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UNPO Publishes Report on Ogaden persecution in Ethiopia
In recent years the Ogaden people in Eastern Ethiopia have increasingly suffered various human rights abuses as the Ethiopian State continues its mission of ethnic oppression.
These violations of human rights often compound the current humanitarian crisis that is developing in the region; with foreign aid funds supporting a state that actively deters humanitarian organisations from operating in the Ogaden region.
To help increase awareness about the worsening situation for the Ogaden people, UNPO has published abackground report outlining some of the major human rights that currently exist.
This report focuses on many of the Ogaden people’s civil and political rights that have been violated by the Ethiopian Government, and puts them into the broader context of the general state of human rights compliance throughout the whole country.
Cause for serious concern continues to be the suppression of the free media and freedom of expression within Ethiopia. Silencing the voices of those willing voice concerns of state suppression means that the outside world is never likely to know the full scale of rights violations that are taking place within the country.
Of further concern to international law is the occurrence of extra-territorial activity of the Ethiopian State in both targeting political opposition and persecuting the Ogaden people. The fact that these actions have now begun to span borders makes it even harder to encourage transparency on the issues.
Listen to this African Union – if you go to bed with dogs then you will wake up with flies!
Africans revere wise-saying and proverbs. I am African and the AU is as African as it can get. So, surely the regional body must listen up when I introduce my ranting with yet another popular saying – He who goes to bed with an itchy bottom wakes up with smelly fingers.
Does the AU have smelly fingers?
Yes! I will tell you why.
The majestic African Union, formerly the Organisation of African Unity has been sitting in the bosom of the tyrant, quietly hiding its shame from the world as one of its very own perfects the art of torture and repression.
The AU sits in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It glows and gloats about being the regional master for a liberal and fairly democratic Africa while its host, the Ethiopian regime has thrived over decades stifling descent and beating to a pulp the people of Oromia region.
The Oromo from Ethiopia’s Oromia region are a sad story of cruelty and gross human rights violations that has persisted unabated for years.
There is no sugar-coating the testimonies of brutality that flow from generations of Oromo descent.
As you read this, you may need to quickly grab a copy of a report that has just been released by Amnesty International on the plight of the Oromo of Oromia region in Ethiopia.
The report Because I am Oromo is a summary of human ruthlessness at its worst. It reads like a rendition from the slavery years when Africa was wilting under the colonialism invasion, only that this time, the perpetrator is African.
It is a scenario that is all too familiar with the region. A regime in power aspires to stay in power and clamps down on any voice of dissent especially from within. If the dissenter is a community, then woe unto them because the regime will victimise the community from generation to generation and make it a crime to be born in such.
And to imagine that this is something that the African Union is aware of and has been aware of ever since and yet still persists is sacrilegious to say the least.
Because I am Oromo is a painful walk into the reality of the sufferings of one of the biggest ethnic communities in Ethiopia for the mere reason of dissenting with the government.
This reality is beyond comprehension because sadly, torture to the Oromo almost comes as second nature, thanks to an oppressive regime.
“We interviewed former detainees with missing fingers, ears and teeth, damaged eyes and scars on every part of their body due to beating, burning and stabbing – all of which they said were the result of torture,” said Claire Beston of Amnesty International.
Claire was referring to the myriads of real-life testimonies given to the researchers on condition of anonymity.
In Oromia it seems, almost every house-hold of the Oromo has experienced the wrath of torture and police brutality.
In the streets and in the village squares in the Oromia region sits the shadows of men and women who have been physically brutalised and maimed while emotionally and psychologically scarred for life in the hands of Ethiopian security forces.
When I speak of torture, I speak of state-sanctioned gang rapes to both men and women, electrical shocks, water-barding, thorough beatings, detentions without trial, forced disappearances and arbitrary killings that continue with shocking impunity. And this list is not exhaustive of the actual violations as detailed in the report.
The profiles of brutality are vast in Because I am Oromo. Infact, Amnesty International says they spoke to more than 240 victims of this brutality in a period of one year.
It is these heart-wrenching testimonies and the impunity of how the violation is meted that leaves a real bad taste in my mouth when I think of the AU sitting pretty in its headquarters in Addis Ababa as if absolutely nothing wrong is going on in its backyard.
The truth is that the people of Oromia region have been under siege for almost three decades now. The OAU knew this and the AU knows it too for they are one and the same, right?
So when the AU focusses the world’s attention to the many wonderful things that the continent seems to be getting right and totally ignores the situation of the Oromo people its pretence stinks to the high moon of repression.
Somebody please tell the AU that with every sip of Ethiopian coffee they take from their air-conditioned Chinese-built headquarters, the blood of the Oromos is spilling on the floor under their feet, enlivened by the silence they have mastered over the atrocities committed by the Ethiopia government against the Oromo community.
Somebody tell the AU that its emblem and its flag, and its national anthem means absolutely nothing to the children of the continent for as long as the children of Oromia weep at the graves of their executed fathers and quiver at the feet of their physically tortured and traumatised mothers.
Somebody tell the AU, that the Clarion call – ” Oh sons and daughters of Africa, flesh of the sky and flesh of the sun, let us make Africa the tree of life” is utterly nonsensical if it does not flinch as the sons and daughters of Oromia are crushed under the whims of repression.
Somebody, please remind the AU that Africa’s children do not give up on liberty struggles. They, as member states, never gave up on the colonial liberation struggles so why do they imagine that the people of Oromia are any different?
Like I have said, there is blood on the floor of the AU as Africa’s leaders meet to deliberate and panel beat the continent to shape and as they do it sleeping on the bed of the hospitality of the Ethiopian government, they know that they sleep with an itch in their bottoms which they cannot ignore for they will surely wake up with smelly fingers!
The ‘hidden hunger’ due to micronutrient deficiency does not produce hunger as we know it. You might not feel it in the belly, but it strikes at the core of your health and vitality.
– International Food Policy Research Institute
Ethiopia and its Hidden Hunger in the Shadows of Fastest Economic Growth Hype
Ethiopia is making the 7th worst country (marked alarming) in Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2014. It is the 70th of the 76 with GHI score of 24.4 and Proportion of undernourished in the population (%) 37.1. http://www.ifpri.org/tools/2014-ghi-map
The 10 worst countries in 2014 GHI Score are: Ethiopia, Chad, Sudan/South Sudan, East Timor-Leste, Comoros, Eritrea, Burundi, Haiti, Zambia and Yemen.
According to the IFPRS report 2014 which was released on 13th October, more than 2 billion people worldwide suffer from hidden hunger, more than double the 805 million people who do not have enough calories to eat (FAO, IFAD, and WFP 2014). Much of Africa South of the Sahara and South Asian subcontinent are hotspots where the prevalence of hidden hunger is high. The rate are relatively low in Latin America and the Caribbean where diets rely less on single staples and are more affected by widespread deployment of micronutrient interventions, nutrition education, and basic health services.
Definitions:
Hunger: distress related to lack of food
Malnutrition: an abnormal physiological condition, typically due to eating the wrong amount and/or kinds of foods; encompasses undernutrition and overnutrition
Undernutrition: deficiencies in energy, protein, and/or micronutrients Causes include poor diet, disease, or increased micronutrient needs not met during pregnancy and lactation
Undernourishment: chronic calorie deficiency, with consumption of less than 1,800 kilocalories a day, the minimum most people need to live a healthy, productive life
Overnutrition: excess intake of energy or micronutrients
Micronutrient deficiency (also known as hidden hunger): a form
of undernutrition that occurs when intake or absorption of vitamins and minerals is too low to sustain good health and development in children and normal physical and mental function in adults
Undernourishment: chronic calorie deficiency, with consumption of less than 1,800 kilocalories a day, the minimum most people need to live a healthy, productive life
Overnutrition: excess intake of energy or micronutrients
The absolute number of hungry people—which takes into account both progress against hunger and population growth—fell in most regions. The exceptions were Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and West Asia.
The 2014 FAO’s report which is published in September indicates that while Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst of all regions in prevalence of undernourishment and food insecurity, Ethiopia (ranking no.1) is the worst of all African countries as 32 .9 million people are suffering from chronic undernourishment and food insecurity. Which means Ethiopia has one of the highest levels of food insecurity in the world, in which more than 35% of its total population is chronically undernourished.
FAO in its key findings reports that: overall, the results confirm that developing countries have made significant progress in improving food security and nutrition, but that progress has been uneven across both regions and food security dimensions. Food availability remains a major element of food insecurity in the poorer regions of the world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southern Asia, where progress has been relatively limited. Access to food has improved fast and significantly in countries that have experienced rapid overall economic progress, notably in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia.Access has also improved in Southern Asia and Latin America, but only in countries with adequate safety nets and other forms of social protection. By contrast, access is still a challenge in Sub Saharan Africa, where income growth has been sluggish, poverty rates have remained high and rural infrastructure remains limited and has often deteriorated.
According to the new report, many developing countries have made significant progress in improving food security and nutrition, but this progress has been uneven across both regions and dimensions of food security. Large challenges remain in the area of food utilization. Despite considerable improvements over the last two decades, stunting, underweight and micronutrient deficiencies remain stubbornly high, even where availability and access no longer pose problems. At the same time, access to food remains an important challenge for many developing countries, even if significant progress has been made over the last two decades, due to income growth and poverty reduction in many countries.Food availability has also improved considerably over the past two decades, with more food available than ever and international food price volatility before. This increase is reflected in the improved adequacy of dietary energy and higher average supplies of protein. Of the four dimensions, the least progress has been made in stability, reflecting the effects of growing political instability.Overall, the analyses reveal positive trends, but it also masks important divergences across various sub- regions. The two sub- regions that have made the least headway are sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, with almost all indicators still pointing to low levels of food security.On the other hand, Eastern (including South Eastern) Asia and Latin America have made the most progress in improving food security, with Eastern Asia experiencing rapid progress on all four dimensions over the past two decades.The greatest food security challenges overall remain in sub-Saharan Africa, which has seen particularly slow progress in improving access to food, with sluggish income growth, high poverty rates and poor infrastructure, which hampers physical and distributional access. Food availability remains low, even though energy and protein supplies have improved. Food utilization remains a major concern, as indicated by the high anthropometric prevalence of stunted and underweight children under five years of age. Limited progress has been made in improving access to safe drinking-water and providing adequate sanitation facilities, while the region continues to face challenges in improving dietary quality and diversity, particularly for the poor. The stability of food supplies has deteriorated, mainly owing to political instability, war and civil strife.
Prevalence of undernourishment in Africa/ #Ethiopia
Summary of Africa Scorecard on Number of People in State of Undernourishment / Hunger Country Name and Number of People in State of Undernourishment / Hunger (2012-2014, Millions):-
1st Ethiopia ( 32.9 million)
2nd Tanzania (17.0)
3 Nigeria (11.2)
4 Kenya (10.8)
5 Uganda (9.7)
6 Mozambique (7.2)
7 Zambia (7.0)
8 Madagascar (7.0)
9 Chad (4.5)
10 Zimbabwe (4.5)
11 Rwanda (4.0)
12 Angola (3.9)
13 Malawi (3.6)
14 Burkina Faso (3.5)
15 Ivory Coast (3.0)
16 Senegal (2.4)
17 Cameroon (2.3)
18 Guinea (2.1)
19 Algeria (2.1)
20 Niger 2.0
21 Central Africa Republic (1.7)
22 Sierra Leone (1.6)
23 Morocco (1.5)
24 Benin (1.0)
25 Togo (1.0)
26 Namibia (.9)
27 Botswana (.05)
28 Guinea Bissau (.03)
29 Swaziland (.03)
30 Djibouti (.02)
31. Lesotho (.02)
Data for South Africa, Sao Tome and Principal, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, Tunisia, Mauritius and Egypt indicate that Prevalence of undernourishment is insignificant or under .01 million. There are no reported data for some countries such as Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Burundi and Gambia.
Read more @ The State of Food Insecurity in the World Strengthening the enabling environment for food security and nutritionhttp://www.fao.org/3/a-i4030e.pdf
September 2, 2014 (The baines report) — Poverty can easily be seen throughout the capital of Ethiopia, but nowhere is it more evident than when you pass a beggar on the street. Beggars are everywhere in Addis Ababa, and they represent a vast range of demographics. There are men, women, children of all ages and conditions– some with their mothers, some without, and the severely disabled.
Older children, rather than begging, try to sell you gum or clean your shoes, while the younger children walk in front of you asking for money or food, not leaving you until they spot another person to ask. The women are often with young children, sometimes babies, and usually with more than one. I was once walking down the street and a young child no older than 2 or 3 who was being held by his mother made the signal they all make to ask for food or money while calling me sister. I thought this child probably learned this signal before he even learned how to speak. Women are often seen grilling corn on the sidewalk on a small grill to sell to people passing by.
I have been told the severely disabled have most likely suffered from stunting, polio or the war. I have seen men with disfigured legs so mangled that they can not walk but instead drag themselves down the sidewalk. Others are in wheelchairs and unable to walk. And this city is not easy for the disabled. The sidewalks, where they exist, are not always flat and not always paved. There are also often giant holes in the middle of the sidewalk or loose concrete slabs covering gutters. On the main roads, near where I’m staying there are tarps and blankets off to the side of the road where the beggars must sleep or live.
It is a very difficult scene to walk through. You want to help them all and give everyone a little bit of money or food. But there are so many it would be nearly impossible to give to them all. We have been told to not give to beggars because once you give to one you will be surrounded by others. When people do give money to beggars it is often very small bills or coins that will not go very far.
I have often wondered how much money they actually receive. Perhaps it would be beneficial to do more in depth look at why these people became beggars and where they come from. After a cursory search for research and reports on beggars in Addis Ababa, I found very little. There is a study on the disabled beggars and a report focusing on children. There is a documentary that follows two women who come to the capital from a rural town and become beggars in order to raise money for their family when climate change creates a food shortage.
Both the government of Ethiopia and large NGO’s, like USAID and the UN, are working to stop the “cycle of poverty.” There are major health and nutrition projects being implemented all over the country, but these are long-term projects that do not address the immediate needs of people on the streets. Short term solutions such as creating shelters or centers for the disabled and homeless could allow beggars more opportunities for housing but could also generate income potential through workshops and other skill development programs.
‘Most of the time we simply do not know enough to assert accurate growth rates. There are also known biases and manipulations. Ethiopia, for example, is notable for having long-standing disagreements with the IMF regarding their growth rates. Whereas the official numbers have been quoted in double digits for the past decade, a thorough analysis suggested the actual growth rates were around 5 to 6 percent per annum. More generally, one study used satellite imaging of nighttime lights to calculate alternative growth rates, and found that authoritarian regimes overstate reported rates of growth by about 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points. Another recent study argues that inflation is systematically understated in African countries – which in turn means that growth and poverty reduction is overstated.’ http://africanarguments.org/2014/08/26/why-saying-seven-out-of-ten-fastest-growing-economies-are-in-africa-carries-no-real-meaning-by-morten-jerven/
Why saying ‘seven out of ten fastest growing economies are in Africa’ carries no real meaning
By Morten Jerven @ AfricanArguments
Before, during and after the US Africa summit one of the most frequently repeated factoids supporting the Africa Rising meme was that ‘seven out of ten fastest growing economies are in Africa.’ In reality this is both a far less accurate and much less impressive statistic than it sounds. More generally, narratives on African economic development tend to be loosely connected to facts, and instead are driven more by hype.
***
The ‘seven out of ten’ meme derives from a data exercise done in 2011 by The Economist. The exercise excluded countries with a population of less than 10 million and also the post-conflict booming Iraq and Afghanistan. This left 81 countries, 28 of them in Africa (more than 3 out of 10) and, if you take out the OECD countries from the sample, (which are unlikely to grow at more than 7 percent per annum), you find that every second economy in the sample is in Africa. It might not give the same rhetorical effect to say: ‘on average some African economies are expected to grow slightly faster than other non-OECD countries,’ but that would be more accurate.
And before we literally get ahead of ourselves (The Economist was reporting forecasts made for 2011 to 2015) there is a difference between forecasted and actually measured growth. According to John Kenneth Galbraith, the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. So how good is the IMF at forecasting growth in Low Income Countries?
According to their own evaluation, IMF forecasts “over-predicted GDP growth and under-predicted inflation.” Another study looked at the difference between the forecasts and the subsequent growth revisions in low income countries, and found that “output data revisions in low-income countries are, on average, larger than in other countries, and that they are much more optimistic.” Forecasts are systematically optimistic all over the world, but in Low Income Countries even more so.
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Among those on the list of the fastest growers were countries like Nigeria, Ghana and Ethiopia. The news that both Nigerian and Ghanaian GDP doubled following the introduction of new benchmark years for estimating GDP in 2010 and 2014 should remind us that the pinpoint accuracy of these growth estimates is lacking. How confident should you be about a 7 percent growth rate when 50 percent of the economy is missing in the official baseline? Recent growth in countries with outdated base years is also overstated.
While Ghana has reportedly had the highest growth rates in the world over the past years, a peer review of the Ghana national accounts noted that “neither a national census of agriculture nor other surveys, such as a crop and live-stock survey, have been conducted…there is no survey to provide benchmark data for construction, domestic trade and services.” It was recently reported that an economic census is being planned for next year. What we do know is that Ghana (together with Zambia, another of the projected ‘top ten growers’) has returned to the IMF to seek assistance following their entry into international lending markets.
Most of the time we simply do not know enough to assert accurate growth rates. There are also known biases and manipulations. Ethiopia, for example, is notable for having long-standing disagreements with the IMF regarding their growth rates. Whereas the official numbers have been quoted in double digits for the past decade, a thorough analysis suggested the actual growth rates were around 5 to 6 percent per annum. More generally, one study used satellite imaging of nighttime lights to calculate alternative growth rates, and found that authoritarian regimes overstate reported rates of growth by about 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points. Another recent study argues that inflation is systematically understated in African countries – which in turn means that growth and poverty reduction is overstated.
***
Data bias is carried across from economic growth to other metrics. The pressure on scholars, journalists and other commentators to say something general about ‘Africa’ is relentless, and so the general rule is to oblige willingly. When talking about average trends in African politics and opinion, analysis is influence by the availability of survey data, such as Afrobarometer, and the data availability is biased. According to Kim Yi Donne, on The Washington Post’s ‘Monkey Cage’ blog, of the 15 African countries with the lowest Polity IV rankings, only seven have ever been included in the Afrobarometer, whereas all but one African country rated as a democracy by the same index is included.
Any quantitative study which says something about the relationship between growth and trends in inequality and poverty, relies on the availability of household survey data. One paper boldly stated that African Poverty is Falling…Much Faster than You Think! The data basis was very sparse and unevenly distributed. There were no data points for Angola, Congo, Comoros, Cape Verde, D.R. Congo, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Seychelles, Togo, Sao Tome and Principe, Chad, Liberia, and Sudan. In addition, six countries only have one survey. The database included no observations since 2004 – so the trend in poverty was based entirely on conjecture. Famously you need at least two data points to draw a line. Yet the study included a graph of poverty lines in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1970 to 2006 – based on zero data points.
A result of doubts about the accuracy of the official evidence, and a dearth of evidence on income distributions, scholars have turned to other measurements. Data on access to education and ownership of goods such as television sets from Demographic and Health Surveys were used to compile new asset indices. In turn, these data were used to proxy economic growth and in place of having a measure of the middle class. In both cases the data may paint a misleadingly positive picture. While claiming to describe all of Africa over the past two decades, these surveys are only available for some countries sometimes.
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The statement ‘seven out of ten fastest growing economies are in Africa’ carries no real meaning. To utter it is merely stating that you subscribe to the hype. It is particularly frustrating, and it surely stands in way of objective evaluation, that the narratives in African Economic Development switches from one extreme to the other so swiftly. The truth lies somewhere between the ‘miracles’ and ‘tragedies’. It is nothing short of stunning that in a matter of 3-4 years the most famous phrase relating to African economies has turned from ‘Bottom Billion’ to ‘Africa Rising’.
Because of a lack of awareness on historical data on economic growth it was long claimed that Africa was suffering “a chronic failure of growth”, but growth is not new to the African economies, growth has been recurring. There is no doubt that there are more goods leaving and entering the African continent today than fifteen years ago. More roads and hotels are being built and more capital is flowing in and out of the African continent than before. But what is the real pace of economic growth? Does the increase in the volume of transaction result in a sustained increase in living standards? The evidence does not yet readily provide us with an answer. It is the job of scholars to give tempered assessments that navigate between what is make-believe and what passes as plausible evidence.
Morten Jerven is Associate Professor at the Simon Fraser University, School for International Studies. His book Poor Numbers: how we are misled by African development statistics and what to do about it is published by Cornell University Press. @MJerven
Since the term “data revolution” was introduced, there has been a flurry of activity to define, develop, and implement an agenda to transform the collection, use, and distribution of development statistics. That makes sense. Assessing the international community’s next development agenda, regardless of its details, will be impossible without accurate data.
Yet, in Sub-Saharan Africa – the region with the most potential for progress under the forthcoming Sustainable Development Goals – accurate data are severely lacking. From 1990 to 2009, only one Sub-Saharan country had data on all 12 indicators established in 2000 by the Millennium Development Goals. Indeed, of the 60 countries with complete vital statistics, not one is in Africa. While most African countries have likely experienced economic growth during the last decade, the accuracy of the data on which growth estimates are based – not to mention data on inflation, food production, education, and vaccination rates – remains far from adequate.
Inaccurate data can have serious consequences. Consider Nigeria’s experience earlier this year, when GDP rebasing showed that the economy was nearly 90% larger than previously thought. The distorted picture of Nigeria’s economy provided by the previous statistics likely led to misguided decisions regarding private investment, credit ratings, and taxation. Moreover, it meant that Nigeria was allocated more international aid than it merited – aid that could have gone to needier countries.
Contrary to popular belief, the constraints on the production and use of basic data stem not from a shortage of technical capacity and knowhow, but from underlying political and systemic challenges. For starters, national statistical offices often lack the institutional autonomy needed to protect the integrity of data, production of which thus tends to be influenced by political forces and special interest groups.
Poorly designed policies also undermine the accuracy of data. For example, governments and donors sometimes tie funding to self-reported measures, which creates incentives for recipients to over-report key data like vaccination or school-enrollment rates. Without effective oversight, these well-intentioned efforts to reward progress can go awry.
Despite these failings, national governments and international donors continue to devote far too few resources to ensuring the collection of adequate data. Only 2% of official development aid is earmarked for improving the quality of statistics – an amount wholly insufficient to assess accurately the impact of the other 98% of aid. And governments’ dependency on donors to fund and gather their core statistics is unsustainable.
In fact, stronger national statistical systems are the first step toward improving the accuracy, timeliness, and availability of the data that are essential to calculating almost any major economic or social-welfare indicator. These include statistics on births and deaths; growth and poverty; tax and trade; health, education, and safety; and land and the environment.
Developing such systems is an ambitious but achievable goal. All that is needed is a willingness to experiment with new approaches to collecting, using, and sharing data.
This is where the public comes in. If private firms, media, and civil-society organizations identify specific problems and call publicly for change, their governments will feel pressure to take the steps needed to produce accurate, unbiased data – for example, by enhancing the autonomy of national statistical offices or providing sufficient funds to hire more qualified personnel. While it may be tempting to bypass government and hope for an easy technology-based solution, sustainable, credible progress will be difficult without public-sector involvement.
The recognition by governments and external donors of the need for more – and more efficient – funding, particularly to national statistical systems, will be integral to such a shift. Establishing stronger incentives for agencies to produce good data – that is, data that are accurate, timely, relevant, and readily available – would also help, with clearly delineated metrics defining what qualifies as “good.” In fact, tying progress on those metrics to funding via pay-for-performance agreements could improve development outcomes considerably.
One concrete strategy to achieve these goals would be to create a country-donor compact for better data.
Across all continents, cultures and religions, 80 per cent of men and women worldwide believe that democracy is the best available form of governance. But there is a raging democracy deficit across the world.
There is wide support for democracy in international agreements and development policy. Yet, only 2 per cent of official development aid goes to democracy support, indicating a low priority in practice.
The much larger aid flows delivered to reduce poverty also affect democratic processes and power dynamics – sometimes negatively.
The binding constraint on development is not always money or knowledge. It is also about political processes. Citizens across the world therefore call for democratic and accountable politics.
There is a raging democracy deficit across the world. Across all continents, cultures and religions, by gender, age, education or income level, 80 per cent of men and women worldwide believe that democracy is the best available form of governance.[1]
Only 30 per cent, however, are satisfied with the democracy that they are experiencing, and 85 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries where media freedom is obstructed. Democratic transitions that were promising 20 years ago have in many cases regressed.
There is wide support for democracy in international agreements and development policy. Key donor countries and international organizations have goals to support democracy within official development assistance. The UN Charter is clear that the authority of governments shall be based on the will of the people. The UN Millennium Declaration promises that no effort shall be spared to promote democracy.
Yet when it comes to the practical implementation of official development aid, supporting democracy is a low priority. The newly published book Development First, Democracy Later? (International IDEA, 2014) takes a critical look at traditional aid forms from a democracy perspective. It finds that despite donor countries’ often explicit ambitions to strengthen democracy, the picture emerging is not encouraging. In practice, democracy seems to be a low priority within official development assistance.
Supporting key democratic processes and institutions – elections, parliamentary strengthening, civil society – is a niche area of aid. But it only accounts for about 2 per cent of all development assistance. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the much larger aid flows delivered to reduce poverty, also affect democratic processes and power dynamics – sometimes in a negative way.
Many aid-recipient countries are ruled by either authoritarian or hybrid regimes. Among the ten countries that received most aid in 2010, all but one were ruled by authoritarian or hybrid regimes. Channelling money in such an environment requires careful consideration of the effects on the domestic political situation as it risks sustaining a dysfunctional system and reinforcing the powers that be.
Yet, the connections between development aid resources and the space for democracy are seldom explicitly discussed, the analysis in the book finds. Despite the use of political economy analysis, donors keep focusing on the executive branch of government and a limited type of civil society organisations, largely avoiding key political and social actors.
The primary focus is still establishing partnerships with governments of which some obstruct political representation, impede free speech, manipulate elections and compromise the rule of law. Despite the increased focus on accountability, development resources risk sustaining the hold on power of already overpowered executive heads of government.
Despite the rhetoric of country ownership, donors continue to prescribe policy priorities in budget reviews and to move policy formulation from domestic political processes to development aid negotiations. National actors become almost redundant in the process.
When donors eventually speak up for democracy and cleaner politics, it is often because things have got so badly wrong that they have to react. So-called ‘political crises’, are often situations which could have been foreseen and addressed in the choice of aid modalities.
Thus, not only has democracy not been a key goal on the aid agenda, but the way in which aid is organized has had challenging consequences for democracy. The development community acknowledges many of these concerns.
The Accra Agenda for Action recognized the need for inclusive ownership and the importance of involving actors such as parliaments, local government and civil society in development. In Busan, the private sector was added as a stakeholder and the term ‘democratic ownership’ was used. These are positive steps at the level of international policy deliberations, but translating the new policies into practice is a challenge.
There are many reasons for democracy being a low priority in the aid agenda. Other foreign policy goals are prioritized. It is difficult. There are disbursement pressures and practical issues in the way aid is organized. But there may also be a more ideological or theoretical reason.
The success stories in Asia, and of China in particular, have reinforced an old view that development comes first, and (hopefully) democracy later, even to the extent of seeing democracy as an obstacle that must be overcome by insulating the state from public concerns.
This is a dangerous path, however, as there is a tendency for absolute power to lead to absolute corruption – and absolute repression. Even if it is possible to find a ‘good autocrat’, he or she usually does not stay that way. Democracy is a fundamental requirement for replacing leaders peacefully. This must not be forgotten.
Moreover, despite some authoritarian successes, there is substantive empirical evidence that democracy delivers on development, even in poor countries. Among the top 50 countries that achieved the highest levels of human development in 2011, only four had either authoritarian or hybrid regimes. The rest were democracies.
One study compares the experience only across poor countries and finds that people in poor democracies live nine years longer than people in poor autocracies, have a 40 per cent greater chance of attending secondary school and benefit from agricultural yields that are 25 per cent higher. Poor democracies suffer 20 per cent fewer infant deaths than poor autocracies. Democracies fare better at avoiding political conflict and dealing with natural disasters.
But there are even more reasons why the development agenda should not ignore democracy. Over the past decade, the role of politics has come increasingly to the fore in explaining development failures. In Africa, success in terms of economic growth does not match its poor record in reducing poverty. There is little doubt that the vast majority of Africans do not get a fair share of the yields from the continent’s huge natural resource wealth.
Africa has 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land. It produces less agricultural output per person today than fifty years ago. Farmers lack access to capital for fertilizer and irrigation. They lack the roads and storage needed to get harvests to market. These are public goods that their governments should be facilitating. The economic resources exist and the solutions are known.
The binding constraint on development is not always money or knowledge. It is also about political processes. Citizens across the world know this, and therefore call for democratic and accountable politics. In a United Nations study in the post 2015-process, it was made clear that ‘honest and responsive government’ was among the top five priorities when people in 194 countries were asked.
Development experts too are finding that dysfunctional political institutions and processes are hindering development. Donor agencies are realizing the same, shown by the interest in political economy analysis. What remains, however, is making the move from analysis to considering aid modalities from the perspective of both democracy and development.
[1] All facts, definitions and references may be found in Development First, Democracy Later?, International IDEA, 2014. Free to download here.
Government media in Ethiopia vs Scholars view of development: A stand-off paradox
Ameyu Etana*
It has been more than a decade since DEVELOPMENT became a buzzword in Ethiopian Radio and Television Agency. As ERTA is a pro-government media and sponsored by the state, there is a strong probability to be under the guise of social responsibility theory when addressing issues. As it is common of using development journalism as an instrument in developmental states, likewise, the Ethiopian government is using media as a big power to making the public participating in development. Television Agency (ERTA) and other media that are pro-government but run under the auspices of private media. Regrettably, probably, it is the most abused and corrupted word beyond what one could imagine. A name developmentalist came to develop a negative connotation for a journalist in Ethiopia. Quite number of academic researches has been done on the single nationwide media in Ethiopia, however; very little of them adduced and proved the professional nature of political power house of Ethiopian government, ERTA.
Ethiopia, a nation came to be a laboratory of political economy is a dish for choose and pick philosophy of politics. The political economy of Ethiopia is democratic developmental state. By their nature such states are repressive. And there has never been a country both democratic and developmental at a time except Ethiopia. Nevertheless, it seems, what we are seeing is not in accord with the political economy.
The Ethiopian government adopted United Nations General Assembly Resolution 41/128:1986. Alike, the right to development is one of the bill rights that had been included in the federal constitution of Ethiopia. Article 43 of FDRE constitution could depict this. To the contrary, mostly, what has been written and what has been practiced seems contradict each other.
As we know, what Ethiopian Television, Ethiopian Radio, Ethiopian Herald, Addis Zemen, Bariisaa, Ethiopian News Agency, Walta Information Center and other government driven media and/or news agency in Ethiopia and other whose names called under the guise of private but pro-government media view development as econometric (statistics use to view development e.g. economic development) view of development. As a result, any report that put Ethiopian development in number presumed to have high political benefit and get the major attention as it makes a headline. Infrastructure, number of investors, their capital, the KM of a road built, export and import quantities, number of graduates, number of higher institutions, and others are mostly at the desk of those media institution. Hence, what is seen is not the human side but the growth side as it uses to be.
Since the philosophy of state media in Ethiopia is development journalism, though wrongly interpreted, the issue of development vastly and exhaustively reported in a form of news, program, documentary, and other types of reports. However, most news are just a report as they lack interpretation while the journalist acts as a conduit than the one who produce it. I.e. Ethiopia is amongst the fastest growing economy in the world though third of its population lives in absolute poverty. In addition, there is been a big unequal economic distribution in the country and unemployment is getting higher albeit it is repeatedly told it is non-oil economy. If so, what is the benefit of jobless growth? Moreover, indigenous knowledge is ignored at the same time modern technology is also getting little attention by farmers, which is discrepancy right now in the country. As the journalism model, those media were supposed to critically examine and meticulously analyze issue that matters most to the people than merely reporting it.
The people of the country have long experienced the use of development for propaganda. Owing to this, it is difficult to identify the real concept of development in the mind of citizens. This resembles the sedative nature of the media in the country. Recently, journalists of Oromia Radio and Television Journalists (ORTO) did a deliberation on the controversial master plan of Addis Ababa, however, regrettably, they got an axe for the mere fact they did speak their mind. Hence, we can say that development is like politics in Ethiopia as it is untouched area to be opened for deliberation.
After all what is development? What scholars say about development?
Several scholars held a debate for decades on what development is until they came to, probably; seems agree as it is all about human development. Lamentably, as Rita Abrahamsen puts it in her book called Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa the issue of development became politicized, which is unfortunate as the world came to see help poor countries based on their political ideology they might have than favoring solely for being human.
The leading professor Amartya Sen in his book Development as Freedom which was published in 1999 argues development should be seen as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. He contrasts the view of development with the widely prevalent concentration on the expansion of real income and on economic growth as the characteristics of successful development. Poverty, the flip side of development, means capability deprivation that inhibits citizen’s freedom to live, the reason they value most. As a result, development means an expansion of freedom.
For Amartya Sen Poverty is lack of choice, socioeconomic and political deprivation while development is a freedom or emancipation from poverty, empowerment of the people. Therefore, we simply understand us development is all about a people than merely numbers.
Similarly Michael Todaro in his book Economic Development argues that development must be seen as multidimensional process involving major changes in social structure, popular attitudes, and national institutions as well as the acceleration of economic growth, the reduction of inequality and the eradication of absolute poverty. And several scholars including Thomas Alan and others believed development is about empowering and emancipating people from the agony that make them suffer most than ignoring their existence.
Having looked at this, inopportunely we see the paradox in Ethiopia. In the name of development people has been ignored freedom; few are benefiting but millions are joining poverty if not struggling to survive. Rather than sensitizing them the media is pursuing sedative under the auspices of development as submissive people at large are being produced in the country seeing that the issue of development became not open for discussion and untouchable. Regrettably, in the name of investment and several projects, millions are being displaced from the land they presumes their only property they got from their forefathers but, are treated like ignorant who could serve nothing for the development. I.e. it is the residents of Addis Ababa that were deliberating over the contentious master plan for days on the lands of farmers surrounding Addis Ababa. How could this be the right way? By no means it is democratic or developmental? It is highly nonsense and absurd but not surprise as it uses to be in the country.
If development is for the people why do ignore them or why to treating them as against development? By its nature development is not merely road or building, it is about mind development. If the big asset for human, which is mind is not well set, how to manage the entire infrastructure? It seems everything is messed up in Ethiopia. Due to this, the wider public is feeling ignorant to the plans and strategies the government drafts each time.
Consequently, here in Ethiopia, under the guise of development thousands get prisoned, displaced, ignored, dehumanized, unnerved, denied capability, bottled in poverty, whereas, few get rich, empowered, emancipate in such a way to fasten andwiden the gap of living standards of citizens, which is shockingly inhuman. Inconveniently, for the development gained it is not the people but a party or officials get recognition as personal cult is common so far.
The other vital issue we should pay attention to is making the people the participant when the plan is drafted which mean making the people the source of development. If doing so, those who decide by themselves become responsible for the accomplishment, which is a big benefit for the ruled and for the ruler. However, this was not happening rather the people are assumed as ignorant mass that could have no role prior to drafting of the plan but after. http://mohiboni.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/government-herd-media-in-ethiopia-and.html
*Ameyu Etana is a journalist in Ethiopia and by now he is a graduate student at Addis Ababa University. Can be reached at: ameyuetana@gmail.com You can follow and comment on his articles on mohiboni.blogspot.com and mohiboni.wordpress.com. All are encouraged to challenge. Any idea is welcomed as far as it has adduced.
The UN claims that its Millennium Development Campaign has reduced poverty globally, an assertion that is far from true.
The received wisdom comes to us from all directions: Poverty rates are declining and extreme poverty will soon be eradicated. The World Bank, the governments of wealthy countries, and – most importantly – the United Nations Millennium Campaign all agree on this narrative. Relax, they tell us. The world is getting better, thanks to the spread of free market capitalism and western aid. Development is working, and soon, one day in the very near future, poverty will be no more.
It is a comforting story, but unfortunately it is just not true. Poverty is not disappearing as quickly as they say. In fact, according to some measures, poverty has been getting significantly worse. If we are to be serious about eradicating poverty, we need to cut through the sugarcoating and face up to some hard facts.
False accounting
The most powerful expression of the poverty reduction narrative comes from the UN’s Millennium Campaign. Building on the Millennium Declaration of 2000, the Campaign’s main goal has been to reduce global poverty by half by 2015 – an objective that it proudly claims to have achieved ahead of schedule. But if we look beyond the celebratory rhetoric, it becomes clear that this assertion is deeply misleading.
The world’s governments first pledged to end extreme poverty during the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996. They committed to reducing the number of undernourished people by half before 2015, which, given the population at the time, meant slashing the poverty headcount by 836 million. Many critics claimed that this goal was inadequate given that, with the right redistributive policies, extreme poverty could be ended much more quickly.
But instead of making the goals more robust, global leaders surreptitiously diluted it. Yale professor and development watchdog Thomas Pogge points out that when the Millennium Declaration was signed, the goal was rewritten as “Millennium Developmental Goal 1” (MDG-1) and was altered to halve the proportion (as opposed to the absolute number) of the world’s people living on less than a dollar a day. By shifting the focus to income levels and switching from absolute numbers to proportional ones, the target became much easier to achieve. Given the rate of population growth, the new goal was effectively reduced by 167 million. And that was just the beginning.
After the UN General Assembly adopted MDG-1, the goal was diluted two more times. First, they changed it from halving the proportion of impoverished people in the world to halving the proportion of impoverished people in developing countries, thus taking advantage of an even faster-growing demographic denominator. Second, they moved the baseline of analysis from 2000 back to 1990, thus retroactively including all poverty reduction accomplished by China throughout the 1990s, due in no part whatsoever to the Millennium Campaign.
This statistical sleight-of-hand narrowed the target by a further 324 million. So what started as a goal to reduce the poverty headcount by 836 million has magically become only 345 million – less than half the original number. Having dramatically redefined the goal, the Millennium Campaign can claim that poverty has been halved when in fact it has not. The triumphalist narrative hailing the death of poverty rests on an illusion of deceitful accounting.
Poor numbers
But there’s more. Not only have the goalposts been moved, the definition of poverty itself has been massaged in a way that serves the poverty reduction narrative. What is considered the threshold for poverty – the “poverty line” – is normally calculated by each nation for itself, and is supposed to reflect what an average human adult needs to subsist. In 1990, Martin Ravallion, an Australian economist at the World Bank, noticed that the poverty lines of a group of the world’s poorest countries clustered around $1 per day. On Ravallion’s recommendation, the World Bank adopted this as the first-ever International Poverty Line (IPL).
But the IPL proved to be somewhat troublesome. Using this threshold, the World Bank announced in its 2000 annual report that “the absolute number of those living on $1 per day or less continues to increase. The worldwide total rose from 1.2 billion in 1987 to 1.5 billion today and, if recent trends persist, will reach 1.9 billion by 2015.” This was alarming news, especially because it suggested that the free-market reforms imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on Global South countries during the 1980s and 1990s in the name of “development” were actually making things worse.
This amounted to a PR nightmare for the World Bank. Not long after the report was released, however, their story changed dramatically and they announced the exact opposite news: While poverty had been increasing steadily for some two centuries, they said, the introduction of free-market policies had actually reduced the number of impoverished people by 400 million between 1981 and 2001.
This new story was possible because the Bank shifted the IPL from the original $1.02 (at 1985 PPP) to $1.08 (at 1993 PPP), which, given inflation, was lower in real terms. With this tiny change – a flick of an economist’s wrist – the world was magically getting better, and the Bank’s PR problem was instantly averted. This new IPL is the one that the Millennium Campaign chose to adopt.
The IPL was changed a second time in 2008, to $1.25 (at 2005 PPP). And once again the story improved overnight. The $1.08 IPL made it seem as though the poverty headcount had been reduced by 316 million people between 1990 and 2005. But the new IPL – even lower than the last, in real terms – inflated the number to 437 million, creating the illusion that an additional 121 million souls had been “saved” from the jaws of debilitating poverty. Not surprisingly, the Millennium Campaign adopted the new IPL, which allowed it to claim yet further chimerical gains.
A more honest view of poverty
We need to seriously rethink these poverty metrics. The dollar-a-day IPL is based on the national poverty lines of the 15 poorest countries, but these lines provide a poor foundation given that many are set by bureaucrats with very little data. More importantly, they tell us nothing about what poverty is like in wealthier countries. A 1990 survey in Sri Lanka found that 35 percent of the population fell under the national poverty line. But the World Bank, using the IPL, reported only 4 percent in the same year. In other words, the IPL makes poverty seem much less serious than it actually is.
The present IPL theoretically reflects what $1.25 could buy in the United States in 2005. But people who live in the US know it is impossible to survive on this amount. The prospect is laughable. In fact, the US government itself calculated that in 2005 the average person needed at least $4.50 per day simply to meet minimum nutritional requirements. The same story can be told in many other countries, where a dollar a day is inadequate for human existence. In India, for example, children living just above the IPL still have a 60 percent chance of being malnourished.
According to Peter Edwards of Newcastle University, if people are to achieve normal life expectancy, they need roughly double the current IPL, or a minimum of $2.50 per day. But adopting this higher standard would seriously undermine the poverty reduction narrative. An IPL of $2.50 shows a poverty headcount of around 3.1 billion, almost triple what the World Bank and the Millennium Campaign would have us believe. It also shows that poverty is getting worse, not better, with nearly 353 million more people impoverished today than in 1981. With China taken out of the equation, that number shoots up to 852 million.
Some economists go further and advocate for an IPL of $5 or even $10 – the upper boundary suggested by the World Bank. At this standard, we see that some 5.1 billion people – nearly 80 percent of the world’s population – are living in poverty today. And the number is rising.
