Ethiopia

Another byproduct of the Gorbachev abandonment of Soviet imperialism outside the Soviet Union is starting to take effect. Shorn of Soviet military aid, the Marxist empire of Ethiopia is dissolving. The State Department has ordered non-essential personnel and dependents out of Addis Ababa.Deprived of Soviet aid or foreign exchange, Ethiopia's army is seizing the available gasoline and food, so that the people starve and farmers cannot bring coffee to market. But that army is nonetheless ceasing to fight.

The food of Ethiopia is popular for its intriguing spices, spongy bread and lack of utensils. Our neighbor to the south, Washington, D.C. , is justly celebrated for having one of the country's best Ethiopian food scenes. Here in Baltimore, our options are more limited, and mostly concentrated in the Mount Vernon area. Sheba Restaurant, which opened last year in Canton, is a welcome addition to Baltimore's list, bringing good Ethiopian food and friendly, though not always attentive, service to a new part of the city.

A 17-year nightmare in Ethiopia has ended with the flight of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam and the collapse of the dergue, or revolutionary council, and Workers Party dictatorship.The officers who overthrew the feudalism of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 promised enlightened socialism. They brought terror, war, famine, pestilence, suspicion and fear. Victims included some 60 high officials murdered in 1974, the later Red Terror executions of 10,000 intellectuals, and perhaps one million dead of starvation.

Lelisa Desisa and Rita Jeptoo have won the 2013 Boston Marathon. Desisa, as 23-year-old from Ambo, Ethiopia, ran past a pack that at various times included 2012 winner Wesley Korir and American Jason Hartmann. Hartmann, the best hope for a United States win after the three top-seeded Americans dropped out, repeated his 2012 placement of fourth.  

The great capital of Addis Ababa is patrolled by soldiers who speak provincial Tigrinya and not the local tongue and Ethiopian national language, Amharic. That can lead to confusion and conflict. The Tigreans rebelled against the imperialism of the Amhara, whether under theocratic emperor or Marxist junta. Now the Amhara not unreasonably fear the shoe on the other foot.Ethiopian rulers had clout on the Red Sea coast until the 16th century, when the Turks invaded. At the end of the 19th century, Italy beat out Egypt and Ethiopia to set up the modern colony of Eritrea.

WASHINGTON -- Irvin Hicks, a career diplomat who grew up in East Baltimore, has been studying the official Ethiopian language of Amharic, and for good reason: He was sworn in Friday as ambassador to that East African country.Foreign service is nothing new to Mr. Hicks, who has spent much of his life at embassies in Africa and around the world, places that few can point to on a map. But compared with Mr. Hicks' previous ambassadorship as envoy to the Seychelles, an idyllic archipelago in the Indian Ocean, Ethiopia will be a challenge.

The exhibition of Ethiopian Christian art at the Walters Art Gallery is a first of its kind in this country. It shows a tradition sustained across the milleniums in the mountain fastness of the Horn of Africa. Rulers of Ethiopia and the Eastern Roman Empire in Greece converted to Christianity in the fourth century. Their traditions of Christian art began similarly and developed separately.The catalog and exhibition, which will tour next year, contribute to knowledge in ways that art exhibitions rarely do, because much of the art has never been out of Ethiopia before.

IT HAS NOW been almost two years since Ethiopia's declaration of all-out war on Eritrea. Since then, Ethiopia has repeatedly attacked Eritrea all along the two states' common border, sending massive human waves of young Ethiopians to certain death. Now Ethiopia is faced with famine. For the past few years, the Ethiopian government bragged about "record harvests" to cover up the fact that the rains, and crops, had failed over large areas of the country. Ethiopia finally admitted this month that close to 10 million of its people are facing starvation.

The first order of business in the new Ethiopia is to reopen the lifelines to centers of famine. Outside relief agencies saw their transport routes severed by the politics of revolution and by the fighting and collapse of government. In one of the grim ironies of modern East Africa, people in danger of starvation include camp-loads of refugees from Somalia and Sudan who had fled into Ethiopia. Reopening these lifelines should be the first thing that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Herman J. Cohen requires of the country's putative new rulers in return for U.S. assistance.

Ethiopia's president, Mengistu Haile Mariam, fled the country last week ahead of the rapid advance of opposition forces. The news was greeted with joy by a population devastated by civil war and by hunger. But the Mengistu government, led by a hand-picked successor, continued to attempt to cling to power, and rebel groups continued to move toward the capital, Addis Ababa.War has been the dominant reality in the Horn of Africa for many years. It has consumed lives and scarce resources, and has made a mockery of all talk about development.

