FPTV's Katherine H. Wheeler interviews
Ethiopian Ambassadador Samuel Assefa
IS ETHIOPIA A FAILED STATE?
The Real Answer: Yes. It has failed its people.
WHY IS THERE SUCH A WIDE GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR IN ETHIOPIA?
The Real Answer: There is a gap because everything is owned by one party and one organization.
HOW DOES THE ETHIOPIAN GOVERNMENT RESPOND TO CHARGES THAT IT HAS ABUSED AND DETAINED JOURNALISTS AND POLITICAL OPPONENTS?
The Real Answer: By denying the facts. And changing the topic from Ethiopia to Eritrea.
WHAT ABOUT ALLEGATIONS OF GOVERNMENT-SANCTIONED BEATINGS OF MEMBERS OF THE OPPOSITION PARTY?
The Real Answer: We deny the facts by talking about Rodney King.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Monday, August 13, 2007
Fossil Hunter Condemns Lucy Tour of U.S.
Associated Press -- One of the world's leading paleontologists denounced Ethiopia's decision to send the Lucy skeleton on a six-year tour of the United States, warning Friday that the 3.2 million-year-old fossil will likely be damaged no matter how careful its handlers are.
The skeleton was quietly flown out of Ethiopia earlier this week for the U.S. tour.
Paleontologist Richard Leakey joined other experts in criticizing what some see as a gamble with one of the world's most famous fossils. The Smithsonian Institution also has objected to the tour, and the secretive manner in which the remains were sent abroad has raised eyebrows in Ethiopia, where Lucy has been displayed to the public only twice.
"It's a form of prostitution, it's gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity and it should not be permitted," Leakey told The Associated Press in an interview at his office in Nairobi.
Ethiopian officials could not immediately be reached for comment, but have said proceeds from the tour would be used to upgrade museums in one of the world's poorest countries.
Dirk Van Tuerenhout, the curator of anthropology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where Lucy will be on display from Aug. 31 to April 20, said his museum would treat the relic with "the greatest respect and sense of protection — something we in the museum world do all the time."
"On the one hand, I would say we definitely share the concern that people have to safeguard fossils like Lucy, or for that matter any other fossils," Van Tuerenhout said. "Where we part company, in a sense, is the decision that was made to allow her to travel."
He emphasized the decision to allow Lucy to travel abroad was made by the Ethiopian government, and that Houston was honored by its selection.
Van Tuerenhout also noted the exhibit's story line was broader than just Lucy and offers other educational aspects.
"We are definitely going to be able, with Lucy's presence, to tell the story of Ethiopia — not only the prehistoric part, but also the historic part," he said. "This is one of those exhibits that covers quite a lot of history."
Lucy, the fossilized partial skeleton of what was once a 3 1/2-foot-tall adult of an ape-man species, was discovered in 1974 in the remote, desert-like Afar region in northeastern Ethiopia. Lucy is classified as an Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about 3 million to 4 million years ago, and is the earliest known hominid.
The State Department approved the exhibit for temporary importation into the U.S., saying that display of Lucy and the other artifacts is in the national interest because of their "cultural significance."
Stops beyond Houston have yet to be finalized, but Ethiopian officials have said they include New York, Denver and Chicago.
Leakey said the skeleton will almost certainly get damaged.
"These specimens will get damaged no matter how careful you are and every time she is moved there is a risk," he said. "A specimen that is that precious and unique shouldn't be exposed to the threats of damage by travel."
He also said keeping Lucy in Ethiopia would lure tourists to the country.
"The point is, what is the benefit of taking one of the most iconic examples of the human story from Africa to parade it around in second-level museums in the United States?" he said.
Leakey is one of the world's most renowned paleontologists. His team unearthed the bones of Turkana Boy — the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human ever found — in the desolate, far northern reaches of Kenya in 1984.
He is also a conservationist credited with helping end the slaughter of elephants in Kenya during the 1980s.
Related Stories
No Goodbyes for Famous Lucy
The skeleton was quietly flown out of Ethiopia earlier this week for the U.S. tour.