These more accurate parameters suggest that the story of global poverty is much worse than the spin doctored versions we are accustomed to hearing. The $1.25 threshold is absurdly low, but it remains in favour because it is the only baseline that shows any progress in the fight against poverty, and therefore justifies the present economic order. Every other line tells the opposite story. In fact, even the $1.25 line shows that, without factoring China, the poverty headcount is worsening, with 108 million people added to the ranks of the poor since 1981. All of this calls the triumphalist narrative into question.
A call for change
This is a pressing concern; the UN is currently negotiating the new Sustainable Development Goals that will replace the Millennium Campaign in 2015, and they are set to use the same dishonest poverty metrics as before. They will leverage the “poverty reduction” story to argue for business as usual: stick with the status quo and things will keep getting better. We need to demand more. If the Sustainable Development Goals are to have any real value, they need to begin with a more honest poverty line – at least $2.50 per day – and instate rules to preclude the kind of deceit that the World Bank and the Millennium Campaign have practised to date.
Eradicating poverty in this more meaningful sense will require more than just using aid to tinker around the edges of the problem. It will require changing the rules of the global economy to make it fairer for the world’s majority. Rich country governments will resist such changes with all their might. But epic problems require courageous solutions, and, with 2015 fast approaching, the moment to act is now. Read more @original source http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html
*Dr Jason Hickel lectures at the London School of Economics and serves as an adviser to /The Rules.
Land grabbing increased in 2008, when price shocks in the food market alerted the world to the finite limits of food production. From this came a rush to acquire farmland all over the globe and a dramatic increase in the value of arable land. “Land acquisitions,” as they are termed by their proponents, are the latest weapon in the arsenal of conventional development. Although it is claimed that they alleviate poverty and increase technological transfer, employment, and food security, the “grabs” have a range of other motives. Some are politically driven, some provide new markets for corporations, others provide food security for far-off nations. The “grabbers” range from elite businessmen to governments to multinational corporations and are not defined by any one particular demographic.
In Tanzania, the wild Serengeti Desert, home to elephants, lions and a host of other magnificent wildlife, is being carved up as Middle Eastern businessmen purchase huge parcels of land for private hunting rights. The Serengeti is home to the pastoral Masai people, who are now restricted to smaller and smaller territories. As a result they are not only being criminalized for trespassing on their ancestral lands, they are accused of over-grazing and degrading ecosystems as their herds no longer have enough room to graze without impacting grasslands.
In nearby Ethiopia, the government of the Gambela region has enacted a “Villagization” program that promises new schools, wells, medical facilities, and general infrastructure to relocated communities. Unfortunately, these promises have rarely materialized and more often than not the “villagization” process has resembled the violent forcing of communities into state-designated camps, in a process that is clearing the way for foreign agribusiness. Those that stay put in their ancestral homes often find themselves surrounded by new plantations. Two concessions of 25,000 acres and 250,000 acres are currently under development by a Saudi oil billionaire and an Indian flower agribusiness for 60 and 50 years, respectively. The latter, Karuturi Global, is growing oil palm, corn, sorghum, rice, and sugarcane for export back to India, using a labor pool comprised primarily of Indians or Ethiopians from other regions. Karuturi Global pays a measly $2.50 per acre annually – little to none of which is seen by local residents. A few local tribespeople now work for the company, although this is usually because they were left with no choice, their own land having been taken or degraded. These tribespeople used to earn their livelihoods by hunting, fishing, and making honey. When the company began cutting down the forest the bees and the animals vanished; now that the company has started draining the wetlands, the fish will soon be gone too. http://theeconomicsofhappiness.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/land-grabbing-and-the-threat-to-local-land-rights/
Land Grabbing and the Threat to Local Land Rights
By Sophie Weiss*
In recent years, foreign governments and multinational corporations have bought or leased huge tracts of sovereign land in the developing world, converting much of it to industrialized agriculture for export. This “land grabbing” – now widespread across Africa and Asia – is most common in nations with the least secure land tenure systems. Usually the land transfers involve land occupied by indigenous communities; often they are not legally registered as landholders and can be easily evicted. In terms of both ecological and cultural impacts, land grabbing has emerged as one of the most painful manifestations of the globalized economy in the 21stCentury.
Land grabbing increased in 2008, when price shocks in the food market alerted the world to the finite limits of food production. From this came a rush to acquire farmland all over the globe and a dramatic increase in the value of arable land. “Land acquisitions,” as they are termed by their proponents, are the latest weapon in the arsenal of conventional development. Although it is claimed that they alleviate poverty and increase technological transfer, employment, and food security, the “grabs” have a range of other motives. Some are politically driven, some provide new markets for corporations, others provide food security for far-off nations. The “grabbers” range from elite businessmen to governments to multinational corporations and are not defined by any one particular demographic. Many organizations have attempted to estimate how many acres are involved, though there is no central registry and little transparency. The World Bank claimed 120 million acres were transferred in 2010, while Oxfam gave a figure of 560 million acres*.
In Tanzania, the wild Serengeti Desert, home to elephants, lions and a host of other magnificent wildlife, is being carved up as Middle Eastern businessmen purchase huge parcels of land for private hunting rights. The Serengeti is home to the pastoral Masai people, who are now restricted to smaller and smaller territories. As a result they are not only being criminalized for trespassing on their ancestral lands, they are accused of over-grazing and degrading ecosystems as their herds no longer have enough room to graze without impacting grasslands.
In nearby Ethiopia, the government of the Gambela region has enacted a “Villagization” program that promises new schools, wells, medical facilities, and general infrastructure to relocated communities. Unfortunately, these promises have rarely materialized and more often than not the “villagization” process has resembled the violent forcing of communities into state-designated camps, in a process that is clearing the way for foreign agribusiness. Those that stay put in their ancestral homes often find themselves surrounded by new plantations. Two concessions of 25,000 acres and 250,000 acres are currently under development by a Saudi oil billionaire and an Indian flower agribusiness for 60 and 50 years, respectively. The latter, Karuturi Global, is growing oil palm, corn, sorghum, rice, and sugarcane for export back to India, using a labor pool comprised primarily of Indians or Ethiopians from other regions. Karuturi Global pays a measly $2.50 per acre annually – little to none of which is seen by local residents. A few local tribespeople now work for the company, although this is usually because they were left with no choice, their own land having been taken or degraded. These tribespeople used to earn their livelihoods by hunting, fishing, and making honey. When the company began cutting down the forest the bees and the animals vanished; now that the company has started draining the wetlands, the fish will soon be gone too.
In Sri Lanka, instability has given land grabbers the advantage as the country transitions out of a bloody 30-year civil war. During the conflict, the Sinhala Buddhist government claimed several large pieces of land as High Security Zones (HSZ), conveniently located in Tamil territories. In these seizures, local families were evicted from their lands in the name of security. Now that the war is over, the validity of the HSZs has come into question, but instead of returning the land to its original tenders, the government is converting many of the HSZs into Economic Processing Zones and Special Economic Zones, commonly contracting them out to large Chinese and Vietnamese corporations. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils are relegated to “displaced person camps” with little or no access to resources.
These are only a few of the heart-wrenching examples of land deals across the globe. Large-scale land transfers like these remove all human connection from land management. If the land grabbing trend continues, we could be witnessing the true end of the commons everywhere.
While proponents claim that these land acquisitions provide development to needy regions in the form of technology transfer and employment, these lofty claims require scrutiny. Is this kind of “employment” what is needed or desired among local people? How will technology transfer help them and what kind of technology is needed? In a region thriving on small-scale farming, are large tractors and bulldozers really of any benefit?
First and foremost, what local people need to prosper are secure land rights. Then they can make choices about the technologies they want to adopt, and about how their land can be managed for the benefit of the local communities, economies and ecosystems. To this end, we need an international legal framework that restricts and regulates the ability of foreign businesses to acquire land. Regulations need to limit the size of land deals, ensuring accountability and justice for the communities and ecosystems impacted.
It speaks to the disconnection between governments and indigenous/rural peoples that the land grabbing trend continues to grow; and it speaks to the cruelty of a deregulated global economy that it allows massive industrialized food production for export from the lands of those who are already hungry. Land grabbing may seem a distant problem for those of us outside the regions where it is taking place, but we also have a role to play. Often we don’t know what we are supporting when we buy mass-produced products from global corporations. By keeping our purchases within our local communities, we are keeping our money where we can see it – supporting businesses and communities in our own backyard, rather than enabling corporations to steal someone else’s on the other side of the world. This kind of localization – at the policy and grassroots levels – empowers communities everywhere to defend their relationship to their land, and honors the deep connection and intimate dialogue between cultures and ecosystems. Read more @http://theeconomicsofhappiness.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/land-grabbing-and-the-threat-to-local-land-rights/
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*Sophie Weissis an intern with Local Futures. She graduated with a BA concentration in Geography/International Development Studies from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a printmaker, designer, and critical geography researcher, focusing on indigenous land rights and anti-land grab advocacy for the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank based in Oakland, California.
Abstract: Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another. The etymology of the term from Latin word colonus, meaning farmer. This root reminds us that the practice of colonialism usually involves the transfer of population to new territory, where the arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to the country of origin. Colonialism is a characteristic of all known civilizations. Books on African history teaches us that Ethiopia and Liberia are the only countries, which were not colonized by West European states, but the paper argues that Ethiopia was created by Abyssinian state colonizing its neighbouring nations during the scramble for Africa. Using comparative colonial history of Africa, the paper tries to show that Abyssinian colonialism is the worst of conquest and colonial rule of all territories in Africa, according to the number of people killed during the conquest war, brutal colonial rule, political oppression, poverty, lack of education, diseases, and contemporary land grabbing only in the colonial territories. In its arguments, the paper discusses why the Oromo were defeated at the end of 19th century whereas we do have full historical documents starting from 13th century in which the Oromo defended their own territory against Abyssinian expansion. Finally the paper will elucidate the development of Oromo national struggle for regaining their lost independence.
Africa’s poverty persists in the midst of a wealth of natural resources, estimated by the United Nations Economic Commission on Africa as including 12 percent of the world’s oil reserves, 42 percent of its gold, 80 to 90 percent of chromium and platinum group metals, and 60 percent of arable land in addition to vast timber resources.
If these were idle, unexploited resources, it would be one thing.
However, the reality is that they are increasingly being exploited: investment and trade in Africa’s resources sector is on the rise, largely accounting for the sustained GDP growth rates witnessed over the last decade. The Economist magazine has reported increased foreign direct investment into Africa, rising from U.S. $15 billion in 2002, to $37 billion in 2006 to $46 billion in 2012.
While trade with China alone went up from $11 billion in 2003, to $166 billion in 2012, very little can be pointed to in commensurate changes in human development and fundamental economic transformation. It is multi-national corporations and a few local elites which are benefiting disproportionately from the reported growth – exacerbating inequality and further reinforcing the characteristic “enclave economy” structural defect of most African economies.
The disparity between sustained GDP growth rates and Africa’s seemingly obstinate and perverse state of underdevelopment, extreme poverty and deepening inequality brings to the fore issues of inclusivity and responsible governance of domestic resources. The question that is being asked by many – especially Africa’s young people who have assumed the agenda for economic transformation as a generational mandate – is this: Why are we so poor? Yet we are so rich?
Working Group Must Address Trade Misinvoicing and Role of U.S. Business and Government in Facilitating Illicit Finance to Be Truly Effective, Warns GFI
Illicit Financial Flows Drain US$55.6bn Annually from African Continent, Sapping GDP, Undermining Development, and Fueling Crime, Corruption, and Tax Evasion
August 7, 2014, WASHINGTON, DC (GFI) – Global Financial Integrity (GFI) welcomed the announcement from the White House and African leaders today regarding the establishment of a bilateral U.S.-Africa Partnership to Combat Illicit Finance, but the Washington-DC based research and advocacy organization cautioned that any effective partnership must be sure to address deficiencies in both the U.S. and in Africa that facilitate the hemorrhage of illicit capital from Africa.
“We welcome the move by President Obama and certain African leaders to form this partnership on curbing illicit financial flows from African economies,” said GFI President Raymond Baker, who also serves on the UN High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa. “Illicit financial flows are by far the most damaging economic problem facing Africa. By announcing the creation of the U.S.-Africa Partnership to Combat Illicit Finance, President Obama and African leaders have taken the first step towards tackling the most pernicious global development challenge of our time.”
GFI research estimates that illicit financial outflows cost African (both North and Sub-Saharan African) economies US$55.6 billion per year from 2002-2011 (the most recent decade for which comprehensive data is available), fueling crime, corruption, and tax evasion. Indeed, GFI’s latest global analysis found that these illicit outflows sapped 5.7 percent of GDP from Sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade, more than any other region in the developing world. Perhaps most alarmingly, outflows from Sub-Saharan Africa were found to be growing at an average inflation-adjusted rate of more than 20 percent per year, underscoring the urgency with which policymakers should address illicit financial flows.
The problem with illicit outflows from Africa is so severe that a May 2013 joint report from GFI and the African Development Bank found that, after adjusting all recorded flows of money to and from the continent (e.g. debt, investment, exports, imports, foreign aid, remittances, etc.) for illicit financial outflows, between 1980 and 2009, Africa was a net creditor to the rest of the world by up to US$1.4 trillion.
Trade Misinvoicing at the Heart of Illicit Outflows
According to GFI’s research, most of the illicit outflows from Africa—US$35.4 billion of the US$55.6 billion leaving the continent each year—occur through the fraudulent over- and under-invoicing of trade transactions, a trade-based money laundering technique known as “trade misinvoicing.” As GFI noted in a May 2014 study, trade misinvoicing is undermining billions of dollars of investment and domestic resource mobilization in at least a number of African countries. The organization emphasized the importance of ensuring that the new U.S.-Africa partnership prioritizes the curtailment of trade misinvoicing.
“The misinvoicing of ordinary trade transactions is the most widely used method for transferring dirty money across international borders, and it accounts for the vast majority of illicit financial flows from Africa,” said Heather Lowe, GFI’s legal counsel and director of government affairs. “While it is easy to place the blame for this on corrupt officials or transnational crime networks, the truth of the matter is that the bulk of these fraudulent trade transactions are conducted by normal companies, many of them major U.S. and European companies.”
Ms. Lowe continued: “Just yesterday, President Obama announced the Doing Business in Africa Campaign, a U.S. government initiative focused on boosting trade between U.S. and African companies, without a signal mention of the elephant in the room: trade misinvoicing. Increasing trade is important to boosting economic growth across Africa, but only if the trade is done honestly and at fair market values. The single most important step that wealthy nations like the U.S. can take to help African economies curtail illicit flows is to trade legitimately and honestly with Africa. While this topic was not addressed at the U.S.-Africa Business Forum yesterday, it must be on the table as the U.S.-Africa Partnership to Combat Illicit Finance commences its work.”
U.S. Must Clean Up Its Own Backyard
GFI further emphasized the need to address the role of the U.S. financial system as a major facilitator of such outflows.
“For every country losing money illicitly, there is another country absorbing it. Illicit financial outflows are facilitated by financial opacity in tax havens and in major economies like the United States,” said GFI Policy Counsel Joshua Simmons. “Indeed, the United States is the second easiest country in the world—after Kenya—for a criminal, kleptocrat, or terrorist to incorporate an anonymous company to launder their ill-gotten-gains with impunity.
“While governance remains an issue for many African countries, structural deficiencies in the U.S. financial system are just as responsible for driving the outflow of illicit capital. This initiative cannot place the onus entirely on the shoulders of African governments. The burden for curtailing these illicit flows must be shared equally by policymakers in the U.S. and in Africa for this partnership to be effective,” added Mr. Simmons.
The fact that we are gathered here today to honor the founding of Macha Tulama 50 years ago speaks to the fact that despite all odds, we, as a people are survivors. Ethiopian history is full of attempts to annihilate the Oromo—culturally, politically, socially, economically, in all and every ways possible.Oromos — cast as foreign, aliens to their own lands, have been the targets of the entire infrastructure of the Ethiopian state since their violent incorporation. Our identity, primarily language, religion and belief systems and cultural heritage have been the main targets of wanton destruction. Oromo and its personhood were already demonized, characterized as embodiments of all that is inferior, shameful and subhuman from the beginning. Oromo people were economically and politically exploited, dominated and alienated.
By HELEN EPSTEIN, The New York Times, Opinion page, AUG. 1, 2014
A specter is haunting Africa — the specter of impunity. Many countries the United States considers allies are in the grip of corrupt, repressive tyrants; others are mired in endless conflict. As Washington prepares to host the first-ever U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit next week, American policy makers must acknowledge their contributions to this dismal situation. By lavishing billions of dollars in military and development aid on African states while failing to promote justice, democracy and the rule of law, American policies have fostered a culture of abuse and rebellion. This must change before the continent is so steeped in blood that there’s no way back.
The summit seeks to highlight Africa’s development successes and promote trade and investment on a continent rich in oil and natural resources. Justice and the rule of law aren’t on the agenda. But they should be, unless American C.E.O.s want to see their investments evaporate.
‘The international community’s failure to demonstrate strong opposition to the antidemocratic trajectory of many African countries is allowing authoritarian heads of state to gain more power and influence. The United States should single out and prioritize the needs of the few African leaders working to comply with international law and to promote democratic governance domestically and regionally. One way Washington can do this is by acknowledging and giving preference to the democratic states participating in the U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit next week. If current trends are not thwarted, the future of the continent could fall under the control of a resurgent “Dictators’ Club.”’
“Repressive leaders are also copying one another’s laws, which collectively undermine basic freedoms for the continent’s citizens. In 2009, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia enacted the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation and the Charities and Societies Proclamation, which essentially aimed to eliminate independent civil society activity. Within a few years, Presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya had introduced nearly identical laws, which are muzzling the work of human rights defenders, the independent media, local journalists, and members of the political opposition across East Africa.”
Reemergence of the African Rat Pack
Alyssa Rickard, Program Associate, Africa Programs
Freedom House.
(Freedom House, 30 July 2014) The reemergence of unconditional solidarity among Africa’s incumbent leaders is threatening respect for human rights and good governance throughout the continent. The phenomenon is obviously bad for the people of Africa and for the overall progress of democracy. But the worst consequence of many African leaders’ support for even their most authoritarian colleagues is the growing regional acceptance—and in some cases promotion—of deeply repressive policies.
Strong bilateral relationships in Africa, for instance between Presidents Jacob Zuma of South Africa and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, are undercutting domestic and regional democratic frameworks. In Zimbabwe’s 2013 election, Zuma—acting as the chief election facilitator for the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC)—disregarded his obligation under the organization’s Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections to maintain neutrality by publicly rebuking a technical team for questioning the election preparations. Zuma then endorsed Mugabe’s reelection on behalf of SADC, even when clear evidence of vote rigging emerged, which Botswana cited as another violation of SADC’s guidelines. Nevertheless, Zuma stood by his counterpart in Zimbabwe, bolstering the idea that the region’s entrenched leaders can rely on one another in their efforts to maintain power, even if this means violating their own democratic standards.
This type of solidarity in Southern Africa has extended beyond domestic affairs to include limiting citizens’ access to justice on a regional level, as clearly demonstrated by the disbandment of the SADC Tribunal, launched in 2005 to enforce the SADC Treaty. The tribunal’s fate was sealed when it ruled that Zimbabwe’s seizure of land from white farmers without compensation was illegal and discriminatory. Mugabe refused to obey the decision, challenging the court’s authority and paving the way for its suspension in 2010. Despite the best efforts of civil society groups in the region, Southern Africa’s heads of state sided with Mugabe and voted to remove the individual mandate of the court, meaning victims of state abuse could no longer file cases against their governments. Not only was this a blow to human rights protection, but it also discouraged private-sector investment, as property owners would have no legal recourse beyond national courts. Once the SADC court ruled against the big man’s interests, political imperatives suddenly took precedence, and legal order was sidelined.
Repressive leaders are also copying one another’s laws, which collectively undermine basic freedoms for the continent’s citizens. In 2009, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia enacted the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation and the Charities and Societies Proclamation, which essentially aimed to eliminate independent civil society activity. Within a few years, Presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya had introduced nearly identical laws, which are muzzling the work of human rights defenders, the independent media, local journalists, and members of the political opposition across East Africa.
A similar contagion effect occurred after the signing of what UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay referred to as “a piece of legislation that in so few paragraphs directly violates so many basic, universal human rights.” Nigeria’s Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, signed early this year, went far beyond other anti-LGBTI laws by banning association with or operation of “gay” organizations. Instead of pushing back, many of the continent’s leaders supported Nigeria with their own repressive measures, including the signing of an “anti-homosexuality” bill in Uganda, the introduction of a draft law to criminalize gay and transgender people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the launching of a parliamentary caucus to ensure the implementation of anti-LGBTI laws in Kenya, and the refusal of justice for victims of homophobic attacks in Cameroon. Many argue that this is not surprising given the preceding rise in homophobic rhetoric from many African leaders, but since the Nigerian bill was enacted, attacks against LGBTI people across the continent have increased, even in more tolerant countries such as Côte d’Ivoire and Sénégal. Nigeria’s leadership catalyzed a steep regression for the protection of LGBTI individuals that could take decades to reverse.
Big-man interests are also driving a movement to withdraw en masse from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which would enable impunity for mass atrocities. Urged on by President Kenyatta, who is currently accused of crimes against humanity at The Hague, the African Union (AU) held a special meeting in October 2013 to discuss an ICC withdrawal. Due to the efforts of countries like Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Sénégal, the AU rejected the proposition, but Kenyatta succeeded in obtaining a resolution calling on the ICC to postpone his trial and to exempt sitting heads of state from international prosecution. As if this were not enough, an amendment to the newly established Protocol on the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights was adopted at a June 2014 summit, giving immunity to African heads of state and senior government officials (yet to be defined) at what was supposed to be the continent’s new regional human rights court.
If the immunity amendment to the African court’s statute is ratified by AU member states, leaders will not be deterred from committing the same crimes of the past, and African citizens will have one less option for protection against human rights abuses. Furthermore, the amendment is entirely at odds with the normative frameworks already ratified by the AU member states to protect human rights, including the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Compliance with and enforcement of these frameworks are the best hope for strengthening democratic governance in Africa. However, these treaties, laws, and protocols will be useless if authoritarian leaders succeed in working together to ignore and actively undermine them.
It is therefore extremely important for countries like the United States to work actively with their African partners to uphold democratic principles on the continent. The international community’s failure to demonstrate strong opposition to the antidemocratic trajectory of many African countries is allowing authoritarian heads of state to gain more power and influence. The United States should single out and prioritize the needs of the few African leaders working to comply with international law and to promote democratic governance domestically and regionally. One way Washington can do this is by acknowledging and giving preference to the democratic states participating in the U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit next week. If current trends are not thwarted, the future of the continent could fall under the control of a resurgent “Dictators’ Club.” Read @http://freedomhouse.org/blog/reemergence-african-rat-pack#.U9lHW9JDvys
The Mass Massacre & Imprisonment of ORA Orphans – Wallaga 1992-93
By Mekuria Bulcha*
“…. many of us lost our parents and relatives and were cared for by the Oromo Relief Association (ORA) for our survival and wellbeing. With the support of the international community and Oromos abroad, some 1,700 of us have been taken care of in exile in the Blue Nile Province of the Sudan. … The ORA gave us the chance to survive” (from a letter by “Raagaa”, one of the ORA children 1993).
“The life of those of us who did not experience the sweet love of parents, but had known only an organization [ORA] was devastated when the organization collapsed; we were left alone without relations. There are many who shared my misfortune; regrettably the whereabouts of many of them remains a mystery” (from an interview by the author with another former ORA child, Leensaa, March 2014).
“We appeal to you to do all you can to shed light upon the fate of the more than 1,600 children from ORA camp in Kobor. Where are Sagantaa Useen, Tolina Waaqjiraa and Duulaa Tafarra and all others?” (from a letter sent by the teachers and pupils of Heinrich-Goebel-Realschule to Dr. Klaus Kinkel, German Minister of Foreign Affairs, November 2, 1992)
Introduction
The three quotations presented above are from documents used in writing this article and reflect, in one way or another, the fate of about 1,700 Oromo children who were looked after by the Oromo Relief Association (ORA) in the refugee camps of Yabus, Damazin and Bikoree in the late 1980s. The first quote is from a letter written by one of the ORA children to the ORA office in Germany after he escaped from the Dhidheessa concentration camp in 1993. “Ragaa” is a fictive name as the letter writer lives in Ethiopia. The second quote is from an interview with Leensa Getaachoo who was one of the ORA orphans. First incarcerated at the age of ten in 1994, she had been in seven Ethiopian prisons before she fled from Ethiopia in 2000. A brief account of her more than a decade-long odyssey across three continents and her sojourn in six countries in search of a safe haven is included in the last section of this article. The last quotation is from a letter written by students and teachers of a school in Germany appealing to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them find out the whereabouts of the ORA orphans. Their school supported the ORA project materially and the pupils were pen friends with the ORA children.
The main purpose of this article is to shed light on what happened to the ORA children in western Oromia during the summer months of 1992. Associating them with the Oromo Liberation (OLF), the Tigrayan Liberation Front (TPLF) imprisoned hundreds of them in 1992 and 1993 along with thousands of Oromo civilians and OLF fighters in the Dhidheessa concentration camp. Although I knew that many of the ORA children were imprisoned, I only got a hint of the full magnitude of the crime committed against themlast year when I came across a report written in 1996 by the UK based Oromia Support Group (OSG Press Release No. 13, 1996). The OSG wrote about the flight of the ORA children and their guardians chased by the TPLF forces. The report noted that“After three weeks on the run, with rain, mud, hunger and sleeping rough in the bush, the remaining 600 or so children were attacked in the Gunfi area.…. Local informants claim that the fleeing children were hunted like kurupé, a small antelope which leaps to see its way while fleeing through tall vegetation.” (Emphasis mine) This reminded me of what I read about the now extinct indigenous inhabitants of the island of Tasmania. They were hunted and killed by white settlers just like wild game and were exterminated. It is embarrassing that we have failed to record the story of the ORA children properly during the last twenty-two years. However, I believe that it is our obligation to record their story now and bring it to the attention of particularly the Oromo people. As the first two quotations above indicate, most of the children were parentless; the majority had no families to remember them. It is our duty to remember them by recording their story.
An inquiry into the intention of the crime is another aim of the article. The crime was carried out systematically and over a long period of time. The question is: why? Why did the TPLF forces chase children and adolescents for over three months and capture or kill them, when they knew that they were unarmed youth and that the adults accompanying them were not fighters but their guardians? Based on information gathered through interviews and the description of the manner in which the TPLF security forces have treated them inside and outside the concentration camps, the article will argue that politicide,[1] was perpetrated against the ORA orphans. The TPLF was in an open war with the OLF when the children were massacred in the summer months of 1992. Consequently, it wouldn’t be farfetched to argue, as I will do in this article, that the atrocities committed by the TPLF against the ORA children and their guardians constitute a war crime.
Thirdly, the article will show that the persecution of the ORA children was a springboard for the TPLF policy of liquidating those individuals and groups its makers see as bearers of the seeds of Oromo nationalism, and that this has culminated in the current widespread war against Oromo students. I will describe, albeit briefly, the case of other Oromo children and youth who have been accused of “supporting” the OLF or branded as “terrorists” and treated with incredible cruelty.The many crackdowns on Oromo students during the past fifteen years, including the ongoing war against secondary school and university students throughout Oromia, which I will discuss in another forthcoming article, are guided by the same odious policy which led to the massacre and imprisonment of the ORA orphans. Based on my readings of its cruel treatment of the educated Oromo youth, my assessment of the main objective of the TPLF regime’s policy has been to deprive the Oromo nation of its current and future leaders. In short, what has been going on in Oromia since 1992 is clearly politicide. Oppressive Latin American dictatorships, which were led by military generals such Augusto Pinochet in Chile from 1973 to 1999, and Jorge Rafael Videla, Leopoldo Galtieri and others in Argentina between 1975 and 1983. Although not widely known and acknowledged, the politicide carried out against Oromo intellectuals, businessmen and students—who are often labelled by the TPLF regime as “OLF supporters” or “terrorists”—surpasses in its ferocity that of the Latin American dictators against the so-called communists. Its treatment of its Oromo victims is in many ways “dirtier” than the “Dirty Wars” which the Argentinian military dictators carried out against left wing politicians and others between 1975 and 1983. Politicide takes on genocidal characteristics when carried out against members of an ethnic, linguistic or “racial” community. The policy of the Tigrayan ruling elites against the Oromo displays these characteristics.
Sources of information
The article is based on information collected from both primary and secondary sources. The primary sources comprise
correspondence which I had with a former teacher and head of the ORA children’s project who was also with the children during their flight from the TPLF in western Oromia,
written and telephone interviews with two former ORA children who live in an African country and one who lives in England,
telephone interviews conducted with Oromos who were imprisoned by the Ethiopian regime in the 1990s. These Oromos, who are now scattered across different countries in Africa, North America and Europe and who know what happened to the children during the second half of 1992 or later.
I have consulted reports and documents from the archives of ORA as a secondary source of information. These include a short letter written in Afaan Oromoo by one of the ORA children who were deported to the Dhidheessa concentration camp in June 1992. He escaped from the concentration camp in 1993 and found his way to Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) from where he wrote the letter to the ORA office in Germany. The letter was translated into English by Tarfa Dibaba. The other secondary source of information, an OSG (Oromia Support Group) report, was based on interviews with the surviving children, teachers, guardians and local Oromo population of western Oromia in 1996. The third document used here is a short article based on an interview given in 1994 by a former prisoner of the Dhidheessa concentration camp. The interview was in Afaan Oromoo and was translated to English by Yoseph Taera & Kathrin Schmitt and published as “An EPRDF Prison Camp from Inside” (see Oromo Commentary, Vol. VI (1), 1994). The informant was a detainee at the Dhidheessa concentration camp. Other documents obtained from the ORA archives in Germany include most of the photos used in the article, and a copy of the letter written by the teachers and pupils of Heinrich-Gobel-Realschule of the city of Springe in Germany to the German Minister for Foreign Affairs in November 1992 mentioned above. The article has three short parts including this one. The second part will discuss imprisonment and death in the Dhidheessa concentration camp. The third part consists of short life stories of some of the children, both dead and alive.
The Oromo Relief Association: Its Origins and Objectives
The Oromo Relief Association (ORA) had its origin in a clandestine committee created during the dark days of the so-called Red Terror which was unleashed by the Dergue (the Ethiopian Military Regime) and devoured thousands of the educated youth in Ethiopia in 1977-78. The objective of the committee was to assist families whose breadwinners were jailed, had “disappeared” or had been killed. The committee was known as “Funding-raising Committee”, and functioned mainly in Finfinnee (Addis Ababa). Oromo government employees and businessmen made contributions to assist the work of the clandestine committee. [2]
When it was formally established abroad in 1979, one of the objectives of ORA was to assist in bringing up the children of those Oromos who had died or were imprisoned because of their role in the national struggle for freedom. ORA provided humanitarian assistance to needy people in the OLF-held areas and offered medical and social service for Oromo refugees in the neighboring countries of the Horn of Africa. The Sudan was one of the countries in which the association was established and was recognized by its government.
ORA’s humanitarian activities in the Sudan
I visited the ORA offices in both Khartoum and Damazin in the Sudan for the first time in November 1981. From December 1982 to February 1983 I was again in the Sudan and could see the progress which the association was making in providing crucially needed services to Oromo refugee communities settled in the Blue Nile Province of the Sudan. In all the places I visited in the Sudan, the largest concentration of Oromo refugees was in Yabus, a district located south of Kurmuk town near the Ethiopian border.
Being one of the remotest districts in the Sudan, Yabus lacked not only a clinic and a school, but also all means of communication including roads. In February 1983, I presented a report entitled “Some Notes on the Conditions of Oromo, Berta and other Refugees in the Kurmuk District of the Blue Nile Province, Republic of Sudan” (Bulcha, 1983) to the UNHCR and NGOs in Khartoum, to raise awareness about the problems which were facing Oromo refugees in the remote districts of Sudan’s Blue Nile Province, particularly the health problems and high death rate among children. I also pointed out that the only organization which was assisting the refugees in the province was the ORA, and that it had almost no resources at its disposal to support even its staff. The UNHCR and NGOs responded positively to my short report. The UNHCR sent a staff member to Damazin and followed up the problem. Among NGOs was Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders, who participated in providing medical service to Oromo refugees and the ORA children whose stories are given in this article. Researchers from Europe and the US were also in the region and to conduct further studies of the problem facing Oromo refugees.[3] The reportwas also presented during workshops organized by ORA support committees in some European countries.
Through hard work and assistance from Oromo Support Committees in Europe and the US, the ORA was able assist Oromo refugees in the Horn of Africa, particularly in the Sudan. Through its children’s program, the association provided education to young refugees, and took care of parentless children in shelters it had built in the Sudan (see Tarfa Dibaaba’s book: It is a Long Way: A Reflection on the History of the Oromo Relief Association (2011).
The social backgrounds of the ORA children
As described in the first two quotations at the beginning of this article many of the children, who were supported and educated by ORA in its children centers in Yabus, Damazin and Bikoree in the Sudan, were parentless. They lost their parents and relatives during the Dergue period. Most of them were small when they came to the ORA camps. For example, the record shows that of the 244 children who fled Yabus to Damazin, 24 percent were between six and ten years old, 67 percent were between 11 and 15, and 9 percent from 15 to 17 years old (source:ORAdocuments, Berlin, Germany).
Pictures 7a & 7b: Some of the ORA children in Yabus and in Damazin in the late 1980s (Photo: Tarfa Dibaba).
Picture 8a & 8b: Some of the smallest ORA children in Yabus in 1988: In the forefront are the ‘inseparable sisters’ Sadiyyaa and Nuuriyya Tolasaa (see also 8b above, Photo: Tarfa Dibaba). Many of these children were viciously killed, imprisoned and tortured by TPLF’s forces in the 1990s.
The 1989 flight from Yabus
Quoting Amanda Heslop and Rachel Pounds of the London-based agency “Health Unlimited,” who were working as volunteers in Yabus as a teacher and a nurse respectively when it was attacked by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the New African (April, 1990) wrote “In mid-December 1989, Oromo children started arriving in an Oromo refugee camp in Damazin, Central Sudan in a severe state of malnutrition and shock. The New African added “They were orphaned children who, among 6,000 Oromo refugees, had fled from the South Sudanese town of Yabus”. According to another source (Dhaabaa, November 21, 2013) some of the children were moved to Damazin and the rest were sent to Bikoree when Yabus was attacked by the SPLA. The SPLA was fighting the Sudanese army and was backed by units of the Ethiopian army when it attacked Yabus.
Picture 9:The 244 children who fled from Yabus to Damazin in December 1989 were quartered in tents on their arrival. The tents and other ORA properties including trucks and large amounts of food in store were confiscated by the Sudanese government in 1992 supporting the Tigrayan regime in Finfinnee (Addis Ababa). The tents were donated by the German Ministry for Development Aid. Photo Tarfa Dibaba
The children who were in the ORA children’s camps in the Sudan in the mid-1980s returned home in 1992. According to the ORA, the first batch of its1033 children returned to Oromia from Bikoree in early 1992. They were joined in May 1992 by 691 children from Damazin. In addition to the 1,724 returnees from the Sudan, there were over 300 children in two camps—one in Caanqaa and the other Mummee Dhoqsaa in OLF controlled areas (source: Dhaaba as above).
Following the demise of the Dergue regime, “Those from Bikore, aged 12-18, were moved to Asosa in 1991. Because of the poor security situation there, they were moved to a site near Mendi (Wallaga) for one year. Nearby clashes between the OLF and the TPLF forced them to be moved around April/May 1992 to Kobor, 10-20 km in the direction of Asosa from Begi” town. Soon after, “the 5-15 year olds” from Damazin also arrived in Kobor (OSG Press Release, No. 13, 1996).
“We were all full of joy to be back in our country”
Research on international migration shows that, irrespective of age, sex and profession, a spiritual and physical return to the lands of their ancestors is uppermost in the minds of most of those who find themselves outside of their homeland against their wishes. Indeed, the ORA children must have been very happy to return to their homeland. The parents of many of them had sacrificed their lives fighting for its freedom. In a letter he wrote to ORA-Germany, Raagaa, who escaped from the Dhidheessa concentration camp explained,
When the situation seemed favorable to move back to our country, arrangements were made to take us back to our home areas of western Wallaga. … First, we were taken to Mendi and from there to Begi. We did not see anything of the fighting between the TPLF and the OLF. We did not know anything about the problem. We did not see any armed units on the way. We enjoyed a short-lived peaceful time. We continued our regular lessons under shady trees and in small village schools and spent most of the time outside enjoying the cool climate of our country. We were all full of joy to be back in our country (emphasis mine).
Raagaa belongs to the batch of children who returned from Bikoree in early 1992. The joy he described above did not last long. Those who returned from Damazin in May 1992 did not get a chance to experience even the short-lived peaceful life that the returnees from Bikoree experienced. Their dream of a happy life in a free homeland was shattered by terror perpetrated by enemy forces who occupied their homeland. The children were deprived not only the right to live and grow in freedom and happiness in their ancestral homeland, but many of them were also deprived of the right to life itself.
A walk into a death trap
The return of the ORA children from Damazin to Oromia coincided with the encampment of the OLF forces which was mediated by representatives of the US and Eritrean governments and signed by the OLF and the TPLF, preparing the ground for elections planned to take place in June 1992. But that did not happen. As we all know, following the withdrawal of the OLF from the local elections scheduled for the third week of June, its camps were attacked by the TPLF soldiers, who were not encamped like those of the OLF.
Regrettably, it was not the peace and happiness for which the children were longing, but violence, horror and death that was waiting for them at home in the shape of a new enemy that had occupied it. Ironically, from the relative security in refugee camps in the Sudan, they walked into a death trap laid out by the TPLF-led regime in their homeland. The shelters for the children at Gabaa Jimaata (for those from Bikoree) and at Ganda Qondaala (for those from Damazin)—both near Kobor—were attacked as if they too were OLF camps. So were the smaller shelters at Mummee Dhoqsaa and Caanqaa. The fact that the shelters were both homes and schools for children was known to the public. This was not hidden from the TPLF troops. They would have been informed, not only by their intelligence agents, but were in the area for weeks before they started their murderous attack on the children. In other words, the assaults on the shelters were carried out with the intent of harming the children. At that time of the attack, 1,724 children who returned from the Sudan and 22 who joined them at home (altogether 1,746 children) lived with their 37 caretakers and 35 teachers in the two ORA children centers mentioned above. In addition, the two smaller centers at Caanqaa and Mummee Dhoqsaa run by the OLF, housed and supported about 300 internally displaced, poor or parentless children. All in all the assault targeted over 2000 children. According to Dhaabaa (November 21, 2013), at that time the children were receiving training in different skills in addition to the education given in public schools.
Describing what had happened to the children he had bravely tried to protect from the TPLF killers during their three-month long bewildering flight, Dhaaba (November 21, 2013) wrote,
“The children were denied human rights; they were hunted, shot at, wounded and killed. Those who were captured were dragged into prison in violation of ethics that ought to be respected. That became their fate.”
Picture 10: A classroom in a school ran by ORA for refugee children in Damazin
As reflected in the eager faces of these pupils, children in refugee camps often have an amazing thirst for education. They see in it a better future. Regrettably, the life of these knowledge thirsty ORA children was cut short by the TPLF regime. They lacked protection, parental, organizational and legal. Photo: Tarfa Dibaba, 1988
Picture 11: Obbo Shifarraa was one of the assistant teachers and caretaker of ORA children in the ORA school in Damazin
ORA and the OLF ran schools which taught classes up to grade six. This was also the case in areas under OLF control inside Oromia. It was here that together with the literacy classes that were given to Oromo refugees in different places in the Sudan, Djibouti and Somalia and elsewhere that the qubee based educational system adopted by all school Oromia in 1992 was laid down.
Picture 12: Shows a classroom in Bikoree in 1990. It is difficult to say how many of these lovely kids were killed during the June-July 1992 TPLF onslaught or died in Dhidheessa concentration camp later. (Photo: Tarfa Dibaba)
Through Forests and Marshlands and Over Mountains with Killers on their Heels
Dhaba reported that they, the teachers and caretakers (hereafter the guardians), fled with the children into the Charphaa forest. From there, they sent some of the children away to Gidaami and some of them to Begi to look for relatives or hide among the local population. The TPLF forces arrived after sometime and opened fire on the group. In the shooting that followed some of the children were killed or injured. The children and their guardians fled from Carphaa to the Gaara Arbaa mountain range. Helped with information about the whereabouts of the TPLF forces provided by the sympathetic local population, they had been hitherto ahead of their hunters. However, soon aftertwo days after their arrival in Gaara Arbaa area, they detected that the TPLF fighters were building a ring around the forest wherein they were hiding. The children were forced to rush down the hillsides towardthe Dabus River. As the month of June is part of the season when the rainfalls are the heaviest, the valley had turned into a marshland and was covered with impenetrable tall elephant grass. Fleeing on foot through thewild and impenetrable vegetation was taxing. Blood-thirsty insects swarmed in the tall grass making travel through them immensely difficult and unbearable even to the most experienced adults: they had to fight off biting insects and struggle to walk through the grass at the same time. The children and their guardians found the Dabus was in full flood and unfordable on foot. Fortunately there were canoes owned by the locals. However, they carried only 2 or 3 individuals at a time. Therefore, it took many hours filled with fear and anxiety to take the children to the other side.After ten days, the children and their caretakers came to Mummee Dhoqsaa on the banks of the Dillaa River, a tributary of the Dabus after ten days (Dhaabaa, December 9, 2013).
The Dillaa was also in flood and, as the children were trying to cross under similar stress and circumstances (as when they crossed the Dabus), the TPLF, whose soldiers were still on their heels opened fire on them in the Gunfi area. According the OSG report mentioned above, an unknown number of children were killed or wounded and some were captured by the soldiers. The rest were separated and scattered in different directions. Dhaabaa reported (December 9, 2013) that a clinic in Gunfi (where children who were suffering from malaria and other diseases were getting medication) was surrounded by the TPLF soldiers who opened fire on them. Although caretakers were assigned and had accompanied each group (Dhaabaa, see above) it is difficult to say how many of the children were able to escape the TPLF troops as they continued to chase and capture or kill them for many weeks.
