THE INDIAN OCEAN NEWSLETTER N°1164 - 14/01/2006

Elias Wondimu, the head of the American company Tsehai Publishers and Distributors, has just created an Ethiopian Institute for Nonviolence Education and Peace Studies (EINEPS) in the United States. (...).

This institute opened its own web site at the beginning of the year at www.eineps.org. It has support from Professor Donald Levine, a specialist onEthiopia, Bernard LaFayette Jr, director of the University of Rhode Island Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, Tsegaye Gebremedhin, poet and founder of the theatre studies department of Addis Ababa University (AAU), and movie director Haile Gerima. On 5 February, the EINEPS is to inaugurate a peace center in Ethiopian city of Awassa with the presence of Levine.

This Awassa Peace Center will dispense training programmes from aikido (a martial art form considered pacifist), through the study of Ethiopian democratic traditions, to conflict resolution and non-violence. Born in 1973 in Ethiopia, Wondimu worked as a journalist before fleeing his country for political reasons. He went to the United States in 1994 to participate in a conference and has stayed there since. He then became the director if the magazine Ethiopian Review for several years and later settled in Los Angeles and founded his publishing company in 1998.