Running through the streets of a still slumbering city, fighting off cramps, the chill October air and the dozens of runners around him, Stephen Muange once again tasted victory in Charm City, claiming his second consecutive Baltimore Marathon championship. The Kenya native defended his 2011 title with a personal best time of 2:13:08, three seconds ahead of second-place finisher Tesfaye Alemayehu of Ethiopia. It broke the record Muange set last year for narrowest margin of victory in the men's marathon.

Bruce Thomas Hall, a retired utilities engineer and decorated World War II veteran, died of pneumonia Saturday at a Sebring, Fla., hospital. He was 88 and lived in Rodgers Forge. Born in Baltimore and raised on Edgemere Avenue in Park Heights, he was the son of a Baltimore & Ohio Railroad engineer and a homemaker. He was a 1940 graduate of Polytechnic Institute and trained as a lineman and installer with the old Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co. Mr. Hall was drafted into the Army In September 1942 and took additional training in telecommunication.

At first, the police only beat her. They had come to the two-room stone house where Abeba Hagos Enday lived with her four children to conscript her husband into the Eritrean army. When she told them - truthfully, she says - that she didn't know where he was, they gave her an ultimatum: Find him before we come back, or we will kill you. "I had to leave," Enday says through an interpreter. Enday, 39, is one of about four dozen Eritreans who have arrived in Baltimore since July, the first members of a group that resettlement officials expect to rival the current big three - Iraqis, Bhutanese and Burmese - in admissions during the next year.

Lola Tillyabaera shared artifacts from her native Uzbekistan with classmates at Harford Community College at a table set up in the Global Cafe. As students gathered at the table, she donned an ornate gold hat. "This hat is called a duppa," said Tillyabaera, 21. "This is the hat that women wear during their wedding." The hat was one of many things American-born students learned from about 100 international students at the school, who participated last week in International Education Week activities.

Israel condemns `Satan' remarks TEHRAN, Iran -- Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday that Israel was the standard bearer of Satan and that the Jewish state would soon fall apart, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. The agency quoted Ahmadinejad as he spoke at a religious conference and did not elaborate on what he meant by Satan. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, however, Iran has regularly referred to the United States as "the Great Satan." Israel condemned Ahmadinejad's statements as harmful to international peace and stability.

WASHINGTON -- Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country's nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from North Korea, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior U.S. officials. The United States allowed the arms delivery to go through in January in part because Ethiopian troops were in the midst of a military offensive against Islamic militias inside Somalia, a campaign that aided the U.S. policy of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia -- Ethiopia, freshly emerged from Marxist dictatorship and civil war, is on the brink of renewed conflict following a flawed election.The voting June 21 for powerful regional assemblies was to have marked a major step in a planned transition to democracy by 1994.But it left the country bitterly divided, with President Meles Zenawi warning of warfare between his interim government and the second-largest political faction, which has its own army.The tension not only jeopardizes a fragile recovery from warfare and from a disastrous attempt at socialism, it calls into question what many considered a promising experiment in handling ethnic rivalries.

Ethiopia has a long and illustrious history. Its people, thought to be a mixture of African and South Arabian peoples, were spoken of by Homer as the "farthermost of men," who welcomed the gods to their banquets. Its traditions claim that the Queen of Sheba was Ethiopian, and its monarchs claimed descent from Menelek, the son of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon.Moreover, Menelek is supposed to have carried the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the tablets of the Ten Commandments, from Jerusalem to the Ethiopian capital of Aksum.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia -- The headline in an Ethiopian newspaper drew familiar, if unflattering, comparisons to another nation's premature declaration of victory in a war abroad. "Mission Accomplished," blared Addis Ababa's Daily Monitor in an article about Ethiopian forces' triumph over Somali Islamists this week. In 2003 the same phrase adorned a banner behind President Bush as he declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. The battles and bloodshed proved far from over. Just as the Iraq invasion has divided Americans, Ethiopians are split on their government's decision to get involved in Somalia's brewing civil war by sending troops across the border.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Troops from Ethiopia and Somalia's weak transitional government cornered Islamic fighters yesterday in their stronghold of Mogadishu, setting the stage for a possible showdown over Somalia's seaside capital. A weeklong assault led by Ethiopia's military, which sent nearly 4,000 troops into Somalia at the request of the transitional government, has resulted in a sudden reversal of fortunes for the Islamists, who have lost nearly all the territory they had seized during the past six months.