Picture 13: Some of the ORA teenagers in Bikoree, Sudan, having a good time together in 1990. This and the other pictures taken in exile show that that the children were well cared for by ORA. Photo: Tarfa Dibaba
As mentioned above, there is no doubt that the TPLF forces knew that those who were fleeing from them were children, as well as their caretakers and teachers, and not Oromo soldiers or fighters. Although they might have been “carrying out” orders from above, they behaved monstrously as though the children they were chasing and killing were not human beings like themselves. It seems that they captured, persecuted or killed the children as a matter of duty.
Killed by TPLF bullets or taken by floods while fleeing from them
Nobody knows how many of the ORAchildren were killed or captured and imprisoned by the TPLF. Different incidents are mentioned by the sources in which the children incurred casualties at the initial stage of their flight. According Abdalla Suleeman, a former OLF fighter, in one attack at a place called Yaa’a Masaraa near Kobor in Begi district over 30 children were killed when the TPLF forces bombed a building in which the fleeing children took shelter. He also mentions that many children had also drowned when the pursuing forces opened fire on them on the banks of the Dabus River (personal communication, March 2013). One of the eyewitness-accounts of the TPLF assault was given by a 13-year old girl, “Milkii” (fictive name as she is married and lives in Oromia now). Milkii was among the group of children who were sent in the direction of Mendi in the north. Although wounded when her group was attacked on the banks of the Dabus River, she was lucky to escape together with her 11-year brother and many of her companions. Regrettably, it was not all the children in her group who had that luck. She said that between 35 and 40 children in her cohort were killed on the riverbank or drowned while trying to cross to the other side seeking safety.
Since we do not have any other eyewitness of the incident described above, we have to accept Milkii’s account with caution. This, not because I believe she is telling lies, but because of the situation under which she had made the observation. However, it is important to note that other sources also indicate that a number of the ORA children had drowned while crossing the Dabus River or its tributaries.The OSG, for example, mentions that about 20 children had drowned while Dhaabaa mentions only one child who died in such an accident. Since the children were dispersed and fled in different directions, nobody seems to know how many of them had drowned or were killed during the flight. It is also difficult to verify whether the sources are referring to the same or to different incidents. In general, given the information we have, it is impossible to account for the fate of the majority of the 1,724 children who returned home, nor of the 300 who were in the Caanqaa and Mummee Dhoqsaa shelters when the TPLF attacked them in June 1992. However, regarding the number of children killed by the TPLFforces,the OSG (Press Release no. 13, August 1996: 17) wrote that “Between 170 and 200 bodies of children were found.” The OSG indicated that the figures were based on “Interviews with surviving children, teachers and carers, and interviews with residents in Wollega province over the last twelve months”. In short, although wecannot confirm the death statistics given above, there is no doubt that many of the ORA children were killed during their three-month long vicious pursuit and assault by the TPLF forces. Among those who were gunned down by the TPLF forces were the three boys—Tolina Waaqjiraa, Duula Tafarraa and Sagantaa Useen—mentioned in the letter cited at the beginning of the article (Dhaabaa, December 9, 2013). As mentioned above, over 300 children were captured and imprisoned in the Dhidheessa concentration camp. As will be revealed in the next part of this article, many died there from hunger, diseases and torture.
Crime against guardians and sympathetic local Oromo population
Noteworthy aspects of the flight of the ORA children were the courage that their guardians—their teachers and caretakers—had shown in protecting them as well as the support given them by the inhabitants of the districts they traversed. The price which both the guardians and many sympathetic peasants have paid to protect and support the children was high. Some were killed during the flight. It seems many were also caught and imprisoned. Among the children’s guardians who were killed were Abbaa Jambaree and Adabaa Imaanaa. The killing of the physically handicapped Adabaa Imaanaa was carried out with barbaric brutality. Dhabaa wrote (November 21, 2013) that
Adabaa Imaanaa was a guardian of the ORA children starting in Bikoree until the time of the TPLF assault. As he couldn’t walk, I got help from the people who gave us a mule to be used by him during flight from the assaulters. We were followed by the enemy from place to place and arrived in Mummee Dhoksaa on the banks of the Dillaa Gogolaa. After sometime we were surrounded by the enemy. They opened gunfire on us. One of the children’s caretakers, Abba Jambaree was killed. We managed to cross the river by canoes. Since his mule was frightened by the gunfire, panicked and galloped away, we sent away Adaba Imaanaa to limp to his village hiding from the enemy. When I went to his village later and I heard from his neighbors that he had reached his village with difficulty. But the TPLF agents had traced him, surrounded his house, took him out and killed him in late 1992.
However, in spite of the risks involved, the Oromo inhabitants of the districts through which the children passed, sheltered, fed, and directed them to the safest routes, informing them about the whereabouts of the TPLF forces. They had also volunteered to receive and hide those children whom the ORA staff were forced to place in their guardianship. The generosity shown to the fleeing children and their guardians by the inhabitants of the many villages through which theypassed, did not go unpunished by the TPLF. According Dhaabaa (November 21, 2013), the first person to be accused of helping the ORA children was a priest the village of Gabaa Jimaata mentioned above. His name was Abbabaa. He was dragged out of his house by the TPLF soldiers and shot in cold blood. A farmer called GaaddisaaDaaphoo was killed for feeding the children and their guardians in Harrojjii, a village in which they stayed during their flight.
It is difficult to imagine the hate that makes people commit such atrocities. Why did they kill, for example, a physically handicapped old man? Is it because he was an Oromo? What did the Oromo do to them? How can one hate a people amongst whom one lives in such a manner? Some probable answers to these questions will be discussed in the forthcoming part of this article.
[1] Politicide” means “a crime committed with intention on political grounds.” More fully, it is a deliberate killing or physical destruction of a group who form (or whose members share a distinctive characteristic of) a political movement.
[2] I was a contributor for a short time before I left the Ethiopia in September 1977.
[3] See for example, Virginia Lulling, “Oromo Refugees in a Sudanese Town”, Journal of Northeast African Studies, 8(2&3), 1996;
*Mekuria Bulcha, PhD and Professor of Sociology, is an author of widely read books and articles. His most recent book, Contours of the Emergent and Ancient Oromo Nation, is published by CASAS (Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society), Cape Town, South Africa, in 2011. He was also the founder and publisher of The Oromo Commentary (1990-1999).
The Name of the Abominable Crime is Politicide
(Part Two)
Deportation and Death in the Dhidheessa Concentration Camp
By Mekuria Bulcha*
Introduction
In the first part of this article, published on this website on June 22, 2014 under the title “The Name of the Abominable Crime is Politicide: The Mass Massacre and Imprisonment of ORA Orphans – Wallaga 1992-93,” I described the humanitarian activities of the Oromo Relief Association (ORA) among Oromo refugees in the Sudan in the 1980s and discussed the repatriation of some 1700 orphans, who were taken care of by the association, to Oromia in 1992. As I mentioned in the article, the initial TPLF onslaughts on the fleeing ORA children and their guardians took about three months. The different sources that I consulted indicated that between 170 and 200 children were hunted down and killed or drowned in flight. In addition, an unknown number of their guardians—as well as inhabitants of the districts through which they passed who helped during their flight—were killed during the onslaught. At the start of the onslaught about 300 children were captured and sent to the Dhidheessa concentration camp.
Deportation, torture, and political indoctrination
As mentioned before, most of the children were either placed in the care of the people or were sent away to look for relatives before their teachers and caretakers scattered to hide or flee back to the Sudan to seek refuge. However, the TPLF search for ORA children continued for more than a year after the initial onslaught came to an end. Apparently, many of the children who escaped the TPLF-forces’ bullets, and who were not arrested during the onslaught were traced, arrested and sent to jail. One of the survivors H.S. (who lives in a country neighboring with Ethiopia) told me:
I was about eight [years] old when the TPLF attacked us. I fled with the other children and adults in our camp. After sometime, we smaller children, who were unable to keep pace with the rest in the flight, were given to families in different villages along the route. I was placed with a family in a village called Gaara Arbaa. Two of my shelter mates, Kuusaa and Dingata, were also placed in the neighborhood in the same village. However, after a few weeks, the TPLF found and captured us and took us first to Begi town and then to the Dhidheessa prison camp.
Consequently, the number of the ORA children who ended up in the TPLF jails and died whilst kept captive remains unknown. The limited information I could gather confirms that, generally, the children were treated with cruelty in the concentration camp. In his letter to ORA (see the first part of the article), Raagaa mentions the names of some of the friends he left behind in the Dhidheessa concentration camp grieving that,
The fate of those children mentioned in this note, many hundreds of them, is that they were accused by the TPLF that they were brought up by the OLF and as such need to go through “re-education programs” of the TPLF. Can anybody imagine the children would fight the EPRDF/TPLF back? The truth is the children did not understand anything about the war.
Concerning the TPLF “re-education program,” another informant has also reported that “frequently the children are asked about their attitude towards the EPRDF” and that their “hands are fettered behind their backs” during the interrogations and that “the children’s skin was cut and wounded around their wrists from the rope” with which they were tied. To change their “political attitude,” the TPLF forced the children to participate in a “political education.” The OLF was demonized and the participants (prisoners) were instructed about the “crimes it had committed” and were made to shout anti-OLF slogans at the top of their voices.
The so-called political education was forced not only on the ORA children who were detained in the Dhidheessa concentration camp but also on the tens of thousands of Oromo prisoners kept in the numerous open and secret prison camps run by the TPLF regime in the early 1990s. One of the prisoners forced to experience the TPLF “political education” was Jamal. He was imprisoned in the Hurso concentration camp, outside of the eastern Oromo city of Dire Dawa. Jamal escaped from Hurso and fled to Djibouti in 1993.In August 1997, whilst in Djibouti, he met the two Swiss journalists Bruna Bossati and Peter Niggli as well as the late Lydia Namarraa of the ORA (UK) and told them about his own experience of the “political education” that was given by the TPLF cadres to Oromo prisoners as follows:
The lessons [were] given by the OPDO [and] were supervised by armed TPLF soldiers. The prisoners were instructed that the OLF was a criminal organization with a misguided anti-democratic program directed against the people. The teachers measured the success of their efforts by the enthusiasm with which their ‘pupils’ shouted slogans such as: “The OLF kills and slaughters the people” and “We will destroy the OLF.”
Jamal said “Whoever didn’t agree with the slogans was forced to stand up and repeat them at the top of his voice.” Those who showed insufficient enthusiasm were punished. They were beaten. Any resistance, according to Jamal, would have risked death (see Bruna Fossati, Lydia Namarra & Peter Niggli, The New Rulers of Ethiopia and the Persecution of the OromoFrankfurt am Main: Evangelischer Pressedienst, 1996, Nr. 45e , p. 25). The treatment of the imprisoned ORA orphans followed the same pattern. However, reports indicate that there were those among the ORA children imprisoned in Dhidheessa who resisted the intimidation of the TPLF “political educators,” thus risking their lives. Tarfa Dibaba notes that one of the survivors of the Dhidheessa concentration camp whom he met in Khartoum in 1998 told him about one of the ORA children who was hung upside down during one of the sessions of the TPLF political education and was ordered to tell its other participants to “give up” the idea that “Oromia shall be free.” But the boy was not intimidated into following the order. He refused to tell his prison mates anything nor did he repeat anti-OLF slogans. He paid with his life. He was tortured and left hanging upside down and died in the same position in the evening. According to the same source the boy was about 13 years old. An OPDO-TPLF militia participated in his torture. Another report (Dhaabaa, January 7, 2014) indicates a boy called Simeesso was also killed in the circumstances similar to the above. The report also mentions the names of two other ORA children, Soreessaa and Asabo, who were tortured for showing similar resistance. It is reported that these two adolescents were separated from the other children and were taken away. Nobody knows what happened thereafter.
When a prisoner is “taken away” by the security agents of the TPLF regime, it can mean two things: either execution or solitary confinement in another section of the prison camp, or transfer to another prison in another part of the country. As noted by a former prisoner, Magarsaa Dame who escaped from a firing squad in March 1995 (see the Amharic Weekly Urjii Newspaper, March 1995), prisoners were taken out of the Dhidheessa concentration camp, executed and their bodies left in the open to be devoured by wild beasts. According to another former inmate (see Schmitt & Taera, “An EPRDF Prison Camp from Inside”, Oromo Commentary IV (1), 1994), the Dhidheessa camp constituted several prisons, some of which were open for inspection by international human rights organizations such as the Red Cross, while others, such as the so-called Korea Sefer, were secret. He said that some of the ORA children were kept in a secret prison “separate from others.” He reported that,
In December 1992, for instance, about 40 children were locked up in a very narrow dark room [and] those kids, who become ill, physically or psychologically, due to the hot climate of the Dhidheessa lowlands and torture, are not given medical treatment (Taera & Schmitt, as above 1994: 25).
According to the same source, the argument of the camp authorities for denying the children medication was that the children were not ill but that their problems were “related to their political attitude towards the EPRDF” (Taera & Schmitt, as above 1994: 25). “Political attitude” stands here for affiliation with the OLF and animosity toward the EPRDF (TPLF).
In the “Korea Sefer” and the other sections of the camp, untreated wounds caused by torture inflicted by the TPLF thugs and their OPDO prisoners of war, thirst and hunger, and above all, contagious diseases which flourished in the overcrowded filthy prison rooms, also caused the death of many prisoners. In the interview he gave in 1993, a former prisoner from Dhidheessa (as above Taera and Schmitt 1994: 25) explained,
In the so-called Korea Sefer section of concentration camp where the ORA children were kept, the prisoners are not allowed to go out to urinate, they do not get water to drink and are not allowed to wash themselves and their clothing. They are not allowed to go out to get fresh air. On a very narrow space many people are locked up with almost no possibility to move, heavily guarded from outside. As the consequence of the abhorrent sanitary conditions that prevailed in the concentration camp there were cases of typhoid fever. Since there are few facilities for washing, many prisoners are also suffering from lice.
However, there is no information whether the two boys mentioned above were taken to a firing squad or to another prison within or outside of the Dhidheessa concentration camp. Describing (in his letter mentioned in the first part of this article) the barbarisms to which he was exposed in the Dhidheessa concentration camp, Raagaa wrote:
I escaped from one oppressor and fell into the hands of another oppressor. When one oppressor is replaced by another oppressor life begins to be miserable. To adjust oneself from an Amhara military oppressor [the Dergue] to a crueler regime of a Tigre oppressor is not an easy case.
Obviously it was not. It is impossible to expect human being to adjust to the cruel treatment which the ORA children received in the hands of the agents of the current regime. As Raagaa’s description of the prison conditions suggests, it is plausible to assume that many of them might have not survived imprisonment in Dhidheessa.
“Many have pains in their hearts and their feelings …
Some died like insects”
The words in the sub-title, above, are from Raagaa’s letter. The horrendous atrocities which, according Raagaa and the other sources cited here, the ORA children and apparently Oromo prisoners in general were made to endure in the Dhidheessa prison camp, are painful even to imagine. However, no information is available about the exact number of those who died from diseases, hunger and torture in the filthy concentration camp. Malaria, in particular, seems to have taken its toll.In the letter, Raagaa expressed the inhumanity he saw and the pains he felt as follows:
Those of us who were detained were between 10 and 16 years of age. Many of us became ill from malaria and lack of food. Many of us were sick from diseases that affect children. Many have pains in their hearts and in their feelings. The worst sight which I will not forget is when the kids got sick from malaria and became crazy and talked nonsense. When their condition became serious their hands and legs were tied and they were made to lie on bare ground to keep them silent. During these hours nobody attended them and gave them medicine. Some died like insects. I do not know how many. I can only remember few of the names of the children I stayed all those days, weeks and months. I and these children have nothing to do with the political and military problems [of the TPLF and OLF]…. How can they do such things to children? Nobody can imagine this (Translated from Afaan Oromoo by Tarfa Dibaba. Emphasis mine)
Phrases such the “children became insane,” “have pain in their hearts” and “died like insects” indicate the excruciating pain felt and the unspeakable suffering the children experienced in the prison camp. Raagaa mentions with grief Maritu (female), Waanca (female), Burqaa Nagaasaa (male), Guutuu Injigu (male), Iddoosaa Ammayuu (male), Saloome Abdiisa (female), Galaanee Taariku (female), Aster (female), Almash (female) and Mitiku Abdallah (male) as some of the many former friends and playmates he left behind in the Dhidheessa concentration camp in the conditions described above. The camps in which the TPLF regime incarcerated tens of thousands of Oromos, irrespective age, were death camps. According to Susan Pollock (see “Ethiopia: A Tragedy in the Making”, Oromo Commentary, Vol. VI, no.1, 1996), 3000 men, women and children had died in four of the TPLF regime’s concentration camps from malaria, diseases and lack of food. Dhidheessa was one of these camps. A former prisoner from the Dhidheessa concentration camp has described the conditions that resulted in the death of inmates in the following words.
Many prisoners had lost their lives or become mentally ill as a consequence of illness or maltreatment in the camp. Extremely bad is the situation of the OLF fighters who were disabled in the fight against the Dergue and in the conflict with the EPRDF. Among them, there are many who are blind, and some have lost their arms and legs. They are not offered any support although they are in the most terrible conditions in the camp since they are not able to wash themselves or their clothes or to go to the latrine without help of others. They suffer from unimaginable dirt and lice. (Taera & Schmitt, 1994: 25)
The horrific maltreatment described above was not limited to the inmates of the Dhidheessa prison. Similar conditions prevailed in the many hidden and official concentration camps which had been erected all over the Oromo country by the TPLF in 1992 and after.
Rape crime against imprisoned children
In an article published on Gadaa.com on May 28, 2013 I described that rape has been one of the dehumanizing torture-methods that are routinely used against Oromo detainees in the TPLF-run prisons in Oromia. The Dhidheessa concentration camp was no exception. One of my informants, Dhaabaa (December 4, 2013), gives the names of 10 of the ORA female children (the names are withheld here) who became pregnant in Dhidheessa prison after being raped by TPLF prison guards. These, it seems, were only some among the many children who were exposed to this outrageous crime in prison. According to the same source, the father of one of the girls (name withheld) committed suicide on hearing that his child had been raped by guards in the concentration camp.The sources also indicate that some of the adolescent girls were forced to marry TPLF soldiers.
“Where are Sagantaa Useen, Tolina Waaqjiraa and Duulaa Tafarra…?”
As indicated above, nobody knew what exactly had happened to the ORA children and their guardians once they were back in their homeland. Therefore the story described in this article is sad news to everyone who knew them or was involved in helping them. The inquiry “Where are Sagantaa Useen, Tolina Waaqjiraa and Duulaa Tafarra and the others?” which was raised by the teachers and pupils of Heinrich-Gobel-Realschule of city of Springe in Germany in their letter reproduced below was not answered. They were the only people who tried to find out what had happened to the children after they returned to their homeland in the spring months of 1992. They appealed to the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, the German Commission for UNESCO and the UNCHR Branch Office for Germany, to speak for and protect the ORA children. The following is the content of their letter addressed to Dr. Claus Kinkel the German Minister of Foreign Affairs dated November 2, 1992.I have reproduced its content unabridged in order to give the reader a grasp of the concern of the letter writers and the relations that existed between them the children in question.
Dear Dr. Kinkel,
We are deeply concerned about the fate of 1,600 Oromo orphans in Kobor near Begi in West-Wollega/Ethiopia. We have not received any information from the children’s camp there since July of this year, when Ethiopian government troops marched into West Wollega and also Begi. The ‘Oromo Relief Association’ (ORA) in Addis Ababa, which has been looking after and feeding these children for many years, was unable to establish contact to the camp.
In February 1985, our school organised an African Day with the Ethiopian teacher Terfa Dibaba. In this context we got to know about the starvation and civil war in his homeland and about the work of the indigenous refugee relief organisation ‘Oromo Relief Association’ (ORA). Since that time our school has continuously traced the work of ORA for parentless refugee children. We received oral and written reports and photographs regarding the opening of the refugee settlement in Yabus/Sudan, the opening of the children’s camp in Damazin/Sudan in early 1988, the day-to-day, medical and educational care for the orphans by the devoted and unpaid work of the ORA staff. The pupils, their parents and the teaching staff of our school have organised relief shipments with clothing, school material, toys, sports equipment and musical instruments since 1988.
The number of children in Damazin was increasing, and therefore, ORA opened another camp in Bikore/Sudan in 1990. The last time we received photographs, a letter and some children’s drawings was in August 1991. Duula Tafarra, a 12-year-old boy, closed his letter with the words: “Nagaa nu hundaaf haa tahuGARA JERMANII“. It means “To Germany: Peace be with us all” (emphasis mine).
In spring 1992 the children from Damazin and Bikore could return to their homeland Ethiopia. Our last relief shipment included, amongst other things, 200 notebooks, into which our pupils wrote – in view of the return: “I wish you peace and a good future in your homeland.” “Yeroo biyyakeetti galtu, nagaa fi hegeree gaarii akka argattun siifi hawwa”.
In the meantime, we have received information about several incidents of brutal attacks by Ethiopian government troops (EPRDF) against the Oromo population. The election observers, who were assigned to the regional elections in the Oromo regions of Ethiopia by your Ministry in June this year [1992], told us that they had been asked by the parents of arrested children [not ORA’s] to speak up for their release. Now we heard that in July minors from the ORA camp in Kobor have been arrested [also] and deported to the EPRDF camp in Didessa. Is this information correct? Are they 250, as we heard, or are they more?
We appeal to you to do all you can to shed light upon the fate of the more than 1,600 children from the ORA camp in Kobor. Where are Sagantaa Useen, Tolina Waaqjiraa and Duulaa Tafarra and all the others? Please take action to protect these children. Please try to arrange for the 1,600 Oromo orphans to be returned to the care of their previous guardians and teachers and make sure they can be supplied by the relief organisation ORA as before.
Yours faithfully
For the teaching staff of the Heinrich-Goebel-Realschule: J. Brennecke, Headmaster, and [14 signatures of teachers], Representing the pupils of the Heinrich-Goebel-Realschule [5 Signatures]
(The letter is translated from German by Kathrin Taera, November, 2013)
Duulaa and his group returned to Oromia in May 1992 and their camp was attacked in June that year. He wrote the letter (below) on behalf of the ORA children in Damazin.
Date 13-7-1991
From the [ORA] School in Damazin,
To pupils [of Heinrich-Gobel-Realschule, Springe) in Germany,
First of all we send you our greetings. How are you? We are well. We who are greeting you are the Oromo children at the school in Damazin. We will like to inform you that we have received the gifts such as balls and other sport materials you sent us and that we are using them. We are happy with the gifts and thank for your generosity. [We] the Oromo children who fled from [our] country and are in Damazin in the Sudan are given the opportunity to learn [and we are happy about that]
We urge you to write to us. He who wrote this letter is Duulaa Tafara. He is in grade five and is 12 years old. May peace be with all of us!
(The letter is translated from Afaan Oromoo by the author)[1]
Regrettably, Duulaa and his friends were deprived not only the peace which he wished for all, but also of the right to life. As I have mentioned in the first part of this article, Duula and his two school (camp) mates mentioned in the letter by the pupils and teachers of Heinrich-Gobel-Realschule, were among the victims of the TPLF assault on the ORA orphans. Tolina Waaqjiraa was killed on the first day when the TPLF forces opened fire on their camp in June 1992. Duula Tafarra and Saganta Usen were killed by the same force in the Carphaa forest where they took shelter with other children after their camp was attacked (Dhaabaa, December 9, 2013).
Notwithstanding the praiseworthy efforts of the pupils and teachers of the Heinrich-Goebel-Realschule, it seems that, neither the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nor the officials of the two UN organizations who had received their appeal letters, took the initiative to confront either the late Mr. Meles Zenawi or his regime to find out the whereabouts of the ORA children in 1992 or after. It is unlikely, therefore, that the authors of the letter were informed about what had happened to the children. To my knowledge, this article is, regrettably, the first response to the enquiries they raised twenty-two years ago.
Photo (Left) This photo is said to be that of Duula Tafarra, Saganta Usen, and Tolina Waaqjiraa. The person (Dhaabaa) who sent it me did not identify who is who in the photo. The only thing he said he knew is that the photo is that of the three boys taken together. I have included the picture here hoping that someone who knew them can help us to identify them.
The case of Duula, Saganta and Tolina reflects not only the fate of many of the ORA children, but also of the numerous other unnamed Oromo children who perished inside and outside the TPLF regime’s concentration camps during the last two decades.
A case of politicide
The sources indicate that the ORA children were very conscious of their identity and were, above all, eager to repatriate and live in their homeland in peace. An Oromo scholar who knew the ORA children in the Sudan (mail communication with Asafa Dibaba, July 4, 2014) wrote,
I lived in Damazin two and half decades ago and together with Nagaasaa [killed in 1992 in a battle with the TPLF] I used to visit the children in Bikoree from time to time. The children were, as far as I remember, between 7 and 15 years and most of them had passed the Gammee age group (0 to 8 years). Their knowledge of Oromo history and culture was beyond expectation. Their knowledge of makmaaksa (folktales), riddles hibboo (riddles) and the flora and fauna of Oromia was also remarkable. The children narrated their family histories and genealogy as if they were growing up in family homes with their parents and grandparents. Although their education was based on a curriculum that followed by schools in Ethiopia, it reflected the cultural and education programs laid down by the OLF. They used to tell me that their hope was to return to an independent and Oromia to grow up and serve their people (freely translated from Afaan Oromoo by the author).
Once they started an open war with the OLF, the TPLF leaders did not want to leave the ORA children in peace. The fact that the said children were brought up by an organization which was associated with the OLF was enough for the TPLF to see them as potential enemies and persecute them. Its argument about “political education” mentioned above indicates that the ORA children were seen as “carriers” of Oromo nationalism, a “problem” which the TPLF leaders associate with the OLF. In his letter to ORA mentioned above Raagaa noted,
We [the ORA children] were accused by the TPLF of being brought up and educated by the OLF. Can anybody imagine the children would fight the EPRDF/TPLF back? The truth is the children did not understand anything about the war.
The three-month long pursuit of the fleeing children by the TPLF troops in the summer of 1992 and the search for children who were entrusted to the local households in western Wallaga by their guardians indicates that the children were, as indicated above, seen as bearers of the seeds of Oromo nationalism and the OLF aspiration of establishing an independent state. Therefore, I will argue that the TPLF believed that their best course of action was to exorcise the ideas and inspirations with which they believed the Oromo children were imbued (through their association with the OLF) before these spread among the Oromo youth at large.The so-called political education was, for example,to brainwash and make them subjects loyal to the TPLF-led regime. Those who were resistant to the process were eliminated physically.
In general, the intention behind the atrocious massacre committed by the TPLF-led regime against the ORA children and the murderous crackdowns which it has been conducting currently against Oromo high school, college and university students during the last fifteen years can been seen as a policy of politicide with the aim of nipping Oromo nationalism in the bud. As the comments which were repeatedly made on many occasions by the late Meles Zenawi reflected, the TPLF saw in any and every socially and politically conscious Oromo, a potential member or sympathizer of the OLF. It is common knowledge that tens of thousands of Oromos who were labelled as such have been in one way or another victimized by the TPLF-led regime. Therefore, its criminal actions against the ORA orphans in the 1990s and against Oromo students during the last fifteen years are hardly surprising.
Children labelled “terrorists” and killed by the TPLF
Associating and killing of Oromo children by the TPLF-led regime did not stop with the assault on the ORA orphans in western Oromia. Many Oromo children were detained and killed in other places for the same reasons. The Oromia Support Group (OSG Press Release No. 13, 1996) notes that in 1996 the government forces killed Usen Kaallu, aged 12, Badiri Shaza, also aged 12, Awal Saani, aged 13 and Awal Idire, aged 16 years old in Tukaana village near the town of Gasera in Bale in the southeast. Their “crime” was tattooing the initials “ABO” (the Oromo version of OLF) on their hands. It seems that, not knowing the consequences, schoolchildren have been tattooing the initials on their bodies or embroidering them on their capsand clothes in many places throughout the Oromo country. The same report indicates, for example, that seven other children between the ages of 12 and 14 years of age were imprisoned, accused of committing similar “crimes” in the nearby Dabool village at the same time. The report gives their names and ages as Muyidin Haj Useen (14), Kaliil Useen (13), Eliyas Haj Abdo (12), Idris Aman (13), Qadiro Useen (12) and Shitta Usman (12). However, the report does not indicate how long they were imprisoned nor any details about what had happened to them in prison or afterwards.
After the al Qaida 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, the TPLF-regime changed the characterization of its “Oromo enemies,” including schoolchildren was changed from members or supporters of the “OLF” to “terrorists.” The Human Rights Watch (HRW, 2005) wrote that “In early 2004, police in Dembi Dollo, arrested a twelve-year-old schoolboy and imprisoned him after discovering that he had tattooed ‘ABO’, the Afaan Oromoo acronym for ‘OLF’, onto his hand.” His father told HRW that
They [the police] said he was a terrorist. They said he was a supporter of the OLF. The child’s family petitioned the local authorities and secured his release after two weeks of detention, but the police continued to follow and harass the boy until the family was forced to send him to live with relatives in Addis Ababa.
The HRW notes that between 2001 and 2005, “At least twenty other children under the age of fifteen have been imprisoned for similar reasons in Dembi Dollo alone” (emphasis mine). Furthermore, a relative of a boy who was arrested in 2003 told a HRW reporter, “I had an eleven-year old relative who wrote ‘ABO’ on the blackboard at school. He was dragged off to the police station and imprisoned there. They released him after several days because there was “too much noise about it” from the local people who were affronted by the imprisonment of an 11-year-old child. However, the HWR writes that the “child also experienced problems with the police after his release and eventually left [home] to live with relatives in Canada.” The TPLF regime did not see the 11 year old boy as a child but as an enemy—a terrorist and a supporter of the OLF.
There are international conventions signed by the UN member-states to prevent genocide and other crimes against humanity of which the 1948 Human Rights Convention was the first. Regrettably, however, the conventions did not end the evil which was the cause for the origins of the convention—the evil which is epitomized by the acts of Adolf Hitler and his cronies.As mentioned in the first part of this article, the telling metaphor “hunted like kurupé” (used by Oromo peasants to describe the predicament of the fleeing children they had witnessed) reveals not only the physical movement called forth by the existential instinct to escape from life-threatening danger, but also the horror and angst the children felt as a consequence of the unconcealed vicious intentions of the armed units who were chasing them from one district to another, shooting at them and wounding or killing them. Notwithstanding the size of the affected population, the cruelty reflected in the assault on the ORA children brings to mind the evil deeds of the Nazis against Jews, and in particular, incidents which Serge Klarsfeld (2010) describes in his book French Children of the Holocaust—a Memorial concerning deportation to death camps. In his descriptions of some of the incidents, Klarsfeld reveals how Jewish children who attempted to escape deportation were callously shot down by the Gestapo as though they were not human beings. Even the TPLF action against the local peasants who helped the fleeing ORA children and their guardians was reminiscent of what Nazi thugs did to those who tried to rescue the European Jews and their children from deportation to the concentration camps. The nature of the evil, the intent to harm their victims with impunity which underpinned the actions of the TPLF forces, reflects a shocking similarity with the murderous behavior of the Nazi criminals. Nothing is as evil as treating human-beings as wild game as the TPLF forces did to the ORA children.
Disturbing silence over crimes against humanity
As noted by the famous physicist Albert Einstein “The world is too dangerous to live in – not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who stand by and let them” (cited in S. Bruchfeld & P. Levine, Tell Ye Your Children: A Book about the Holocaust in Europe 1933-1945, Revised Edition, 2012, p. 14).
It would not be an exaggeration to construe that today the world has become too dangerous for the Oromo to live in.Whether it is at war or at “peace” with the Oromo and the other oppressed peoples in Ethiopia, the TPLF regime has been committing crimes against them and “against humanity” during the last twenty-three years.
A crime against humanity targets a given group and is carried out as a “widespread and systematic” violation of their human rights. By definition, crime against humanity differs from war crime in that it occurs not only in the context of war, but also in times of peace. Under international law, examples of war crimes include, among others, the persecution and deportation of the civilian population of an occupied territory, and the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war. (See for example Gary Solis,The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War (2010: 301: 3). By and large, all the crimes mentioned here have been committed against the Oromo children. The crimes which were committed against Oromo prisoners in general (see my articles from May 28 and July 31 in Gadaa.comor Ayyaantuu.com) are acts that appear in the definition of crimes against humanity in the ICC Statute of 1998 and in other international conventions on human rights. In short, one can say that the characteristic elements of war crime and crime against humanity overlap clearly in the persecution of the Oromo children by the TPLF. A war situation prevailed between the OLF and the TPLF forces when the children were attacked and killed. The children were unarmed and non-combatants. However, the TPLF forces chased and killed or captured the children with the intention of harming them. The TPLF associated the children with the OLF and attacked, captured and incarcerated hundreds of them in a concentration camp. Many of them were denied the right to life. The ORA, an internationally known and supported humanitarian organization, was banned, and its properties were confiscated. The foundation it had laid for the physical and intellectual development of the orphans was destroyed. Consequently, as I will describe in the third and last part of this article later, the life chances of those who survived the assault and imprisonment were shattered.
Regrettably, there is an ominous silence, not only over the less known massacre of the ORA children described in this and the first part of this article, but also on the many well recorded crimes committed by the TPLF-led regime against humanity during the last two decades. In August 1943, Fl. Hällzon, editor of the Swedish newspaper Hemmets Vän, frustrated by the continued silence over the holocaust, wrote that
The mass graves of Jews cry out to the world; yes, they scream, and the screams pierce the skies up to God in Heaven. Woe betide Germany and those responsible when the bloody crops are harvested. Woe betide the world, which through its sins has participated in this blood-soaked crime being committed in our days (F. Hällson, Hemmets Vän, August 1943, cited in Bruchfeld & Levine, as above, 2012: 60).
Implicit in Hällson’s frustration was that the silence over the Holocaust was not because of lack of information, but his country’s lack of the will to save the Jews. As reflected in the heroic deeds of Raul Wallenberg between July and December 1944, the Swedes finally acted to save the Jews, but it was too late. By then millions of Jews had been killed. The Nazis were defeated by the allied forces in 1945 and the leading holocaust criminals were also brought to justice.
Whether it could have been possible for the international community to intervene and save more Jews before 1944-45 or not remains a controversial issue. However, the type of problems that could have hindered international intervention against the Nazi onslaught on the European Jews do not exist today. The UN was established to end human rights violations. The purpose of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which the UN member states signed is to safeguard the right of every human being to life, liberty and security of person. Therefore, the silence of the international organizations over the atrocities committed against the Oromo is as frustrating— if not more so—than that over the fate of the Jews in the early 1940s. I am not saying that the Oromo are being killed on the same scale or at the same speed as the Jews were in the 1940s, but that the plight and fate of the tens of thousands Oromos who were incarcerated in the prison camps bear similarities with that of the millions of Jews who perished in the Nazi concentration camps. The congestion, the lice and the rats, the filth and diseases, the dearth of medical care and the lack of food and water which the Oromo prisoners (including the ORA children) suffered and died of in the outrageous concentration camps run by the TPLF regime bear striking similarities with the conditions associated with the Nazi concentration camps. As the recent excavation by a Turkish construction firm near a previous site of the TPLF concentration camp Hamaressa revealed, mass graves of Oromo victims bear signs of the crimes committed by the present regime. As it was with the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, the Oromo are being persecuted today because of their ethnic identity. The policy of the TPLF regime regarding the Oromo reflects elements of the Nazi policy of destroying a group based on race or nationality. The difference is that the Nazis believed they would solve what they called the Jew problem with the annihilation of the entire population of European Jews while the TPLF leaders intend to solve the Oromo “problem” with elimination of the politically conscious class of the Oromo population. Hitler’s policy was to rule a Europe “free” from Jews. He conducted genocide. The TPLF policy is to destroy current and future Oromo leaders and to become the rulers of the Oromo people. They have been committing politicide. As stated in the Hizbaawi Adera (The People’s Trust), the official quarterly of the ruling party TPLF/EPRDF, their policy is to eliminate Oromo intellectuals and businessmen who are labelled as the “enemy of Revolutionary Democracy.” They argued,
Higher echelon intellectuals and big business people are narrow-minded. Their aspiration is to become a ruling class only to serve their own self-interests. They are so greedy that they want to “eat” alone. As they are desperate, they can be violent. … Unless the narrow nationalists are eliminated, democracy and development cannot be achieved in Ethiopia (see Hizbaawi Adera, Vol. 4, no. 7, 1996, emphasis mine)
Tens of thousands of Oromo intellectuals, journalists, teachers, students, businessmen and their families have been the victims of this policy. One may argue that the crime against the ORA children was committed in a remote part of the country and was unknown. But, in general, the silence over the crimes committed against the Oromo was not due to lack of information. There are numerous, reliable reports by local and international human rights organizations such as the Human RightsLeague of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA), the Oromia Support Group (OSG), Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) which indicate that the TPLF leaders and their security forces have been serial abusers during the last twenty-three years. The crimes which have been committed against the Oromo were systematically conducted and widespread. In other words, we are not talking about sporadic cases of rape, rare cases of mass killings, or occasional disappearances of few individuals, but crimes that have been consistently committed all over the Oromo country for more than two decades. The extra-judicial killings which the TPLF forces carried out in Oromia have involved not just a few men and women, but thousands of individuals. They have been the outcomes of an official policy which has been systematically implemented to terrorize and subjugate the entire Oromo nation of more than thirty-five million members.
Concluding remarks
The atrocities described in this article constitute what the international human rights statutes define both as war crimes and as crimes against humanity. Yet the international organizations and governments of democratic states have continued to conduct business with the TPLF-led regime as usual. I will say more on the role of bystanders regarding the violation of human rights by the TPLF-led regime in the third part of this article. It suffices to note here that, in general, the international organizations’ silence over the crimes committed by the Ethiopian regime is alarming. It is alarming because it makes the UN and its conventions irrelevant in the eyes of millions of people. It is important to note that the silence over the April-May 2014 massacre of Oromo students is particularly shocking to many observers, particularly among the Oromo. This is particularly so because the students were killed while participating in peaceful demonstrations to oppose the government plan to expand the city of Finfinnee (the indigenous Oromo name of Addis Ababa) thereby forcibly displacing hundreds of thousands of Oromo families. In addition, Finfinnee, which serves as the capital city of both Oromia and of the Federal state of Ethiopia, is also the diplomatic headquarters of the continent of Africa. The headquarters of the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the embassies of UN member states, and the headquarters of the African Union (AU) are located in the city. Given the proximity of the “place of crime” to the seats of the representatives of international organization and states, the total silence over the atrocities committed by the Ethiopian regime is both astonishing and offensive to many people worldwide. Regrettably, the Oromo predicament is being repeatedly ignored by the entire diplomatic community their city is hosting.
By and large, the situation created by the recent mass massacre and widespread persecution of Oromo students has led to a new development in current Oromo affairs. The incident has made it clear to every Oromo that the survival of his/her community is under serious threat. This new insight has brought Oromos together everywhere to protest against the anti-Oromo policies of the Ethiopian government. This is a positive sign. It is also encouraging to witness that in some places like Minneapolis in US and in Canberra in Australia, Oromo communities have been able to solicit the support of important politicians and national political institutions to voice their protests against human rights violations in Oromia. These international responses will help considerably and should be stepped up and continued. However, it is not enough by itself to solve the Oromo problem or remove the regime from power. It is a deadly illusion to expect that foreign pressure would bring down the TPLF-led regime. We know that there is no interest among the great powers to do that. The Oromo themselves must do that. Therefore, there is the need for a strong Oromo organization that can strengthen the Oromo struggle for freedom at all levels, both at home and abroad, to ensure the survival of the nation. Needless to say, the recent reunification of the two OLF factions can be seen as a promising development in this regard and it is expected that other Oromo organizations will follow suit.
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[1] My gratitude is to the long-time Chairperson of the German ORA Support Committee to Rüdiger Jentsch and Obbo Shorroo Gemechu for sending me copies of this and other documents regarding the ORA children).
*Mekuria Bulcha, PhD and Professor of Sociology, is an author of widely read books and articles. His most recent book, Contours of the Emergent and Ancient Oromo Nation, is published by CASAS (Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society), Cape Town, South Africa, in 2011. He was also the founder and publisher of The Oromo Commentary (1990-1999).
Global Innovation Index (GII) 2014: This year, the theme of the report is the ‘Human Factor in Innovation’
The fundamental driver behind any innovation process is the human factor associated with it. We observe that some nations take the lead in innovation capability over others. A major factor for this disparity of innovation prowess is the quality of human capital linked to the innovation activities carried out in these nations. Other factors, such as technology and capital, also influence the innovation process; these directly correlate with the human factor. Hence nurturing human capital at all levels and in all sections of society can be crucial for developing the foundation for innovation.
Human-Centric Innovation: Inspired Talent Is the Engine of Innovation.
Out of 143 countries listed in the Global Innovation Index report released in Sydney, Australia, 18th July 2014, Ethiopia is in the 126th position. The score is 25.4.
Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Sweden are the most innovative countries in the world – and Singapore is Asia’s most innovative economy. No African country made the first 39 spot in the ranking but Mauritius tops the list for African countries coming in at 40. Mauritius (40) and Seychelles (51) beat South Africa (53rd) to the chase in the African continent. The regional winner, Mauritius, has shown an impressive improvement of 13 places from 53rd in 2013. The following Africa countries are in the first 100 rankings: Tunisia (78), Morocco (84), Kenya (85), Uganda (91), Botswana (92), Ghana (96), Cabo Verde (97), Senegal (98) and Egypt (99).
Top 10 in the 2014 rankings:
1. Switzerland
2. United Kingdom
3. Sweden
4. Finland
5. Netherlands
6. USA
7. Singapore
8. Denmark
9. Luxembourg
10. Hong Kong (China)
According to the authors of the report: “These GII leaders have created well-linked innovation ecosystems, where investments in human capital combined with strong innovation infrastructures contribute to high levels of creativity.”
