Day: January 14, 2020

Ethiopians and U.S. foreign policy observers are trying to unravel a comment made by President Donald Trump last week where he claimed to have “saved a country” and implied he should have been given the Nobel Peace Prize for the achievement.  

Trump made the comments during a rally in Toledo, Ohio, and appeared to be referencing Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed whose Nobel Peace Prize was announced in October. “I made a deal, I saved a country, and I just heard that the head of that country is now getting the Nobel Peace Prize for saving the country. I said, ‘what? Did I have something do with it?’”

Abiy received the prize for his efforts to end nearly 20 years of hostility between Eritrea and Ethiopia relating to disputes over their shared border.

Observers believe Trump was referring to White House efforts to mediate discussions between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan over water usage from the Nile River. Ethiopia is building a massive hydroelectric power project known as the Grand Renaissance Dam, but countries downstream on the Blue Nile are concerned it will deplete their principal water source.

The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee wasted no time jumping on what they believed to be a gaffe by Trump. “Trump is confused. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring peace to the Horn of Africa, not stalled negotiations about a new dam on the Nile,” the committee said on its Twitter account on Jan. 10.  

The committee, which is chaired by a Democratic lawmaker, also pointed out that the negotiations have not been successful. The three countries continue to be deadlocked and have been unable to reach an agreement as they approach a Jan. 15 deadline to resolve the issue.  

“If they gave the Nobel for deals that didn’t happen, the Pres. would have a shelf full of them,” the Foreign Affairs Committee Twitter account stated.

Trump is confused.
PM @AbiyAhmedAli was awarded the @NobelPrize for his efforts to bring peace to the Horn of Africa, not stalled negotiations about a new dam on the Nile.

If they gave the Nobel for deals that didn’t happen, the Pres. would have a shelf full of them. #Ethiopiahttps://t.co/WhJ6nLvb6Z

— House Foreign Affairs Committee (@HouseForeign) January 10, 2020

Trump has not elaborated on the comments since then. When asked about the meaning, the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia referred reporters to comments made in October by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo congratulating Abiy on the award, the Washington Post reported.

For his part, Abiy did not appear bothered by the statement. “To be honest, I don’t have any clue about the criteria [of] how the Nobel committee selects an individual for the prize. So, the issue of President Trump must go to the Nobel Prize Committee,” Abiy said on Jan. 12 during a press conference in South Africa.  

Abiy added that he is more concerned with progress toward peace in the region than awards. “I am not working for the prize. I am working that peace is a very critical thing for our region and if they recognize and if President Trump complained, it must go to Oslo, not to Ethiopia,” he said.  

VIDEO: After US President Donald Trump said that he believes he deserves the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, Abiy Ahmed, the winner and Ethiopian Prime Minister replied: “If Donald Trump wants to complain, he should go to Oslo, not Ethiopia” pic.twitter.com/63IrjUKK9D

— AFP news agency (@AFP) January 12, 2020

Ambassador Herman Cohen, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said these types of confounding, off-the-cuff remarks have become a hallmark of Trump’s presidency. “He has this tendency to make comments without first looking in the background. That’s the way he operates,” Cohen told VOA’s Amharic service.  

But Cohen said the U.S. has the potential to play a leading role in relieving tensions among the Nile River countries. Representatives from Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia met at the White House on November 6. This week, the delegations are continuing to negotiate. They have meetings scheduled with Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and the President of the World Bank David Malpass.  “

Egypt has been in a very tense situation with Ethiopia. And what President Trump did was he called both countries and said ‘come to the United States and we’ll mediate your dispute.’ And this caused a drop in the tension between Ethiopia and Egypt,” Cohen said. “And for that, I think President Trump deserves a lot of credit. Now, maybe he’ll get the peace prize for that next year.”

VOA Horn of Africa’s Amharic service Solomon Abate contributed to this story.

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Hackers from Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU, have allegedly targeted a Ukrainian energy firm tied to the impeachment proceedings against U.S. President Donald Trump.

Cybersecurity experts at California-based Area 1 Security released a report on Monday that found Burisma Holdings, where the son of presidential front-runner Joe Biden sat on the board, was successfully penetrated in a wide-ranging phishing campaign that stole e-mail credentials of employees.

It isn’t clear if anything was stolen from the company or its subsidiaries, which were initially targeted, if any information was gleaned, and what the ultimate goal of the hackers was.

Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, was a board member of Burisma from 2014 until last year.

Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to “look into” allegations of wrongdoing by the Bidens and the energy firm in a July 25 phone call. Their conversation was the subject of an ensuing whistle-blower’s complaint that triggered the impeachment investigation, which began in September.

