now at least one travel agency offers tours round Kenya’s Kibera slum, one of Africa’s largest.
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/ 19 January 2007
African rights champions like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and environmentalist Wangari Maathai will join thousands of fellow campaigners when the continent hosts a global anti-capitalist jamboree this weekend. Organisers predict more than 80 000 people will descend on Nairobi to campaign over trade, poverty, war and the environment.
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/ 13 December 2006
Somali Islamist forces backed by 4Â 000 foreign fighters are moving into position for an attack on the interim government’s base, Somalia’s prime minister said on Wednesday. ”I don’t think that they are ready for dialogue, for peace and stability to prevail in Somalia. In that case, war may become inevitable,” Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi said.
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/ 20 November 2006
Somalia has replaced Sudan as the ”epicentre of jihadism” in East Africa since the rise of a powerful Islamist movement, according to an author who has just finished a book on the Horn of Africa nation. ”The most potent expression of jihadism in the region has occurred in stateless Somalia,” says Gregory Alonso Pirio.
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/ 25 October 2006
Ethiopia’s tiny neighbour Eritrea has nearly 10 000 soldiers and militia inside a United Nations buffer zone on their disputed border in a ”flagrant” breach of a ceasefire, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said. His figure was far higher than the 1 500 soldiers the United Nations last week accused Asmara of moving to the border.
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/ 26 September 2006
The growing tide of Somalis fleeing conflict at home has raised the number of refugees in Kenya to the highest for a decade and is threatening to exhaust food aid stocks, the United Nations warned on Tuesday. About 24Â 000 people have entered the Dadaab camps in northern Kenya since the start of the year, the UN World Food Programme said.