“In particular, the top 25 countries in the GII consistently score high in most indicators and have strengths in areas such as innovation infrastructure, including information and communication technologies; business sophistication such as knowledge workers, innovation linkages, and knowledge absorption; and innovation outputs such as creative goods and services and online creativity.”
11 of the bottom 20 countries are from Africa ( Ethiopia, Sudan, Burundi, Angola, Niger, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Benin, Guinea and Togo). These countries are making the 11 worst African countries.
The Global Innovation Index surveys 143 economies around the world, using 81 indicators – to gauge both their innovation capabilities and measurable results.
The annual rankings is published by Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization. To view the full list, click here
Western countries are using aid to Africa as a smokescreen to hide the “sustained looting” of the continent as it loses nearly $60bn a year through tax evasion, climate change mitigation, and the flight of profits earned by foreign multinational companies, a group of NGOs has claimed.
Although sub-Saharan Africa receives $134bn each year in loans, foreign investment and development aid, research released on Tuesday by a group of UK and Africa-based NGOs suggests that $192bn leaves the region, leaving a $58bn shortfall.
It says aid sent in the form of loans serves only to contribute to the continent’s debt crisis, and recommends that donors should use transparent contracts to ensure development assistance grants can be properly scrutinised by the recipient country’s parliament.
“The common understanding is that the UK ‘helps’ Africa through aid, but in reality this serves as a smokescreen for the billions taken out,” said Martin Drewry, director of Health Poverty Action, one of the NGOs behind the report. “Let’s use more accurate language. It’s sustained looting – the opposite of generous giving – and we should recognise that the City of London is at the heart of the global financial system that facilitates this.”
Supporting regulatory reforms would empower African governments “to control the operations of investing foreign companies”, the report says, adding: “Countries must support efforts under way in the United Nations to draw up a binding international agreement on transnational corporations to protect human rights.”
But NGOs must also change, according to Drewry: “We need to move beyond our focus on aid levels and communicate the bigger truth – exposing the real relationship between rich and poor, and holding leaders to account.”
Sarah-Jayne Clifton, director of Jubilee Debt Campaign, said: “Tackling inequality between Africa and the rest of the world means tackling the root causes of its debt dependency, its loss of government revenue by tax dodging, and the other ways the continent is being plundered. Here in the UK we can start with our role as a major global financial centre and network of tax havens, complicit in siphoning money out of Africa.”
A UK government spokesman said: “The UK put tax and transparency at the heart of our G8 presidency last year and we are actively working with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to ensure companies are paying the tax they should and helping developing countries collect the tax they are owed.” Read @http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/jul/15/aid-africa-west-looting-continent?CMP=fb_ot
A UK High Court ruling allowing judicial review of the UK aid agency’s compliance with its own human rights policies in Ethiopia is an important step toward greater accountability in development assistance.
Ethiopia: UK Aid Should Respect Rights
By Human Rights Watch, 14th July 2014
(London) – A UK High Court ruling allowing judicial review of the UK aid agency’s compliance with its own human rights policies in Ethiopia is an important step toward greater accountability in development assistance.
In its decision of July 14, 2014, the High Court ruled that allegations that the UK Department for International Development (DFID) did not adequately assess evidence of human rights violations in Ethiopia deserve a full judicial review.
“The UK high court ruling is just a first step, but it should be a wake-up call for the government and other donors that they need rigorous monitoring to make sure their development programs are upholding their commitments to human rights,” said Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director. “UK development aid to Ethiopia can help reduce poverty, but serious rights abuses should never be ignored.”
The case involves Mr. O (not his real name), a farmer from Gambella in western Ethiopia, who alleges that DFID violated its own human rights policy by failing to properly investigate and respond to human rights violations linked to an Ethiopian government resettlement program known as “villagization.” Mr. O is now a refugee in a neighboring country.
Human Rights Watch has documented serious human rights violations in connection with the first year of the villagization program in Gambella in 2011 and in other regions of Ethiopia in recent years.
A January 2012 Human Rights Watch report based on more than 100 interviews with Gambella residents, including site visits to 16 villages, concluded that villagization had been marked by forced displacement, arbitrary detentions, mistreatment, and inadequate consultation, and that villagers had not been compensated for their losses in the relocation process.
People resettled in new villages often found the land infertile and frequently had to clear the land and build their own huts under military supervision. Services they had been promised, such as schools, clinics, and water pumps, were not in place when they arrived. In many cases villagers had to abandon their crops, and pledges of food aid in the new villages never materialized.
The UK, along with the World Bank and other donors, fund a nationwide development program in Ethiopia called the Promotion of Basic Services program (PBS). The program started after the UK and other donors cut direct budget support to Ethiopia after the country’s controversial 2005 elections.
The PBS program is intended to improve access to education, health care, and other services by providing block grants to regional governments. Donors do not directly fund the villagization program, but through PBS, donors pay a portion of the salaries of government officials who are carrying out the villagization policy.
The UK development agency’s monitoring systems and its response to these serious allegations of abuse have been inadequate and complacent, Human Rights Watch said. While the agency and other donors to the Promotion of Basic Services program have visited Gambella and conducted assessments, villagers told Human Rights Watch that government officials sometimes visited communities in Gambella in advance of donor visits to warn them not to voice complaints over villagization, or threatened them after the visits. The result has been that local people were reluctant to speak out for fear of reprisals.
The UK development agency has apparently made little or no effort to interview villagers from Gambella who have fled the abuses and are now refugees in neighboring countries, where they can speak about their experiences in a more secure environment. The Ethiopian government’s increasing repression of independent media and human rights reporting, and denials of any serious human rights violations, have had a profoundly chilling effect on freedom of speech among rural villagers.
“The UK is providing more than £300 million a year in aid to Ethiopia while the country’s human rights record is steadily deteriorating,” Lefkow said. “If DFID is serious about supporting rights-respecting development, it needs to overhaul its monitoring processes and use its influence and the UK’s to press for an end to serious rights abuses in the villagization program – and elsewhere.” Read @http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/14/ethiopia-uk-aid-should-respect-rights
(Washington Post, 26th June 2014), There’s a lot of recent scholarship suggesting that non-democratic regimes grow faster than democratic regimes. This has led some people not only to admire the Chinese model of growth focused authoritarianism, but to suggest that it may be a better economic model for developing countries than democracy. However, this research tends to assume that both democracies and non-democracies are telling the truth about their growth rates, when they report them to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank. Is this assumption safe? The answer is no, according to aforthcoming article (temporarily ungated) by Christopher S. P. Magee and John A. Doces in International Studies Quarterly.
The problem that Magee and Doces tackle is that it’s hard to figure out when regimes are being honest or dishonest about their rates of economic growth, since it’s the regimes themselves that are compiling the statistics. It’s hard to measure how honest or dishonest they are, if all you have to go on are their own numbers. This means that researchers need to find some kind of independent indicator of economic growth, which governments will either be less inclined or unable to manipulate. Magee and Doces argue that one such indicator is satellite images of nighttime lights. As the economy grows, you may expect to see more lights at night (e.g. as cities expand etc). And indeed, research suggests that there’s a very strong correlation between economic growth and nighttime lights, meaning that the latter is a good indicator of the former. Furthermore, it’s an indicator that is unlikely to be manipulated by governments.
Magee and Doces look at the relationship between reported growth and nights at light and find a very clear pattern. The graph below shows this relationship for different countries – autocracies are the big red dots. Most of the dots are above the regression line, which means that most autocracies report higher growth levels to the World Bank than you’d expect given the intensity of lights at night. This suggests that they’re exaggerating their growth numbers.
The two countries with the biggest difference between their reported growth and their actual growth (as best as you can tell from the intensity of nighttime lights) are China (although the discrepancy was considerably larger in the mid-1990s than now) and Myanmar. More broadly:
If democracies report their GDP growth rates truthfully, then dictatorships overstate their yearly growth rate by about 1.5 percentage points on average. If democracies also overstate their true growth rates, then dictatorships exaggerate their yearly growth statistics by about 1.5 percentage points more than do democracies.
The authors conclude:
the existing literature on economic growth overestimates the impact of dictatorships because it relies on statistics that are reported to international organizations, and as we show, dictatorships tend to exaggerate their growth. Accounting for the fact that authoritarian regimes overstate growth slightly diminishes the effect of these regimes on long-run economic growth. In light of this point, much of the evidence showing growth benefits associated with authoritarian regimes is less compelling and the case for democracy looks better than before. See more @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/26/dictators-lie-about-economic-growth?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost
Related Article:
What if everything we know about poor countries’ economies is totally wrong?
(OPride) – Over the last decade, Ethiopia has been hailed as the fastest growing non-oil economies in Africa, maintaining a double-digit annual economic growth rate. The Ethiopian government says the country will join the middle-income bracketby 2025.
Despite this, however, as indicated by a recent Oxford University report, some 90 percent of Ethiopians still live in poverty, second only after Niger from 104 countries measured by the Oxford Multidimensional Poverty Index. The most recent data shows an estimated 71.1 percent of Ethiopia’s population lives in severe poverty.
This is baffling: how can such conflicting claims be made about the same country? The main source of this inconsistent story is the existence of crony businesses and the government’s inflated growth figures. While several multinational corporations are now eyeing Ethiopia’s cheap labor market, two main crony conglomerates dominate the country’s economy.
Meet EFFORT, TPLF’s business empire
The seeds of Ethiopia’s economic mismanagement were sown at the very outset. We are familiar with rich people organizing themselves, entering politics and protecting their group interests. But something that defies our knowledge of interactions between politics and business happened in 1991 when the current regime took power.
Ethiopia’s ruling party, the EPRDF, came to power by ousting the communist regime in a dramatic coup. A handful of extremely poor people organized themselves exceptionally well that they quickly took control of the country’s entire political and military machinery.
In a way, this is analogous to a gang of thieves becoming brutally efficient at organizing themselves to the extent of forming a government. Once in power, the ruling Tigrean elites expropriated properties from other businesses, looted national assets and began creating wealth exclusively for themselves.
This plan first manifested itself in the form of party affiliated business conglomerate known as the Endowment Fund for Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT). EFFORT has its origin in the relief and rehabilitation arm of the Tigrean People Liberation Front (TPLF) and the country’s infamous 1984 famine.
As reported by BBC’s Martin Plaut and others, the TPLF financed its guerilla warfare against the Dergue in part by converting aid money into weapons and cash. That was not all. On their way to Addis Ababa from their bases in Tigray, the TPLF confiscated any liquid or easily moveable assetsthey could lay their hands on. For instance, a substantial amount of cash was amassed by breaking into safe deposits of banks all over Ethiopia. Those funds were kept in EFFORT’s bank accounts. TPLF leaders vowed to use the loot to rehabilitate and reconstruct Tigray, which they insisted was disproportionately affected by the struggle to “free Ethiopia.”
Intoxicated by its military victory, the TPLF then turned to building a business empire. EFFORT epitomizes that unholy marriage between business and politics in a way not seen before in Ethiopian history. According to a research by Sarah Vaughan and Mesfin Gebremichael, EFFORT, which is led by senior TPLF officials, currently owns 16 companies across various sectors of the economy.
This figure grossly understates the number of EPRDF affiliated companies. For example, the above list does not include the real money-spinners that EFFORT owns: Wegagen Bank, Africa Insurance, Mega Publishing, Walta Information Center and the Fana Broadcasting Corporate. The number of companies under EFFORT is estimated to be more than 66 business entities. Suffice to say, EFFORT controls the commanding heights of the Ethiopian economy.
While it is no secret that EFFORT is owned by and run exclusively to benefit ethnic Tigrean elites, it is a misnomer to still retain the phrase “rehabilitation of Tigray.” Perhaps it should instead be renamed as the Endowment Fund for Rendering Tigrean Supremacy (EFFORTS).
MIDROC Ethiopia, EPRDF’s joker card
In Ethiopia’s weak domestic private environment, EFFORT is an exception to the rule. Similarly, while Ethiopia suffers from lack of foreign direct investment, MIDROC Ethiopia enjoys unparalleled access to Ethiopia’s key economic sectors. Owned by Ethiopian-born Saudi business tycoon, Sheik Mohammed Al Amoudi, MIDROC has been used by the EPRDF as a joker card in a mutually advantageous ways. The Sheik was given a privilege no less than the status of a domestic private investor but the EPRDF can also count it as a foreign investor. For instance, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reported that about 60 per cent of the overall FDI approved in Ethiopia was related to MIDROC.
MIDROC stands for Mohammed International DevelopmentResearch and Organization Companies. Despite reference to development and research in its name, however, there is no real relationship between what the crony business says and what it actually does. Ironically, as with EFFORT, MIDROC Ethiopia also owns 16 companies. But this too is a gross underestimation given the vast sphere of influence and wealth MIDROC commands in that country.
Like EFFORT, Al-Amoudi’s future was also sealed long before the TPLF took power. He literally entered Addis Ababa with the EPRDF army, fixing his eyes firmly on Oromia’s natural resources. Shortly after the TPLF took the capital, Al-Amoudi allegedly donated a huge sum of money to the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization.
Why the rush?
The calculative Sheik sensed an eminent threat to his business interests from the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), a groups that was also a partner in the transitional government at the time. In return for its “donation,” MIDROC acquired massive lands in Oromia – gold mines, extensive state farms and other agricultural lands. In a recent article entitled, “The man who stole the Nile,” journalist Frederick Kaufman aptly described Al Amoudi’s role in the ongoing land grab in Ethiopia as follows:
In this precarious world-historic moment, food has become the most valuable asset of them all — and a billionaire from Ethiopia named Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi is getting his hands on as much of it as possible, flying it over the heads of his starving countrymen, and selling the treasure to Saudi Arabia. Last year, Al Amoudi, whom most Ethiopians call the Sheikh, exported a million tons of rice, about seventy pounds for every Saudi citizen. The scene of the great grain robbery was Gambella, a bog the size of Belgium in Ethiopia’s southwest whose rivers feed the Nile.
It is little wonder then that Al-Amoudi said, “I lost my right hand,” when Ethiopia’s strongman of two decades Meles Zenawi died in 2012. If EFFORT is a curse to the Ethiopian economy, MIRDOC is EPRDF’s poisoned drink given to the Ethiopian people.
Mutual Distrust
The marriage between politics and business has had damaging effects on the country’s economy. One of its most far-reaching consequences is the total breakdown of trust between the EPRDF and the Ethiopian people. In economic policy, trust between private investors and the government is paramount. The deficit of trust is one of the hallmarks of Ethiopia’s much-touted development.
After all youth unemployment hovers around 50 percent. Every year, hundreds of young Ethiopians risk their lives trying to reach Europe or the Middle East, often walking across the Sahara desert or paying smugglers to cross the Red Sea or Indian Ocean aboard crowded boats. The desperation is a result of the lack of confidence in the government’s ability to provide them with the kind of future they were promised.
Ironically, aside from their crony businesses, the EPRDF does not have any confidence in Ethiopian entrepreneurs either. It is this mutual distrust that culminated in the prevalence of an extremely hostile environment for domestic private investment.
This is not a speculative claim but a well-documented fact. The World Bank’s annual survey, which measures the ease with which private investors can do business, ranks Ethiopia near the bottom. In the 2014 survey, Ethiopia came in 166th out of 189 countries in terms of difficulties in starting new business or trading across borders. Moreover, year on year comparison shows that the investment climate in Ethiopia is actually getting worse, sliding down the ranking both in the ease of doing business and trading across borders.
Farms but no firms
The TPLF cronies do not engage in competitive business according to market rules but act as predators bent on killing existing and emerging businesses owned by non-Tigrean nationals. However, the ruling party, which largely maintains its grip on power using bilateral and multilateral aid, is required to report its economic progress to donors (the regime does not care about accountability to the people). In this regard, the lack of foreign direct investment (FDI) has been a thorn in the throat of the EPRDF. Donors have repeatedly questioned and pressured the EPRDF to attract more FDI. The inflow of FDI is often seen as a good indicator of the confidence in countries stability and sound governance. Despite widespread belief in the West, the EPRDF regime cannot deliver on these two fronts.
To cover up these blind spots, the regime has persuaded a handful of foreigners to invest in Ethiopia, but until recently few investors considered any serious manufacturing venture in the country. Besides, considered “cash cows” for the government, banks, the Ethiopian Airlines, telecommunication and energy sectors remain under exclusive monopoly of the state. They provide almost free service to the crony businesses. Any firm looking to invest in manufacturing and financial sectors have to overcome insurmountable bureaucratic red tape and other barriers.
One sector that stands as exception to this rule is agriculture. Since the 2008 financial crisis and the rise in the global price of food, the regime opened the door widely for foreigners who wanted to acquire large-scale farms. These farms do not hurt their crony businesses but they do harm poor subsistence farmers. Vast tracts of lands have been sold to foreigners at ridiculously cheap prices, often displacing locals and their way of life.
Contrary to the government rhetoric, the motivation for opening up the agricultural sector has nothing to do with economic growth but everything to do with politics – to silence critics, particularly in the donor community who persistently question EPRDF’s credibility in attracting FDI. In essence, hundreds of thousands of poor farmers were evicted to make way for flower growers and shore up the government’s image abroad. This tactic seems to be working so far. Earlier this year, Ethiopia received its first credit rating from Moody’s Investors Service. In the last few years, in part due to rising labor costs in China and East Asia, several manufacturers have relocated to Ethiopia.
Addis’ construction boom as a smokescreen
Crony businesses and flower growers may have created some heat but certainly no light in Ethiopian economy. EFFORT and MIDROC were in action for much of the 1990s and early 2000s but GDP growth was not satisfactory during that time. In fact, since other private businesses were in dismal conditions (and hence domestic market size is very limited), even the crony businesses encountered challenges in getting new business deals.
The setbacks in political front during the 2005 election shifted EPRDF’s strategies to economic front to urgently register some noticeable growth. This partly explains the motives behind the ongoing construction rush in and around Addis Ababa. In several rounds of interviews on ESAT TV, former Minister d’etat of Communications Affairs, Ermias Legesse, provided interesting accounts of cronyism surrounding Addis’ explosive growth and its tragic consequences for Oromo farmers.
It is important to understand the types of construction that is taking place around or near Addis. First, private property developments by crony estate agents mushroomed overnight. A lion’s share of land expropriated from Oromo farmers were allocated to these regime affiliates through dishonest bids. Luxury houses are built on such sites and sold at prices no average Ethiopian could afford, except maybe those in the diaspora. The latter group is being targeted lately due to shortages of hard currencies.
Second, EPRDF politicians and high ranking military officers own multi-storey office buildings, particularly aimed at renting to NGOs and residential villas for foreign diplomats who can afford to pay a few thousand dollars per month. It is a known fact that the monthly salary cap for Ethiopian civil servants is around 6000 birr (about $300). As such, that these individuals could invest in such expensive properties underscores the extent of the daylight robbery that is taking place in Ethiopia.
Third, the government was engaged in massive public housing construction but under extremely chaotic circumstances. The condominium rush in Addis is akin to the Dergue regime’s villagization schemes in rural Ethiopia. Families are uprooted from their homes without any due consideration for their social and economic well-being.
Most households that once occupied the demolished homes in Addis Ababa’s shantytowns made a living through informal home businesses such as brewing local drinks and preparing and selling food at prices affordable to the poor. It was clear that the condominiums were not suitable for them to continue doing such businesses. The construction of the public houses was financed by soft loans from various donor agencies to be sold to target households at affordable prices. However, the government often priced them at the going market rates for condos.
As a result, the poor households simply rented out the properties to those who could afford, while struggling to find affordable houses for themselves. Solving the public housing crisis was never the government’s intention in the first place, as they were only interested in creating business opportunities for their crony construction companies.
Fourth, roads and railway networks are by far the most important large-scale public sector construction projects taking place in Addis. There is no doubt that Addis Ababa’s crowded roads, equally shared by humans, animals and cars, need revamping. But, what is happening in the name of building roads and railways simply defies belief. First, the sheer scale and magnitude as well as the obsession with construction makes the whole undertaking look suspicious. Every time I travelled to Addis, I witness the same roads being constructed and then dug up to be reconstructed over and over again.
The ulterior motive behind these projects is nothing more than expanding TPLF’s business empire and benefit crony allies. Having exhausted opportunities within the existing perimeter of Addis, the so-called master plan had to be crafted to enlarge the size of “the construction site” by a factor of 20 to ensure that the cronies will stay in business in the foreseeable future. In effect, the large-scale construction projects are being used to siphon off public funds. And there seems to be no priority or accountability in the whole process from the project inception, planning to implementation.
Lies and damn lies
The construction boom in Addis serves as a two edged sward. On the one hand, the funds generated from selling Oromo lands to private property developers adds to the ever-expanding business empire of Tigrean political and military elites. On the other hand, the appearances of several high-rise buildings and complex road networks give the impression that Ethiopia is witnessing an economic boom. The target audience for the latter scenario is foreign journalists and the diplomatic community in Addis Ababa, some of whom are so gullible that they fall in love with ERDF’s economic “miracle” from the first aerial view even before landing at the Bole airport.
The fact remains however: no such economic miracle is actually happening in Ethiopia. A pile of concrete slabs cannot transform the economy in any meaningful way. After all, buildings and roads are only intermediaries for doing other businesses. For instance, it is not enough to build highways and rural roads – a proportionate effort is required to enhance production of goods and services to move them on the newly built roads in such a way that the roads will get utilized and investments made on them get recovered. Otherwise, the roads and buildings can deteriorate without giving any service, and hence more public money would soon be required to maintain them. This is exactly what is happening in Ethiopia.
Meanwhile, the EPRDF has been engaged in a frantic effort to generate lies and damn lies to fill the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of Ethiopia’s economy. The government-controlled media has been used for extensive propaganda campaign to create a “positive image” in the eyes of ordinary citizens. They literally compel viewers or listeners to see or feel things that do not exist on the ground. The Ethiopian television zooms onto any spot of land with a colony of green grass or lush crop fields to “prove” the kinds of wonders the government is engineering.
Barring rain failures, much of Ethiopia’s lush-green countryside has a decent climate for agriculture. But the EPRDF regime tries to convince the public that anything positive that occurs in the Ethiopia is because of its economic policies. But, as evidenced in ongoing multifaceted grievances around the country, the government is fooling no one else but itself (and perhaps a few gullible individuals in the diplomatic community).
Its lies also come in the form of dubious economic statistics, which are generated in such a way that EPRDF could report double-digit economic growth year after year. The story of the double digit economic growth rate in Ethiopia has been such that a lie told hundreds of times, no matter how shambolic the numbers are, is becoming part of the western vernacular. Donors often point to the abundance of high-rise buildings and impressive road networks in Addis Ababa in regime’s defense.
In a brief conversation, it is not possible to take such casual observers through details of the kind I have attempted to narrate in the preceding paragraphs. And, unfortunately for millions of Ethiopia’s poor, in the short run the government’s lies and crony capitalism may continue to ravage the country’s economy until it begins to combust from within.
*The writer, J. Bonsa, is a researcher-based in Asia.
Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) minority led regime has ruled Ethiopia for 23 years. During the years TPLF has been in power, they have used various methods to control everything in the country. One of these methods was false accusations against individuals or groups of sympathizing with the Oromo Liberation Front although the question of these individuals or groups has been based on the constitution of the country.
At the beginning when they came to power after overthrowing the Derg regime they promised to democratize the country, however they didn’t take time before they started targeting those who didn’t support their ideas as dissenters were subjected to torture and terrible sufferings in mass detention centres across the country. Over the last 23 years they have been in power, they have carried out unimaginable destruction against human life and natural resources in the country particularly in Oromia region. For instance destruction of Oromia forests and other natural resources as well as the killing of Oromo students, farmers and Oromo intellectuals in all parts of the region.
In December 2003 the government security forces massacred more than 400 Anuak Civilians in Gambella region as reported on January 8, 2004 by Genocide Watch, a US based Human Rights group. Police violence in Tepi and Awassa in the Southern Nations-Nationalities, and Peoples (SNNP) regional state, resulted in the death of more than one hundred civilians and the arrest of hundreds. The Human Rights Watch report 14 January 2003 termed it as Collective Punishment.
War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State, June 2008 and 19 October 2006, the Ethiopian police massacred 193 protesters in violence following last year’s disputed elections, an independent report says. These are very few among many such incidents that I have elected to mention as an example of TPLF security forces’ atrocious acts against innocent people in different parts of the country. The victim of these brutal acts range from very young children to the elderly people by age categories. For example, there was a report that an eight years old child was killed by federal police in Gudar in May 2014.
If any individual does not agree and support their agenda, automatically that person is a member of OLF, according to Woyane regime’s definition. For example, Bekele Gerba, who was a lecturer at Addis Ababa University was arrested in 2010 by the TPLF-led regime simply because he clearly depicted the true evil nature and behavior of TPLF and its members. He said the land inOromia is a private property of the ruling party members. If they want they will sell it or they will give it to the people who support them and these are people who got rich in a way that cannot be reasonably explained. Many Oromo prisoners testified about Oromo people suffering in jail after they have been released or escaped from prison. To name some of them, Ashenafi Adugna and Morkaa Hamdee are among the victims who suffered at the hands of Woyane security forces while they were in prison. Many innocent Oromo people sentenced to life term and death without any evidence that shows their involvement in any criminal act. What happened in the Oromia region against Oromo University and high school students by federal police as reported by the BBC and other mass media is evident to mention as an example.
In general, the brutal acts against Oromo people by TPLF security forces have never been witnessed anywhere in the world. This clearly depicts what the TPLF government and its party members stand for and lack of their perception about personal worth, and the contempt they have for a human being. One can be quite sure that oppression cannot continue forever, and the dark time for Oromo people shall be replaced with justice and freedom.
In a democratic country, the people have right to express themselves freely in accordance with the constitution and the laws of the country; but in Oromia, there is no freedom of speech. No one in Oromia can freely express him/herself. In oromia, the will of the people has been replaced by the will of the TPLF regime. What has been unfolding for the last 23 years in Oromia region is that the TPLF regime is busy fabricating false documents that are used by the brutal regime’s security forces to incriminate, intimidate, persecute, harass, arrest, torture and kill the innocent Oromo people. So for Woyane democracy means not to allow people their freedom of expression, intimidating, persecution, harassment, arresting, torture and killing innocents in cold blood.
Generally, woyane is a tyrant regime which uses power oppressively and unjustly in a harsh and cruel manner against Oromo people to keep itself in power as long as they could, but I strongly believe that the crimes woyane carried out against Oromo people as a part of its lust for wealth and power will not keep them in power rather it shall hasten the time the Oromo people will achieve freedom. It would be wrong to say woyane will stay in power while using excessive force of power and committing crimes against innocent Oromo people in horrible and oppressive character. What the government is doing now by the name of development is meaningless and inhuman; how one can bring development while exposing people to suffering and death is beyond anyone’s imagination.
Playing game with human life to gain wealth and acquire luxurious life in modern time by robbing and plundering the Oromo people’s wealth is simply unacceptable. The TPLF regime should have been grateful to the Oromo people instead of making Oromo people live a horrible life; because the better life enjoyed by the TPLF politicians came as a result of Oromia’s natural resources. Instead of displacing Oromo farmers, dismissing, arresting and killing Oromo students and dismissing Oromo workers from their job, would have given more respect and value for all Oromos. The problem is that the TPLF regime and itsSatellites parties like OPDO never understand the importance of Oromo people and Oromia region in Ethiopia. Oromia is bleeding since woyane has come to power, because woyane governed Oromia by using excessive force and violence.
All countries that have diplomatic relationships with Ethiopia have also played a major role in keeping woyane in power, because woyane has received too much money from these developed countries under the name of humanitarian assistance which woyane uses to buy weapons to brutally crackdown Oromo students, farmers and scholars. Under woyane’s political system there is no legal and moral right, in general, no rule of laws and justice.
On May 2, 2014, BBC reported that the security forces of the regime in Ethiopia had massacred at least 47 University and high school students in the town of Ambo in Oromia region. Human rights watch and other Non- governmental organizations also reported how the Ethiopian government abuses its own citizens for the benefit of the ruling party members.
The inhuman acts of TPLF regime against the Oromo students shows that it does not only kill students but also TPLF wants to kill the whole young generation psychologically which is their evil strategy and tactics in fact became in vain as Oromo students have continued their struggle for justice in Oromia region. We, Oromo should stand together to bring the perpetrators of massacre in Ambo town and other Universities to justice. It is true that as long as Woyane keep getting money and other facilities from developed countries; as developed countries also give priority for strategic interest than human right, it will be like climbing the top of a mountain; however, we should not let them to continue their inhuman action. What we have to know is that those students who have been massacred by woyane security forces could have been mine, our relatives or children. These students are hope of their family, Oromo society and the Oromia region in general.
TPLF-led regime in Ethiopia never understand the value of human being, what democracy and freedom of speech means because since they came to power, they have never learned from their mistakes rather than its political system goes from bad to the worst. Atrocities against our people have to continue because of just addressing the human right issue and the question of justice and freedom. So, to change the woyane’s oppressive and horrible political system in Oromia, all people who believe in justice and who know the value of human being should stand with the Oromo people and say no to the fascist and terrorist government of Ethiopia. Killing Oromo University and high school students in April and May 2014, beating and arresting students and local people, when the students and local people protested peacefully against the expansion of Finfinne and the eviction of Oromo farmers from their indigenous land is a proof that the regime in Ethiopia is being the fascist and terrorist regime. Woyane is always looking for a scapegoat for their evil actions and behaviors, but it is only woyane and its members who are responsible and will be held accountable for the crimes they committed against innocent Oromo people.
Fake leadership in Ethiopia have destroyed the Oromo people, and the constitution and the law of the country is always in favour of the TPLF regime, not the Oromo people. The TPLF regime is simply the worst government I have ever seen in the modern era.
At the end of my piece of writing, I challenge all Oromos to unite, as unity is strength and to contribute whatever we can to bring down woyane and its members from power and to bring justice and freedom to Oromia and I challenge and hope developed countries also will stop financial and technical support to terrorist regime in Ethiopia.
Read more@ http://ayyaantuu.com/horn-of-africa-news/oromia/what-does-democracy-mean-for-tplfeprdf/
Pre 2015 Election and The Fate of The Opposition In Ethiopia
By Firehiwot Guluma Tezera
When we talk about election in Ethiopia, the 2005 national election has become foremost as previous elections under both Derg and EPRDF were fake. The national election of 2005 has shown a hint of democracy until election date in Addis Ababa but in regions it was until one month before the voting date. The ruling party has been harassing the opposition and has killed strong opposition candidates. In Addis Ababa the hint of democracy disappeared after the ruling party diverted the election results.
Having no other option than forcefully suppressing the anger of the people caused by its altering of election results, the ruling party intensified the harassment and killing. So the outcome for the opposition was either to go to prison or follow the path given by EPRDF. Election 2005 ended in this manner.
The plan of the ruling party to give a quarter of the 540 parliamentary seats to the opposition and to minimize outside pressure and to restart the flow of foreign aid was unsuccessful. The election has made the party to assess itself. Even though it was widely accepted that EPRDF had altered the outcome of the 2005 election and had not anticipated the outcome, many have expected that the party will correct its mistakes. But the party says it has learnt from its mistakes but it made the following strategies:
Measures taken post 2005 election
To harass print medias and to formulate and implement harassing press legislatures
The government is the main American ally in east Africa in the anti-terrorist campaign. Through this it gets significant military and financial aid. Using this as a pretext the government formulated and implemented anti-terror laws and used it to harass and imprison parties that struggle peacefully. And through this to weaken peacefull struggle.
Labeling jobless youth as dangerous and discriminating against the educated was identified as mistake during the election. To correct it they tried to share benefits by replacement and to appoint to political positions and making them members
Letting jobless youth to organize and allowing them to get loans but making party membership a precondition and to stop youth joining the opposition by means of benefit
To organize the rest of the people in groups of five and to disperse security personnel among the people and make difficult for the opposition to work with the people
To change the roads built by aid organizations by cobble stone by employing unemployed youth. Employing the youth was good but they request exaggerated amount from the people. By doing this they are hitting two birds with one stone, to make its members beneficiaries and increase their numbers.
EPRDF used the above strategies for the preparation of 2010 elections. By implementing the strategies it has succeeded in increasing its members but they were not genuine supporters but they supported for benefits. When such kind of members increase, it becomes difficult to fulfill their benefits and at the end they become corruptionists. And they will become the ultimate enemies of the party.
The strategies mentioned above have enabled the party to claim to be winning 99% of the votes. Thenext day the then prime minister said” the people have given us 5 years contract believing that we have learnt from our past mistakes. This is a big warning for us. If we don’t live to their expectation they will take away their votes.” This was his scorning speech. But both the people and they know how they won and the 2010 election was declared error free.
Itophiyaa waan halle, durooma waa tattaa, human namaa fi surrii saamuu malee hanga yoonaa waan Oromiyaaf buufte hin qabdu. Surrii itt lola’e kan waajjirbulchii Itoophiaa bara dheeraaf jiraachise. Surroota sana isaanii kan fuuloo ta’ee fula saanii xuraawaa dhosseef. Gaaffiin Oromoo gaaffi bilisummaa sabaawaa sammicha seermalee akasii hambisuuf kan dhihaate yoo ta’u kan koloneeffataa olhaantummaa gad jabeessuuf kan dhihate. Yoo qabamsi raawwate malee dhoofsisaaf irraa ka’i waloo hin jiru. Kan golli sadaffaan qayyabachuu dadhabu sana ta’a. Gaaffiin hiree ofii ofiin murteeffachu dhugooffachuu mirkanii jireenya seenaa sabichaa irratt hundaawaa.
Mootummaan amma jiru kana beekuun kan heera saa keessatt mirga kana galche. Sun waan qajeelaa dha. Sobaan dhiheessuun garuu addagummaa dha. Oromomitiin seexaa qaban kan Oromiyaa keessatt dhalatan, jiraatan, yk hojjetan kanneen keesumsiisoo, michuu, nama biyya walii ta’an waan bilisomuu irraa sodaatan kan hin jirreef isaan waliin qabama raawwachiisuuf akka dhaabbatan eegamuu. Kanneen jibba sanyii fi amantee koloneeffamoo hin qabne ummati Oromoo naga qabeessoo fi aada qabeessoo akka tahan beeku. Nama nagaatt roorrisuun uumaa sabichaa keessa waan hin jirre. Garuu Wayyaaneen ofii yakka hamaa tolchee kan biraatt maqachuun amala see waan ta’eef dammaqanii eeggachuu dha.
Koloneeffataa inni eegalaallee yeroo mootii Itophiyaa fi biyya Oromoo ofiin jechuu labse adda addummaa biyyooti lamaan, Itophiyaa fi Oromiyaan qaban beekuufii saa agarsiisa. Oromoon akka wallaaloti tokko tokko xeeban gosa hedduu of keessaa qaba malee ofii gosa miti. Mootummaan ammaa gaaffii bilisummaa Oromoo irra darbama jira. Heera tumuun, Oromoo qabsoo saanii irraa dagachiisee, hamaa dhiiga lolaasu duuba fiduu deemuuf yeroo bitachuu saa ture. Hacuuccaa hagamiittu dhimma bahuun deebii gaaffii akkasiif barbaachisu yeroo hin beekamneef dabarsuun boombii innaa eeggatee dhukahu waan ta’eef irra darbuun hin dandahamu. Kanaaf bu’aa olloototaa fi addunyaa jedhamee ariitiii dandahamuun ilaalamuu qaba.
Ka’ka’i barattoota dhiheenya ta’e qabattee ilaalamu qaban hedduu keessaa tokko qofaa. Kanneen biro akka “Ittissa Haaromaa” (GRD) kan nammi hedduun kuusaa saa jireenyaa gowwoofamee bondi bituun itt dhagalaase; “Samicha lafaa” kan Oromiyaan ummati see buqqifamuun gatii yartuun gurguramte; Afaan Oromoo waajjiraalee fi waabaroota Finfinnee akka hin seene ittifamuu fakkaatan Oromoo waan laalaniif roorroo biraa irratt dabalamuun qabattee morma guddaa kaasuu danda’an keessatt argamu. Lagi Abbayyaa bishaa gara caalu Oromiyaa irraa argata. Yaa’aan saas lafa Oromiyaa guddaa tuqa. Bishaan qajeellaan dhimma itt bahamuu kan mormu hin jiru. Garuu akki inni itt eegalee malbeekiin kan gorsamu mitii, horiin barbaachisu kan hanga dhumaatt baasu miti, yaadi duuba jirus mamsiisaa dha. Wanti sanaan dhufuu kan Oromiyaa hubuu danda’u samicha lafaa gadi hin ta’u.
What can nationals do to help the struggle back home?
By Ibsaa Guutama*
Finfinnee is found in Oromiyaa, and so it is the indisputable part of it. Oromiyaa has been under occupation for over a century. Finfinnee was turned into the headquarters of the occupying force where Oromo was forced to serve with sweat and blood rather than getting benefit out of its formation. After the overthrow of the Darg, the state of Oromiyaa and the interest it has in Finfinnee was formally recognized by the occupying regime and a sort of administrative structure was created for it.
With what seemed a magic wand, the empire was turned into federation. It is assumed that all federal states will have equal contributions in organizing and running it so that no one state should bear a federal burden alone. Therefore, federal state has to lease Finfinnee if Oromiyaa wills or buy land or found a brand new citadel with master plan of its choice. Other than that, trying to expanding Finfinnee will be denying the change in nature of the empire. The alternative is to recant the officially declared federal status, and reestablish it as a colonial empire. Then, the question becomes not federal, but colonial. Be it as it may for an alien force to kill Oromo in their own land for whatsoever reason is unjustifiable, and so is wanton aggression and criminal.
Now the people of Oromiyaa are showing solidarity to defend their rights more than any other time, whatever the cost may be. Students and parents in north, south, west and east Oromiyaa had simultaneously gone out to protest the meddling of the Ethiopian regime in affairs of Oromiyaa. Though they know that the government is not known to respect its own single-handedly crafted Constitution, they gave it benefit of the doubt and went out to test the truth if the Constitution is constitutional. Alas, the government exposed its true self and met them with live bullets and clubs – imported from abroad, and a special force known as “Agaazii.”
Numerous under ages lost their lives, and properties were destroyed. The world has witnessed in clear terms the impossibility of peaceful struggle under such an empire and such anti-people regime. Their laws are only fake instruments. Since people cannot give up on their birth rights, it is lamentable that the alternative available to them is going to remain the violent ones alone.
Ethiopia so far has given nothing to Oromiyaa, but has taken away everything valuable, material wealth, human labor as well as brains from her. It is the brain drained that sustained Ethiopian bureaucracy for a long time. It is those brains that they use as masks to cover their dirty face.
The Oromo question is a question of national liberation to end such undue exploitation, while that of the colonizer is question of domination. There is no common premise for negotiation unless the occupation ends. That is what third parties might fail to understand. The demand for the realization of the right to national self-determination is based on historic fact of life of the people. It was realizing this that the present regime included such right in its constitution. That was the right thing to do. To fake it, is hooliganism. Conscientious non-Oromo who were born, lived or worked in Oromiyaa are expected to stand with their hosts, friends and Oromo compatriots in resisting occupation and have nothing to fear from being free. Those who have no biases against race and creed of the colonized know that the Oromo are the most peaceful and cultured people. To do harm to innocent human beings is not in the nature of the nation. But the possibility of TPLF committing heinous crimes and putting the blame on others must be watched out.
Even the first colonizer recognized the separate status of the two countries Oromiyaa and Ethiopia when he declared himself as emperor of Ethiopia and Oromo country. Oromo is a nation of many tribes not a tribe (gosa) as some ignorant want to refer to it. The present regime has kept on postponing the question of Oromo liberation. Promulgation of the Constitution was only to distract Oromo from their struggle, and buy time for the bloody repression it was going to unleash later. Whatever repressive force it may apply, the response to such questions cannot be avoided indefinitely for it is a time bomb waiting to explode when the appropriate time comes. Therefore, for the benefit of all neighbors and the world, they have to be attained the soonest possible.
Recent student uprising is only one out of several issues of concern. Others like the unsustainable “Great Renaissance Dam” (GRD) in which many are fooled into spending their life’s saving in buying bonds; “Land Grabbing” where Oromiyaa is being sold at the expense of eviction of natives; prohibition of Afan Oromo from schools and offices in Finfinnee also concern Oromo and could possibly be issues provoking public protest in addition to the overall human rights abuses. The Abbayya River gets most of its water from Oromiyaa and its course touches big swath of Oromo land. No one will object to fair use of the water. But, the ways it started is not diplomatically commendable, financially sustainable and the motive is questionable. The consequence affects Oromiyaa no less than the land grab.
Is the “GRD” for momentary individual or group glory or is it really meant for national benefits as stated. Is it meant to manipulate rifts in international relation in favor of one side and has nothing to do with Ethiopia’s interest? From the nature of the regime that is addicted to amassing wealth for small circle of cohorts, it is not to take the project to completion, but to benefit from possible negotiation to modify or end it. Many harnessed rivers of Oromiyaa did not benefit her, but the mother land and foreign business. Abbayya will not be different. As far as the question of land is concerned, land still remains property of the alien government. The owner can dispose of it as it liked. That is why the regime is selling to whoever asks at very cheap price; or give to supporter who amass wealth by selling it or give it to galtuu Oromo whom they could blackmail later with crime of “kiraayi sabsaabii” (rent seeking). It is Oromo land; the Oromo cannot accept the sale of their land or obliged to respect such contracts. It is unlawful contract that did not take peasant farmers’ interest into consideration. As far as the general Oromo question goes, it seems the regime has signed the end to the right of subjects to peacefully express oneself. Therefore, the form of resistance is sure to change, otherwise any peaceful demonstration there will be suicidal.