The U.S. president has since been charged with abuse of office and obstruction of Congress by the Democratic-led House of Representatives, which is scheduled on January 14 to vote on the timing of when to send the articles of impeachment to the Republican-controlled Senate for a trial on whether to remove him from office.

No evidence of corruption by either of the Bidens has surfaced in light of allegations by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that the former vice president sought to protect his son by pressuring Ukrainian officials.

Evidence has yet to emerge of allegations that Joe Biden pushed for the ouster of Ukraine’s chief prosecutor when he served as vice president and was seen as then-President Barack Obama’s point man on Ukraine.

U.S. allies in Europe and Ukraine’s international lenders supported Joe Biden because successive chief prosecutors were believed to have been either obstructing or stalling investigations into high-profile corruption cases, including probes into Burisma.

The alleged hacker group used a similar phishing pattern and is directly connected to Fancy Bear, the same Russian cyber-infiltrators of the Democratic National Committee in the months leading up the 2016 presidential election that Trump, a Republican, won.

The GRU featured prominently in the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, which concluded that Russia hacked the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to help Trump.

Russia has denied meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign and election.

Area 1’s eight-page report said the cyberattacks on Burisma began in November, when Ukraine and impeachment, as well as talk of the Bidens, were dominating news headlines in the United States.

Zelenskiy Firm Targeted

“Area 1 Security has also further connected this GRU phishing campaign to another phishing campaign targeting a media organization founded” by Zelensky, the report said.

The New York Times, which first wrote about the anti-phishing company’s report, said the attack “appears to have been aimed at digging up e-mail correspondence” of Studio Kvartal 95, which then was headed by Ivan Bakanov, whom Zelenskiy appointed as head of Ukraine’s Security Service in June.

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Calling preparations for the 2020 Census “conspicuously deficient,” the NAACP is suing the U.S. Census Bureau, demanding that the agency send more workers into the field and spend more money on encouraging people to participate in the once-a-decade head count.
    
The civil rights group and Prince George’s County, a majority African American county in Maryland, filed the lawsuit last Friday in federal court in Maryland. It  claims the Census Bureau wasn’t planning to put enough workers in the field and hadn’t opened up a sufficient number of field offices.
    
The lawsuit also faulted the bureau for conducting  limited testing, particularly when, for the first time, it is encouraging most respondents to answer the questionnaire online.
    
The 2020 census will help determine the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending and how many congressional seats each state gets. It starts for a few residents next week in a remote part of Alaska, but most people won’t be able to begin answering the questionnaire until mid-March.
    
“These deficiencies will result in a massive and differential undercount of communities of color,” the lawsuit said. “Such a dramatic undercount will especially dilute the votes of racial and ethnic minorities, deprive their communities of critical federal funds, and undervalue their voices and interests in the political arena.”
    
The Census Bureau didn’t immediately respond to an email for comment on Monday. The bureau plans to hire as many as 500,000 temporary workers, mostly to help knock on the doors of homes where people haven’t yet responded to the census. Although that is less than in 2010, the agency has said it doesn’t need as many workers this year because of technological advances, such as the ability of workers to collect information on their mobile devices.
    
An earlier version of the lawsuit was first filed in 2018, but it was dismissed by the district court. An appellate court last month ruled some of the claims could be raised again in the amended complaint filed Friday. In previous court papers, the Census Bureau has called the lawsuit “meritless.”

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Iranian President Hassan Rouhani pledged Tuesday to punish those responsible for the accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet, calling the incident “unforgivable.”

In a televised speech, Rouhani called for a special court to be set up, and said, “the whole world will be watching.”

Also Tuesday, an Iranian judiciary spokesman said some people had been arrested for their role in shooting down the plane, but did not specify how many or how they were connected.

The developments come as the government faces protests after first insisting mechanical problems caused the plane to go down before admitting Saturday that Iranian military personnel shot down the plane, killing all 176 people on board.

Hundreds of students at a prestigious Iranian university openly denounced their Islamist rulers in a third day of protests Monday.

In several video clips vetted by VOA, the students at Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology, a top engineering school, appeared to be gathered in an outdoor location on campus, chanting slogans and listening to several speakers criticize the government. VOA could not independently verify the authenticity of the clips.

In one video, the students chanted, “They killed our elites and replaced them with mullahs.”

The reference to “elites” was a tribute to the dozens of Iranian students who had been on the Ukraine International Airlines plane that was downed by a missile shortly after taking off from Tehran on a flight to Kyiv last Wednesday.

The pre-dawn crash happened hours after Iran fired missiles at U.S. forces in Iraq and was bracing for a U.S. counterstrike that never came. Iran’s missile attacks, which caused no casualties, were in retaliation for what the United States called a self-defensive strike that killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan. 3.