Paleontologist Richard Leakey joined other experts in criticizing what some see as a gamble with one of the world's most famous fossils. The Smithsonian Institution also has objected to the tour, and the secretive manner in which the remains were sent abroad has raised eyebrows in Ethiopia, where Lucy has been displayed to the public only twice.
"It's a form of prostitution, it's gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity and it should not be permitted," Leakey told The Associated Press in an interview at his office in Nairobi.
Ethiopian officials could not immediately be reached for comment, but have said proceeds from the tour would be used to upgrade museums in one of the world's poorest countries.
Dirk Van Tuerenhout, the curator of anthropology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where Lucy will be on display from Aug. 31 to April 20, said his museum would treat the relic with "the greatest respect and sense of protection — something we in the museum world do all the time."
"On the one hand, I would say we definitely share the concern that people have to safeguard fossils like Lucy, or for that matter any other fossils," Van Tuerenhout said. "Where we part company, in a sense, is the decision that was made to allow her to travel."
He emphasized the decision to allow Lucy to travel abroad was made by the Ethiopian government, and that Houston was honored by its selection.
Van Tuerenhout also noted the exhibit's story line was broader than just Lucy and offers other educational aspects.
"We are definitely going to be able, with Lucy's presence, to tell the story of Ethiopia — not only the prehistoric part, but also the historic part," he said. "This is one of those exhibits that covers quite a lot of history."
Lucy, the fossilized partial skeleton of what was once a 3 1/2-foot-tall adult of an ape-man species, was discovered in 1974 in the remote, desert-like Afar region in northeastern Ethiopia. Lucy is classified as an Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about 3 million to 4 million years ago, and is the earliest known hominid.
The State Department approved the exhibit for temporary importation into the U.S., saying that display of Lucy and the other artifacts is in the national interest because of their "cultural significance."
Stops beyond Houston have yet to be finalized, but Ethiopian officials have said they include New York, Denver and Chicago.
Leakey said the skeleton will almost certainly get damaged.
"These specimens will get damaged no matter how careful you are and every time she is moved there is a risk," he said. "A specimen that is that precious and unique shouldn't be exposed to the threats of damage by travel."
He also said keeping Lucy in Ethiopia would lure tourists to the country.
"The point is, what is the benefit of taking one of the most iconic examples of the human story from Africa to parade it around in second-level museums in the United States?" he said.
Leakey is one of the world's most renowned paleontologists. His team unearthed the bones of Turkana Boy — the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human ever found — in the desolate, far northern reaches of Kenya in 1984.
He is also a conservationist credited with helping end the slaughter of elephants in Kenya during the 1980s.
"The point is, what is the benefit of taking one of the most iconic examples of the human story from Africa to parade it around in second-level museums in the United States?"
-Paleontologist Richard Leakey
Related Stories
No Goodbyes for Famous Lucy
Friday, August 10, 2007
Deadly Battle for Oil and Gas
Chicago Tribune -- Petroleum nearly killed Eskedar Demissew. Or at least the illusion of it did.
In the predawn gloom of a morning in April, insurgents rousted the stocky truck driver from his tent at a remote oil prospecting camp in Ethiopia's Ogaden desert. They lined him up in the sand with other workers. And without further ceremony, they sprayed them with machine-gun fire.
Demissew survived, just barely, by playing dead. But 74 other people, including nine Chinese contractors, died in one of the worst attacks on an African oil facility in recent memory.
"I will never work in oil again," Demissew said quietly at his tiny house in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, where he was popping painkillers and hoping to regain full use of his nerve-damaged arms. "It isn't worth it."
Unfortunately, when it comes to getting shot over disputed energy resources, that's especially true for the Ogaden, where little oil actually has been found.
Indeed, while lucrative pools of crude have inflamed conflicts in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, even the merest promise of oil wealth -- most of it tragically overblown -- is stoking violence in the arid wastes of eastern Ethiopia, one of the poorest corners of the world and home to a secessionist movement that has been bubbling for decades.
Rebels with the Ogaden National Liberation Front have added oil operations to their usual targets of army convoys and police stations in the Ogaden, warning all foreign companies not to steal "the mineral resources of our people" on pain of further guerrilla attacks. At the same time, Ethiopia's government has assured exploration firms that recent security crackdowns in the region have again made prospecting safe. And local conspiracy theorists now hold that the ugly civil war in the Ogaden is heating up only because the U.S. and China are vying over its hydrocarbon riches.