After the massacre, the most outrageous thing is the putting of words in mouths of the vulnerable by the regime to say things against their dead compatriots and their struggle. The case is Federal. They are also the ones that turned their guns against children. But they were the Neo-Goobanaa that had come out to distort the real causes of the uprising and blame culprits their masters are going to create for it later. The old Goobanaa served the same pacifying role until his dishonorable fall. The Ethiopian peoples have enough experience about allegations. Coined epithets were for the king “foreign hand,” for Darg “CIA hirelings,” and forWayyaanee they are “terrorists and anti-developments.” The Neo-Goobanaa also tried to deny the objective of the Master Plan that is to turn Finfinnee into one metropolitan “Addis Ababa” forgetting the plan is there in black and white.
The Oromo are opposed, of course, to those bodies that are trying to dismantle Oromiyaa in the name of city planning and development that dispossesses them. No amount of malicious propaganda will stop the Oromo struggle for liberation and the integrity of united Oromiyaa. There cannot be a nation called Oromo without integrated free Oromiyaa. For lack of formidable political organization, students are taking the lead as during the emperor’s days. Just like those days, if old OLF is not ready, other organized group will come forward and revitalize the originalKaayyoo of the liberation movement. As long as repression continues, Oromo revolution cannot be stopped. The wisest thing for Oromo activists is not to waste time lamenting about what happened yesterday, but on what should be done henceforth. Yesterday with its best and worst has gone; to make or break, we have today aiming at better tomorrow.
Committing more crimes to silence the Oromo is already in full gears. The tragic events of past weeks cannot be reversed. But it is hoped that all nationals have already started to ponder on how to stop such crime continuing. Domestically, the wheels of resistance have already started rolling. People who are feeling the brunt of alien repression will continue to put up resistance against dismantling Oromiyaa, and evicting the inhabitants from their ancestral grounds where umbilical cords of generations were buried. They may require only to strengthening their movement as to make it difficult for the enemy to control Oromiyaa. The death of young students and innocent nationals is heartbreaking, but there is always price to be paid for freedom. The spy networks of “Goox,”“Garee” and “Aand Laamist” are broken. The enemy has already started to be frantic; keeping the moment could make it entangled with its own follies and forced to negotiate for own survival. Let us raise issues of concern on how nationals and people in the Diaspora help Oromo struggle back home by assessing areas of sustainable cooperation.
Oromo all over the world are organized into communities as well as faith based and professional associations. But all organizations are infested with active and sleeping cells of infiltrators. To be useful for the national cause, they need to cleanse themselves first. What is said of civic entities is also true for political organizations. The functions of a community organization are limited to a surrounding. The Oromo predicament requires global coordination. It needs an in depth assessment of possibilities and thorough understanding of the issue to operate in unison for pan Oromo benefit. Past experiences have lessons to learn from.
Political organization will be effective if they could coordinate their operations. If they fail, it must be known that organizations and leaders can be born out of a situation and make them irrelevant. Those that cannot for reasons take part in joining efforts should take necessary care as not to be obstacle to people’s struggle. Refusing to yield to ideas of majority and stubbornness do not serve under the prevailing situation. The enemy pokes there to trigger conflict. So everyone has to be vigilant not to be caught off guard. On has also to beware of gents of colonialists and expansionists disguised as missionaries of religious establishments to take part in creating obstacles for cultural development and peoples’ struggle for freedom. These are also to be countered by nationals from faiths for they are divisive and anti-peace.
One important thing to remember is that Wayyaanee is using structures created in its embassies and government fund for espionage wherever there is dissidence. Among its objectives are creating conflicts among nationals abroad to paralyze opposition against it and also to gathering information on their movements. Where possible, they also recruit from among their ranks for their PDO’s. For this, they use modern technics as well as human spies, infiltrators who act more radical than true nationalists. This is carried out in accordance with permanent guidelines given to diplomatic missions. That is why tight organization of trusted members is needed. Oromo nationals are either with national organizations or with the enemy. They cannot serve both camps. Liberal attitudes have to stop in such matters. Safuu serves in Oromo context and only with those who have similar values.
There are peoples neighboring Oromiyaa – who had fallen to colonial rule and still face alienation by the same source. Solidarity of struggle with those is indispensable. Those are sovereign peoples with own territory, and deserve unequivocal recognition from all nations, including Oromo, without any precondition. Those who had already joined hands in struggle have to take it to higher level whenever possible. Enemy hand to divide them has to be watched out. Oromo activists have to give benefit of the doubt for such people as not to jeopardize relations by jumping to conclusions on assumptions. Otherwise, it will be walking into enemy trap.
Many Oromo living abroad are citizens of respective countries they live in. These, as ethnic groups, may have civic organizations. There are many arenas open to them to influence decision making of their respective countries. As long as they have the votes, they will have the voice as well. They have always to keep in memory that the people they left behind are crying to be rescued from dictators. Oromiyaa, a historically free and democratic country, should not remain dependent when they are there for her. It has to remain a challenge to their conscience. Therefore, they should take on themselves that they have at least a role to play in the peaceful or diplomatic struggle of their people. Their people need knowledgeable and skilled manpower as well as material support of all sorts. No Oromo group has more exposure to resources than they do.
People back home are not free to gather and discuss matters of common interest. But when oppression pass their limits, fear of being caught fades away. That is the stage where Oromo is reaching. Whether children demonstrate or not, the Wayyaanee will is not stopping incarcerating and killing Oromo. Unless it breaks the morale of the nation, it is afraid that Oromo will demand ownership of the land and resources it is plundering. As far as possible, it will try to gaga it so that it does not utter a word, produce wealth and it remains uninformed. All who believe being Oromo have to help and devise means that this nation can release itself from the alien entanglement. Those who give their lives and freedom to maintain the name high are doing so believing in their rear.
There is nothing worse than living despised and humiliated in own country. For this reason, those who are not living under that scourge have to be strong and dependable rear. Oromummaa demands that. Because when a person is imprisoned or killed, not only the person, but the community and family enter into political, social and economic crisis that is why to support from the rear becomes essential.
Those activists who started with carbon copying and have passed through alcohol and stencil duplicators have now reached the electronic printer age. Messenger and copper wire telephone they used are now replaced by computer communication. Many did not get chance to see it, but they have traveled tortuous road and passed away contributing to our self-consciousness. We may not realize that the older one is the less comfortable one becomes with computers and modern ideas. Therefore, computer suave and better informed younger generation has to be entrusted with that for efficient functioning of the struggle. The old ways have to phase out, be it in communication or administration, for they are becoming obsolete. In other words, the Gadaa principle of rejuvenation of political process has to be adopted in a way fitting changing times. Wisdom acquired through ages has its proper role to play in Oromo tradition. The Oromo have to gear up for the drive towards liberation in memory of their old and recent martyrs. We cannot help being in tears when our hearts bleed remembering the recent atrocities committed against Oromo youth by occupation’s special force sent by TPLF/EPRDF butchers.
Honor and glory for the fallen heroines and heroes; liberty equality and freedom for the living, and nagaa and araaraa for the Ayyaanaa of our fore parents!
A Summary of Oromos Killed, Beaten and Detained by the TPLF Armed Forces during the 2014 Oromo Protest Against The Addis Ababa (Finfinne) Master Plan Compiled by: National Youth Movement for Freedom and Democracy (NYMFD) aka Qeerroo Bilisummaa
July 05, 2014
Background
It is a well-documented and established fact that the Oromo people in general and Oromo students and youth in particular have been in constant and continuous protest ever since the current TPLF led Ethiopian government came to power. The current protest which started late April 2014 on a large scale in all universities and colleges in Oromia and also spread to several high schools and middle schools begun as opposition to the so called “Integrated Developmental Master Plan” or simply “the Master Plan”. The “Master Plan” was a starter of the protest, not a major cause. The major cause of the youth revolt is opposition to the unjust rule of the Ethiopian regime in general. The main issue is that there is no justice, freedom and democracy in the country. The said Master Plan in particular, would expand the current limits of the capital, Addis Ababa, or “Finfinne” as the Oromos prefer to call it, by 20 folds stretching to tens of Oromian towns surrounding the capital. The Plan is set to legalize eviction of an estimated 2 million Oromo farmers from their ancestral land and sell it to national and transnational investors. For the Oromo, an already oppressed and marginalised nation in that country, the incorporation of those Oromian cities into the capital Addis Ababa means once more a complete eradication of their identity, culture, and language. The official language will eventually be changed to Amharic. Essentially, it is a new form of subjugation and colonization. It was the Oromo university students who saw this danger, realized its far-reaching consequences and lit the torch of protest which eventually engulfed the whole Oromia regional state.
For the minority TPLF led Ethiopian regime, who has been already selling large area of land surrounding Addis Ababa even without the existence of the Master Plan, meeting the demands of the protesting Oromo students means losing 1.1 million of hectares of land which the regime planned to sell for a large sum of money. Therefore, the demand of the students and the Oromo people at large is not acceptable to the regime. It has therefore decided to squash the protest with its forces armed to the teeth. The regime ordered its troops to fire live ammunition to defenceless Oromo students at several places: Ambo, Gudar, Robe (Bale), Nekemte, Jimma, Haromaya, Adama, Najjo, Gulliso, Anfillo (Kellem Wollega), Gimbi, Bule Hora (University), to mention a few. Because the government denied access to any independent journalists it is hard to know exactly how many have been killed and how many have been detained and beaten. Simply put, it is too large of a number over a large area of land to enumerate. Children as young as 11 years old have been killed. The number of Oromos killed in Oromia during the current protest is believed to be in hundreds. Tens of thousands have been jailed and an unknown number have been abducted and disappeared. The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa, who has been constantly reporting the human rights abuses of the regime through informants from several parts of Oromia for over a decade, estimates the number of Oromos detained since April 2014 as high as 50, 000
In this report we present a list of 61 Oromos that are killed and 903 others that are detained and beaten (or beaten and then detained) during and after the Oromo students protest which begun in April 2014 and which we managed to collect and compile. The information we obtain so far indicates those detained are still in jail and still under torture. Figure 1 below shows the number of Oromos killed from different zones of Oromia included in this report. Figure 2 shows the number of Oromos detained and reportedly facing torture. It has to be noted that this number is only a small fraction of the widespread killings and arrest of Oromos carried out by the regime in Oromia regional state since April 2014 to date. Our Data Collection Team is operating in the region under tight and risky security conditions not to consider lack of logistic, financial and man power to carry the data collection over the vast region of Oromia.
In 1941 Selassie passed a decree to ban the Oromo language, [Afan Oromoo]. His bias against the Oromo became readily apparent when he went so far as to forbid them from speaking their own language. The emperor followed this in 1944 with Decree Number 3, which required all missionaries to teach in Amharic, despite the fact that the majority of the Oromo and other ethnic minorities did not speak the language. According to the decree, The general language of instruction throughout Ethiopia shall be the Amharic Language, which language all missionaries will be expected to learn. Selassieís government entrenched the Abyssinian culture further by making Amharic the national language of Ethiopia in 1955. During the early 1970 the regime recognized and used four other languages (Tigrinya, Tigre, Somali, and Afar) but not Oromoo afan, thereby demonstrating the leaderís level of disdain for the Oromo.
The concept of Oromo peace also influenced their beliefs regarding the social development of humanity (finna), which they believed passed through five stages to reach the nagaa oromoo. They called the first stage the gabbina, where humanity learned from their past mistakes to create the gada system. After this stage they progressed to the ballina, which involved greater cooperation between them and increased wealth. The badhaadha marked the third stage, where unity and tranquility persisted among the Oromo, which pleased Waqa. After humanity had made peace with itself, it next made peace with nature, represented by the hoormaata stage. Finally, the daaga was the level on which humans integrated all lessons learned from previous stages in order to live in perfect harmony.
Haile Selassie and American Missionaries: Inadvertent Agents of Oromo Identity in Ethiopia (Thesis)
By Horace Eric Gilchrist
The thesis analyzes the dynamics among the Ethiopian government under Emperor Haile Selassie, American Protestant missionaries, and the Oromo during the period of 1960-1975. The thesis argues that Selassie and the missionaries had different agendas for helping the Oromo and shows how this resulted in political and social outcomes which neither the missionaries nor emperor intended to create. One such consequence was the
evolution and entrenchment of the Oromo sense of identity. Using the unpublished records of the Christian Missionary Fellowship (CMF) the thesis examines the efforts of this particular mission and that of its counterpart, the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) of which more is known. The speeches and decrees of Haile Selassie and other government officials have also been helpful in this study, and for the Oromo particular, the thesis has had to rely
on published works by the Oromo themselves.
The government of Haile Selassie and the CMF had different views on the proper role of missionary work in Ethiopia. Selassie saw the missionariesí role as being utilitarian, aiding his overall objective of the unification of Ethiopia. However, the CMF saw their primary goal as spiritual, saving the Oromo from a life of sin through the acceptance of Christianity. Neither agenda had as its primary goal elevating the depressed sociopolitical and economic levels of the Oromo society. The question arises regarding the success of the CMF in evangelizing to the Oromo and the extent to which the Oromo benefited from CMF efforts. Related to this is the manner in which the Amhara-dominated government and Ethiopian Orthodox Church responded to the success of the CMF.
Findings of the Thesis
‘No unified Ethiopian society existed prior to the late nineteenth century and that the Oromo and Abyssinians had separate and distinct societies during this period. Abyssinians developed a unique sociopolitical culture which differed fundamentally from those of most Africans. Cushitic-speaking humans occupied the area of modern Ethiopia for thousands of years. The Abyssinians traced their heritage back before the time of ancient Egyptians, with roots outside of Africa. Around 1,000 BC Arabic-speaking people, the Sabeans, invaded Ethiopia.’
‘The governing system of the Oromo reflected the society’s openness and flexibility, which contrasted with the Abyssiniansí rigid and autocratic government system. The Oromo clearly placed a value on individual liberty and freedom, which was reflected in their political organizations and social customs. Their acceptance and incorporation of other ethnicities reflected the societyís mutability; they also saw themselves not as a unified nation but as individual federations with a common culture.’
‘The Oromo held religious beliefs as complex as the Abyssinians’ beliefs. Contrary to traditional scholarship, the Oromo practiced a monotheistic religion distinct from Christianity and Islam long before they came into contact with Abyssinians and Westerners. The Oromo believed in a sky god, Waqa, whom they believed created the universe and, like many pre-Christian societies, the Oromo held a pantheistic belief that Waqa resided in all living things yet remained a distinct entity. The Oromo also had Jesus and Abraham figures, known as Orma: a demigod and son of Waqa, whom the Oromo saw as their progenitor. Orma set down Waqaís law to the abbaa muudaa (father anointed), who acted as the chief priest of the religion. The similarities with Christianityshould be noted: first, Waqa functioning as God the father, Orma as the Son, and finally a figure similar Abraham in the form of the abbaa muudaa. The complexity of the Oromo religion went beyond monotheism. The Oromo also believed in a complex theological system, with many similarities to Christianity. According to their tradition, their god created spirits, known as ayaana, who could be evil or good. However, they did not have the concept of a devil (setana) until the advent of Christianity. Some scholars might describe the Oromo concept of ayaana as a simple pagan belief, yet they resembled Christianity’s angels and functioned in a similar intercessory role for the Oromo as did angels with the Christian god.The Oromo also believed in a divine moral code (saffu), created by Waqa, which guided all things in nature (uuma), and the saffu served to achieve and maintain earthly peace called nagaa oromoo. This moral concept of nagaa oromoo carried over into the Oromo belief in cooperation with each other so that they never formed alliances with non-Oromo against other Oromo groups.’
‘The concept of Oromo peace also influenced their beliefs regarding the social development of humanity (finna), which they believed passed through five stages to reach the nagaa oromoo. They called the first stage the gabbina, where humanity learned from their past mistakes to create the gada system. After this stage they progressed to the ballina, which involved greater cooperation between them and increased wealth. The badhaadha marked the third stage, where unity and tranquility persisted among the Oromo, which pleased Waqa. After humanity had made peace with itself, it next made peace with nature, represented by the hoormaata stage. Finally, the daaga was the level on which humans integrated all lessons learned from previous stages in order to live in perfect harmony.’
‘The Oromo developed a religious class as complex and distinct as Orthodox Christian priests. Oromo called their priests qaallu, and choose them at birth, the position passing from father to son. These priests acted as intercessors for the Oromo with the ayaana and Waqa much like Orthodox priest did for the Abyssinians. Unlike the Orthodox priests, the Oromo priests did not live apart from the people. They also had prophets, called ragas, who foretold the future. Religious historians called ayaantus committed to memory all significant religious and social events in Oromo society.53 Finally, the abbaa muuda acted as the patriarch or pontifical figure in the Oromo qaallu system. The Oromo believed that he obtained his powers directly from Orma. Certain Oromo subgroups such as the Matcha Oromo made yearly pilgrimages to the abbaa muuda to seek blessings.’
‘Several important factors characterized Oromo political, social, and religious life. First, the Oromo clearly valued societal openness and flexibility over a rigid hierarchical society like that of the Abyssinians, and their willingness to incorporate other ethnicities into their groups is one proof of this. Likewise, the Oromo felt closely connected to nature with their religious beliefs and practices. Unlike Orthodox Christianity, which had an elaborate system focused on clergy, the Oromo religion centered on the individual. These religious beliefs easily meshed with their democratic practices, similar to Protestant Christianityís closeness to liberal democracy in the United States and other Western nations. This contrasted sharply with Orthodox Christianity, which matched more with the Abyssinian feudalistic governing system.’
‘The Oromo and Abyssinians possessed distinct cultures with different religious practices prior to the late nineteenth century. No unified Ethiopian nation existed during this period, except as represented by Abyssinian culture. Hierarchical political and religious structures characterized the Abyssinian culture, while democratic political and religious structures marked the Oromo culture.’
‘Abyssinians commenced the political unification of Ethiopia in the middle of the nineteenth century by destroying the sociopolitical and religious institutions of the Oromo. In 1852 the Amhara, under Dejazmatch Kassa (who later became Emperor Tewodros), defeated the most powerful Oromo city-state controlled by Ras Ali.
Within three years Dejazmatch Kassa conquered all of his Tigrean and Amhara rival leaders and assumed the title of Emperor of Ethiopia. Once the Abyssinians had unified the country, they initiated political and religious procedures to pacify other ethnic groups, including the Oromo. Emperor Menelik II (1885-1913) destroyed the Oromo gada system, replacing it with the military feudal structure known as nafxanya. Abyssinian soldiers confiscated the Oromo land and turned the Oromo into gabbars (peasants), who began to pay a feudal homage to their new conquerors by contributing one third of their crops and paying a monetary tax.’
‘The Orthodox Church played a key role in the pacification of the Oromo in the twentieth century. Emperor Menelik II initiated this campaign through a mass Christianization process in Oromo areas. He used his soldiers to conquer the Oromo, made them all Orthodox Christians by imperial decree, and then sent Orthodox priests to pacify his newly conquered subjects with religion. He also supported the construction of Orthodox churches throughout the conquered Oromo territory; he accomplished this by granting bala gults (feudal grants) to the Orthodox priests with Oromo peasants on the land. Meanwhile, all Oromo had to attend Orthodox services conducted entirely in Geíez, the ancient Abyssinian language that most Amhara and Tigreans did not understand. Like most imperial powers, the Abyssinian rulers naturally sought to make their language and religion the dominating one. Although to date the governmentís efforts at colonization had been more haphazard than coordinated, they achieved results. By the beginning of the twentieth century the Abyssinians had made significant inroads into destroying Oromo culture and creating in them a new Ethiopian identity.’
‘Haile Selassie’s ascendancy to the throne marked the beginning of perfected efforts by the Abyssinian government to pacify the Oromo. Selassie wanted to create a unified Ethiopian state under his control and devised several means to accomplish this goal.Through a project called Teklay Gizat (pulling together) he attempted to manufacture an Ethiopian identity with a campaign of uniting all disparate peoples. Selassie’s effort to centralize his power and create a new national identity manifested in many forms. In his philosophical outlook the Abyssinian culture, particularly that of the Amhara and Orthodox Christianity, represented his concept of Ethiopia and, under him, being Ethiopian became synonymous with accepting his view of Abyssinian culture. The emperor expressed this sentiment in public speeches throughout his reign. In a 1959 college speech Selassie clearly expressed this sentiment: The Amhara race must know that it has an obligation on its part to work in the technical field no matter at what level. To preserve the heritage of one’s honor and culture. This statement indicates that, for Selassie, being Ethiopian meant being Amhara. The emperor continued to express the belief that being an Amhara Orthodox Christian represented the qualities of Ethiopians when he stated on 15 January 1965, Ethiopia, an island of Christianity, has made her own distinctive contribution to the Christian faith; forever since her conversion to Christianity she has remained faithful, her age-old ties with the apostolic church uninterrupted. This shows that Selassie believed that Orthodox Christianity represented all of Ethiopia’s peoples and their non-Christian religions. In his Ethiopia, no room existed for people who did not assimilate to the Abyssinian culture and religion.
‘Selassieís attempt to create a national Ethiopian identity appeared harmless on the surface but, in fact, he took the nafxanya system to its logical conclusion by destroying the traditional Oromo provinces and creating new ones controlled by military governors. He employed a technique that communist governments would later use to pacify ethnically diverse populations: He forcibly split up the Oromo and other ethnic groups.Selassie also continued Menelikís policies of church building and forced conversions in conquered Oromo areas.These policies helped to weaken substantially the political cohesiveness of Oromo communities.’
‘The Ethiopian government enacted legislative policies to weaken the Oromo politically as well. In 1941 Selassie passed a decree to ban the Oromo language, Oromoo afan. His bias against the Oromo became readily apparent when he went so far as to forbid them from speaking their own language. The emperor followed this in 1944 with Decree Number 3, which required all missionaries to teach in Amharic, despite the fact that the majority of the Oromo and other ethnic minorities did not speak the language. According to the decree, ìThe general language of instruction throughout Ethiopia shall be the Amharic Language, which language all missionaries will be expected to learn.î15 Selassieís government entrenched the Abyssinian culture further by making Amharic the national language of Ethiopia in 1955. During the early 1970 the regime recognized and used four other languages (Tigrinya, Tigre, Somali, and Afar) but not Oromoo afan, thereby demonstrating the leaderís level of disdain for the Oromo.’
‘In its continued effort to unify Ethiopia, Selassie’s government actively limited the political activities of the Oromo. The regime provided the Oromo only limited participation in the government. The Oromo officials selected by Selassie to work in the public service were those who had completely abandoned their culture and adopted that of the Amhara. One such person was Major General Mulugeta Bulli, an Oromo balabat, who became Minister of National Community Development. Selassie was an autocratic constitutional monarch who tolerated no political opposition, not least from the Oromo. After several coup attempts in the 1960s, primarily by Amhara officials and some Oromo, Selassie further restrained the advancement of the Oromo even the assimilated ones. In 1966 he banned the Oromo political party, Macha Tulama Association, and harassed its leaders with imprisonments and executions. In one episode the government jailed one hundred party members and executed two of them (General Taddesse Birru and Lieutenant Mamno Mazamir) on grounds of subversion in spite of the fact that, earlier that year, they had helped to put down an actual coup attempt by Amharic officials. The regime also executed leading Oromo intellectuals and human rights advocates, including Marno Mazamir, the author of an Oromo book; also executed was Haile Mariam Gamada, a famous lawyer.’
‘Imperial authorities also used social neglect to subjugate the Oromo. The government failed to provide adequate educational facilities for the Oromo, while encouraging them and other minorities to help themselves. In a speech on education in 1962 Selassie stated, ìAnd similarly if you [Ethiopia’s non-Amhara ethnic groups] continue to consult one another and strive to get rid of the other handicaps, say problems of obtaining clean water, better roads, and sanitation for your community, you will find that the accomplishment within your capacity. This indicates that Selassie did not feel personally responsible for providing even basic social services to the Oromo in the manner that most governments provide for their citizens. The regime required all teachers to instruct students only in Amharic, ensuring that Amhara teachers made no effort to be culturally sensitive or accommodating to Oromo children. Statistical data from the Selassie era show the harmful effect that the policy of social neglect had on the Oromo, educational reforms benefiting the Abyssinian elite only. For example, sometime in 1947 Selassie created an education tax via Proclamation 94, and the Abyssinian elite managed to ensure that Oromo peasants paid most of it. This policy resulted in Oromo peasants paying for Abyssinian childrenís education to the detriment of their own. Nearly 88% of Oromo school children between the ages of seven and twelve years did not attend school, as well as 97% of those in the age range of thirteen to eighteen years. In the 1960s the majority (83%) of Oromo children who attended school dropped out by sixth grade.The result of all this was that the Oromo had limited opportunities for basic employment and for secondary and college education. By 1974 0nly 10% college age Oromo students were enrolled in Ethiopia’s universities.’
‘The government of Haile Selassie also failed to provide economic opportunities to the Oromo. Subsistence feudal agriculture formed the basis of the Ethiopian economy from its earliest history through the 1960s, with Amhara aristocrats benefiting from the labor performed by peasants on their land. The Selassie administration consisted primarily of nobles who came from this feudal tradition and had no incentive to alter the system. By the late 1960s 60% of Oromo farmers remained in a feudal system of land tenure because Selassie failed to dismantle it, contributing to the economic disparity endured by the Oromo by allowing Abyssinian nobles to avoid government taxes, while the peasants paid them.Earlier, in 1942, he had issued Proclamation 8, which established land taxes that were paid primarily by the Oromo peasants.Proclamation 60 of 1944 set out details of an income tax but, when the Abyssinian nobles refused to pay, the emperor substituted it with a regressive tax on labor and rented land that, once again, placed the onus on Oromo peasants.All major industrial projects were in areas dominated primarily by the Amhara.’
‘ Haile Selassie bore a great deal of responsibility for the poor conditions of the Oromo people, even if he was not directly involved with all of the policies. Although he ascended to power as a modernizer, he readily sacrificed true reforms for political convenience. For example, in 1924 he attempted to abolish the slave trade by making it a capital crime, but he did not enforce this law, and he allowed the problem to continue well into the late 1960s. The emperor also demonstrated his exclusive commitment to himself by his failure to enforce his own tax codes on the Abyssinian nobles, and he personally oversaw most of his governmental initiatives through the 1960s. For example, he reportedly used merit to appoint all government ministers, and he personally chose 1,000 them.’
‘The successive policies of the Abyssinian governments through the 1960s require some comment. The evidence presented thus far shows that Abyssinian rulers were determined to form a unified state under their domination and used Orthodox Christianity as one means to subjugate non-Semitic speakers such as the Oromo. Haile Selassie perfected the system of colonization through the use of legal measures, political repression, and socioeconomic neglect to subdue such peoples, and he supported and established the notion of accepting Orthodox Christianity and the Abyssinian culture of the Amhara as the prerequisite for being Ethiopian. His governmentís actions allowed no room for groups such as the Oromo to retain their cultural identity and still be Ethiopian. One would expect the oppressed people to respond to this assault on their culture in a negative manner, and there is no doubt that the Oromo viewed the Orthodox Church as a tool of their subjugation. Indeed, they did respond in a negative way to this onslaught of Abyssinian culture.’
‘During the 1900s to the 1940s the Oromo reacted to Abyssinian imperialism by applying their traditional societal flexibility, which allowed them to adapt easily to new situations. Most non-Muslim Oromo accepted the mass conversion to Orthodox Christianity and wore circles around their neck to symbolize their acquiescence.
However, American Protestant missionaries witnessed many Oromo, including those of Wollega, practicing their traditional religion in secret. Christian missionaries in the 1960s testified that ìwhile most Oromo feigned adherence to the Orthodox religion, they secretly worshiped other spirits. Some Oromo attempted genuinely to accept Christianity on their own terms. Among such converts was the religious scholar Onesimos, who translated the Bible into Oromoo. The Oromo elite also responded to the political domination by taking Amharic names and cooperating with the local Abyssinian officials. However, as before, the Abyssinian rulers responded negatively by limiting the advancement of Oromo officials because of the fear that this would help to promote a sense of a national identity. Had the Amhara-dominated government approached the Oromo in a different manner, taking into account the Oromo traditional societal flexibility, the outcome might have been different. The Selassie governmentís negative response to the attempts of the Oromo to adapt their system subtly, while retaining some cultural independence, caused them to become more militant in their actions. Their dissatisfaction with Selassieís regime manifested in the form of several peasants revolts.’
‘The Raya Oromo initially revolted in 1935 in response to the brutal tactics of Selassie’s military governor, Ras Mulugeta, as he attempted to force them into the national army.With the initiation of the Italian Invasion in 1936, another group of Oromo, who described themselves as the Western Oromo Confederation, declared their independence from the Ethiopian government. Eventually, Selassie defeated the two groups, but the fact that the Oromo had rebelled at all indicated their level of frustration with the government. Many Oromo cooperated with the Italians during their occupation because the Italians reorganized Ethiopiaís provinces along linguistic lines and constructed mosques for Oromo Muslims.The negative feelings and actions of the Oromo toward the Abyssinian government intensified as the twentieth century progressed; by the 1960s, peasants became increasingly belligerent toward the Selassie regime. The Oromo peasant populace became enraged by the blatant disparity between themselves and the Amhara elites, including the heavy taxes that they paid without tangible socioeconomic benefits.Oromo simply had no land on which to live or farm because of the pro-Amhara policies of Haile Selassie. In a series of revolts starting in 1963 in the province of Bale, Oromo peasants unleashed their anger on the central government over its increased property taxes and favoritism toward Amhara Christians. The assimilated Oromo elite responded to the tactics of the imperial authorities by developing sociopolitical organizations that instilled a sense of a national Oromo identity that transcended their traditional divisions. The small number of Oromo who managed to achieve positions in government organizations, such as the civil and military services, felt disenfranchised by the Ethiopian government. Oromo civil servants and military officers could expect to achieve only nominal advancement in the imperial government, from which they obviously felt a certain amount of alienation. The disgruntled assimilated Oromo started to form self-help groups to provide political expression and to help their communities to advance. Activists formed organizations such as Arfannn Qallo, Biftu Ganamo, and the Macha Tulama Self Help Association, which sought to improve Oromo communities. The Macha Tulama became the most important and influential of the self-help organizations in expressing the political angst of the Oromo elite. On 24 January 1963 the Macha Tulama organization emerged from three older groups with the goal of creating educational, medical, and religious facilities for the Oromo.’
‘Ethiopia experienced a colonial period that mirrored the rest of Africa in terms of duration and tactics. The major difference was that the Ethiopian colonial system originated with Africans (the Abyssinians) colonizing other Africans (the Oromo). The issues of ethnic and national identity that plagued colonial Africa with the creation of artificial nations that had no historical basis also plagued Ethiopia and continue to plague it…..The study demonstrates that Ethiopian historiography should be reexamined to understand the true dynamics that led to the creation of this state. The traditional scholarly approach of regarding Ethiopia as a monolithic culture centered on Abyssinian society has proven inadequate to understand the sociopolitical conflicts that trouble modern Ethiopia. Only through examining all of Ethiopiaís ethnic groups and their interactions with one another can Ethiopian historiography be advanced.’
(OPHI) –The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), published by Oxford University reveals that Ethiopia ranks the second poorest country in the world and Africa, just ahead of Niger. The study is based on analysis of acute poverty in 108 developing countries around the world. Despite making progress at reducing the percentage of destitute people, Ethiopia is still home to more than 76 million poor people (out of total population of 87 million). 87.3% of Ethiopians are classified as MPI poor, while 58.1% are considered destitute. Oxford University says poverty is not just about a lack of money. It’s also about not having enough food, education, healthcare and shelter, and some poor are much worse off than others.
A person is identified as multidimensionally poor (or ‘MPI poor’) if they are deprived in at least one third of the weighted MPI indicators. The destitute are deprived in at least one-third of the same weighted indicators, The Global MPI uses 10 indicators to measure poverty in three dimensions: education, health and living standards.
In rural Ethiopia 96.3% are poor while in the urban area the percentage of poverty is 46.4%.
The 10 Poorest Countries in the World:
1. Niger
2. Ethiopia
3. Mali
4. Burkina Faso
5. Burundi
6. Somalia
7. Central African Republic
8. Liberia
9. Guinea
10. Sierra Leone
According to Dr. Sabina Alkire — director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, the U.N. Millennium Development Goals – which set targets regarding poverty, hunger, malnutrition, health and other issues – expire at the end of next year. Thus, MPI could help in the creation of a replacement for the MDGs that gives a complete picture of poverty. “We need a replacement that keeps our eyes really focused on human poverty and the pain and suffering that it entails, but also brings in the environment. And our suggestion is really simple. That along side the $1.25 a day measure – or some extreme income poverty measure – that we bring into view these people who are multidimensionally poor. And that we can do so with a measure of destitution and a measure of multidimensional poverty and maybe even a measure of vulnerability that would be more appropriate for middle and high income countries.”
Ethiopia:
MPI Value 0.564
Percentage of Population:
MPI Poor 87.3%
MPI Poor and Destitute 58.1%
$1.25/day Poor 30.65%
Human Development Index (HDI) 0.396
Inequality (Gini Index) 0.336
Income level Low income
Gross National Income (GNI) per capita 380
Survey: DHS Year: 2011
A person is identified as multidimensionally poor (or ‘MPI poor’) if they are deprived in at least one third of the weighted indicators shown above; in other words, the cutoff for poverty (k) is 33.33%.
The proportion of the population that is multidimensionally poor is the incidence of poverty, or headcount ratio (H). The average proportion of indicators in which poor people are deprived is described as the intensity of their poverty (A). The MPI is calculated by multiplying the incidence of poverty by the average intensity of poverty across the poor (MPI = H x A); as a result, it reflects both the share of people in poverty and the degree to which they are deprived.
64.6%
Percentage of Poor People (H)(k = 33.3%)
Average Intensity Across the Poor (A)
58.1% Inequality Among the MPI Poor
Vulnerable toPoverty(k = 20%-33.3%)
In SeverePoverty(k = 50%)
See more @ Oxford and Human Development Initiative (2014). “Ethiopia Country Briefing”, Multidimensional Poverty Index Data Bank. OPHI, University of Oxford. Available at /.
In the last two or three decades, there has been a revolution in thinking about the
explanations of famines. The entitlement’s approach by Amartya Sen brought the issue
of food accessibility to the forefront of the academic debate on famine. Sen noted that,
often enough, there is enough food available in the country during famines but all
people do not have the means to access it. More specifically, famines are explained by
entitlement failures, which in turn can be understood in terms of endowments,
production possibilities, and exchange conditions among others (Sen, 1981).
Ethiopia is a good case in point where, for instance, food was moving out of Wollo
when the people in the region were affected by the 1972-3 famine (Sen, 1981), and even
today some regions in Ethiopia produce surplus, while people in other regions face
famine threats. There are of course infrastructural problems in the country to link the
surplus producing regions to the food-deficit ones. However, the question goes beyond
this simplistic level, as some people simply do not have enough entitlements to have a
share of the food available in the country, a situation which can be described as a case
of direct entitlement failures (Tully 2003: 60)7. Or else, peasants do not find the right
price for their surplus, as in the 2002 Bumper Harvest which ended up in an 80 per cent
price drop, which illustrated a failure in peasants’ exchange entitlements. Alternatively,
the most irrigated land of the country in the Awash River basin, for instance, is used
primarily for cash crop production to be exported to the western world (even when there
is drought) leading the vulnerability of various pastoralist groups to turn into famine or
underpinned by what is known as a crisis in endowments and production possibilities.
In short, while drought and population pressure can partly explain famine threats in
Ethiopia, the entitlements approach provides an explanation from an important but less
visible angle. By shifting the attention from absence of food to lack of financial access
to food, the approach points in the direction of policy failures. That only some classes in
society are affected by famine clearly indicates that policy failures are central to the
understanding of famine. http://portal.svt.ntnu.no/sites/ices16/Proceedings/Volume%203/Alexander%20Attilio%20Vadala%20-%20Understanding%20Famine%20in%20Ethiopia.pdf
In mid-2012 theAddisAbeba City Administration (AACA) has organized a project office called “Addis Ababa City Planning Project Office” and tasked it to prepare a city development plan that it claimed would work for the coming ten years. In the middle of the process, however, the Project Office was givenanadditional mandate of preparing a plan that instead should suit a metropolitan level. It was then that the project expanded its planning boundary toincludethe whole surrounding area ofAddisAbeba – covering as far as 40 to 100 kilometers in an area as big as 1.1 million hectares of land. As these surroundings belong toandare administered by the Oromia National Regional State (ONRS) a supervisory body from theregionwas established to oversee the activities of the project office. It comprised big namesincludingAbdulaziz Mohammed, deputy president oftheONRS andAsterMamo, deputy prime minister in the governance and reform cluster.The Project Office had also brought on board people from the Oromia Urban Planning Institute.Many of the Oromia regional state senior officials were enthusiastic about the idea of organizing a joint metropolitan plan and the project office was re-named ‘Addis Abeba and the Surrounding Oromia Special Zone Integrated Development Plan Project Office’.One of the achievements of Abbaaduula Gammadaa’s tenure as president of ONRS was the amalgamation in 2008 of Addis Abeba/Finfinne surrounding districts and municipalities into a single Special Zone found within 30 kilometers radius of the city of Addis Abeba. Immediately after the establishment of the Special Zone, ONRS commissioned a Regional Plan that was finalized in 2010. The Oromia regional state officials had offered this regional plan to be incorporated with the proposed metropolitan plan commissioned by the AACA.
What went wrong, where and when?
The grand plan that was warmly welcomed by ONRS senior officials failed to attract the same reception from the lower and mid-level political leadership of the Special Zone as well as local governments within the zone. Most of them were skeptical and some viewed it as an effort to annex the Special Zone of Oromia into Addis Abeba. There were few incidents where Oromia regional state officials refused to cooperate with the Project Office in making information necessary for the planning process easily accessible.
The Project Office, too, has done little to establish trust among the Special Zone and ONRS mid and lower level officials. Trust between the two had reached rock-bottom when the Project Office developed what it said was a spatial plan without involving mayors of the municipalities as well as other officials in the metropolitan area and relevant regional and Special Zone officials. In June 2013 the Project Office unveiled a readymade draft metropolitan plan in Adama town, 100km east of Addis Abeba and the capital of the ONRS, that determined, among others, the locations of waste treatment, landfill sites, industrial zones, and transportation corridors. Once again the draft metropolitan plan was welcomed by the top Oromia regional state leadership; but it left the rank and file officials disgruntled. Most of them considered it (perhaps rightly) as a violation of their autonomy. However, since the top leadership has given the grand plan its blessings the Project Office went ahead with it. Things went vividly out of control during a meeting between officials of the Oromia regional state and the Addis Abeba city administration representatives held in Adama town on March 26 and April 12-13.The questions raised in these meetings revealed that the Project Office has failed to build trust on the motive of the Master Plan let alone actively involve the ONRS officials in the planning process.
How not to make a Master Plan
What happened with the preparation of this master plan was an approach that gave strategic planning and political inclusiveness a zero chance. Five fundamental problems highlight the plan.
First, this master planning approach viewed planning as a mere technocratic process and the planner as the chief architect of the spatial area that comes up with a readymade blueprint that everyone is expected to accept.
Strategic spatial planning is as much of a political process as it is professional; it requires the active involvement of political leadership, major urban or regional actors-including the private sector, community organizations and civil society groups. In addition, the planner’s role should mainly be as a facilitator and a negotiator among the diverse actors who have conflicting (and competing) interests.
There was groundbreaking effort to shift urban planning culture to a more strategic and inclusive approach in the 2002-12 City Development Plan of Addis Abeba. In the two year planning process, for example, over 150 workshops and consultative meetings with a wide range of stakeholders, including a city exhibition and public forum, were organized. That is something the current master plan project lacked; it has organized not more than nine consultative workshops.
A grand plan such as this need to be owned as much by politicians and their constituency as by professional urban planners. The only way to do this is if the authorities and the public were involved actively in the planning process. Nevertheless, the Project Office single-handedly decided where to locate the waste treatment, the land fill site or the industrial zone with no formal consent from the respective local government officials who are supposedly the elected representatives of the constituencies in the areas affected by the plan. It was a planning process that gave way to the infamous planning syndrome known as Not in My Backyard (NIMBY). When a planner decides to put a waste treatment in one district, the least s/he needs to do is negotiate with the respective district authorities on how to mitigate the negative externalities. With the new master plan, nothing of this happened, compromising the constitutionally guaranteed autonomy of the Oromia regional state and the Special Zone to make decisions that affect their constituency.
Second,it failed to secure the legitimacy for joint planning. The reason for the suspicion by many low and middle level officials of the ONRS is twofold. The first one is metropolitan planning in Ethiopia is unheard of and Addis Abeba’s administrative boundary has been expanding for the last century, in which the latest one has more than doubled its jurisdiction in 1994. It is, therefore, totally understandable if ONRS officials and concerned citizens fear the encroachment of the Special Zone by the capital city. The second reason is the project office kept most of the process secrete.
Third, amalgamation of municipalities into one gargantuan metropolitan government has lost credence since the late 1980s and new forms of metropolitan cooperation are promoted in lieu of annexation. However, the project office failed in clarifying its intention and mobilizing support from the Oromia region officials and other stakeholders due to its closed door planning process.
Fourth,and the major limitation of the process is the composition of the planning office. As it was mentioned above the project office was initially commissioned by AACA to prepare a city development plan for Addis Abeba. The same planning team was tasked to develop a metropolitan plan with the exception of the recruitment of a handful of former Oromia Urban Planning Institute staff. Less than 10 planners from close to 80 technical staff of the project office cannot ensure Oromia’s interest, the largest and most populous region of the country, in the metropolitan plan. The majorities of the planning team members are born in Addis Abeba or have lived in the city for long or were former staff members of the Addis Abeba city administration, which makes them perfect candidates for sentimental compromise against the interests of the Oromia region.
