Ethiopia

5:30am and still dark. But the rooster knows the sun is coming and his crow trills up past the sulfurous street lamps into the still night sky.

He’s woken the dogs, and suddenly their frantic howling seems to come from the top of every hill in Addis, making the city seem surrounded by their feral packs.

The sharp barks are soon undercut by the rising moan of the muezzin. He sings the same words that have woken me around the world, but his melody here is unique, more of a monotonous chanting than the sung declaration I’ve heard before.

Close to 40 hours after leaving Athens, Ohio, I arrived to my destination in Addis. My Emirates flight was not exactly that long...I had two stopovers - four hours in Hamburg and 12 in Dubai. It is the kind of thing you have to contend with when you make a decision to fly cheap.

Ethiopia wages war with suspected Islamic extremists in Somalia and within its volatile east. And it has secretly cracked down on other groups it deems terrorist, including one in western Ethiopia. The situation is raising serious human rights concerns, and tough questions for its ally, the United States.

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ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA -- Dressed in a black Adidas track suit and seated amid a comfortable clutter of term papers and political science tomes in his modest office at Addis Ababa University, Prof. Merera Gudina hardly looks like a menace. But, ever since he was elected to parliament two years ago, people have been avoiding him.

There was, for example, the time that local mechanics were too terrified to repair his car when it broke down on the way back from his mother's funeral east of Addis.

William Freivogel, for the Pulitzer Center
Ethiopia

William Freivogel is director of the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He and SIUC journalism colleagues met with journalists in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda on a State Department-sponsored tour.

Ethiopia's impoverished Somali region still bears evidence of the 1970s war between Somalia and Ethiopia. From Jijiga — the region's capital and closest major city to the Somali border — to Gode — a badlands town that houses numerous U.N. agencies and NGOs — the region has struggled from the ravages of flood and drought.

A U.S.-based human rights group is accusing the Ethiopian government of widespread abuses as it cracks down on a rebel group in its southeastern Ogaden region. Nick Wadhams reports from our East Africa bureau in Nairobi.

New York-based Human Rights Watch says Ethiopian troops have burned villages and shot civilians in its campaign against the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front.

Jen Marlowe, for the Pulitzer Center

(please read Ethiopians part one if you haven't yet....)

GODE, Ethiopia — The town of Gode sits on an arid plain of brittle yellow scrub brush in Ethiopia's eastern Somali region. It looks like a place a John Wayne character might live and die.

And to be sure, people are dying here as violence from warring factions in the neighboring nation of Somalia spills over into Ethiopia.

"The worst are bullet injuries to the abdomen," said Solomon Muluneh, a 31-year-old Ethiopian general practitioner, one of only two doctors within 100 miles. "When you open the abdomen, you pray because it is a very difficult area."

Ethiopia's Foreign Ministry has released a statement telling the western press that it needs to be more objective and balanced. Unfortunately, this is fairly typical stuff.

Nicholas Wadhams, for the Pulitzer Center

The first of several stories Zoe and I are writing from our Ethiopia trip has moved at last, in The San Francisco Chronicle. You can find it here, with a sidebar here. More to come in the coming weeks. Please let us know what you think -- we're happy to respond to questions and comments.

(04-16) 04:00 PDT Ghimbi, Ethiopia -- First, the police threw Tesfaye into a dark cell. Then, each day for 17 days, it was the same routine: Electric shocks on his legs and back, followed by beatings with rubber truncheons. Four or five officers would then surround and kick him. At last, a large bottle of water would be tied around his testicles. He'd pass out.