Iranian leaders’ belated acknowledgment of Western intelligence that Iran was responsible for the crash angered many Iranians, including students at a Tehran university whose Saturday night vigil for the crash victims turned into an anti-government rally. Protests spread from Tehran to at least 18 other cities on Sunday, according to photos and video clips sent to VOA Persian and reports by other Persian-language media.

A video widely shared on social media showed demonstrators in Tehran fleeing tear gas fired by police late Sunday. Other online footage showed a woman on the ground with blood nearby as bystanders said she had been shot and tried to pick her up.

Iranian state media quoted Tehran’s police chief Gen. Hossein Rahimi as saying his officers had not opened fire on protesters and had acted with restraint.

Police maintained a strong presence in Tehran on Monday, according to a video clip vetted by VOA. It appeared to show officers in riot gear, some on horseback, along the city’s Azadi Street.

“You can see the Iranian people are in the streets — in astounding numbers in spite of enormous personal risk to themselves,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a Monday speech at the Hoover Institution.

“They’re burning posters and billboards with Soleimani’s face on them, and chanting ‘Soleimani is a murderer.’ They know he was one of the key architects of their oppression,” Pompeo added, referring to other widely shared video clips of Sunday’s protests.

Pompeo said the Trump administration has called on U.S. allies in the region and around the world to repeat U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweeted demands for Iran not to harm the protesters. The United States has said Iranian security forces killed at least 1,500 people, mostly with gunfire, in a crackdown on nationwide protests last November.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, told journalists that reports of people being shot during the Iran protests were “clearly worrying.”

“It’s important, as with any demonstration, that reports of the lethal use of force be fully investigated,” Dujarric said.

A second clip from Monday’s protest at Sharif University appeared to show a student shouting an angry message to the gathered crowd: “Our elites have left the country for good, and they (Iran’s leaders) blew them up. If it was not an international flight, we would never have been informed of the truth.”

In a third clip, another protester can be heard telling the students through a megaphone: “We want clarity. This country has been suffering from a lack of transparency for years. They lied to us through all these years. Excuse my language; they treat us like donkeys.”

There were no reports of arrests or clashes at Sharif University.

Confirmed: Drop in internet connectivity registered at #Sharif University, Tehran from 11:50 UTC where students are protesting for colleagues and alumni killed on flight #PS752; national connectivity remains stable despite sporadic disruptions on third day of #Iran protests? pic.twitter.com/LjaNNd4Ut2

— NetBlocks.org (@netblocks) January 13, 2020

But London-based Internet monitoring group Netblocks tweeted that it recorded a drop in connectivity at the university on Monday as the students staged their protest. It said Iran’s national connectivity rate was stable, despite what it said were sporadic disruptions on the third day of protests.

Iranian authorities imposed a near-total Internet shutdown on the country within days of the outbreak of the November protests and only lifted it after a week.

Wow! The wonderful Iranian protesters refused to step on, or in any way denigrate, our Great American Flag. It was put on the street in order for them to trample it, and they walked around it instead. Big progress!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2020

In his latest tweet in support of the protests, Trump on Monday praised Iranians who were seen in other online footage walking around a giant U.S. flag painted on the ground. Iranian authorities have placed such images around the country to encourage people to walk over the U.S. flag as a sign of disrespect.

Trump had tweeted several other supportive messages in Farsi on Saturday and Sunday, marking the first time he had tweeted in the Persian language. In an interview with VOA Persian on Monday, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said there had been an “explosion” of re-tweets and likes of the president’s Farsi posts.

“By the president tweeting in Farsi over this weekend, not just in English, and by Secretary Pompeo tweeting as well, we want to make sure that we are using our platform here in the U.S. government to shine a light on these protests,” Ortagus said.

“If (Iran’s rulers) decide to try to kill innocent protesters again, to imprison thousands of people peacefully protesting, to cut off the Internet — we want them to know that they’re not going to get a free pass, that we are watching, the world is watching, and we will bring it to light when that happens,” she said.

In a briefing with reporters Monday, a senior State Department official also talked about the message the Trump administration was sending with the Soleimani strike and ongoing concerns about Iranian proxy groups in the Middle East.

“We would hope based on the president’s demonstration, the administration’s demonstration of how it is going to respond — that is, that the United States has made clear that we plan on being disproportional in our response to Iranian aggression — that hopefully this will result in the deterrence that we’re looking for,” the official said.  “The ball is in Iran’s court.”

VOA Persian’s Guita Aryan contributed to this report from the State Department and Margaret Besheer contributed from the United Nations.

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This week the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate, setting up a trial to determine whether U.S  President Donald Trump should be removed from office. So far Trump has borrowed from the playbooks of two of his predecessors who faced threats of being removed from office. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has more.

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