All of which is belied by a startling fact: Today there isn't a single functioning oil field in the Ogaden, a tract of scrubland the size of Nebraska near the Somalia border. Most of the wells drilled to date have been dry holes. Natural gas is another matter: Exploitable reserves abound. But even this relatively modest bonanza is many years away from profitable development, experts say, because of the area's profound isolation and instability.
"You've heard about resource wars, right?" said a geologist in Ethiopia familiar with that nation's energy potential. Asking not to be named because of the political sensitivity of the issue, he added, "Well, this one involves an unusual resource. It's called imaginary oil."
The main trouble in the Ogaden doesn't involve squabbling over supplies of black gold.
Ogadeni insurgents have been battling for independence from Ethiopia since 1984, complaining of discrimination by the central government against the region's Somali-speaking nomads.
In recent months the rebels have accused the federal army of mass rapes, torching villages and withholding food aid in the famine-prone region. Ethiopia angrily denies the charges.
But in response to the spectacular rebel attack on the Chinese-run Abole exploration project on April 24, some of the war's bitterest rhetoric has involved the ownership of the Ogaden's underground wealth. And grossly exaggerated notions regarding the size of that bounty -- whether it be used to bankroll a future Ogaden state or alleviate poverty in a unified Ethiopia -- have only complicated a seemingly intractable civil war, analysts say.
"It is my opinion that oil will eventually contribute significantly to the country's economy," Alemayehu Tegenu, Ethiopia's minister of Mines and Energy, predicted in an interview. "We need three or four more years of exploration to fully understand our potential. After that, I see oil as a unifying force."
But many residents of Ethiopia's Ogaden beg to differ.
"The oil is under our land," insisted Kadija, a wizened trader from the dusty Ogaden capital of Jijiga who was too worried about government reprisals to share her full name. "These foreign companies should be giving money to our Somali elders. They should be building schools here."
In fact, there simply is no oil money to give out.
According to industry reports, some of the Ogaden's rock formations match those found across the Red Sea in oil-sodden Saudi Arabia. But years of drilling, some by American companies, have proved disappointing. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that Ethiopia can muster a paltry 428,000 barrels of estimated crude reserves -- what neighboring Sudan exports every 24 hours.
The real prize in the poverty-stricken country seems to be natural gas, experts say. An estimated 4 trillion cubic feet worth of gas has drawn large companies such as Malaysia's Petronas and Sweden's Lundin to the volatile and nearly roadless Ogaden. Chinese subcontractors do much of the prospecting.
All the activity in the Ogaden is part of a new hunt for oil in Northeast Africa, industry analysts say.
Exploration projects are under way in such improbable oil sources as Uganda, Kenya, Djibouti, Eritrea and even war-racked Somalia. Contrary to local gossip, the volumes of potential reserves involved haven't attracted American or Chinese oil majors, which are wrestling for access to bigger subsurface treasures elsewhere in Africa, mainly Nigeria and Angola.
The snooping in Africa's Horn is spurred mostly by energy nationalism locking up supplies on other continents, experts say. Yet that hasn't stifled wild expectations that oil will yank some of the world's poorest nations out of misery.
"It seems like a buzz, but we're really just turning over stones at this stage," said an executive in Addis Ababa who refused to be identified because Ogaden rebels were making death threats against some oil companies. "With Russia and the Middle East closed off to us, we're working around the margins."
Mitchell noted that the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina was stoked in part by murky reports of offshore oil -- reserves that remain untapped to this day. And theoretical crude deposits in the high Arctic are now causing friction between Russia and its circumpolar neighbors, he said.
On Thursday, a Russian submarine dropped a flag onto the seabed at the North Pole in a gesture meant to strengthen its claim over potential oil supplies hidden away there. With global warming melting the northern ice cap, the Arctic is drawing the energy-hungry gaze of several nations.