And finally,the top leadership of ONRS welcomed the draft metropolitan plan regardless of opposition from their subordinates as well as the wider public. The stubbornness of the ruling party, which is seen in other policy arena, was also visible in this planning process. The government, rather than accommodating the reservation of various individuals and groups on the plan or on its motive, chose to label those who complained against the plan as working for the so-called obscure “anti-peace agents”. This was the major reason that led to the widespread protest in many Universities and several towns in Oromia, which claimed the lives of eleven people by the account of the government (other sources put the death as high as 49) and resulted in countless property damages. (Please see A new master plan:Complicated-turned-deadly).
he way out
Many people may believe it may be already too late. But there are things one can do to reverse courses. The first step is to establish a taskforce, which comprises ONRS officials, Special Zone officials, Mayors of the eight municipalities of the Special zone together with the Regional Urban Planning Institute planners or commissioned consultants, to review the draft metropolitan and suggest recommendations that ensure Oromia’s interest. This taskforce in turn needs to consult with the civil society, the private sector, opposition party members, residents of the Special zone, University students and other concerned bodies in its reviewing process. The second and perhaps the most important one, is clarifying the provisions of Art. 49(5) of the country’s constitution by a federal proclamation before signing the metropolitan plan into a law; the metropolitan plan need to be used as an instrument to materialize the constitutional provision of the country. Third, and most sensitive, should be bringing before justice those who ordered the killings of the students who were protesting against the plan as well as those who executed the orders.
PART ONE: WHY THE OROMO WILL STOP THE AAMP BY ANY MEANS, AT ANY COST: THE STRUGGLE OVER FINFINNEE IS THE STRUGGLE FOR OROMIA
By Mekuria Bulcha, Ph.D.*
The so-called Addis Ababa Master Plan (AAMP[1]) has ignited an Oromia-wide protest involving university and high school students. The TPLF-led Ethiopian regime has responded to the peaceful protests staged by Oromo students against the plan with tanks and live ammunition, killing dozens in the crowds. The protest, which started on April 24, 2014 at Jimma University, is joined, not only by tens of thousands of the students of all the universities in Oromia, but also tens of thousands of high school students and members of the local population in many cities, towns and villages. The voice of this massive Oromo rally against the AAMP cannot be silenced by bullets and tanks as in the past. It concerns, not only the cause of the Oromo farmers in Central Oromia, whose livelihoods will be affected by the AAMP, but also that of all the Oromo farmers and pastoralists throughout Oromia whose farms and pasturelands have already been sold and are targeted to be sold to land grabbers by the present Ethiopian regime. In short, it concerns the survival of the Oromo as a nation.
It is important to note that that conflict over the AAMP is an extension of the conflict which was ignited by the 2003 decision of the TPLF regime to evict Oromo institutions from Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) city and relocate them to Adama, a town about 100km to the southeast. Then, the Oromo attempted to stop the eviction with peaceful protest, but were met with atrocities by the TPLF regime. Leaders of the Maccaa Tuulama Association (MTA) and university students, who organized that protest, were arrested and jailed. The property of the MTA, a self-help organization which was established in 1963, was confiscated outright by the government. More than 300 students were expelled from the Addis Ababa University alone. Regrettably, the struggle over Finfinnee which started 11 years ago is not over. The impunity of the TPLF regime, as reflected in the killings of many students who opposed so-called Addis Ababa Master Plan, has continued.
In this article, I will attempt to explain why the present regime is consistently refusing to pay attention to Oromo claims even when expressed through peaceful means in keeping with the current constitution, such as the present student protest. I will also point out why the opposition started by the students of Jimma University on April 24 against the AAMP has turned into an Oromia-wide movement within a very short time. I will discuss how the uprising will reinvigorate the Oromo struggle for independence. In a speech he made at a demonstration staged to oppose the removal of Oromia’s capital from Finfinnee in 2003, the late Secretary General of the Maccaa Tuulamaa Association, Obbo Bekele Nadhi said that:
“The decision that Finfinnee [the Oromo name for Addis Ababa] is no more the Oromo capital is wrong. Oromo claim over Finfinnee is historical and legal. Therefore, we demand that the decision be revoked. Until the decision is revoked we will continue with our protest. If our protests will not change the situation, we will continue with the next phase of our struggle (Gadaa.com. April, 2014)”
The TPLF regime was forced to halt the eviction of Oromo institutions from the city in 2005 under pressure from both Oromo and non-Oromo opposition. That did not mean that Finfinnee was made to serve the Oromo people. In reality, the regime did not withdraw its decision, and the struggle over Finfinnee was not concluded. For unknown reasons, the Oromia Regional State did not build Oromo institutions in the city during the last two decades. Finfinnee (Addis Ababa), which is constitutionally the capital city of Oromia, is without a single public school that uses the Oromo language as a medium of instruction or a single newspaper which is printed in Afaan Oromoo. All of the newspapers which were started in the early 1990s were banned, and their journalists were in jail or in exile by the end of the decade. To paraphrase what the young Oromo artist Jaafar Yuusuf has expressed with poetic eloquence and for which he was detained and tortured, Finfinnee is the capital city of Oromia and of over 35 million Oromos only in name. Thus, despite their historical and “special constitutional interests,” the Oromo, who number between half a million and eight hundred thousand (or 20% of 4 million inhabitants of the city, UN Habitat, 2007), are marginalized and denied the use of their language. Finfinnee remains an Oromo city under a foreign occupation.
The ‘right of conquest’ versus the Ethiopian Constitution of 1995
Many observers refer to the expansion of Finfinnee city as unconstitutional. They refer particularly to Article 49 (5) of the TPLF Constitution of 1995 which talks about “the special interest of the state of Oromia with respect to supply of services, the utilization of resources and joint administrative matters.” The late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi conceded to Oromia’s claim over Finfinnee city in 1991 to convince the OLF to stay in the Transitional Government. In retrospect, it appears that the concession was made to appease the Oromo only until the Meles regime consolidated its control over opponents rather than a genuine recognition of Oromo rights. The arrangement with OLF was included as a provision in the Ethiopian Constitution of 1995. The TPLF regime, however, did not implement the terms of the agreement it had entered with the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) over the city of Finfinnee. The agreement was forgotten as soon the OLF left the Transitional Government in June 1992. In fact, the TPLF does not see what it does in Oromia in legal or constitutional terms. It considers its control over Oromo territory and its resources in terms of the traditional colonial notion of “the right of conquest.” [2]
Although the right of conquest was once recognized formally in international law it is no longer, yet the TPLF regime is still exercising it. As the TPLF representative has clearly, and indeed arrogantly, told the OPDO at a televised meeting in Adama recently (ETV April 14, 2013), the regime will implement the AAMP irrespective what the Oromo think (his exact word, in translation were “there is nothing you Oromo can do about it”). This statement was directed at the OPDO party members he was addressing. In plain language, he was saying that the Oromo should keep quiet; they do not have rights to land. What he meant was carried out in practice after a few days. Those who peacefully gathered to protest the AAMP were cut down in Ambo, Naqamtee, Jimma, and Haramaya by bullets, or were beaten and imprisoned. In short, the TPLF leaders were asserting an illegitimate “right of conquest” when they drew up the AAMP without consulting the very OPDO members who are legally entitled to make all decisions that affect Oromia. The leaders of the international community (the UN member states) appear to recognize the TPLF-led regime, not because it has achieved internally legitimacy, but because it exhibits the power to maintain “peace and order” in the country. Regrettably, the definition of “peace,” and the choice of the means used to maintain “peace and order” are left to the discretion of Ethiopian authorities. Oddly, what is being exercised as maintenance of peace and order by the Ethiopian regime is, by and large, accepted by the UN and its member states as “normal.” But, what may seem normal for them from distance is in reality state terrorism from the vantage point of Oromo and other peoples in Ethiopia.
Yet Oromo appeals to the international community or attempts to employ legal discourse, have not managed to stop the Ethiopian regime from pursuing an antiquated “rights of conquest” at all. The Greek historian John Markakis (see his Ethiopia: the Last Two Frontiers, 2011: 284) has reminded the Oromo (particularly the leaders of the OLF) to learn from the past, and give up all expectations for external intervention on behalf of our people. The question of Oromo survival cannot wait for the time when the big powers will prioritize human rights over strategic interests and take action by going beyond the barricades of sovereignty to take action against the regime for its egregious violation of human rights. Neither can the people wait until the international community is finally repulsed by the immorality involved in the persecution of the Oromo and advocate for Oromo rights, pushing for big powers to take action. The present Oromo situation requires immediate action. That means Oromo action. I do not mean that advocates should stop presenting the Oromo cause to the international community, but that it is not enough even to ensure the survival of the Oromo as a people, let alone the achievement of their national emancipation. It is well known among observers that the TPLF leaders have been using or subverting the law to advance their interests, and that they do not respect the same law when it does not serve their purpose. Therefore, it is naïve to argue about the unconstitutionality of the AAMP with them. It is futile to expect the TPLF to honor or work to implement the provisions of their own constitution.
The role of the OPDO: some signs of change in the right direction
The fact that OPDO officials and members were not informed about the Addis Ababa Master Plan until the Oromo students of Jimmaa University started to protest should not surprise us. The TPLF rules Oromia with a decision-making arrangement made of two tiers of which the upper occupied by the Tigrayans and the lower by the native conquered peoples, of which the Oromo is the largest group. The structure is hegemonic and colonial. Those who occupy the upper tier make all of the important economic and political decisions often without consulting those who are in the lower tier. The latter are made to implement the decisions irrespective of the negative impacts they may have on them and “their” Oromo constituency. That is why the few OPDO officials, such as Mr. Kuma Damaksa, the former Mayor of Finfinnee and Mrs. Aster Mammo, the Deputy Prime Minister, who might have known about the AAMP, did not inform other OPDO members until the project was ready for implementation. When the controversy broke out, both of these Oromo officials were praising the “government” as a guarantor of peace, justice and equality on the national TV, while the next day the forces of the same government were using live bullets and killing Oromo students who were peacefully exercising their democratic rights in protest. According to a political scientist from the Addis Ababa University, all the top leaders of the OPDO, including those who have ministerial positions are, in the parlance of the Oromo population, “zabanya Tigree” – “the house keepers of Tigrayans.” That is to say, they are not the protectors of Oromo rights and interests.
It seems that the OPDO’s behaviour described above is changing now. It is encouraging to hear particularly about the resolution of the local Oromo police who, in many places, such as Jimma and Naqamtee, have allowed the students to continue with the peaceful protests against the AAMP – apparently refusing to take orders from the federal authorities to stop the students. It is said that some of the local Oromo police have been disarmed and dismissed from their posts for lack loyalty to the regime. It was to be expected that part of the Oromia regional police force would eventually stop serving as zabanya Tigree while the rights of the Oromo people are blatantly violated by the TPLF regime. However, as reflected in the comment of the TPLF representative at the Adama meeting on the AAMP, the regime does not care about what the OPDO think, but will proceed to implement the project as scheduled.
Ethiopia: the predatory state
The historian Tibebu Teshale (see his The Making of Modern Ethiopia, 1995) has pointed out that the Abyssinian state was “by and large a predatory state” that lived by looting the peasants. When one speaks about a predatory state one refers to the habits and practices of its rulers and their agents. In practice, Abyssinian rulers relate to the Oromo as predators relate to prey. The Ethiopian state has survived for more than 130 years mainly on Oromo resources. To this day, its ruling elites have failed to change the predatory behavior that characterizes their relationship to the Oromo people. They have continued to be as cruel to the Oromo as predator is to prey. Predators do not produce. They hunt, kill and consume. They survive on their prey. Predation and violence are interrelated even among humans. A robber often has to frighten or kill the owner to get his or her property. Conquerors and colonizers must suppress and intimidate the conquered or colonized to exploit their resources. The degree of violence used to exploit the conquered differs from one conqueror to another conqueror, and can vary from persuasive intimidation to violent acts that can cause the feelings of terror. Violent methods have been used by the Ethiopian rulers to control resources that belonged to the Oromo and the other conquered peoples. The TPLF regime has surpassed its predecessor in using extreme forms of violence against the Oromo to expropriate their resources. It has been using summary arrests, concentration camps, torture, extra-judicial killings and “disappearances” to terrorize them. The ongoing killings and imprisonment of students, who have voiced their opposition against the AAMP peacefully, show that the regime will terrorize the people in order to implement its projects.
The leaders and members of the TPLF have benefited enormously from the use violence during the last two decades. It is common knowledge that many of the TPLF leaders and fighters, whose southward march was caused by the great Ethiopian famine of 1984-85, and who came to Oromia with empty pockets in 1991, are extremely rich today. Thousands of them have become owners of luxurious homes in Finfinnee and other cities, expensive cars, fat bank accounts and vast assets in real estate, commercial farms and businesses in record time. They could do this, because, soon after they took power by force in 1991, they expropriated banks, industrial plants, commercial farms, transport firms and travel agencies which belonged to the state (built on the resources of the southern people, primarily the Oromo) under the Dergue. Since they controlled the state, no one could question what they did with the expropriated state properties. Therefore, they had used the assets, sold the state properties to themselves, and had set up a conglomeration called the Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT) in 1995 as a holding company for an expanding group of industrial, financial and service enterprises that came to dominate the entire economy of Ethiopia.
However, the TPLF leaders did not stop after the expropriation of the above mentioned assets. They continued with their predatory activities and became, albeit indirectly, owners of all urban and rural land which was nationalized by the state during the Dergue era, and as eloquently laid out in Bekele Garba’s speech from 2010, have amassed (and are amassing) enormous amounts of assets in real estate and bank deposits (the speech is accessed at Gadaa.com.com., archive, May, 21, 2014). Consequently, they have been evicting the Oromo and the other non-Abyssinian peoples from their homes, and selling their land to domestic and foreign land grabbers during the last fifteen years. By and large, the indigenous people are not consulted about or compensated for the land from which they are evicted. Instead, they are treated as squatters. A case in point is what happened in Bakko in western Oromia when the Karuturi Universal moved in with bulldozers and tractors, and destroyed the pastures of the indigenous people, blocked their access to water and to their farmlands (Vidal, the Guardian, March 21, 2011). In the language of some cynical ‘economists’ this is called ‘development.’
Only a few of the indigenous inhabitants are employed as laborers while the majority are cleared off the land altogether. What is also remarkable is that the majority of domestic commercial farm owners are Tigrayans. According to researchers from the Oakland Institute (OI) in California, USA, “almost all of the domestic agricultural investment lands are held by the Tigrayans” (OI, 2011: 23). Citing a regional government official in Gambella, they wrote that “75 percent of the domestic investors in Gambella were from Tigray” and that many of them “seem to have limited, if any, farming experience”, and were engaged primarily in charcoal production activities, cutting down the trees and leaving the land bare. Although detailed information is lacking, the overall situation in Oromia where the regime has leased land to 899 contractors (OI, 2011: 26) may not differ much from that in Gambella.
Much of the so-called double-digit growth ascribed to the Ethiopian economy in recent years is the phenomenal increase of the assets of TPLF leaders and their supporters; it has little to do with the improvement of the living conditions of the millions famine victims who survive on international food handouts from year to year. The leaders of the TPLF and their agents are clever, not only at creating fear, but also in benefiting enormously from the terror they use, particularly against the Oromo people. The AAMP is essentially an extension of the two-decades-long profitable TPLF undertaking described above. When implemented, it will become one of the biggest sources of income for its leaders and their agents. The huge chunk of territory which the AAMP is designed to cover will be divided between the TPLF leaders, TPLF members and their supporters. It will provide them with an opportunity to invest the financial assets they have been amassing so far in new real estate that will bring them more money and power. They will also sell the land, from which the Oromo farmers are evicted to others in order to make larger amounts of money.
Politically, the AAMP may also profit the TPLF regime. The income from it will, without doubt, enhance its political power. It can buy lobbyists in Washington, London, Brussels, etc. and garner diplomatic support from political leaders and opinion makers. The Amhara elites who have been critical of what they call the TPLF ‘ethnic politics’ (which recognized Oromo identity and allowed them to use the Oromo language officially) will, without doubt, support the implementation of the AAMP, albeit in silence. On the other hand, the regime has underestimated the great risk it is taking by trampling on Oromo national rights so blatantly. It has undermined the survival of the Ethiopian state it will continue to rule. To start with, through the AAMP the TPLF regime has, as its predecessors had done in the past, proved that the interest of the Abyssinian elites and the rights of the Oromo people are irreconcilable. Gains to be made by the Tigrayan leaders and their followers through the expansion of Finfinnee city are costing the Oromo their lives and livelihood. It has made the democratization of Ethiopia, which is the slogan of pro-Ethiopia Oromo parties, an illusion. The attempts by pro-Ethiopia Oromo politicians who tend to overlook the colonial history of Ethiopia and wish to build an Ethiopian state to suit Oromo interest have lost the limited relevance they may have had hitherto among some Oromos. The TPLF policy has alienated those Oromos who were sympathizers of the TPLF regime, including a section within the OPDO. This was reflected in the indignity felt and the opposition voiced by the OPDO who participated in an information meeting on the AAMP in Adama (ETV April 14, 2004).
2014 is not 1878 – the Oromo have rallied to oppose the AAMP
As I have discussed elsewhere (see Bulcha, Contours of the Emergent and Ancient Oromo Nation, 2011), the Gullellee Oromo lost the battle over Finfinnee in 1878 against Amhara forces led by Menelik’s cousin Meshesha Seifu because they lacked firearms. They were not supported by other Oromos. Few Oromos knew what was happening in Finfinnee. Those who knew about it might have not considered what happened in Finfinnee their business, and did not come to rescue them. But 2014 is not 1878. The Oromo have learnt from experience that what affects an Oromo community anywhere affects the Oromo as a whole. Collective memory helps a society to understand both its past, present, and by implication, to imagine its future. It is needless to emphasis here that it is the memory of past injustices and the sinister aim of the TPLF regime against the future of the Oromo nation which stirs the present opposition against the AAMP. The AAMP violates the territorial integrity and identity of Oromo and their aspiration to nationhood to live as a free and sovereign people in their homeland. Therefore, they are rallying in self-defense, not only across Oromia, but also across the globe. Rallies in support of those who are opposing the AAMP at home have been organized simultaneously by Oromo communities in over 40 cities across the world starting from Wellington in New Zealand in the east to Los Angeles in the west, and from Stockholm in the north to Johannesburg in the south. The rallies have brought together men and women, young and old, Christians, Muslims and Waqeefffataa who demand that the AAMP be stopped immediately. More than 90 percent of the tens of thousands of the diaspora Oromo who participated in the rallies are refugees displaced from their homeland by the TPLF regime during the last two decades. For them, as it is for the Oromo at home, the struggle over Finfinnee is a struggle for Oromia. The Gullallee Oromo were alone when they faced the Shawan forces in 1878. It is not the case with the inhabitants of the districts over which the TPLF regime will implement the AAMP. Their cause is the cause of the Oromo people at large.
The AAMP, land grabbing and Oromia’s territorial identity
It is estimated that over the last twenty years more than 150,000 Oromos have been displaced as the city expanded. The AAMP aims to expand the city over an area of more than one million hectares affecting 10 districts and many towns. The majority of the inhabitants of these places cannot avoid eviction. Those who will manage to stay will be marginalized like present Oromo inhabitants of Finfinnee city. In addition, that the so-called Addis Ababa Master Plan is a scheme that will destroy Oromia as a territorial entity seems to be clear to every Oromo. Oromo artists, poets and political commentators described as a dagger pointed at Oromia’s heart. Territorially, the project will cut out the Tuulama highlands – which constitute the heartland of the Oromo territory – and call it Greater Addis Ababa. Figuratively expressed, the AAMP is indeed a dagger pointed at the “heart” of Oromia. The uprising which is triggered by the AAMP among the Oromo at home and in the diaspora concerns, not only the survival of Oromia as a contiguous geographical entity, but also the survival of the Oromo as a nation. It is no wonder that the Oromo youth are ready to make sacrifices and oppose the implementation of the AAMP. The project is an attack on their national identity and their future. Therefore, they are acting in spite of the danger posed to their lives by the ruthless security forces of the TPLF regime. As has been expressed eloquently in poems, songs and articles produced by Oromos at home and in the diaspora during the last three weeks, the Oromo cannot afford to leave the regime alone to implement its anti-Oromo project. To put this analogically, the AAMP has put the Oromo nation in a state which looks like the situation of a person who is threatened with a knife pointed at him or her by an assailant. Such a person must not be paralyzed by fear of death. He or she must defeat fear and fight back in order to survive. That is what the Oromo youth are doing and are also expecting from the rest of the Oromo population. For an oppressed or a colonized people, defeating fear is a crucial initial step toward liberation. It is common knowledge that it is not the first time for the Oromo to make great sacrifices in defense of their human rights, but it can be concluded that the current uprising led by the Oromo youth is the beginning of a new chapter in the struggle for the liberation of the Oromo nation. The situation demands a revolution, and what they have set in motion is a revolution for survival.
The Tigrayan elites who are ruling Ethiopia today are more destructive than the Haile Selassie and the Dergue regimes had been. They are displacing the Oromo from the land of their ancestors and are selling it to outsiders. They are destroying, not only Oromo homes, Oromo communities, and Oromo lives, but also changing the demographic identity of the land the Oromo have inherited from their ancestors. The Haile Selassie regime “Amharized” Oromo place names, such as Bishoftu, Adama, etc. to Amharic names, such as Debre Zeit and Nazret. It tried, but it did not succeed in destroying the Oromo culture and language or Amharize their inhabitants. With its demise in 1974, the Oromo reclaimed their old place names, and Debre Zeit became Bishoftu and Nazret became Adama. The TPLF regime is changing the demographic (hence linguistic and cultural) identity of rural and urban Oromo territories by displacing their indigenous inhabitants. The method used by the TPLF regime is direct and brutal — it uproots and displaces the people; it kills those who oppose its plans. If the AAMP is implemented and the majority of their Oromo inhabitants are displaced, Sululta, Sabbataa, Akaki, etc. may remain as place names without the sociological, cultural and historical content they possess at present. They will lose their Oromo culture, their Oromo language and identity. They will cease to be part of the Oromo territory. By and large, that is what the TPLF regime is doing, and will continue to do by implementing the AAMP and similar projects in other parts of Oromia if the current Oromo uprising fails to stop it once for all.
[1] “Addis Ababa Master Plan” (AAMP) sometimes also known as the “Master Plan” has become the shorthand reference for government-announced Integrated Development Master Plan for Addis Ababa.
[2] The “right of conquest” has a long tradition and was accepted among states in the past. This is because it was believed that the forces of the conquering state, being by definition stronger than those who are lawfully entitled to rule the conquered territory in question, are more likely to secure peace and maintain order. That was particularly the case with European colonies in Africa, Latin America and Asia in the past.
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* Mekuria Bulcha, PhD and Professor of Sociology, is an author of widely read books and articles. His most recent book, Contours of the Emergent and Ancient Oromo Nation, is published by CASAS (Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society), Cape Town, South Africa, in 2011. He was also the founder and publisher of The Oromo Commentary (1990-1999). He is an active member of the OLF and has served in the different branches of the national movement since the 1970s.
PART TWO: PROTEST AGAINST LETHAL CRIMES COMMITTED IN THE NAME OF DEVELOPMENT – THE STRUGGLE OVER FINFINNEE IS THE STRUGGLE FOR OROMIA
By Mekuria Bulcha, Ph.D.*
As I have indicated in Part One of this article, the message in the slogans of the Oromo rallies at home and abroad, among other things, is against evictions caused by land grabbing. The Oromo are evicted from their land which is being leased or sold by the TPLF-led Ethiopian regime to foreign and domestic land grabbers. The so-called “Integrated Development Master Plan for Addis Ababa,” which is generally known as the Addis Ababa Master Plan (AAMP), is part of the same scheme. Whether it is for urban expansion or commercial farming, the eviction of the indigenous landowners is conducted in the name of development. The TPLF regime is accusing the opponents of the AAMP as instruments used by “terrorist” organizations to disturb peace and oppose democracy (BBC, May 2, 2014). Although it is instigated by the AAMP, the present students uprising in Oromia is against the crimes which are being perpetrated by the TPLF regime in the name of development. In addition to the defense of Oromia’s territorial integrity and identity mentioned in the previous part of this article, the protest is against eviction and displacement inflicted upon the Oromo as well as about the environmental destruction caused by urban and rural “development” schemes of the present Ethiopian regime.
As correctly indicated by the Oakland Institute (OI, 2011), land lease or land grab is a “legal” transfer of ownership rights forever. What is being transferred is the right belonging to the indigenous peoples, such as the Oromo and the Anuak. Of the 3.6 million hectares (36,000 sq.km. or one and half times the size of the state of Djibouti) of land which the TPLF regime has transferred to domestic and foreign land grabbers (up to 2011), over 1.3 million hectares (13,000 sq.km.) are located in Oromia (OI, 2011). This does not include the thousands of hectares of land leased to mining companies, such as the British company Nyota Minerals in western, and MIDROC in southern Oromia. It should be noted here that MIDROC’s Laga Dambi gold and tantalum mines and Nyota’s new concessions at Tullu Kapi (read Kaphii) cover thousands of hectares of forest and farm lands. The Addis Ababa Master Plan, which covers 1.1 million hectares of land, constitutes an additional transfer of Oromo ownership rights to others forever. It will, as the farming and mining companies have done, displace tens of thousands of Oromo households from their homes without proper compensation, which often means no compensation.
The commercial farmers and the miners are not only displacing the Oromo from their lands, but are destroying the eco-system that nurtures human life. They destroy the future of the indigenous populations by cutting down forests and polluting rivers, lakes, and underground water. As expressed gleefully by Mr. Karmjeet Sekhon, the manager of the Indian company, Karuturi Global, the land lease program of the TPLF regime has opened an opportunity to foreign and domestic investors to make enormous profits. But, as revealed by reporters (see, for example, John Vidal, “Ethiopia’s land rush: Feeding the world”, March 21, 2011, Video) it has brought disasters upon communities, such as the Oromo and Anuak, who were evicted from their homes as their farm and pasturelands are leased to foreign speculators. The environmental destruction being caused as the consequence of the policy is beyond estimation. Mr. Sekhon told John Vidal, the environment editor of the Guardian, that the destruction of the forests and trees that cover much of the 300,000 hectares of land (about 3,000 sq.km.), which his company is leasing for 50 years in Gambella, is inevitable. The owners of Karuturi Global will stay in Gambella as long as the farms bring profits. They will depart as soon as the profits start to decline leaving behind a desert-like landscape, contaminated soil, polluted sources of water and a local population who are suffering from diseases as the consequence of toxic chemicals they had dumped into the soil and sources of water to make quick profits from the farms.
The disastrous consequences of land grabbing for the Oromo are reflected clearly in the rivers and lakes of the Rift Valley which are polluted by chemicals used in the flower farms and processing plants in central Oromia. Ethiopia is the second largest cut-flower exporter in Africa after Kenya. The availability of fertile land, cheap labor, free ground water and generous tax free holidays has brought hordes of land grabbers to Ethiopia starting the year 2000. In 2008, there were 814 flower plantations covering about 1,400 hectares of land, nearly all of which is located in Oromia in four clusters in the districts of Bishoftu, Sabbata, Managesha and Ziway. The first three clusters of farms are located within a distance of 30 to 50 km from Finfinnee while the Ziway cluster is about 100 km away from it. The implementation of the AAMP will evict the rest. Four in five (83%) of farmers leased land from the government and the rest rented it from private owners (Abiy Tamrat, Flower Industry Threatens Right to Water in Ethiopia, 2011). It is important to note, in connection, how land grabbing (eviction of the indigenous Oromo population) for commercial farming is overlapping with the AAMP here. A large section of the Oromo peasant households in Sabbata, Managasha and Bishoftu districts are already displaced by the flower farms. Moreover, if the AAMP is implemented, it wouldn’t be long before the districts lose their Oromo culture and language.
The flower farmers are accused of intensive chemical and fertilizer application, criticized for lack of skills for waste management, and improper use of water. There is no proper inspection or monitoring by concerned authorities. Pollution is most evident in Lake Koka; and flower plantations are pointed out as its main cause. In February 2009 the Al Jazeera TV produced a documentary titled the Green Lake. The lake was once beautiful, and a source of clear and fresh water. Today, much of it is covered by green algae. A deadly variety of algae known as microcystis produce the green color. The algae release toxins that cause severe health impacts to human beings. Professor Brian Whitton of the Environmental Research Centre of the University of Durham who studied the case concluded that the high level of phosphates found in agricultural runoffs and factory effluents are the causes of the excessive growth of the deadly algae in Lake Koka. His study linked the phosphates to flower farms and factories which are located on the banks of the Awash, and its tributaries the Akaki (read Aqaaqii) and Mojo Rivers, which flow into Lake Koka. More than 17,000 people who live in the villages around the lake use it as source of water for drinking, cleaning, animal watering, recreation, irrigation and fishing. The consequences of the pollution to the human and livestock population of the area have been terrible. The human tragedy is reflected in Amina’s story (Al Jazeera, February 21, 2009) who said,
“I gave birth to nine children. Six of them died: Makida, Hadiri, Tahir, Sultan, Kasim, Kalil. Three survived. My husband also died. I have lost seven members of my family. They were all vomiting and having diarrhea with blood in it. We visited a health center, but we were told the problem was associated with water. I feel sad about my dead children and husband. I wake at night thinking of them, and I now worry if my remaining children will survive. I don’t even know if I will survive. Except for God, we have no hope.”
There are tens thousands of mothers who share Amina’s tragedy throughout Oromia. Her grief and fear are shared by all mothers in Oromia and elsewhere who are victims of similar developments in their rural communities. For the Oromo communities which depend on Lake Koka, the economic consequences of pollution are equally disastrous. According to the Al Jazeera report, most of the fish in the lake are dead. The livestock are also dead. The toxic water not only kills humans, but also livestock. The government does not want to let environmental concerns to slow down its economic exploitation of Oromia. Flower farmers and factory owners are not held accountable for the pollution which their economic activities are causing.
The Al Jazeera report reveals the hopelessness felt by the affected inhabitants. A local farmer whose family drinks the contaminated water tells the reporter that his wife has died, and adds:
“We are all internally ill”. Another local resident says “It is better to die thirsty than to drink this water. We are drinking a disease. We told the local authorities that our cattle and goats died due to this polluted water, but nobody helped. We are just waiting to perish.”A social worker who shares the agony of the local residents told the Al Jazeera reporter that:
“The people here have great potential, but we are losing them, specially the children. I am very upset. If I have the ability to do something, I will do it. But I can’t do anything.”
The medical workers who serve the community say the same thing. They reported thousands of people are sick and that the cause is the polluted water they drink. But the concerned authorities have been criminally negligent. Consequently, the Oromo are left hopeless and helpless against the environmental destruction and water pollution caused by the commercial farms and industries owned mainly by outsiders.
It is important to note here that it is not only those who use the contaminated waters of the Awash, Mojo, Akaki rivers and Lake Koka for drinking and washing that are affected by the flower farms in question. Since proper safeguards are not provided by owners of these businesses, workers who are employed on the farms and in the packing workshops are also victims of various diseases related to the chemicals used in the plantations. In addition, since the wage they earn is far below subsistence level, workers cannot afford the medical expenses for the job-related health problems they often experience. A worker is paid about one US dollar a day which is less than the cost of a single rose in Amsterdam or Stockholm. Yet flower farming is said to be the most profitable industry in Ethiopia. According to the Ethiopian Horticulture Development Agency (EHDA, 2010), Ethiopia exported cut-flowers for US$250 million in 2010.
It is no exaggeration to state that, while the Tigrayan ruling elites and businessmen, and foreign land grabbers are getting rich, the majority of the Oromo people are becoming poorer and hungrier than ever before.Gold, Ethiopia’s second largest export commodity after coffee fetched US$ 578.8 million in 2012-13 (William Davison, Bloomberg News: July 6, 2013). Following the recent discovery of large deposits of gold, particularly in western and southern Oromia, revenues from its export are expected to triple soon. However, the realization of profits and revenues from the extraction of minerals and precious metals by investors and the Ethiopian government does not benefit the Oromo people. For them, the consequence of gold mining has been eviction from their land, irreversible environmental damage and severe health problems so far. Consequently, the country’s largest gold mine at Laga Dambi in southern Oromia has been a source of conflict between the local Oromo population, on the one hand, and MIDROC Company and the Ethiopian state, on the other since 2009. Many students and members of the local population who demanded environmental protection and compensation for the damages caused by the mining companies have been imprisoned and persecuted on several occasions during the last five years (see for example Environmental Allegations generate Protest, Mass Arrest” report by the US Embassy, Addis Ababa, February 22, 2010, released by Weakileaks, August 30, 2011; Gadaa-com, Sept 15, 2011).
In general, it is no exaggeration to state that the Tigrayan ruling elites and businessmen and foreign land grabbers are getting rich while the majority of the Oromo people are becoming poorer and hungrier than ever before. As noted above, public health is deteriorating and Oromia is undergoing an irreversible ecological devastation. One often hears people quoting the late Meles Zenawi who said allegedly that “a majority can be reduced to a minority and that a minority can be made to become a majority.” Whether what he meant was political influence or demographic size was not clear, but it is speculated by observers that his comment was about Oromo demography. In fact, given the intensity and multi-dimensionality of the ongoing persecutions, and the rate of displacement that is making Oromo livelihood difficult and almost impossible, the reduction of the Oromo to a minority is not surprising.A noted scholar has argued that masses of people may not be killed overnight, in a week, or in a month for genocide to occur. Small scale killings, repression, and violence that target a category of people, can develop into large scale killings and then into genocide (see Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, 1992). Human history is filled with cases where settler minorities have successfully reduced politically oppressed majorities to minorities. The white settlers in the Americas and Australia were for example settler minorities who overtime reduced indigenous majorities to insignificant minorities. In Ethiopia, the killings I have described in previous articles (see Mekuria Bulcha in Gadaa.com; or Ayyaantuu.com, May and July 2013) are signposts on the road to large scale killings unless we stop the present development in time. Genocide is committed, not only through physical destruction of a community, but also committed by imposing conditions that make the survival of its members impossible.The large scale sale of farm- and pasturelands to domestic and international farming and mining companies which are poisoning the rivers, lakes and ground waters in Oromia, and the disintegration of communities by displacing them from their ancestral homes are part of the ongoing process of destruction which the policy of the TPLF regime is inflicting on the Oromo people. The AAMP is part of the disastrous process of destruction and genocide.
In 1993, John Markakis asked the late Meles Zenawi why the TPLF had abandoned the idea of an independent state of Tigray (which was its objectives in the beginning) and decided to capture political power in Addis Ababa. The TPLF leader’s answer was, “When we reached the borders of Tigray, we looked back and saw nothing there” (Markakis, Ethiopia: The Last Frontier, 2011: 192). Meles was talking about the grinding poverty that had affected Tigrayans and the dearth of natural resources of his native province. The situation is quite different today. Tigray is in no desperate need. As indicated above, the Tigrayan middle which came into being during the last two decades is the most powerful and probably the most prosperous class in Ethiopia today. The experience of the Oromo people is the opposite. They are poorer than ever before and are grossly persecuted. They are pushed to the edges and are dehumanized. As I have indicated above, they are being killed in the manner mad dogs are killed in societies that do not have respect for animal life. The ongoing student protest is an uprising in defense of Oromo humanity. It is a struggle for life worthy of human beings.
A crime with multiple dimensions – a crime of the century
Surprised by what he was told by Mr. Karmjeet Sekhon about the conditions under which his company Karuturi Global Ltd. could lease such a vast area of virgin fertile land in Gambella from the Ethiopian regime, John Vidal (The Guardian, March 21, 2011) exclaimed this is “the deal of the century!” In deed it is. Vidal was talking about not only the give-away price of £150 a week at which the Karuturi Universal Ltd. leased the 3000 sq.km of land for 50 years, but also the freedom the company was given to do what it wants with the land and water. The TPLF land deal is the cheapest in the world. Mr. Sekhon told Vidal that his company was given the land almost for free, and that they grabbed it. As described by Mr. Sai R. Karuturi, CEO of Karuturi Global Ltd., his company’s contract with the Ethiopian government is “mouthwatering” in that it includes tax holidays, hassle-free entry into the industry at very low lease rates, tax holidays, and duty free. Mr. Karuturi, who is not only a shareholder in the vast Gambella farm mentioned above but also owner of 11,700 hectare farm in Bakko and 100 hectare flower plantation in Oromia, said that his firm has no commitment to build infrastructure or services that may benefit the local population. He maintains that “There is nothing in the contract that stipulates anything, but payment in cash. The Ethiopian government expects us to pay in cash and we are doing that.”
In other words, his entry into business is “hassle free” because: it includes no commitment to workers’ safety or worry about environmental protection. In general, water for irrigation, whether it is drawn from underground sources, or the rivers, is free of charge. The terms of the contract signed by Karuturi Global Ltd. with the Ethiopian regime do not limit the amount of water the commercial farms can draw from the rivers and the underground water sources. Aditya Agarwal, director of the Emami Biotech company which has leased 30,000 hectares of land for oil seeds cultivation in Oromia says: “We have chosen Ethiopia for investment because of availability of cheap labour, contiguous land and congenial business environment” (OI, 2010:14).
Regrettably, the policy that makes business engagement “hassle free” or “congenial” for investors in Oromia and other places in Ethiopia has filled the life of the affected people such as the Oromo with untold tragedies. As we have seen above, it has brought death to thousands of families who fetch drinking water from Lake Koka. The same can also be said about the tens of thousands of families who depend on water from the Awash, Akaki and Mojo rivers for human and livestock consumption. Karuturi’s flower farm, which is the biggest flower farm in Ethiopia, is one of the contributors to the pollution of Lake Koka. While the hassle-free and congenial policy of the TPLF regime enables domestic and foreign land grabbers to make huge profits, it denies thousands of families the basic human rights of access to food and clean water. The best fertile land on which Oromo farming communities of Ada’aa Bargaa, Akaki Basaqaa, Galaan, Shanoo, Bachoo, etc. produced food for themselves and for city dwellers in the past is leased by the TPLF regime to commercial farmers who produce cash crops, particularly flowers for export. Farmers who were food producers twenty years ago are starving beggars in town- and city streets today. I am not blaming the lucky businessmen such as Mr. Karuturi, but a regime that has betrayed the people it claims to represent.
There are observers who argue that a rapid “economic growth” is taking place in Ethiopia under the current regime. They admit that it may have some negative effects on some people. But they blame its critics for not seeing what they call the positive side of the ongoing economic development. They tell us not to focus on what might have gone wrong in the process. The philosophy of the Ethiopian regime was summarized by Dr. Towldebirhan Gebregziabher, former head of the Ethiopian Environmental Protection, in an interview he gave to a BBC journalist in March 2009. He said “There is no human impact that is not felt by other species or other people. Even when you walk, you kill insects”. He was commenting the criticism directed against the construction of the Gibe III Dam by the Ethiopian regime. However, according to Terry Hathaway, director of the International Rivers’ Africa Program, “Gibe III is the most destructive dam under construction in Africa. The project will condemn half a million of the region’s most vulnerable people to hunger and conflict” (BBC March 26, 2009). My point is that the Ethiopian regime and its supporters will, as implied in Dr. Towldebirhan’s comment, trivialize the consequences of the Gibe III, as well as of commercial farming described above, for the indigenous populations as “normal”. They have little concern, if at all, about the agony felt by mothers such as Amina (mentioned above) over the loss of their children and worries about the future of their families. They tend to see the predicament of Oromo or Anuak households who are evicted from their land as given and an unavoidable aspect of what they call “development”. They do not recognize the helplessness of Oromo communities who are forced to drink water that is contaminated by toxic pollutants from the commercial farms run by land grabbers. Generally economists use Gross National Product (GNP) or the value of the final goods and services produced by a country per annum as a rough measure of economic growth, and not economic development in terms of the improvement of well-being enjoyed by ordinary men, women and children. Commercial crops that are produced for export and concrete high-rise buildings which stand amid shanty towns in a few of the cities constitute a significant part of the GDP growth reported by the media and are owned largely by the TPLF members and their supporters. It is true that Ethiopia is a veritable Eldorado for the leaders and agents of the TPLF regime and a goldmine for domestic and foreign investors such as the Karuturi Global Ltd. As aptly remarked by Mr. Karuturi, the fertile green stretches of land in Gambella and Oromia which are leased to investors is “green gold” (see, Planet for Sale – The New World Agricultural Order, Documentary produced by KAPA Presse TV, 2011). The consequence of land grabbing is the opposite for the Oromo, the Anuak and other peoples. They are denied their property rights by the Tigrayan ruling elites who have illegally made themselves the owners of all land in the non-Abyssinian regions of the Ethiopian state. It means deprivation, displacement, starvation and death. That is what the protest of the Oromo student movement is about.
In general, the land policy of the Ethiopian regime constitutes a crime of a special character. That is why the Oromo students took to the streets in mass everywhere in Oromia peacefully defying live bullets fired at them by the security forces of the regime. In the context of northeast Africa, and particularly Oromia, what John Vidal has called “the deal of the century” can been seen as “the crime of the century”. What makes it such a crime is the multi-dimensional harm it is causing and will continue to cause. It is harmful to human beings and nature. It is a crime against the environment and wildlife. As mentioned above most of the fish in Lake Koka are dead and the lake itself is dying. That will be the fate of the fish and marine life in Lake Ziway and of the lake itself soon. Lake Ziway, which is 420sq.m in area and is the only large body of freshwater in the Central Rift Valley, is already affected by fertilizers used on a cluster of flower farms in the area owned by domestic and foreign contractors. A high fish mortality which is associated with effluent discharge from a flower farm is reported. Growth of algae blooms similar to that in Lake Koka is observed in the lake (Tamrat, 2011). The sparkling life-giving waters of the Akaki and Mojo rivers of yesteryears are murky poisonous morass today. Let alone drinking from them, it is repulsive and at the same time painful to look at pictures that depict them. The waters of the Awash River which sustain life in the Afar desert will soon have the same qualities unless necessary measures are taken now.
As I have described elsewhere,[1] one of the consequences of the TPLF regime’s policy is the disintegration of the affected Oromo, Anuak and other communities. The process of social disintegration is eloquently articulated by Bekele Garba (Gadaa.com – June 9, 2012, who said that in many places, land which was productive in the past is now fenced and looked after by watchmen until buildings will be erected on it. The guard often is a lonely individual, perhaps an evicted former owner of the land employed by the new owner – a land grabber. The land could be where the homestead of the watchman stood in the past. He is there alone because his family could have been disintegrated, as is often the case, by eviction. The community to which his family belonged does not exist anymore. There are tens of thousands of individuals who share the bitter experience of the dispossessed farmer depicted by Bekele Garba. The former English lecturer at the Addis Ababa University and former Deputy Chairperson of Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM), Bekele Garba, was arrested in August 2011 and was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment for speaking the truth. He was charged of “provocation of crimes against the state and collaboration with the OLF.” Today, the regime is killing Oromo students with unimaginable impunity for speaking the same truth.
