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When Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, came to power in 2018, he promised a new era of democratic reforms and an end to years of autocracy.
Political prisoners were freed, opposition parties were allowed to operate, and the new prime minister even won a Nobel Prize for securing peace with neighbouring Eritrea after decades of an uneasy armistice.
But since then, long-standing ethnic divisions have made the future of this complex country more uncertain.
Earlier this year, we went to find out why.
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The event followed a now familiar pattern: a small convoy of dusty 4x4 vehicles drove on to the edge of the airstrip at Galkayo in Puntland, north-central Somalia; armed security guards took up watchful positions nearby and a number of bemused-looking men stepped gingerly from the cars and lined up to have their photographs taken by the media.
On this occasion there were 11 of them; all had been hostages until that morning. They were sailors from a Malaysian cargo vessel that had been hijacked by Somali pirates a few years ago and held until a ransom was paid for their release.
One of them gave a brief account of what had happened. "On November 26, 2010 our ship was hijacked in the Indian Ocean. Their demand was 20 million. After that, they threatened the owner. You now increase money or we will shoot the crew. The owner didn't increase the money and then one Indian is shot with just three bullets. Then they hit us and tortured us. Tell your family to bring us money, otherwise we will kill you!"
The crew had been held for three and a half years but they were the fortunate ones. Five of their crew mates had died in that time. Now the survivors were going home and a UN plane with two envoys on board was flying in to see them to safety.
Such scenes have become relatively commonplace in Galkayo in recent times. Eighty percent of global trade is carried by sea and Somalia sits on a key maritime route linking Europe and Asia. More than 18,000 ships pass its shores every year. Over the past decade, Somali pirates, often former fishermen whose traditional livelihoods have been destroyed by foreign trawlers and toxic waste dumping, have attacked more than 300 vessels and kidnapped 700 people.
Faced with such a threat, the international community responded aggressively. In 2008, European states, the US and others began sending naval forces to these seas. They are still there today - warships, planes and helicopters patrolling thousands of square miles and doing a fair job of keeping the hijackers at bay. The UN and others have also played an increasing role in facilitating negotiations for the release of hostages - such as those set free at places such as Galkayo - for whose liberty large ransoms have been paid.
But if the problem is now slowly coming under control in Somalia, the same cannot be said for other parts of the world where piracy is on the increase. Lawlessness, desperation, poverty, greed and even political radicalism have brought the phenomenon to the waters of South America, Asia and, perhaps most aggressively, to West Africa.
In an effort to understand the reasons why, Bertrand Monnet, a French academic and filmmaker, has been travelling to piracy hot spots around the coast of Africa. In an extraordinary and very tense series of encounters, he came to face to face with heavily armed pirate gangs operating in and around the Niger Delta, where Nigeria's huge offshore oil industry, which employs thousands of expatriates, offers rich ransom pickings. It gradually became clear that piracy in West Africa has many of the same root causes as piracy in Somalia and elsewhere, not least of which is that those who don't share in the benefits and profits of global trade have ever fewer reasons these days to respect the security of those who do.
Source: Al Jazeera
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Last December, an Al Jazeera network investigation examined shocking claims that the government of Kenya has been running secret police death squads, tasked with assassinating suspected terrorists and criminals. At the time the Kenyan government strongly refuted the allegations but reports and rumours in Kenya about extra-judicial killings have continued to proliferate.
Ten months on, People and Power asked Mohammed Ali, one of Kenya’s top independent investigative journalists, to find out why.
In this deeply worrying film, Ali discovers that mysterious killings are indeed continuing amid a culture of apparent impunity, leaving Kenyan security forces open to suspicions that they are unaccountable and seemingly out of control.
He discovers that over 1,500 Kenyan citizens have been killed by the police since 2009, and that statistically, Kenyans are currently five times more likely to be shot by a policeman than a criminal.
With often little or no investigation by the Kenyan state into the circumstances surrounding these deaths, he finds evidence to suggest that an increasing number of Kenyan police officers may be complicit in what have been described as summary executions of suspects.
Even the Kenyan army, seen by most Kenyans as less corrupt and more trustworthy than the police, is now allegedly implicated in the torture and forced disappearance of terror suspects in the country’s northeastern region.
This film contains graphic images of violence and its aftermath that some viewers may find disturbing.
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Featured Speaker: Harriet A. Washington, Medical Ethicist, Award-Winning Medical Writer and Editor.
This video clip was recorded on March 07, 2017 during the “Women's History Month 2017: Women of Vision” Event, featuring Harriet A. Washington (Award-Winning Author of “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present”; “Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself–And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future”; and “Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We “Catch” Mental Illness”), at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, 315 East Warren Avenue, Detroit, MI.
For more information, please visit:
http://www.thewright.org/index.....php/component/itsoc
http://www.greatertalent.com/harrietwashington/
http://nyam.org/events/event/i....nfectious-madness-we
https://www.c-span.org/video/?....313990-11/open-phone
https://www.c-span.org/video/?....305728-1/deadly-mono
https://www.c-span.org/video/?....313990-5/panel-discu
https://www.c-span.org/video/?....328703-4/harriet-was
https://www.amazon.com/Harriet....-A.-Washington/e/B00
https://www.commentarymagazine.....com/articles/medica
https://www.democracynow.org/2....011/10/31/deadly_mon
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