In Ethiopia, Demissew, the wounded truck driver, said he could not care less whether his abandoned oil prospect produced anything. With three bullet holes in his body, he considered himself lucky to be alive. Most of his tent-mates, he said, were dead.
"Nobody told us the company had been warned by the rebels," he said, cradling a useless arm in his lap.
Back in the Ogaden, meanwhile, industry sources said that Demissew's former employers were already replacing the oil camp vehicles and generators destroyed during the rebel attack.
Hope and death spring eternal in the Ogaden, it seems, even when oil doesn't.
In the predawn gloom of a morning in April, insurgents rousted the stocky truck driver from his tent at a remote oil prospecting camp in Ethiopia's Ogaden desert. They lined him up in the sand with other workers. And without further ceremony, they sprayed them with machine-gun fire.
Demissew survived, just barely, by playing dead. But 74 other people, including nine Chinese contractors, died in one of the worst attacks on an African oil facility in recent memory.
"I will never work in oil again," Demissew said quietly at his tiny house in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, where he was popping painkillers and hoping to regain full use of his nerve-damaged arms. "It isn't worth it."
Unfortunately, when it comes to getting shot over disputed energy resources, that's especially true for the Ogaden, where little oil actually has been found.
Indeed, while lucrative pools of crude have inflamed conflicts in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, even the merest promise of oil wealth -- most of it tragically overblown -- is stoking violence in the arid wastes of eastern Ethiopia, one of the poorest corners of the world and home to a secessionist movement that has been bubbling for decades.
Rebels with the Ogaden National Liberation Front have added oil operations to their usual targets of army convoys and police stations in the Ogaden, warning all foreign companies not to steal "the mineral resources of our people" on pain of further guerrilla attacks. At the same time, Ethiopia's government has assured exploration firms that recent security crackdowns in the region have again made prospecting safe. And local conspiracy theorists now hold that the ugly civil war in the Ogaden is heating up only because the U.S. and China are vying over its hydrocarbon riches.
All of which is belied by a startling fact: Today there isn't a single functioning oil field in the Ogaden, a tract of scrubland the size of Nebraska near the Somalia border. Most of the wells drilled to date have been dry holes. Natural gas is another matter: Exploitable reserves abound. But even this relatively modest bonanza is many years away from profitable development, experts say, because of the area's profound isolation and instability.
"You've heard about resource wars, right?" said a geologist in Ethiopia familiar with that nation's energy potential. Asking not to be named because of the political sensitivity of the issue, he added, "Well, this one involves an unusual resource. It's called imaginary oil."
The main trouble in the Ogaden doesn't involve squabbling over supplies of black gold.
Ogadeni insurgents have been battling for independence from Ethiopia since 1984, complaining of discrimination by the central government against the region's Somali-speaking nomads.
In recent months the rebels have accused the federal army of mass rapes, torching villages and withholding food aid in the famine-prone region. Ethiopia angrily denies the charges.
But in response to the spectacular rebel attack on the Chinese-run Abole exploration project on April 24, some of the war's bitterest rhetoric has involved the ownership of the Ogaden's underground wealth. And grossly exaggerated notions regarding the size of that bounty -- whether it be used to bankroll a future Ogaden state or alleviate poverty in a unified Ethiopia -- have only complicated a seemingly intractable civil war, analysts say.
"It is my opinion that oil will eventually contribute significantly to the country's economy," Alemayehu Tegenu, Ethiopia's minister of Mines and Energy, predicted in an interview. "We need three or four more years of exploration to fully understand our potential. After that, I see oil as a unifying force."
But many residents of Ethiopia's Ogaden beg to differ.
"The oil is under our land," insisted Kadija, a wizened trader from the dusty Ogaden capital of Jijiga who was too worried about government reprisals to share her full name. "These foreign companies should be giving money to our Somali elders. They should be building schools here."
In fact, there simply is no oil money to give out.
According to industry reports, some of the Ogaden's rock formations match those found across the Red Sea in oil-sodden Saudi Arabia. But years of drilling, some by American companies, have proved disappointing. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that Ethiopia can muster a paltry 428,000 barrels of estimated crude reserves -- what neighboring Sudan exports every 24 hours.