It should be noted here that the Ethiopian region and the regional state of Oromia in particular, is the “water tower” of the Horn of Africa. The Awash which sustains human and animal life in the Afar region, the Wabe Shabelle, the Ganale on which the Ogaden Somali and the inhabitants of Somalia depend for water, the Baro River which flows through Gambella and drains into the White Nile, and the Mugar, Gudar, Angar, Dhidheessa and Dabus rivers which flow into the Blue Nile contribute more than 70 percent of the water it carries down to Khartoum where it mingles with the White Nile are all from Oromia. In fact, more than 50 percent of Nile water that reaches Egypt comes from Oromia. This should compel us to conclude that the threat posed by the ongoing environmental destruction in Oromia is greater than the threat posed by the controversial Grand Dam.
In general, the extensive land grabbing in Oromia is a threat to the survival of the African peoples who depend on the rivers mentioned above. Therefore, it not an exaggeration to construe that the cause for which Oromo students are conducting peaceful protests all over Oromia, and for which many of them are suffering in Ethiopian prisons or are being killed by the Ethiopian security forces now, is also the cause of most of the peoples of northeast Africa. Regrettably, however, the crime being committed against them by the Ethiopian regime has been treated with indifference by the governments of the countries of northeast Africa. Needless to say that their silence, while the Oromo are being mercilessly murdered en masse, is tantamount to betraying the future of their own citizens.
A regime that commits crimes and tells lies without any sense of guilt
The TPLF regime has many infamous methods to suppress the voice of the people against whom it commits crimes. Deception is its modus operandi. It uses lies as an instrument to create conflict between the Oromo and other peoples in Ethiopia and to advance its divide and strategy. It tells the international community blatant lies to frame the opposition as “terrorists” bent on disrupting peace and democratic development in Ethiopia. Its leaders lack a sense of guilt. They seem to have no feeling of shame in the ordinary sense of the word. They commit crimes and accuse others as the culprits. They displace people forcefully from their land and call it “voluntary eviction” (Vidal, the Guardian March 21, 2011 on Video). In addition, the regime forces the people to participate in public demonstrations that actually contradict their interests and moral values, For example, demonstrations are organized to condemn the victims of the regime’s crimes. Lack of participation in such a “required” demonstration has risks. Those who do not cooperate face strong negative consequences. For public servants it means dismissal from their jobs. For businessmen, it means loss of work permits. For farmers it means denial of seeds and fertilizers, the distributions of which is in the monopoly control of companies owned by the regime. For those who depend on international food aid, absence from such demonstrations means withdrawal of the handouts they need for survival. Having forced the people to participate in fake demonstrations the regime tells the world that the people are supporting its policies and actions against “terrorists,” “criminals” and “secessionists.”
The regime’s notorious but futile strategy is already at work to discredit the Oromo students. It is reported that the very people who are to lose their land to the AAMP were forced to participate in a demonstration on May 17th in support of the AAMP condemning the Oromo students as “anti-peace elements.” According to the report, a similar demonstration was organized in Robe in Bale on the 16th of May. The people are forced to“support” their own destruction. Regrettably, the role of the OPDO should be mentioned here. It is pathetic to hear the same OPDO leaders who did not have courage to press their TPLF bosses to implement what Article 49 of the Ethiopian Constitution promises the Oromo during the last two decades are now coercing the Oromo to support their enemy, the TPLF regime, to implement its AAMP and to condemn their own children who oppose it.
I should add here that there are elements in the Ethiopian diaspora who, in support of the TPLF regime, will label the current protests of Oromo students as hostile against the other ethnic groups who live among them. However, the student uprising is for justice and, as such, benefits not only the Oromo but all the other peoples in Ethiopia. It exposes the lies on which the Ethiopian state is built and survives.
Courage for survival and human dignity — learning from others
In Hindu philosophy the greatest gift for an individual or a nation is courage or the ability to defeat fear. Courage was what Mahatma Gandhi instilled in the psyche of the Indian population to resist the British. Martin Luther King did the same with the African Americans. He persuaded them to defy the pain caused by police batons and the fangs of police dogs and continue their march to freedom. He taught them to face the white police without showing signs of fear. Indeed, the determination of the marching masses he had mobilized did not waver. His inspiring words instilled courage in their hearts and pulled thousands of them to join the historical march on Washington where they listened to the famous speech, “I have a dream” on 28 August 1963. Nelson Mandela’s role in the liberation of South Africa from the evils of apartheid is similar. For 27 years he armed the South Africans with inexhaustible courage to continue with the liberation struggle even from his prison cell on Robben Island.
While Oromo political leaders have much to learn from the great leaders mentioned above, Oromo religious leaders must follow the examples which were set by religious leaders such as Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu and preach courage from the podia in the churches and mosques. Popular resistance cannot be conducted without courage and sacrifice irrespective of the form—armed or peaceful—in which it is to be conducted. Courage is also what our community leaders must instill in the Oromo everywhere. We need to muster moral and intellectual courage to defend our rights and humanity against the TPLF regime as the Indians, the African Americans and the South Africans were armed with courage to fight colonialism and racism. Gandhi’s peaceful method may not work for us, because the British and the Tigrayans are not the same. Although the British were not happy to give up their jewel colony, India, they did not revert to systematic terror to defend their hold on it. The TPLF are unlikely to change their present position on the Oromo peacefully. The adoptability of Mandela’s approach to our situation is also doubtful for two main reasons. To start with, there were whites who fought against apartheid as members or supporters of the ANC. As bridge-builders, their contribution in making reconciliation between the white and black South Africans possible was not negligible. In the absence of their role Mandela could have not convinced his constituency to settle for a multi-racial democratic South Africa peacefully. He may have not even tried. Those type of bridge builders are not yet born in the Tigrayan-Amhara societies. Secondly, apartheid South Africa used terror to maintain white supremacy over the black population. But it was sensitive to the reaction of the world community. The TPLF leaders do not bother much about international opinion or about the human dignity of the people they oppress. Unfortunately, so far the UN and their foreign supporters do not seem bothered by their horrific human rights records. But that will not make us lose hope. In our present situation what we should adopt from both Gandhi and Mandela is their principled and consistent courage to continue with the ongoing revolution to achieve national freedom from the grip of oppression. We should stand for the truth and for what we believe in. In other words, whatever approach we will use to achieve freedom, we must be equipped with courage that targets the oppressor, and cares about the innocent bystander.
The Oromo struggle concerns freedom from fear
The Oromo will lead a life worthy of human beings. As the Burmese winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and ex-political prisoner, Aung San Suu Kyi, has stated, among the basic freedoms to which humans aspire to lead a full and unhampered life, freedom from fear stands out. The deadliest weapon which tyrannical regimes use against their subjects is fear; they create fear in the minds of those they oppress. Writing about apartheid and its laws Steve Bantu Biko, the murdered anti-apartheid activist and leader of Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) argued, “No average black man can ever at any moment be absolutely sure that he is not breaking a law. There are so many laws governing the lives and behaviour of black people that sometimes one feels that the police only need to page at random their statute book to be able to get a law under which to charge a victim.” In other words, the laws of apartheid spread among the black population a feeling of uncertainty, fear and powerlessness.The TPLF regime has been doing in Oromia during the last two decades what the apartheid regime did before its demise. The regime made the life of millions of Oromo worse than the life of the black South Africans had been during the darkest days of apartheid. Every aspect of Oromo life is impacted by feelings of fear and uncertainty. The Oromo fear the agents of the Tigrayan rulers who can put them in prison without due process of law or make them “disappear” without trace. It is common knowledge that thousands of Oromos have “disappeared” since the TPLF took power in Finfinnee in 1991. They fear the Oromo underdogs who serve the Tigrayan rulers. Through the system called “one to five” (one person spying on five others), the TPLF has planted its “antennae” in every community, every village and homestead throughout Oromia. For an Oromo, it is difficult to tell which head, among his neighbors, is the “antenna” tuned on him or which pair of eyes that are watching him. Hence no Oromo is sure when the ever-present terror of the TPLF regime will strike him or her.Ethiopia is a country of fitesha (endless search) that turns a person, particularly an Oromo, into a perpetual suspect, a criminal by birth. An Oromo is made to fear his/her neighbours, friends, and even relatives because, forced by poverty, many honest people have joined the TPLF’s pack of informers in order to survive. The sniffing dogs of the regime are everywhere, in street corners, in work places, in schools and university lecture halls, and above all in the kebeles— neighborhoods.
For an Oromo in the diaspora, Ethiopia is a country which he/she visits at the risk of causing danger to his/her relatives. It is a country where an innocent telephone call from a son or a daughter from abroad can send a father or mother to prison. It is a country which makes mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters dread to communicate with a family member who lives abroad. The Oromo struggle is about freedom from the climate of fear created by the Tigrayan regime. Oromo artist need freedom to exercise their profession. He/she needs an audience to develop his/her profession as the audience needs art that makes life enjoyable. Oromo art and scholarship must serve the progress and happiness of the Oromo people and humanity at large. Therefore, for those concerned with the development of Oromo art and culture their right place is within the battle being fought for freedom. Indeed, Oromo artists have taken the front line and are making their contributions with courage. That is also what is expected from Oromo scholars: their studies should contribute to the development of the Oromo society.
The Oromo people need political independence to read what they want to read, and enjoy the music they relish without fear for being accused of narrow nationalism, terrorism or of being arrested put in jail, tortured, raped and killed. Ethiopia is a state in which the Oromo are made to fear to speak their mother tongue. They need political freedom to speak their language without fear or looking back on their shoulders fearing that someone is listening to their conversation and reporting them to the security organs of the regime just because they were “committing the crime” of talking in Afaan Oromoo. The right of speaking one’s mother tongue without worry and harassment is a human right. Needless to say here that it is not the case in Oromia even today. It may not happen at all before Oromia is free land. This may seem banal to pro-Ethiopia Oromos who will argue that this dilemma will be solved through the democratization of the Ethiopian state. In my view, those who would hope to inoculate the Ethiopian state against the hegemonic passions of the Abyssinian ruling elites with a “democratic” constitution and empty talk about justice are fooling themselves.
A revolution in need of coordination
The fact that the Oromo people have lived in fear for a long time is not a result of cowardice, but of a deep sense of powerlessness. Today, one can see that this feeling of powerlessness is rapidly changing into a simmering anger of the Oromo population and the readiness of tens of thousands of Oromo youth to sacrifice their lives for freedom. During the last twenty years, the Oromo have expressed their grievances in poetry and music. Above all Oromo music has been an expression of the popular grievance against injustice. The price paid by Oromo youth for waging the struggle has been mass expulsion from educational institutions, exile, torture and death. Many of them were beaten to death by the security agents of the TPLF as if the victims were not human beings. The list of Oromo artists who were jailed, tortured and murdered by the Tigrayan regime for their songs against injustice is very long.
In short, the Oromo have learnt from experience the need for solidarity to defy terror and powerlessness. They are learning that fear and the sense of powerlessness are defeated when they act together. They have witnessed what common action can do in the so-called Arab Spring. Indeed, signs of common action among the Oromo have been increasing both at home and in the diaspora in recent years. The uprising which the AAMP has ignited is a revolutionary signpost of the trend described above. It is a revolution that needs coordination. The way it is coordinated and the goal it aims to achieve matter. The ability of the Oromo political organizations to use the currents which the uprising has set in motion, mobilize our people for a sustained struggle, and lead our nation to freedom is crucial.The uprising should be given the right direction to be effective and fruitful. It should give dividends which will benefit the Oromo as a nation. It is an opportunity that should not be wasted or misused. It should not be hijacked or exploited by political parties who are biding their time to ride back to Menelik’s palace in Finfinnee. They have nothing against the “Addis Ababa Plan” of the TPLF regime. As we all know, they will implement it with great pleasure if they get the chance.Let no Oromo organization become their Trojan horse or another OPDO. If they are wise enough, there is also an opportunity for the current members of the OPDO to abandon their subservient status under the TPLF, and join the national struggle for freedom not only to defend the right of the nation to which they belong, but even to regain the of respect of their countrymen and women. This is the time for every Oromo to get up and be counted on the side of justice and freedom.
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[1] See for example Mekuria Bulcha, “Landownership, Land Grabbing and Human Rights in Ethiopia: The Indigenous Peoples’ Perspective and Experience”, paper presented at the OSA Mid-Year Conference, 7-8 April 2012 Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
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* Mekuria Bulcha, PhD and Professor of Sociology, is an author of widely read books and articles. His most recent book, Contours of the Emergent and Ancient Oromo Nation, was published by CASAS (Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society), Cape Town, South Africa, in 2011. He was also the founder and publisher of The Oromo Commentary (1990-1999). He is an active member of the OLF and has served in the different branches of the national movement since the 1970s.
The Africa Rising illusion: continent needs more than just growth – By K.Y. Amoako @ The African Arguments
We hear a lot these days about “Africa Rising” – and with good reason. … Enabled by reforms in macroeconomic management, by high commodity prices, and by increasing exports of extractives, this growth has created a spirit of optimism, encouraged foreign investment, and provided an incentive for young Africans to return home after being educated abroad. Increasing earnings among some sectors of society have supported the emergence of an African middle class, with promising purchasing power. But beneath the surface it’s not that simple. The rate of African growth may have increased, but the structure of most Sub-Saharan economies has not changed much over the past 40 years. African economies are still narrowly based on the production and export of unprocessed agricultural products, minerals, and crude oil. There is little manufacturing— indeed, in many countries the share of manufacturing in GDP is lower now than in the 1970s. Competitiveness on global markets – apart from crude extractive products – is low due to poor productivity and underdeveloped technology. And in most countries, more than 80% of the labor force is employed in low-yield agriculture or informal activities in towns and cities. Thus the headline statistics disguise both residual problems and inherent vulnerabilities. Recent economic growth has not eliminated inequalities between or within countries, and has done little to reduce hunger. While the proportion of Africa’s population living in extreme poverty is falling, the total number of extremely poor people rose by more than 20 million between 2002 and 2012. Youth unemployment threatens instability, and while access to education has improved significantly, standards are still low. This is not the first time that the continent has experienced growth of an unequal or unstable nature. Indeed, in the years after independence, the region’s economy was booming. But growth faltered in the mid-1970s following the first oil price shock, and the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s saw incomes fall and poverty increase. How can we prevent this pattern repeating itself? – Read more @http://africanarguments.org/2014/05/29/the-africa-rising-illusion-continent-needs-more-than-just-growth-by-k-y-amoako/
The silent recolonisation of Africa is happening on a mass scale.
Tragically, a silent recolonisation on a mass scale is happening through further dispossession in areas where the original colonisation had not been complete. The new colonisation is dressed in the language of economic development and fighting poverty but its interest is the satisfaction of the needs of multinational companies for markets and land to grow food for export – to satisfy the food needs of their primary market while depriving Africans the satisfaction of their needs.- Read more @
Any system which crushes its brightest should not be considered a success….The Ethiopian government likes to trumpet its higher education system to its western aid backers as a crowning success of its development policy. As billions in foreign aid are spent annually on Ethiopia, the west must be more cognisant of the fact that this money helps reinforce a government which cuts down those who dare to speak out against it.
Ethiopia crackdown on student protests taints higher education success
Western backers of the Ethiopian education system should not ignore reports of violent clashes on university campuses
Oromia, Ethiopia, where at least three dozen people were reportedly shot dead by security forces during student protests
Over the past 15 years, Ethiopia has become home to one of the world’s fastest-growing higher education systems. Increasing the number of graduates in the country is a key component of the government’s industrialisation strategy and part of its ambitious plan to become a middle-income country by 2025. Since the 1990s, when there were just two public universities, almost 30 new institutions have sprung up.
On the face of it, this is good news for ordinary Ethiopians. But dig a little deeper and tales abound of students required to join one of the three government parties, with reports of restricted curricula, classroom spies and crackdowns on student protests commonplace at universities.The Ethiopian government likes to trumpet its higher education system to its western aid backers as a crowning success of its development policy. As billions in foreign aid are spent annually on Ethiopia, the west must be more cognisant of the fact that this money helps reinforce a government which cuts down those who dare to speak out against it.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in Ambo in Oromia state. On 25 April, protests against government plans to bring parts the town under the administrative jurisdiction of the capital, Addis Ababa, began at Ambo University. By the following Tuesday, as protests spread to the town and other areas of Oromia, dozens of demonstrators had been killed in clashes with government forces, according to witnesses.
As Ethiopia experiences rapid economic expansion, its government plans to grow the capital out rather than up, and this involves annexing parts of the surrounding Oromia state. An official communique from the government absolved it of all responsibility for the clashes, claiming that just eight people had been killed and alleging that the violence had been coordinated by a few rogue anti-peace forces. The government maintains that it is attempting to extend Addis Ababa’s services to Oromia through its expansion of the city limits.
However, Oromia opposition figures tell a different story. On 2 May, the nationalist organisation the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) issued a press release that condemned the “barbaric and egregious killing of innocent Oromo university students who have peacefully demanded the regime to halt the displacement of Oromo farmers from their ancestral land, and the inclusion of Oromo cities and surrounding localities under Finfinnee [Addis Ababa] administration under the pretext of development”. The Addis Ababa regime dismisses the OLA as a terrorist organisation.
While news of the killing of unarmed protesters has caused great concern among many Ethiopians, there has been little coverage overseas. The government maintains strict control over the domestic media; indeed, it frequently ranks as one of the world’s chief jailers of journalists, and it is not easy to come by independent reporting of events in the country.
Nevertheless, the government’s communique does run contrary to reports by the few international media that did cover the attacks in Ambo, which placed the blame firmly on government forces.
The BBC reported that a witness in Ambo saw more than 20 bodies on the street, while Voice of America (VOA) reported that at least 17 protesters were killed by “elite security forces” on three campuses in Oromia. Local residents maintain that the figure [of those killed] was much higher.
These reports, while difficult to corroborate, have been backed up by Human Rights Watch, whichissued a statement saying that “security forces have responded [to the protests] by shooting at and beating peaceful protesters in Ambo, Nekemte, Jimma, and other towns with unconfirmed reports from witnesses of dozens of casualties”. One university lecturer said he had been “rescued from the live ammunition”, and that it was the “vampires – the so-called federal police” who fired on the crowds.
The Ethiopian government likes to trumpet its higher education system to its western aid backers as a crowning success of its development policy. As billions in foreign aid are spent annually on Ethiopia, the west must be more cognisant of the fact that this money helps reinforce a government which cuts down those who dare to speak out against it.
Inevitably, continued support for such an oppressive regime justifies its brutal silencing of dissent. Yes, the higher education system has grown exponentially over the past 15 years but the oppression and killing of innocent students cannot be considered an achievement. Any system which crushes its brightest should not be considered a success.
Paul O’Keeffe is a doctoral fellow at La Sapienza University of Rome, where he focuses on the higher education
When students in Ethiopia started protesting last month against the Ethiopian Government’s proposal to annex territory from the state of Oromia to facilitate the expansion of the capital city Addis Ababa, diasporans mobilized to show their solidarity. As federal “Agazi” security forces cracked down, opening fire on peaceful protesters, placing students on lock-down in their dormitories, and conducting mass arrests, Oromos around the world staged rallies and hunger strikes to raise international awareness and to call on the governments of the countries where they live to withhold aid and put pressure on the Ethiopian Government to respect human rights.
In the first three posts in this series, I discussed the Oromo diaspora’s mobilization to shed light on the human rights violations on the ground, the sharp criticism the government of Ethiopia faced during the Universal Periodic Review on May 6, and the steps the Oromo diaspora in Minnesota is taking to show solidarity and press for accountability in Ethiopia. This final post tells some of the stories of Oromos in the diaspora who have spoken with friends and family on the ground in Oromia about events over the past three weeks, and also covers the Ethiopian government’s formal response to the UN review and offers some suggestions for next steps.
Not “voiceless,” but deliberately silenced by Ethiopian government
“We need to be a voice for the voiceless” has been a common refrain from the diaspora. But in my view, the students and others who are protesting in Ethiopia are far from voiceless. They have been bravely marching, placing their lives and academic careers on the line, to express their opposition to the government’s “Integrated Development Master Plan for Addis Ababa.” In the words of 2004 Sydney Peace Prize winnerArundhati Roy, “there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
The government controls the media and telecommunications in Ethiopia, effectively placing a stranglehold on open debate and criticism of the government. Historically, efforts by western media, including CNN, to cover events on the ground in Ethiopia have been stymied. The government’s repression and intimidation also create obstacles for independent journalists trying to cover the story from outside the country. I spoke with one U.S.-based reporter who covers the Horn of Africa, and he explained that when he tried to confirm casualty reports, hospital personnel in Ethiopia refused to speak to him, fearing for their jobs.
We are reaching out to you as the Board of officers of the International Oromo Youth Association (IOYA) whose nation is in turmoil back in Oromia, Ethiopia. Recently, Oromo students have been protesting against the new Addis Ababa “Integrated Master Plan” which aims at incorporating smaller towns surrounding Addis Ababa for the convenience of vacating land for investors by displacing millions of Oromo farmers. As a political move, this will essentially result in the displacement of the indigenous peoples and their families. Oromo farmers will be dispossessed of their land and their survival both economic and cultural terms will be threatened. The Oromos strongly believe that this plan will expose their natural environment to risk, threaten their economic means of livelihood (subsistence farming), and violate their constitutional rights.
The Ethiopian government is executing its political agenda of progressive marginalization of the Oromo people from matters that concern them both in the Addis Ababa city and the wider Oromia region. The master plan is an unconstitutional change of the territorial expansion over which the city administration has a jurisdiction. The government justifies the move in the name of enhancing the development of the city and facilitating economic growth. The justification is merely a tactical move masked for the governments continued abuse of human rights of the Oromo people. While the Oromos understand that Addis Ababa itself is an Oromo city that serves as the capital of the federal government, they also consider this move as an encroachment on the jurisdiction and borders of the state of Oromia.
The protesters peacefully demonstrated against this move. University students and residents have been in opposition to the plan, but their struggle has been met by a brutal repression in the hands of the military police (famously known as the Agazi). It has been reported that shootings, arrests, and imprisonments are becoming rampant. It is also reported that the death toll is increasing by the hour. Recently, sources indicate that over 80 people have been shot dead, others severally injured and thousands arrested. In addition, Oromo students have been protesting peacefully for over three weeks now, despite mass killings and arrests by Ethiopian security forces. University and high school students from more than ten universities have been engaging in the Oromo protests. The peaceful rally has now spread across the whole country and is expected to continue until the Ethiopian government refrains from incorporating over 36 surrounding smaller towns into Addis Ababa. It is stated to be displacing an estimate of 6.6 million people and violating constitutional rights of regional states.
As an organization subscribing to broader democratic engagement of the Oromo youth, we oppose the brutal violence that the Ethiopian government is meting out on innocent, unarmed young students who are peacefully protesting. As leaders of the Oromo community, we support and stand in solidarity with Oromo protests in Ethiopia. The human rights violations being carried out by the Ethiopian government against innocent students are unacceptable. Continuous assaults, tortures, and killings of innocent civilians must be stopped. We urge you to join us in denouncing these inhumane and cruel activities carried out by the Ethiopian government. We believe it is imperative that the international community raise its voice and take action to stop the ongoing atrocities that are wreaking havoc to families and communities in the Oromia region.
We urgently request that such actions be taken in an attempt to pressure the Ethiopian government to stop terrorizing and killing peaceful protesters:
The US government and other International organizations should condemn the Ethiopian government’s brutal action taken on unarmed innocent civilians. Furthermore, we demand over 30,000 innocent protesters to be released from prisons, as they will be subjected to torture and ill treatment.
The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) is currently terrorizing its own electorates/nation. Under the law of R2P in the UN constitution, the international community is obliged to protect a nation that is being terrorized by its own government and EPRDF should be taken accountable.
We demand Ethiopia to be expelled from any regional and international cooperation including and not limited to AU and UN for its previous and current human rights violations. The International community should stop providing support in the name of AID and development to Ethiopia as it is violating the fundamental and basic needs of its nation.
The Ethiopian government should be stopped on immediate effect; its forceful displacement of the indigenous peoples across Ethiopia is unjust and unconstitutional. We ask the United States, European Union, and the United Nations to stand in solidarity with peaceful student protesters who are condemning such injustice.
The onus is on the international community to act in favor of the innocent and civilian populace that is seeking its fundamental right. Punitive actions towards this government should be taken for cracking down on freedom of expression and other democratic rights being expressed by its citizens.
We believe it is in the interest of our common humanity to take responsibility, to pay attention to this problem, to witness the plight of the voiceless victims, and to raise concerns to the Ethiopian government so it can desist from its brutal acts of repression.
We count on your solidarity to help the Oromo youth be spared from arbitrary arrest, incarceration, and shootings.
‘Debt and Corruption are an awful mix: The appetite for debt by African governments is particularly concerning given that there does not appear to be any serious action to end the gross mismanagement of public funds. Getting into debt only makes sense if you plan to use the money properly. But if substantial sums of money end up in the pockets of faceless politicians, then Africa is ransoming future earnings with no future benefits. This is self-sabotage at its best. There is no need to belabour the point. Don’t take on billions of dollars of debt if corruption is still an untamed beast…the consequences for Africa’s economy and people will be dire….. ‘Many of the Chinese contracts in Africa lay down that repayments be made in natural resources, with complex institutional contracts that make repayments unpredictable in financial terms’. [2] How can we be comfortable with our governments getting into deals into the billions of dollars and yet these are shrouded in mystery? With no information at hand, we do not really know how deep of a hole we’re digging for ourselves.’
Step away from the debt plate Africa, you need to watch what you’re eating
Africa is bingeing on debt and risks overeating at the buffet of financial offers from China, India, Brazil and many others. Kenya just recently signed a series of financial agreements worth billions with China during Prime Minister Lee Keqiang’s visit to the country this last weekend making it clear that we live in a multipolar world. In this new world order Africa is spoilt for choice with regard to who to partner with to fund development. But we (Africa) seem to have an insatiable appetite for this new money and do not seem to be fully aware of the implications of accepting all these tasty offers of cash. We also don’t seem to be thinking about whether we can, or how we can absorb these volumes of cash. Don’t get me wrong, Africa’s excitement at promises of billions apparently with ‘no conditions’ is understandable. Having spent the past decades grovelling at the doors of donors and investors from Europe and North America, many Africans felt we were giving away our pride for monies tied to what many felt were onerous conditions. So now, we are whistling our way to the bank with our new financials ‘partners’.
But is this truly smart? The reality is that all borrowing has conditions. So allow me to digress briefly and go slightly further with this point. China enjoys talking about about how it provides money with ‘no conditions’, but closer analysis reveals that this is not strictly true. The Chinese government, like any other government, will protect its investments; investments made almost exclusively with African governments…which seems to suggest that if China has to back up (even unpopular or despotic) African governments to protect its investments, it will. Look at the incriminating allegations that China funded Mugabe’s election ‘victory’ last year. Documents from Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organization suggest that the success of Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party, ‘reflected direct intervention by the Chinese Communist Party’. (See more here and here). Perhaps for Zimbabwe the conditions that make China feel most secure in its investments is if Mugabe is in power. So maybe there are some conditions tied to money from China. The point I’m making is that it is important Africans analyse reality and not get spellbound by the rhetoric. But that is an aside; let’s get to the real problems behind Africa’s debt binge
1. We don’t really know the scale of the debt we’re getting into
By ‘we’ I mean Africans not on the inside corridors of power, but on whose behalf these deals are being made. It is absolute madness that in the case of countries such as China, we actually don’t know how much debt we’re getting into. Over the weekend Kenya and China signed several agreements but, ‘The two leaders did not disclose the actual financial value of most of the agreements and protocols signed but their aides said the deals run into billions of Kenya shillings.’[1] Why the secrecy? How much of this money from China is grants vs debt? What are the interest rates (there are references to ‘concessional loans’ but that’s about it), what are the terms of repayment, what are the penalties for defaulting? Also bear in mind that in the past, ‘Many of the Chinese contracts in Africa lay down that repayments be made in natural resources, with complex institutional contracts that make repayments unpredictable in financial terms’. [2] How can we be comfortable with our governments getting into deals into the billions of dollars and yet these are shrouded in mystery? With no information at hand, we do not really know how deep of a hole we’re digging for ourselves.
2. Do we have the absorptive capacity to handle all this money?
We are getting into debt to fund numerous development projects that range from infrastructure to agriculture, to security and wildlife but, pray tell, do we have the absorptive capacity to soak up these billions? Because whether we can absorb the money or not, we will be paying it back. Absorptive capacity here relates to the macro and micro constraints that recipient countries face in using resources, in this case money, effectively.[3] Does Africa have the physical, intellectual and systems-related infrastructure, expertise and culture to competently implement all these projects? For example, do county governments have the technical savoir faire to implement agriculture projects worth millions? One of the issues of serious concern is that investment in educational infrastructure rarely features prominently in these deals. There are very limited (if any) provisions for building the educational capacity of African countries especially at tertiary and vocational levels. So great, we’re getting money to build railways, but how many Africans can be effectively put to task on this, especially at managerial positions? Bear in mind that already, with regards to China, Africa has fallen into a trap where, 1) China is allowed to bring in Chinese nationals to provide labour and, 2) When African labour is used, it is cheap, unskilled labour.[4] This situation is untenable. Africa should be using every single government- funded project to hire Africans and build the capacity of Africans to do the job competently in the future. Africa cannot continue to so fundamentally rely on outsiders to do the basics for us such as building roads. But sadly, African countries seem to be happy with outsourcing all the large-scale projects, sometimes back to companies from the country that gave us the loans in the first place. This leads to the next point.
3. With limited absorptive capacity, Africa will continue to outsource big contracts
Africa is not being very bright. We get loans then outsource the implementation of the projects back to companies from the donor country. In short, we’re paying China to pay itself. Why? Generally however, using outsourcing as the default strategy for large-scale project implementation is problematic in at least two ways: 1) It hides and exacerbates Africa’s skills deficit and, 2) It pumps money out of the country. The first point is obvious, if we continue to rely on others to build our roads, we will continue to lack the skillsets and capacity to competently build and maintain our roads ourselves. But since the roads are being built, we never feel the weight of our incompetence in this area and therefore have no sense urgency to rectify this problem. Secondly, companies implementing projects in Africa make a profit then expatriate the profit. So we’re getting into debt and then haemorrhaging some of that expensive money out of the continent through outsourcing. This makes no long-term sense. Ideally we should use local contractors to implement projects however, as elucidated in point 2, we do not seem to have sufficient volumes of companies capable of absorbing this workload. But rather than fix that, African governments go to the default setting labelled ‘outsource’. We’re getting into a vicious cycle as follows: We don’t have the capacity to implement large-scale projects → we outsource but fail to ensure skills transfer → exacerbates the skills deficit → we don’t have the capacity to implement large-scale projects. African governments should essentially use the development projects led by non-Africans as structured training opportunities for newly qualified professionals as well as building more seasoned professionals into the management structure of projects.
4. Debt and Corruption are an awful mix
The appetite for debt by African governments is particularly concerning given that there does not appear to be any serious action to end the gross mismanagement of public funds. Getting into debt only makes sense if you plan to use the money properly. But if substantial sums of money end up in the pockets of faceless politicians, then Africa is ransoming future earnings with no future benefits. This is self-sabotage at its best. There is no need to belabour the point. Don’t take on billions of dollars of debt if corruption is still an untamed beast…the consequences for Africa’s economy and people will be dire.
5. Overleveraged?
This issue relates to point number 1. There is limited information on the scale of the debt Africa is getting into with certain parties so at what point will we in Africa know when we’re overleveraged? It seems like the answer to that is ‘not any time soon’. The scary part is that some African governments seem to think debt will fix all our problems with Heads of States expecting hearty praise when they secure even more debt for the continent. It is true that structures such as the Debt Sustainability Framework (DSF) exist which seek to stop lenders from lending more money to countries that have exceeded their debt ceilings. But, ‘to work well, the DSF needs close co-ordination between all creditors. This is hard enough to do between public and private lenders from the traditional partners, but is even more difficult with the new lenders [such as China].[5],[6]Sadly, African countries do not seem to be keen on tabulating public debt figures at either national or pan African levels, and sharing them.
Two things happened simultaneously on May 1st, both involving the U.S. State Department and its relation to Ethiopia. Thing one was the State Department’s news program, Voice of America, broadcasting its brief account of Ethiopian security forces firing upon student demonstrations the previous day (April 30) at three universities resulting in 17 dead and many wounded. Thing two was the Secretary of State John Kerry in Ethiopia giving a speech full of praise for Ethiopia’s rapid economic development as well as the U.S.-Ethiopia partnership in addressing the violence against civilians in neighboring Sudan and Somalia. Apparently, Kerry was unaware that the day before, just a two-hour’s drive down the road from where he was speaking, America’s supposed partner, the Ethiopian government, had committed acts of violence against its citizens. In fact, thousands of individuals at universities and in cities across the Oromia region of Ethiopia had been protesting for days, and as the journalist Mohammed Ademo’s article for Think Africa pointed out on Tuesday (August 29), what they were protesting was precisely the consequences of the rapid economic development and foreign direct investment that Kerry praised in his speech – the eviction and displacement of tenant farmers and poor people due to the expansion of the capital city Addis Ababa into the Oromia region.
We might observe a contradiction here within the same State Department. While the State Department’s news program laments an event and clearly points to the root cause, the State Department’s secretary appears ignorant of the event and also strangely unable to discern the causes of ethnic unrest across Africa. An Al Jazeera op-ed responding to Kerry’s speech suggests that the United States fails to see the contradiction in its policy that talks about democracy and human rights but in practice emphasizes security for foreign direct investment (as per the State Department’s own report on such investment in Ethiopia published shortly before Kerry’s visit.) Noticeably, two contradictory ideas are coming out of the State Department simultaneously. What do we make of that contradiction?
Before I answer that question, I might add on to this strange state of affairs by pointing out that Kerry did criticize the Ethiopian government for using repressive tactics against its journalists — the famous Zone 9 bloggers — but what strikes me is that at the very moment that Kerry criticizes the state of journalism in Ethiopia, the mainstream American news outlets such as CNN, National Public Radio, and the NY Times have for a long time neglected to give any serious coverage of the issues within Ethiopia and in fact did not report on the student demonstrations. The only American media mention of the recent student demonstrations and deaths is a very brief Associated Press article that appeared the day after Kerry’s speech (May 2) and that article embarrassingly gets its facts wrong about what happened and why. Such poor journalism is increasingly perceived to be the norm of America’s once celebrated media whose many factual inaccuracies and lack of any genuine will to truth arguably contributed to the Iraq War back in 2003. Curiously, the only news organization in America that did its job (the VOA) is the news organization intended to serve communities outside of America. Moreover, the VOA is part of the very same “department” that Kerry heads. The quality of mainstream American media coverage might seem excusable if it weren’t for the fact that BBC covered these tragic events in Ethiopia reasonably well, first on its radio program immediately after the massacre (May 1st) and then more comprehensively on its website the following day.
Two things happened simultaneously on May 1st, both involving the U.S. State Department and its relation to Ethiopia. Thing one was the State Department’s news program, Voice of America, broadcasting its brief account of Ethiopian security forces firing upon student demonstrations the previous day (April 30) at three universities resulting in 17 dead and many wounded. Thing two was the Secretary of State John Kerry in Ethiopia giving a speech full of praise for Ethiopia’s rapid economic development as well as the U.S.-Ethiopia partnership in addressing the violence against civilians in neighboring Sudan and Somalia. Apparently, Kerry was unaware that the day before, just a two-hour’s drive down the road from where he was speaking, America’s supposed partner, the Ethiopian government, had committed acts of violence against its citizens. In fact, thousands of individuals at universities and in cities across the Oromia region of Ethiopia had been protesting for days, and as the journalist…
Ibsa Ijjannoo Waldaa Qorannoo Oromoo fi Waldaalee Hawaasa Oromoo Ameerikaa Kaabaa: Ijjechaa Barattootaa Oromootiif Ummata Oromoo Ilaalchisee | Statement of Oromo Community Organizations in the U.S. and Oromo Studies Association (OSA)
Posted: Caamsaa/May 3, 2014 · Finfinne Tribune | Gadaa.com
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We, Oromo Community Organizations in USA, and OSA jointly prepared this press statement in Afaan Oromoo to condemn the heinous crimes committed against defenseless and innocent Oromo University students and those who joined their just movements in solidarity. We also expressed our readiness to stand in solidarity with the Oromo University Students and the #OromoProtests. We ask the Ethiopian regime to unconditionally release the hundreds of University Students detained by the Federal Security Forces and bring to justice those who ordered the use of live bullets to put down the protest. We ask the Oromo in Diaspora to protest in all major cities where the Oromo live in large numbers and fund raise money to support the victims of the massacre and affected families by covering some of their medical and miscellaneous expenses. We have formed a National committee to coordinate the fund raising activities during rallies and at prayer places (Mosques, Churches). This is a work in progress and seek your support as we go forward. We strongly believed that the regime can only be defeated through concerted and sustained resistance movements which requires our collective material and intellectual resources. The Oromo must be ready to pay the utmost sacrifices the struggle demands to free our nation and heal the broken hearts of its oppressed masses.
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The orderly village of Agulodiek in Ethiopia‘s western Gambella region stands in stark contrast to Elay, a settlement 5km west of Gambella town, where collapsed straw huts strewn with cracked clay pots lie among a tangle of bushes.
Agulodiek is a patch of land where families gradually gathered of their own accord, while Elay is part of the Ethiopian government’s contentious “villagisation” scheme that ended last year. The plan in Gambella was to relocate almost the entire rural population of the state over three years. Evidence from districts surrounding Gambella town suggest the policy is failing.
Two years ago people from Agulodiek moved to Elay after officials enticed them with promises of land, livestock, clean water, a corn grinder, education and a health clinic. Instead they found dense vegetation they were unable to cultivate. After one year of selling firewood to survive, they walked back home.
“All the promises were empty,” says Apwodho Omot, an ethnic Anuak, sitting in shade at Agulodiek. There is a donor-funded school at the village whose dirt paths are swept clear of debris, and the government built a hand pump in 2004 that still draws water from a borehole. Apwodho’s community says they harvest corn twice a year from fertile land they have cleared. “We don’t know why the government picked Elay,” she says.
Gambella region’s former president Omod Obang Olum reported last year that 35,000 households had voluntarily moved from a target of 45,000. The official objective had been to cluster scattered households to make public service delivery more efficient. Critics such as Human Rights Watch said the underlying reason was to clear the way for agricultural investors, and that forced evictions overseen by soldiers involved rape and murder. The Ethiopian government refute the allegations.
A DfID spokesman said: “We will not comment on ongoing legal action, however, the UK has never funded Ethiopia’s resettlement programmes. Our support to the Protection of Basic Services Programme is only used to provide essential services like healthcare, schooling and clean water.”
Karmi, 10km from Gambella town, is a newly expanded community for those resettled along one of the few tarmac roads. Two teachers scrub clothes in plastic tubs on a sticky afternoon. A herd of goats nibble shrubs as purple and orange lizards edge up tree trunks. There is little activity in the village, which has bare pylons towering over it waiting for high-voltage cables to improve Gambella’s patchy electricity supply.
The teachers work in an impressive school built in 2011 with funds from the UN refugee agency. It has a capacity of 245 students for grades one to five – yet the teachers have only a handful of pupils per class. “This is a new village but the people have left,” says Tigist Megersa.
Kolo Cham grows sorghum and corn near the Baro river, a 30-minute walk from his family home at Karmi. The area saw an influx of about 600 people at the height of villagisation, says Kolo, crouching on a tree stump, surrounded only by a group of children with a puppy. Families left when they got hungry and public services weren’t delivered. “They moved one by one so the government didn’t know the number was decreasing,” he says.
The Anuak at Karmi have reason to fear the authorities, particularly Ethiopia’s military. Several give accounts of beatings and arrests by soldiers as they searched for the perpetrators of a nearby March 2012attack on a bus that killed 19. The insecurity was a key factor in the exodus, according to residents.
As well as the Anuak, who have tended crops near riverbanks in Gambella for more than 200 years, the region is home to cattle-herding Nuer residents, who began migrating from Sudan in the late 19th century. Thousands of settlers from northern Ethiopia also arrived in the 1980s when the highlands suffered a famine. The government blamed the bus attack on Anuak rebels who consider their homeland colonised.
David Pred is the managing director of Inclusive Development International. The charity is representing Gambella residents, who haveaccused the World Bank of violating its own policies by funding the resettlement programme. An involuntary, abusive, poorly planned and inadequately funded scheme was bound to fail, he says. “It requires immense resources, detailed planning and a process that is truly participatory in order for resettlement to lead to positive development outcomes,” he adds.
Most of flood-prone Gambella, one of Ethiopia’s least developed states, is covered with scrub and grasslands. Inhospitable terrain makes it difficult for villagisation to take root in far-flung places such as Akobo, which borders South Sudan. Akobo is one of the three districts selected for resettlement, according to Kok Choul, who represents the district in the regional council.
In 2009, planners earmarked Akobo for four new schools, clinics, vets, flourmills and water schemes, as well as 76km of road. But the community of about 30,000 has seen no change, says 67-year-old Kok, who has 19 children from four wives. “There is no road to Gambella so there is no development,” he says. One well-placed civil servant explains that funds for services across the region were swallowed by items such as daily allowances for government workers.
A senior regional official says the state ran low on funds for resettlement, leading to delivery failures and cost-cutting. For example, substandard corn grinders soon broke and have not been repaired, he says. The government will continue to try to provide planned services in three districts including Akobo this year and next, according to the official.
