The European leftist politician from Portugal, Ana Gomez, has applied for a visa to come to Addis Abeba in order to participate in the EU-ACP summit to be held here next week.
Lady Gomez has remained famous or infamous - depending who refers to her - in Ethiopia's contemporary politics since her role as chief of the EU's team of election observers in the 2005 national elections. Known to have sided with the main opposition coalition, the CUD and one of its leaders now in exile, in the end she provoked perhaps the longest "letters to the editor" rebuttal ever published in the history of newspapers, by the late Meles Zenawi, which appeared in The Ethiopian Herald, a daily newspaper.
The summit will be a three-day event, where members of parliament from the EU, and the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries will congregate to discuss politics, trade and goals set in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). There will be breakout sessions, where Ethiopia's policies on housing provision and employment opportunities for youth and women will be talked about. Co-chairs of the EU joint parliamentary assembly, Louis Michel and Joyce Laboso, and their delegates are scheduled to privately engage Ethiopian authorities over the latter's program of a green economy.
A spokeswoman of foreign affairs for the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialist & Democrats (S&D) in the European Parliament, Lady Gomez's inclusion in this private meeting is yet to be confirmed, gossip disclosed. Nonetheless, the possibility of her presence across the aisle in a conference room where Hailemariam and Abadula Gemeda, speaker of the House, are to address the delegates, appears to be within the bounds of possibility, claims gossip.
EU Commission leaders in Brussels placed their official request for a visa on behalf of Lady Gomez last week, gossip disclosed. After what was described as a long pause, Brehane G. Kirstos, state minister for Foreign Affairs, who is quite familiar with Lady Gomez, while serving as an ambassador in Brussels, granted permission for her travel to Addis Abeba, gossip revealed. Ethiopian authorities wanted to neutralise what they see as a plot devised by Lady Gomez, in which she may have hoped that her visa application was declined, and thus create cause for hue and cry, claims gossip.
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