The real prize in the poverty-stricken country seems to be natural gas, experts say. An estimated 4 trillion cubic feet worth of gas has drawn large companies such as Malaysia's Petronas and Sweden's Lundin to the volatile and nearly roadless Ogaden. Chinese subcontractors do much of the prospecting.
All the activity in the Ogaden is part of a new hunt for oil in Northeast Africa, industry analysts say.
Exploration projects are under way in such improbable oil sources as Uganda, Kenya, Djibouti, Eritrea and even war-racked Somalia. Contrary to local gossip, the volumes of potential reserves involved haven't attracted American or Chinese oil majors, which are wrestling for access to bigger subsurface treasures elsewhere in Africa, mainly Nigeria and Angola.
The snooping in Africa's Horn is spurred mostly by energy nationalism locking up supplies on other continents, experts say. Yet that hasn't stifled wild expectations that oil will yank some of the world's poorest nations out of misery.
"It seems like a buzz, but we're really just turning over stones at this stage," said an executive in Addis Ababa who refused to be identified because Ogaden rebels were making death threats against some oil companies. "With Russia and the Middle East closed off to us, we're working around the margins."
Mitchell noted that the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina was stoked in part by murky reports of offshore oil -- reserves that remain untapped to this day. And theoretical crude deposits in the high Arctic are now causing friction between Russia and its circumpolar neighbors, he said.
On Thursday, a Russian submarine dropped a flag onto the seabed at the North Pole in a gesture meant to strengthen its claim over potential oil supplies hidden away there. With global warming melting the northern ice cap, the Arctic is drawing the energy-hungry gaze of several nations.
In Ethiopia, Demissew, the wounded truck driver, said he could not care less whether his abandoned oil prospect produced anything. With three bullet holes in his body, he considered himself lucky to be alive. Most of his tent-mates, he said, were dead.
"Nobody told us the company had been warned by the rebels," he said, cradling a useless arm in his lap.
Back in the Ogaden, meanwhile, industry sources said that Demissew's former employers were already replacing the oil camp vehicles and generators destroyed during the rebel attack.
Hope and death spring eternal in the Ogaden, it seems, even when oil doesn't.
No Texting for Millennium Crowd
TeleGeography -- Ethiopia will have 1.2 million mobile phones available for sale to the hundreds of thousands of tourists and Ethiopians living abroad who are expected to visit the country to celebrate the Ethiopian millennium, which falls on 12 September.
Ethiopia is the only country in the world to have preserved the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox faith-based Julian calendar, which is seven years behind the Gregorian calendar used by the rest of the world. Both the UN and the African Union have recognised the Ethiopian millennium as a unique African occasion, dubbing it the ‘African Millennium’.
Expected guests include African heads of state and musicians Beyonce Knowles and Michael Jackson. According to Ethiopia Telecommunication Corporation (ETC), the handsets will afford tourists access to various special services including audio and video data.
Ethiopia is the only country in the world to have preserved the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox faith-based Julian calendar, which is seven years behind the Gregorian calendar used by the rest of the world. Both the UN and the African Union have recognised the Ethiopian millennium as a unique African occasion, dubbing it the ‘African Millennium’.
Expected guests include African heads of state and musicians Beyonce Knowles and Michael Jackson. According to Ethiopia Telecommunication Corporation (ETC), the handsets will afford tourists access to various special services including audio and video data.
DOWNSIDE:
Post 2005 election, SMS messaging systems in Ethiopia were deliberately shut off by the government in an attempt to stop people from communicating.
More details of the chaos on Ethiopiamillenium.com.
News Archive: Taxi Drivers in Ethiopia's Capital on Strike
Post 2005 election, SMS messaging systems in Ethiopia were deliberately shut off by the government in an attempt to stop people from communicating.
More details of the chaos on Ethiopiamillenium.com.
News Archive: Taxi Drivers in Ethiopia's Capital on Strike
The Horn: A Front for US War on Terror?