However, the programme has transformed lives, with some farmers harvesting three times a year, says Ethiopia’s ambassador to the UK, Berhanu Kebede. The government is addressing the “few cases that are not fully successful”, he says. Service provision is ongoing and being monitored and improved upon if required, according to Kebede.
At Elay, Oman Nygwo, a wiry 40-year-old in cut-off jeans, gives a tour of deserted huts and points to a line of mango trees that mark his old home on the banks of the Baro. He is scathing about the implementation of the scheme but remains in Elay as there is less risk of flooding. There was no violence accompanying these resettlements, Oman says, but “there would be problems if the government tried to move us again”.
The U.S House of Representatives and the government of United Kingdom plus EU Parliament and United Nations have recently stepped up a campaign to help Somalis from Ogaden region to realize that their voice has been heard by the International Community after decades of virtually silent.
As UK’s government recently released a report indicating allegations of abuses by the Liyu Police or “Special Police”,which London expressed its concerns,United States House of Representatives and EU Parliament have both sent strong messages to Addis Ababa,which was meant to open the Somali religion of Ogaden to the humanitarian agencies and International media to have free access to avoid further humanitarian crisis.
The U.S Congress issued a message which eventually published on Somalilandsun that reads:
The US House of Representatives has asked Ethiopia to Permit Human Rights and Humanitarian Organizations Access to its Somali region of Ogaden. The House informed (d) ETHIOPIA. “That Funds appropriated by this Act that are available for assistance for Ethiopian military and police forces shall not be made available unless the Secretary of State–
(A) certifies to the Committees on Appropriations that the Government of Ethiopia is implementing policies to–
(i) protect judicial independence; freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion; the right of political opposition parties, civil society organizations, and journalists to operate without harassment or interference; and due process of law; and (ii) permit access to human rights and humanitarian organizations to the Somali region of Ethiopia; and (B) submits a report to the Committees on Appropriations on the types and amounts of United States training and equipment proposed to be provided to the Ethiopian military and police including steps to ensure that such assistance is not provided to military or police personnel or units that have violated human rights, and steps taken by the Government of Ethiopia to investigate and prosecute members of the Ethiopian military and police who have been credibly alleged to have violated such rights.”http://somalilandsun.com/index.php/world/4945-make-ogaden-accessible-us-house-urges-ethiopia–
The EU’s head of International Unit Party Socialist democrat,Anna Gomes,MEP said “Ethiopia is one of the largest humanitarian and development aid receiver yet these donations are used incorrectly and corruptly. Western governmental Organizations and Western Embassies to Addis Ababa ignored the stolen donations and humanitarian aid that are being used as a political tool by the Ethiopian regime, which is contrary to EU rules on the funding”.http://www.tesfanews.net/eu-holds-discussion-on-ethiopian-human-rights-crisis-in-ogaden-and-kality-prison/
Ulvskog, MEP,in her part when she was speaking about the steps needed to be taken in order to stop the human rights abuses that is being committed against Ethiopian and Ogaden civilians, she said that the EU could use sanctions or words against Ethiopia or follow up documents and information like the one provided by Ogadeni whistle-blower, Abdullahi Hussein,who smuggled out one-hundred-hours filmed footage, to show the reality in the ground.
The UK government’s website said last week that there have been many reports of mistreatment associated with the Special police,including torture and executions of villagers accused of supporting the Ogade n National Liberation Front.
The Rights Groups such as Human Rights Watch,Amnesty International and Genocide Watch have accused of Ethiopia that it has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ogaden region.The ONLF accuses Addis Ababa similar charges of egregious human rights abuses against Somali civilians in the region.
John Holmes, The highest UN Official to visit Somali Region of Ogaden in part of its fact finding mission,since the Ethiopian crackdown (2007) called on a further investigation,a plan to wait its implementation until now.
Somali people of Ogaden Region,who has been deplored the international Community’s inaction and silence,when it comes to human rights violations committed at Ogaden region could now feel that they have been heard as the International Community including U.S,UK,EU and United Nations are ready to take action against those committed war crimes and crimes against humanity yet believe that they can get away with it.
“Compare free development in Botswana with authoritarian development in Ethiopia. In Ethiopia in 2010, Human Rights Watch documented how the autocrat Meles Zenawi selectively withheld aid-financed famine relief from everyone except ruling-party members. Meanwhile democratic Botswana, although drought-prone like Ethiopia, has enjoyed decades of success in preventing famine. Government relief directed by local activists goes wherever drought strikes.”- http://time.com/23075/william-easterly-stop-sending-aid-to-dictators/
Traditional foreign aid often props up tyrants more than it helps the poor. It’s time for a new model.
Too much of America’s foreign aid funds what I call authoritarian development. That’s when the international community–experts from the U.N. and other bodies–swoop into third-world countries and offer purely technical assistance to dictatorships like Uganda or Ethiopia on how to solve poverty.
Unfortunately, dictators’ sole motivation is to stay in power. So the development experts may get some roads built, but they are not maintained. Experts may sink boreholes for clean water, but the wells break down. Individuals do not have the political rights to protest disastrous public services, so they never improve. Meanwhile, dictators are left with cash and services to prop themselves up–while punishing their enemies.
But there is another model: free development, in which poor individuals, asserting their political and economic rights, motivate government and private actors to solve their problems or to give them the means to solve their own problems.
Compare free development in Botswana with authoritarian development in Ethiopia. In Ethiopia in 2010, Human Rights Watch documented how the autocrat Meles Zenawi selectively withheld aid-financed famine relief from everyone except ruling-party members. Meanwhile democratic Botswana, although drought-prone like Ethiopia, has enjoyed decades of success in preventing famine. Government relief directed by local activists goes wherever drought strikes. In the postwar period, countries such as Chile, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have successfully followed the path of free development–often in spite of international aid, not because of it. While foreign policy concerns have often led America to prop up dictatorial regimes, we need a new rule: no democracy, no aid. If we truly want to help the poor, we can’t accept the dictators’ false bargain: ignore our rights abuses, and meet the material needs of those we oppress. Instead, we must advocate that the poor have the same rights as the rich everywhere, so they can aid themselves.
Easterly is the co-director of New York University’s Development Research Institute and author of The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor.
As protestors from Kiev to Khartoum to Caracas take to the streets against autocracy, a new book from economist William Easterly reminds us that Western aid is too often on the wrong side of the battle for freedom and democracy. In The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, Easterly slams thedevelopment community for supporting autocrats, not democrats, in the name of helping the world’s poorest. Ignoring human rights abuses and giving aid to oppressive regimes, he maintains, harms those in need and in many ways “un-develops” countries.
The Tyranny of Experts takes on the notion that autocracies deliver stronger economic growth than freer societies. Easterly argues that when economic growth occurs under autocratic regimes, it is more often achieved at the local level in spite of the regime’s efforts. In some instances, growth under autocracies can be attributed to relative increases in freedoms. He points to China as an example of this, attributing the country’s phenomenal growth to its adoption of greater personal and economic freedoms, especially compared to the crippling Maoist policies of the past.
Easterly also rejects the myth that dictators are dependable and that a certain level of oppression should be overlooked for the sake of economic growth and overall prosperity. Most recently, the violence and chaos following the 2011 Arab uprisings has made some nostalgic for the stable, if undemocratic, governments that kept civil unrest in check, allowing for a measure of economic development to take hold. Easterly stresses that instability and tumult in the wake of ousting a dictator is not the fault of an emerging democracy, but instead an understandable result of years of autocratic rule. The answer is not to continue to support autocrats in the name of stability, but rather to start the inevitably messy process of democratization sooner.
Still, the hard questions remain: how to help those without economic and political freedoms? And when should donors walk away from desperately poor people because their government is undemocratic? Easterly argues that the donor community should draw the line with far more scrutiny than it does today – not just at the obvious cases, such as North Korea, but with other undemocratic countries, such as Ethiopia, where human rights abuses are rampant. He debunks the notion that aid can be “apolitical,” arguing that it is inherently political: giving resources to a government allows it to control and allocate (or withhold) resources as it sees fit. The aid community should focus on ways to help oppressed populations without helping their oppressors. For example, scholarship programs, trade, and other people-to-people exchanges can give opportunities to people in need. At the very least, Easterly argues, development actors should not praise oppressive regimes or congratulate them on economic growth they did not create.
Rather than being seduced by “benevolent dictators,” Easterly urges donors to focus their energy on “freedom loving” governments that need help. The Millennium Challenge Corporation is a step in the right direction but, as Easterly pointed out during the CFR meeting, MCC’s approach is undermined by other U.S. aid agencies, such as USAID, that continue to assist countries even when they don’t meet certain good governance and human rights standards.
March 26, 2014 (The Seattle Times) — SOMEHOW — probably my own fault — I have wound up on Bill Gates’ list of the world’s most misguided economists. Gates singled me out by name in his annual 2014 letter to his foundation as an “aid critic” spreading harmful myths about ineffective aid programs.
I actually admire Gates for his generosity and advocacy for the fight againstglobal poverty through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. We just disagree about how to end poverty throughout the world.
Gates believes poverty will end by identifying technical solutions. My research shows that the first step is not identifying technical solutions, but ensuring poor people’s rights.
Gates concentrates his foundation’s efforts on finding the right fixes to the problems of the world’s poor, such as bed nets to prevent malarial mosquito bites or drought-tolerant varieties of corn to prevent famine. Along with official aid donors, such as USAID and the World Bank, the foundation works together with local, generally autocratic, governments on these technical solutions.
Last year, Gates cited Ethiopia in a Wall Street Journal guest column as an example, a country where he described the donors and government as setting “clear goals, choosing an approach, measuring results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach.”
This approach, Gates said, “helps us to deliver tools and services to everybody who will benefit.” Gates then gives credit for progress to the rulers. When the tragically high death rates of Ethiopian children fell from 2005 to 2010, Gates said this was “in large part thanks to” such a measurement-driven program by Ethiopia’s autocrat Meles Zenawi, who had ruled since 1991. Gates later said Meles’ death in August 2012 was “a great loss for Ethiopia.”
Do autocratic rulers like Meles really deserve the credit?
Gates’ technocratic approach to poverty, combining expert advice and cooperative local rulers, is a view that has appealed for decades to foundations and aid agencies. But if technical solutions to poverty are so straightforward, why had these rulers not already used them?
The technical solutions have been missing for so long in Ethiopia and other poor countries because autocrats are more motivated to stay in power than to fix the problems of poverty. Autocracy itself perpetuates poverty.
Meles violently suppressed demonstrations after rigged elections in 2005. He even manipulated donor-financed famine relief in 2010 to go only to his own ruling party’s supporters. The donors failed to investigate this abuse after its exposure by Human Rights Watch, continuing a long technocratic tradition of silence on poor people’s rights.
Rulers only reliably become benevolent when citizens can force them to be so — when citizens exert their democratic rights.
Our own history in the U.S. shows how we can protest bad government actions and reward good actions with our rights to protest and to vote. We won’t even let New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie get away with a traffic jam on a bridge.
Such democratic rights make technical fixes happen, and produce a far better long-run record onreducing poverty, disease and hunger than autocracies. We saw this first in the now-rich countries, which are often unfairly excluded from the evidence base.
Some developing countries such as Botswana had high economic growth through big increases in democratic rights after independence. Botswana’s democrats prevented famines during droughts, unlike the regular famines during droughts under Ethiopia’s autocrats.
Worldwide, the impressive number of developing countries that have shifted to democracy includes successes such as Brazil, Chile, Ghana, South Korea and Taiwan, as well as former Soviet Bloc countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia.
If the democratic view of development is correct, the lessons for Gates are clear: Don’t give undeserved credit and praise to autocrats. Don’t campaign for more official aid to autocrats. Redirect aid to democrats. If the democratic view is wrong, I do deserve to be on Gates’ list of the world’s most misguided economists.
The UK government is providing financial aid to human rights abusers in Ethiopia through funding training paramilitaries, who perpetrate summary killings, rape and torture in the impoverished African country, local media reported.
Through its foreign aid budget, the UK government provides financial support to an Ethiopian government security force known as the “special police” as part of its “peace and development programme”, which would cost up to £15 million in five years, The Guardian reported.
The Department for International Development warned in a leaked document of the “reputational risks” of working with organizations that are “frequently cited in human rights violationallegations”, according to the report.
The Ethiopian government’s counter-insurgency campaign in Ogaden, a troubled region largely populated by ethnic Somalis is being enforced by the 14,000-strong special police.
This is while police forces are repeatedly accused by Human Rights Watch of serious human rights abuses.
Claire Beston, the Amnesty International’s Ethiopia researcher, said it was highly concerning that Britain was planning to work with the paramilitary force.
The deliberate expansion of the amorphous city they call “Addis Ababa” is politically created to divide Oromiyaa into east and west sector. It is not a master plan. It is an evil plan mastered to consummate an evil goal.
When we see the history of Abyssinian political philosophy, from which we have a written record, it is entirely based on the philosophy of depriving the Oromos from having any right to homeland. To convert Oromummaa to Amaarummaa and ultimately to Itiyophiyawwinnet has been the policy in action up to this very day.
What happened to those Oromos who were living in Finfinnee for centuries? Particular mention has to be made about those Tulama Oromo groups of Gullallee, Eekkaa, Galaan, Aabbuu, Jillee. The answer is very simple: They were mercilessly decimated; their villages burnt down, their pasture and arable lands confiscated and shared among the invading Manzian Nagasii families of whom the Dejazmach Mangasha Seifu and the Ras Birru families were the most notorious ones. Thereafter, the Oromo territory occupied by Matcha-Tulama was officially changed to the expanding Kingdom of Showa, a detached enclave from Gonder, Abyssinia. Finfinnee was given a new colonial name “Addis Ababa”, just like Zimbabwe was changed to Rhodesia, Harare to Salisbury. Under this excruciating condition, the conquered Matcha-Tulama region had to lose its historic significance and had to be involuntarily submitted to the colonial name Showa.
Among the major Oromo descent groups, the Matcha-Tulama group has got one of the largest populations, stretching on vast area of land in central and western Oromia. As we are able to learn from our fathers, Matcha and Tulama are Borana brothers, being Tulama angafa (first born) and Matcha qixisuu (second born son). As common to all Oromo ethno-history, the tradition that governs the social role of “angafa and qixisuu”, which begins right from the immediate family unit, has a deep genealogical meaning and social role in re-invigorating the solidarity of the nation. From the earliest time of which we have a tradition hanging down to us,
Matcha-Tulama Oromo has had a supreme legislative organ known as Chaffe. The Chaffe legislates laws which will eventually be adopted as Seera Gadaa
They have a senatorial council known as “Yaa’ii Saglan Booranaa”, in which elected individuals from major clans are represented. The function of Yaa’ii Saglan Booranaa is to deliberate on issues pertaining to regional issues, resolve inter-clan disputes and oversees how interests of each clan in the confederacies are represented; how local resources are fairly shared and wisely utilised according to the law.
These two northern Boorana brothers are historically referred to as Boorana Booroo or Boorana Kaabaa
Among the known five Oromo Odaas, Odaa Nabee and Odaa Bisil are found in Boorana Booroo
However, beginning from the 13th century onward, the Match-Tulama country (Boorana Booroo), adjacent to Abyssinian border, has begun to be ravaged by a group of individuals whose legendary genealogy connects them to a certain King Solomon of non-African origin. They came and settled at a place they call “Manz”.They organised themselves at this place, and started to attack neighbouring villages of Cushitic Oromo family stock of Laaloo, Geeraa and Mammaa. The attacked villages were gradually incorporated into the expanding Manz, which eventually developed to a military outpost known as Showa in the late 18th century. Hereafter, they declared themselves “Ye Negasi Zer, the root of Showa Amhara Dynasty.
After vanquishing Agaw people’s identity and sovereignty on the northern frontier, the Solomonic Negasi Dynasties of Showa intensified their attacks against the Match-Tulama of Borana and the Karrayyu of Barantu Oromos. In such turbulent situation, the rule of yeNegasi Zer entered nineteenth century era, which ushered the era of the Scramble for Africa by European imperialist powers. From Africa, it was only King Minilik of Showa (1866-1889) who was recognised as a partner and invited to attend the Berlin Imperialist Conference of 1884. In this conference, Minilik was represented by his cousin, Ras Mekonnen Tenagneworq Sahile-Sellasie (1852-1906). After completing their mission, King Minilik and the European imperialist powers made concession on border demarcation. After the border demarcation had been completed, a systematic elimination of his prominent general, Ras Goobanaa Daacci (1819-1889), was meticulously carried out. Minilik was so confident to declare himself Emperor of Ethiopia (1889- 1913).This was the Ethiopia, the first time in the history of the region, that brutally annexed and included Oromo, Sidama, Walaita, Kaficho, Beneshangul, Gambella, and others to the expanding of Abyssinia.
The years 1887-89 were the boiling point for Minilik’s declaration of being “Emperor of Ethiopia, yeItiyophiya Nuguse, nägest. Why?
Because, it was the time when he exterminated the Gullallee Oromo from the marshy-hot spring and pasture land of Finfinnee and collectivised the place under a new colonial name Addis Ababa.
Because, it was the time when he built full confidence in himself and built his permanent palace at Dhaqaa Araaraa, a sacred hill, where the evicted Oromos peacefully used to sit together and conduct peaceful deliberation for reconciliation.
It was the time when he annexed three-fourth of southern peoples’ territories, including the Oromo territory, to the expanding Showan Dynasty and put under the iron-fist of his inderases(viceroys).
It was the time when he assured un-shivering confidence of being continued to be assisted and advised by his European colonial partners: militarily, diplomatically and technically.
Here is the question: What happened to those Oromos who were living in Finfinnee for centuries? Particular mention has to be made about those Tulama Oromo groups of Gullallee, Eekkaa, Galaan, Aabbuu, Jillee. The answer is very simple: They were mercilessly decimated; their villages burnt down, their pasture and arable lands confiscated and shared among the invading Manzian Nagasii families of whom the Dejazmach Mangasha Seifu and the Ras Birru families were the most notorious ones. Thereafter, the Oromo territory occupied by Matcha-Tulama was officially changed to the expanding Kingdom of Showa, a detached enclave from Gonder, Abyssinia. Finfinnee was given a new colonial name “Addis Ababa”, just like Zimbabwe was changed to Rhodesia, Harare to Salisbury. Under this excruciating condition, the conquered Matcha-Tulama region had to lose its historic significance and had to be involuntarily submitted to the colonial name Showa.
In addition to the former derogatory term “Galla”, imposed on the conquered Oromos as a whole, the new regional name of Showa is prefixed to the derogatory term Galla.Hence, “ye Showa Galla” came into force as a collective insulting name in addressing the whole Oromo of Matcha-Tulama. This clearly justifies the vertical segregation policy of the conquerors for easy identification of who is who in the newly colonised territory.
Using various forms of oppressive models, Abyssinian colonial tactics and strategies have been going on violently and, now entered into the first half of the 21st century. Since the second half of the 19thcentury in particular, the oppressive models have been amassing massive firearms from European colonialist partners, enjoying diplomatic immunities and profitable political advises.
In the late 19th century, one European writer commented that, if the Abyssinians had not been armed and advised by global colonial powers of the day, notably France and Britain, late alone to defeat the ferocious Oromo forces, they could not have even dared to encroach upon the limits of Oromo borders. He wrote what he witnessed the real situation of the time as follows:
“Against the Galla [Oromo] Menelik has operated with French technicians, French map-makers, French advice on the management of standing army and more French advice as to building captured provinces with permanent garrison of conscripted colonial troops. The French also armed his troops with firearms, and did much else to organize his campaigns. Menelik was at a work on these adventures as King of Shewa during John’s lifetime; adding to his revenues and conscripting the Oromo were thus conquered by the Amhara for the first time in recorded history during the last thirteen years of the nineteenth Century. Without massive European help the Galla [Oromo] would not have been conquered at all.”
The writer further explained what he personally encountered during the campaign in the following unambiguous language:
“A large expedition was sent as far South in Arsi as frontier of Kambata to return with100, 000 head of Cattle. The king’s army fought against tribes who have no other weapons but a lance, a knife and shield, while the Amahras always have in their army several thousand rifles, pistols and often a couple cannon.—-Captive able-bodied males and the elderly were killed. The Severity of the Zamacha [campaign] was aimed at the eradication of all resistance. Whenever the army surged forward, there was the utmost devastation. Houses were burned, crops destroyed, and people executed:”
When we see the history of Abyssinian political philosophy, from which we have a written record, it is entirely based on the philosophy of depriving the Oromos from having any right to homeland. To convert Oromummaa to Amaarummaa and ultimately to Itiyophiyawwinnet has been the policy in action up to this very day. Even though the policy works on all Oromos indiscriminately, the one which has been exercising on the Oromos of Tulama in Finfinnee and surrounding areas has its own unique feature. Some of the unique features are embedded in the formation of “Addis Ababa” itself; as a seat of colonial headquarters with all its oppressive machineries. To have ample space for the settlers, to build army headquarters, to build churches in the name of numerous Saints of Greek and Hebrew origins, to build residences and offices for foreign embassies and missionaries, to build factories and storage houses the crucial demand is land. To fulfil these crucial demands of the customers, helpless Oromo peasants of the area have to be evicted. They have been under routine eviction and land deprivation since the seizure of Burqaa Finfinnee and the establishment of Ethiopian Imperial capital at this place.
It could be incorrect to think of the current TPLF-Arinnet Tigray regime as a detached entity from the whole system of Abyssinian colonial regimes, when we equate what they need against the survival needs of the peoples they generically conquered as “Galla and Shanqilla”. Though since 1991, the Ethiopian imperial system has been overtaken from the Showan Nagasi Dynasty by their junior Tigrean brethren, the life of the colonised Oromo people has been going down from worse to the worst.
What makes TPLF-Arinnet Tigray different from its predecessors is its total monopolisation of resources of the empire, right from the imperial palace to the bottom village levels, from the centre to the periphery. Arable and pasture lands, plain and forest lands, rivers and mining areas are totally under its predatory control. It is routinely evicting peasants from their plots, their only means of existence. They are selling to Chinese, Indians, European, Turkish, Pakistani, Arabians and other companies at the lowest price. In making this huge business, the most preferable area in the empire is Oromoland; of which the land around Finfinee holds rank first.
This politically architected scheme, in the name of investment and development, is daily evicting Oromo peasants around Finfinnee often with meagre or no compensation at all. As a consequence,
some of the evicted families are migrating to cities like Finfinnee and are becoming beggars
Some of them are leaving the country for unknown destination and found being refugees in neighbouring countries like Kenya and Yemen.
Since most of them who have no any alternative, they remain on the sold land and become daily labourers, earning less than half dollar a day.
Farm lands that had been producing sufficient grains of various types are now turned to produce non-edible flowers and toxic chemicals that contaminate rivers and lakes.
The incumbent Ethiopian regime of TPLF-Arinnet Tigray, more than any other imperial regimes of the past, is committed to make the Oromo people an “African Gypsy”. At one time the deceased prime minister of the Empire and EPDRF leader, Meles Zenawi, refers to the Oromos, who are numerically majority ethnic group in the Empire, said, “It is easy to make them a minority”. They are practically showing us the evil mission they vowed to accomplish. When they become rich of the richest in the Empire, the Oromo peasants they are daily uprooting are becoming poor of the poorest, being reduced to beggary and often deprived of burial sites after death. This evil work, as indicated above, has given priorities to sweep off “garbage” around Finfinnee and ultimately to encompass three-fourth of the region of “Showa” as a domain of “non-garbage” dwellers.
As vividly explained above, the Oromo of Tulama, since the onset of colonisation, have begun to be collectively addressed as “ye Showa Galla”. Those who resisted the derogatory name, the eviction, and the slavery system have been inhumanly executed or hanged. Their land and livestock have been confiscated and shared among the well-armed conquering power.
When Minilik invaded the Gullalle Oromo in Finfinnee, for instance, they remarkably resisted to the last minute but finally defeated. Those who remained behind the massacre had no other option except to leave for other regions against their choice. In their new homes, they have been even treated as collaborators of the invading “Showans” by their own kinsmen, calling them “Goobanaa”.Those able-bodied Gullallee, Eekkaa, Galaan, Abbichuu youths were involuntarily conscripted to the colonial army which is typical to all colonial policies. They were forced to go for further campaign to the south, east and west commanded by Showan fitawuraris and dejazmaches
From time to time, all Abyssinian forces, changing forms of their names, swearing in the name of Ethiopian unity and inviolable sovereignty, have never turned down the initial policy of evicting and persecuting the Oromo from their ancestral araddaa. Araddaa Oromoo is the embryonic stage whereOromummaa has begun to radiate from. Hence, by virtue of its original formation, now and then, it could not be integrated into the enforced Abyssinian policy of Itiyophiyawwinnet .
Since the enforced policy has shown no visible success for the past 130 years, this time, it has taken on to shoulder the last option of “sweeping them off” from around what they call “Addis Ababa” as a priority number one. As a consequence, came into being the destruction of Oromo survival relationship with their ancestors’ plot of land. The desecration of their shrines, sacred rivers, sacred mountains and sacred trees of which the case of Odaa and Burqaa Finfinnee, Dhakaa Araaraa and Caffee Tumaa in the vicinity of Finfinnee are quite enough to mention. TPLF’s long range missile policy of destroying Oromos’ relation to their historic araddaa is not the end. It is just the beginning extrapolated to destroy Biyyoo Oromoo.
At this critical time, any concerned Oromo should not be oblivious of the dreadful situation going on in Oromiyaa right now; in Finfinnee and surrounding areas in particular. The deliberate expansion of the amorphous city they call “Addis Ababa” is politically architected to divide Oromiyaa into east and west sector. It is not a master plan. It is an evil plan mastered to consummate an evil goal.
At this critical time, may we believe in the “No life after death”? Rather, may we are for the life right now? Those who are for the life right now are genuinely expected to show discernible power through tangible solidarity to our victimised families at home. Pursuant to our tradition, we have been nurtured learning the wisdom of “Dubbiin haa bultu”. Now, we should redirect this wisdom to “Dubbiin kun hin bultu”,that we ought to swear by great confidence to move in unison against the inhuman act, endless atrocities and perpetual eviction of our families from their ancestral araddaa. Thereof, could we recall the intrinsic wisdom of our fathers’ saying “Tokko dhuufuun namummaadha, lama dhuufuun harrummaadha?”
The classical definition of knowledge was given by Plato as “justified true belief.” There are many philosophical theories to explain knowledge. The online Oxford dictionaries define knowledge as a theoretical or practical understanding of a subject [online]. The same source explain knowledge that can be implicit (as with practical skill or expertise) or explicit (as with the theoretical understanding of a subject); it can be more or less formal or systematic. According to Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging” the “knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, communication, association and reasoning; while knowledge is also said to be related to the capacity of acknowledgment in human beings.” I am not here to write the theory of knowledge, but trying to bring the human society acknowledgement and recognition for the Oromoo nation’s indigenous knowledge.
The Oromoo Gadaa System (OGS) is an indigenous knowledge reserve institution of the Oromoo nation. It is an organic system, which is self-refining every eight years (in two four-year terms) to meet the needs of the society. The OGS is a well-structured and organized indigenous knowledge reserve that encompasses social, political, economic and military institutions that operate mainly based on self-reliance principles while Oromummaa is an act of embracing these institutions and applying the indigenous knowledge to manifest an authentic Oromoo’s cultural and national identity.
The essence of scientific education is to understand Mother Nature, daachee haadha marggoo, and human experience in relation to Mother Nature. Through scientific education we can ask questions and try to investigate or do research to find out the facts and report the new knowledge about the subject. For example, who is responsible for the creation of human being, other living and non-living things as a part of the whole nature? What if I told you that the answer to the question is Mother Nature? I guess, you would not be satisfied with the answer because it leads to another subsequent philosophical questions such as who is responsible for the creation of the Mother Nature. Again, what if I told you the answer is a God? This time, probably you would be settled and agree with me. But how do you know for sure that it is a God who is responsible for the creation of nature?
I have thought deeply about these questions and tried to find the best possible answers. I would like to share the final answer with you later on if you continue the journey with me through reading and thinking about the perplexities of human life experience.
The purpose of this paper is to share my points of view with you and highlight that the Oromoo Gadaa System is the prima source of Oromo indigenous knowledge reserve that every Oromoo person should safeguard it and reclaim it as a shared-value that can be manifested through applied Oromoo knowledge and life experience, which is often called Oromummaa. Hence, the Oromoo Qubee generation are highly encouraged to embark their scientific studies and discoveries on our forefathers’ indigenous knowledge and bring it to light to show the world that our forefathers had made significant contribution to human society and civilization by creating and developing a comprehensive and complex democratic system: the Oromoo Gadaa System and its Institutions. For the qubee Oromoo generation, I would say they have a gold mining opportunity on their own backyards and they have to go for it.
Oromoo’s Indigenous Knowledge
Indigenous knowledge is local by nature. It is primarily based on social skills and production techniques. Both social skills and production techniques employ indigenous knowledge that in turn involves the process of life-long learning and teaching. The Oromoo Gadaa System provides such indigenous knowledge reserve so as to enable the new generation to learn from and teach the generations to come. For example, Oromummaa is a social skill. The Oromoo children learn social skills: respect, love, sympathy, empathy, ethics (Safuu), sharing, helping others, communications, etc from their parents and through well-organized Gadaa institutions such as the Age group (Hiriyyaa) and Qalluu.
Like every society, the Oromoo Gadaa Society had engaged in production of goods and services for long time or millenniums. They have millennium years of farming and animal husbandry experience and knowledge. The Oromoo farmers were the first people who domesticated barley as cereal crop in the region and a coffee plant and used the coffee beans in the world. This means the Oromoo farmers had possessed a primary indigenous knowledge about these crops. This indigenous knowledge reserve, however, needs a substantial effort in the field of scientific research and documentation for learning and teaching purposes by present and future Oromoo generations.
The lack of self-ruling political right in Ethiopian Empire and the decline of the Oromoo Gadaa System of Self-governance lead to the deterioration of the Indigenous knowledge and Institutions. In addition, the absence of curiosities from the Oromoo educated class for long time and self-inflicted prejudices against Oromoo indigenous knowledge had played a significant role on its underdevelopment. The educated class is the first social group who run away from their villages and turn their back to their culture and traditional ways of life. Consequently they find themselves in the garrison cities where almost everything is imitation of modernity that has no root in the local culture or traditions. Moreover, the educated elites had been played an agent role to introduce exogenous values including foreign religion, culture of conspicuous consumption and other copy-cut life styles from the West, and Middle-East world.
As I mentioned above, because of the lack of basic human right the Oromoo as a nation has no formal indigenous institutions yet. Instead, the institutions are maintained by the Oromoo Gadaa fathers and mothers who have been serving as Oromo indigenous knowledge reserve as institution. . This means the Qubee generation scientific research and discoveries are highly dependent on the existence of Gadaa Oromoo fathers and mothers (abbootii Gadaa Oromoo) and time because if they die the institutions and knowledge will die with them. For many of them, a biological time is about running out now. One day they will leave us for good. So it is responsibilities and sacred duties of this generation to secure and backup these precious indigenous “documents” that had been inherited form the previous generations.
As JF Kennedy said, the purpose of education is to advance human knowledge and dissemination of truth. However, contrary he said, the education system in Ethiopia has been harboring ignorance, distortion and denial of the truth that effectively disabled the process of learning, thinking and bringing positive changes to our society. So I suggest to the new generation regardless of their ethnic and cultural background to use the best three doses of pills/prescription for ignorance, distortion and denial of history. They are: genuine education, genuine education, and genuine education (3-GE). Through genuine education one can learn the true essence of love (jaalala), which is unselfishness, the creator, and creatures, uumaa fi uumammaa.
Generally, indigenous knowledge (IK) are the outcome of true and genuine collective human experience. It could be knowledge about culture, tradition, history, philosophy, belief system, art, farming, biodiversity, medicine, family, economic distribution, etc. The Oromoo Gadaa System is one of such collective human experience that need to be learned as universal value to human society and pass down to the next generations.
The Predicaments of Indigenous Knowledge in Ethiopia Politically speaking, Ethiopia as a nation had never been colonized and maintained its independence while all African countries had been colonized by European states. To some extent, this is true. Practically, however, the Ethiopian Empire State had been constructed and maintained by European states and continued to operate under indirect-colonialism of Anglo-American and European States. Like all African Republics or States, the Ethiopia’s government structure, military structure, religious institutions, political and social, educational, and legal systems are highly influenced mainly by Anglo-American and European institutions including British, France, Italian, Germany, American, Japan, China, etc. Consequently, indigenous knowledge had been systematically marginalized and ignored, unfairly criticized as primitive, static and simple idea by semi-literate domestic elites or agents of exogenous institutions.
These exogenous institutions such as the Orthodox Coptic Church officials (clergy/priests) and collusion of feudal neftenyaa and self-serving local balabats in Ethiopia, for instance, had played a key role in dismantling indigenous institutions, discrediting and condemning indigenous knowledge and even blessing Menelik’s genocidal and unjust war against our people and indigenous people of the south. Here one must note that the local Oromoo balabats had played a primary role in sponsoring, defending and assigning a commanding site Oromoland to the Orthodox Churches in Oromiyaa today. In addition to the neftenyaa system, these social class is accountable historically for the decline of the Oromoo Gadaa System and underdevelopment of its Institutions. Beside this, at present the decedent of these social class still maintained their loyalty to the Orthodox Church and Ethiopia’s empire state. Some individuals even have been involving in the Oromoo liberation struggle by dressing a sheep skin to saboteur the genuine aspiration of Oromians for freedom and independence. This author suspect that this very social class had contributed to the weakness of Oromia liberation camp.
The Impacts of Church Education on Indigenous knowledge
The Orthodox Coptic church jealously dominated the education system in Ethiopia. The Orthodox Coptic Church in Ethiopia had provided training in reading and writing in Ge’ez and Amarigna (Amharic) at primary school level to limited areas and people of the country. To summarize the church education in Ethiopia: elementary pupils had to learn to read, write, and recite the Dawit Medgem (Psalms of David). There are 15 sections, called negus (kings), which normally took two years to master. Next they learned to sing kum zema (church hymns), which took four years, and msaewait zema (advanced singing), which took an additional year to learn. Liturgical dancing and systrum holding required three years. Qine (poetry) and law required five years to learn. The interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, as well as the Apostles’ Creed, took four years on average, while the interpretation of the works of learned monks and priests took three years. When a student knew the psalms by heart, he had mastered the “house of reading” and was now considered an elementary school graduate. As one can see there is no a single grain of indigenous knowledge or belief system had been taught by the Orthodox Church.
The Orthodox Coptic Tewahido Church is considered by government as indigenous institution, when it is imported and imposed on native culture. Both religions Christian and Islam were imported and imposed on native population, such as the early Christianized ethnic Tigray and Amhara and then ethnic Oromoo, Sidama, and other people of the south, by few clergies and foreign religious crusaders. These institutions had replaced the indigenous belief system, institutions and knowledge over time. As a result, the majority, if not the entire population, ethnic Tigray and Amhara believe that Bible is the source of their history and culture. As one can easily understand, the people of Tigray and Amhara have lived far more years than the bible does, which is two thousand years. As people who residing in East Africa, the Tigray and Amhara people must have had indigenous culture and knowledge. What are they?
Despite the claim of three thousand years history of civilization, Ethiopians exposed to non-church education or modern education in 1920s. The ministry of education established in 1930s. Secondary schools established in 1940s, and higher education, Addis Ababa University, established in 1960s. In similar way, the modern education system had also failed in teaching and conducting research on indigenous knowledge so as to integrate it into the modern education. As a result, creativity, inventions and innovations have seen as odd culture to our society. On the contrary, receiving aid, economic migration, conspicuous consumption of imported goods including education and dependency on Western advanced societies or institutions have become a culture.
Therefore, it is up to the Habesha (Tigre and Amhara), the Oromoo and other ethnic groups of the new generation to dig deep down to find out their respective indigenous knowledge that deep rooted in their culture and traditions and pass down from one generation to other generations by their native ancestors if any and re-evaluate the existing very controversial written history, which is biased and by large based on fiction history. The cycle of self-discrimination must end by the new generation. By doing this they can find shared human values that would allow them to live in peace without disrespecting one another as good neighbors and citizens of their respective nation. So one must understand that no one would agree on imported history that was written by the followers and supporters of Christianity crusaders, war lords, kings, dictators and agents of the Western discriminatory and racist institutions of the time as shared human value and history of our respective people in our time. The time and world have changed forever.
The present suspicion, political conflicts and all forms of problems in our region will not be solved without recognizing and applying indigenous knowledge. The lasting resolutions for the problems can be achieved if every member of our society or nation adults learn and teach their younger generation good social skills, which are critical to successfully functioning society. Basic social skills enable adults and children to know what to say, how to make good choices, and how to behave in adverse situations. The extent to which young people possess good social skills can influence their adult behavior in decision making, conflict management and problem solving. Social skills are also linked to the quality of the school environment. The Church and modern education in Ethiopia, unfortunately, had been denying members of our society these good basic skills such as respect, appreciation, empathy, apology, truthfulness, positive attitude about others, etc. Instead, the system allowed social ignorance such disrespect, occupational despise, ethnic chauvinism, fear, the divine right of the kings and honor for ruling class. As a result, the Ethiopian empire has produced highly educated class like Dr. Getachew Haile without basic and good social skills; it seems that he passed through poor socialization as one can understand the meaning of his name, ‘lord of …power’, which is false-self has given to him by his parents
and trying his best to make them proud by being discourteous and rude to the Oromoo people. Dr. Getachew Haile, be nice!
The black people or African descents are subject to institutional discrimination and racism more than any other races in the world including the holy land- Israel and Saud Arabia. Do you know why? The reasons can be many, but one of the reasons is imitation of ideas. The black people are the most imitating of other societies’ idea. They did not protect and develop their own indigenous institutions (political, religious, cultural and socio-economic institutions) to shape their lifestyle and influence others. No other nations are imitating Africans’ culture, religion, lifestyles but the Africans tend to imitate others about everything that life needs. Some African or extremists trying to be more imitator and more knowledgeable about the culture, religion and ideology than the original inventor or creator of the idea. It is understandable that human being has ability to imitate and all cultures imitate ideas from original culture. The question I would like ask the readers is why the changes are in one direction only. Why African descents imitate ideas of the other culture when the other culture do not imitate the African idea or world view?
For example, black Africans including Ethiopians has been pretending as if they have better known about the Jesus of Nazareth more than the Israelis and Prophet Muhammad more than the Arabs; Marxism and Leninism or communism more than Russians; democracy more than Americans and Western societies. These blind optimists about other’s idea are cynical at the same time about their own indigenous knowledge; they are willing to abuse, jail, torture and murder their own innocent people for the authenticity of imported ideas, religious and political ideology. In the case of Ethiopia, the king Menelik II and Yohanness II – holy war and wildish conquests were a case in point. They had imitated from the history of European middle-age idea of religious crusaders and empire builders. The Abyssinian kings had been acted as proxy war lords of European colonial powers and committed incalculable atrocity against the Oromo people and other black people in East Africa. In addition, these Abyssinian kingdom were one of the worst Africa’s kingdoms who sold Africans, their own race, to British, Arabs and other European white race for the exchange of European firearms to conquer the land of other nations and subjugate the people and build the empirical institutions based on European ideas and political model. What most disgracing is when people like Dr. Getachew Haile and his like trying to keep the truth elusive and misrepresent the history of the black people and glorifying the history of the White colonial proxy war lords like Menelik II as great black king, who was cowardly cut women’s breast, mutilate men’s hand and embarrassingly sold his own black race to the European white race.
In conclusion, the quest for truth shall continue by present and future Oromo generations. The root cause for conflicts in Africa is an imported knowledge and imitation of ideas. In many cases, imitation represent a false-self or an act to hiding a true-self. Discriminatory and racist attitude against black people had been partly brought up by European’s colonial power proxy war lords in Africa such as Menelik II of Abyssinia/Ethiopia kingdom. Although most black people tend to cherish and assimilate their cultural identity into the Middle-Eastern and Western cultural identity and ways of life, the very culture of the societies they imitating have been reciprocating or holding discrimination against them based on race, stereotypes and historical disadvantages. Institutional racism still exist and there are also significant number of individuals who think that Africans have not yet acquired culture and civilization. The imitation of others’ ideas, belief system and political institutions by Africans including my fellow Oromoo has kept the racist believes alive. It is suffice to mention the 2013 incidents against African immigrants in Saud Arabia and recently in Israel. The majority of Africans believed that embracing Christianity and Islam would lead to heaven via holy land. Unfortunately, it turned out differently; they end up in hell in the holy land. So, the lasting solution would be revitalizing indigenous knowledge and institutions that demands for real efforts, courage and sacrifices. As to the Oromo’s quest for indigenous knowledge and institutions, revitalization of the Gadaa Republic of Oromia and its institutions would be the lasting solution for century old colonial extraction, subjugation and embarrassment.
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* About the author: Iddoosaa Ejjetaa, Ph.D., native to Oromiyaa, Ethiopia. Independent and Naturalist Thinker; An activist and advocator for the revitalization of Authentic Oromummaa, Oromoo Indigenous knowledge and institutions, and for the formation of Biyyaa Abbaa Gadaa,Oromiyaa-The Gadaa Republic of Oromia.
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Picture 9: The 244 children who fled from Yabus to Damazin in December 1989 were quartered in tents on their arrival. The tents and other ORA properties including trucks and large amounts of food in store were confiscated by the Sudanese government in 1992 supporting the Tigrayan regime in Finfinnee (Addis Ababa). The tents were donated by the German Ministry for Development Aid. Photo Tarfa Dibaba
Picture 13: Some of the ORA teenagers in Bikoree, Sudan, having a good time together in 1990. This and the other pictures taken in exile show that that the children were well cared for by ORA. Photo: Tarfa Dibaba
Photo (Left) This photo is said to be that of Duula Tafarra, Saganta Usen, and Tolina Waaqjiraa. The person (Dhaabaa) who sent it me did not identify who is who in the photo. The only thing he said he knew is that the photo is that of the three boys taken together. I have included the picture here hoping that someone who knew them can help us to identify them.
Oromian Economist 
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