Boston Globe -- THE UNITED STATES is expanding its military presence in the Horn of Africa in an attempt to counteract terrorist groups in the region. But military activity is not the way to achieve that goal. Instead, the United States needs to put more effort into solving the outstanding political dispute there: the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
American forces have established a network of outposts in Ethiopia and Kenya centered on a base in Djibouti. The United States has created an Africa Command to coordinate military activities. In January, US gunships blasted away at suspected Islamic terrorists in southern Somalia. These forays have continued as an Ethiopian force occupies Mogadishu, the Somali capital, to bolster the provisional government there.
The Eritreans, seeing a chance to make trouble, are supplying Islamic insurgents with weapons and military advice. Could Mogadishu become another Baghdad, with Ethiopians playing the part of the US troops in Iraq? The Ethiopians need to withdraw before that happens.
Some terrorists are no doubt lurking in Somalia, but the United States should not view the Horn strictly as a front in the war on terror. The inconclusive 1998-2000 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia is a greater threat to peace.
Settlement of the border comes first. An international tribunal, deliberating with the support of both countries, gave a section of land around the town of Badme to Eritrea in 2002. To an outsider, this scrubby countryside is hardly worth fighting over, but the Ethiopians have resisted pulling out, and the Eritreans have harassed the international force policing the cease-fire and sent troops into the neutral zone between the two armies.
Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister, said in June that his country accepted the border in principle but wanted more talks on how to demarcate it. The United Nations Security Council last week extended the mandate of the international peacekeepers for another six months. It's time to resolve the dispute once and for all. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ought to make a settlement this year one of his top priorities.
The United States can help by putting more pressure on Ethiopia, a de facto ally and the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. It won't be easy. President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea is a particular problem -- authoritarian, increasingly repressive, and not afraid to go it alone, even though his people bear the consequence of isolation and perpetual mobilization for war.
The conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea caused 100,000 deaths, the US State Department reckons, far more than the death toll from terrorism. A settlement between the two countries will make it easier to form a common front against the stateless sources of violence in the Horn.
American forces have established a network of outposts in Ethiopia and Kenya centered on a base in Djibouti. The United States has created an Africa Command to coordinate military activities. In January, US gunships blasted away at suspected Islamic terrorists in southern Somalia. These forays have continued as an Ethiopian force occupies Mogadishu, the Somali capital, to bolster the provisional government there.
The Eritreans, seeing a chance to make trouble, are supplying Islamic insurgents with weapons and military advice. Could Mogadishu become another Baghdad, with Ethiopians playing the part of the US troops in Iraq? The Ethiopians need to withdraw before that happens.
Some terrorists are no doubt lurking in Somalia, but the United States should not view the Horn strictly as a front in the war on terror. The inconclusive 1998-2000 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia is a greater threat to peace.
Settlement of the border comes first. An international tribunal, deliberating with the support of both countries, gave a section of land around the town of Badme to Eritrea in 2002. To an outsider, this scrubby countryside is hardly worth fighting over, but the Ethiopians have resisted pulling out, and the Eritreans have harassed the international force policing the cease-fire and sent troops into the neutral zone between the two armies.
Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister, said in June that his country accepted the border in principle but wanted more talks on how to demarcate it. The United Nations Security Council last week extended the mandate of the international peacekeepers for another six months. It's time to resolve the dispute once and for all. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ought to make a settlement this year one of his top priorities.
The United States can help by putting more pressure on Ethiopia, a de facto ally and the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. It won't be easy. President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea is a particular problem -- authoritarian, increasingly repressive, and not afraid to go it alone, even though his people bear the consequence of isolation and perpetual mobilization for war.
The conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea caused 100,000 deaths, the US State Department reckons, far more than the death toll from terrorism. A settlement between the two countries will make it easier to form a common front against the stateless sources of violence in the Horn.
No Goodbyes for Famous Lucy
USA Today -- ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — After 3.2 million years in East Africa, one of the world's most famous sets of fossils was quietly flown out of Ethiopia overnight for a tour of the United States that some experts say is a dangerous gamble with an irreplaceable relic.
Although the fossil known as Lucy was expected to leave the Ethiopian Natural History Museum this month, some in the nation's capital were surprised the departure took place under cover of darkness with no fanfare Sunday.
"This is a national treasure," Kine Arega, a 29-year-old attorney in Addis Ababa, told The Associated Press. "How come the public has no inkling about this? It's amazing that we didn't even get to say goodbye."
Paleontologist Berhane Assaw said he worked late Sunday at the museum only to arrive Monday morning to find that the fossil and key staff members had left for Texas.
The departure "should have been made public," he said.
Ethiopia's culture minister, Mahamouda Ahmed Gaas, declined to comment.
The Smithsonian Institution has objected to the six-year tour because museum experts do not believe the fragile remains should travel. Even in Ethiopia, the public has only seen the real Lucy remains twice. The Lucy exhibition at the Ethiopian Natural History Museum is a replica and the real remains are usually locked in a vault to protect them.
Lucy goes on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science on Aug. 31, continuing through April 20, 2008. The other tour stops have not been finalized, according to Melodie Francis, a spokeswoman at the Houston museum. Ethiopian officials have said New York, Denver and Chicago were among the tour stops.
Officials have refused to say how much they had insured Lucy for or how much the Ethiopian government was being paid. Ethiopian government officials have said they will use the money raised from Lucy's display to improve museums and build new ones in Ethiopia, one of the world's poorest countries.
Zelalem Assefa, an Ethiopian who works at the Smithsonian but was visiting Addis Ababa, said he disapproved of the U.S. tour.
"Money cannot be a justification to export original specimens," Zelalem said. "These are original, irreplaceable materials. These are things you don't gamble with."
The fossilized partial skeleton of what was once a 3 1/2-foot-tall adult of an ape-man species was discovered in 1974 in the remote, desert-like Afar region in northeastern Ethiopia. Lucy is classified as an Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about 4 million and 3 million years ago, and is the earliest known hominid.
Most scientists believe Australopithecus afarensis stood upright and walked on two feet, but they argue about whether it had ape-like agility in trees. The loss of that ability would suggest crossing a threshold toward a more human existence.
Lucy's name was taken from a Beatles song that played in an archaeological camp the night of her discovery.
Although the fossil known as Lucy was expected to leave the Ethiopian Natural History Museum this month, some in the nation's capital were surprised the departure took place under cover of darkness with no fanfare Sunday.
"This is a national treasure," Kine Arega, a 29-year-old attorney in Addis Ababa, told The Associated Press. "How come the public has no inkling about this? It's amazing that we didn't even get to say goodbye."
Paleontologist Berhane Assaw said he worked late Sunday at the museum only to arrive Monday morning to find that the fossil and key staff members had left for Texas.
The departure "should have been made public," he said.
Ethiopia's culture minister, Mahamouda Ahmed Gaas, declined to comment.
The Smithsonian Institution has objected to the six-year tour because museum experts do not believe the fragile remains should travel. Even in Ethiopia, the public has only seen the real Lucy remains twice. The Lucy exhibition at the Ethiopian Natural History Museum is a replica and the real remains are usually locked in a vault to protect them.
Lucy goes on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science on Aug. 31, continuing through April 20, 2008. The other tour stops have not been finalized, according to Melodie Francis, a spokeswoman at the Houston museum. Ethiopian officials have said New York, Denver and Chicago were among the tour stops.
Officials have refused to say how much they had insured Lucy for or how much the Ethiopian government was being paid. Ethiopian government officials have said they will use the money raised from Lucy's display to improve museums and build new ones in Ethiopia, one of the world's poorest countries.
Zelalem Assefa, an Ethiopian who works at the Smithsonian but was visiting Addis Ababa, said he disapproved of the U.S. tour.
"Money cannot be a justification to export original specimens," Zelalem said. "These are original, irreplaceable materials. These are things you don't gamble with."
The fossilized partial skeleton of what was once a 3 1/2-foot-tall adult of an ape-man species was discovered in 1974 in the remote, desert-like Afar region in northeastern Ethiopia. Lucy is classified as an Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about 4 million and 3 million years ago, and is the earliest known hominid.
Most scientists believe Australopithecus afarensis stood upright and walked on two feet, but they argue about whether it had ape-like agility in trees. The loss of that ability would suggest crossing a threshold toward a more human existence.
Lucy's name was taken from a Beatles song that played in an archaeological camp the night of her discovery.
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