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ODUU GADDAA: OBBO DHAQQABOO EEBBAA DHALATANII WAGGAA 163 ISAANIITTI LUBBUN DHAN BOQOTAN. Oromo Elder Dhaqqaboo Eebbaa (1853-2015): The oldest man ever to have lived has died at age of 163. His eldest son Ahmed Dhaqqboo now at age of 128 is the oldest living person on earth.
This is the moment of deepest sorrow for Oromo people as they have lost their respected elder, the oldest and one of the richest library. The burial ceremony of Dhaqqaboo Eebbaa was held at his birth place in rural village of Dodolaa District in West Arsi Zone of Oromia State. Dhaqqaboo Eebbaa was born in 1853 in specific rural place called Serufta around Dodolaa town from his father Eebbaa Badhaaso and his mother Washo Kolocho. He passed away on May 10, 2015 at 11: 30 pm. Dhaqqaboo Eabbaa was dubbed by many as a living library of three his centuries with his old memories and knowledge of the social, economic and political history of the people and the country. He had witnessed major historical events in the Oromo nation and North East Africa. Obbo Dhaqqaboo Eebbaa had lived through independent Oromia in the second half of 19th century, witnessed the colonization of his country and nine Ethiopian empire regimes. His eldest son Ahmed Dhaqqboo is now the oldest living person, he is 128 years old. He considered his father as his best friend. Even though the world knows little about the legendary Oromo elder, Obbo Dhaqqaboo Eebbaa will be remembered in recorded Oromo history, by his villagers and the entire Oromo people forever. He is deeply missed. Rest in Peace! Biyyoon isinitti haa salphatu.
Part I 1 . Introduction
Election fever is gaining momentum in Ethiopia. It is ‘Election 2015’, the 5th general election since Ethiopia’s formal adoption of the more (or less) liberal constitution of 1995 that ended the hesitant ‘transition’ from the Derg’s military rule to a western-style representative democracy[1]. The projected aim of the transition was to liberalize and pluralize the politics, to reform and resuscitate the economy, to restructure the state (through democratization and decentralization), and to transform the hitherto tenuous state-society relations. Through the constitution, the regime provided itself the legal edifice on which to ensure that transitional project is attained and a liberal democracy (expressed through representative and participatory institutions) is formally instituted. In a gesture of transforming the state, the constitution recognized national diversity, legalized collective rights such as the right to self-determination[2], and institutionalized federal non-centralization. Having ostensibly demilitarized politics [3], electoral contestation became the formal mode of contending for political power. The election fever that is steadily gripping the nation now is the symptom of that contention.
Over the last few weeks, controversy has progressively raged over the politics and the logistics of the upcoming election. Decisions pertaining to recognition by the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) of political parties with the ‘right’ leadership [4], registration of ‘qualified’ candidates [5], and ensuring the proper adherence to the relevant rules of constitutional, electoral, and political party registration laws have provoked a lot of ire among some of the parties seeking to partake in the election. Rulings over who is qualified as a candidate and which party is qualified as a contestant have unleashed a conversation over the process and speculations over the outcome of the election. In the first election debate conducted live on public television, the major ideological fault lines between the three major political parties were outlined. In the same week, we heard that some of the parties (such as the Ethiopian Federal Democratic Unity Forum, alias Medrek in Amharic) were denied access to the state media (Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation, EBC) on the pretext that the parties’ criticism of the media’s bias towards the incumbent is an attempt to undermine the impartiality of the media. Their petition to the NEBE has not found a response yet. Not entirely unexpectedly, tension has started to build up.
As anyone familiar with Ethiopia and its histories knows, the tension around elections is only symptomatic of deeper issues that have roots in—but never contained by—the political contestations of the past. In this piece, I offer a reflection on what election means to the various sectors of the population in the Ethiopian polity in the light of that past. I will thus reflect on what election means to the incumbent, the opposition political parties, and to the electorate, north and south. Along the way, I will also reflect on the mood in the context of which the election takes place. By drawing historical parallels between 2015 and 1915 (historical moments when two dead leaders—Meles Zenawi and Menelik II, respectively -rule from the grave in spite of the place holders whose genealogies make them unlikely successors, namely Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and Emperor Eyasu II, alias Lij/Abeto Eyasu, respectively), I will point to the continuity in the nature of the State in which the election takes place, irrespective of the appearance of change. Lastly, I will offer my points on what is beyond winning and losing this particular election, and how it affects the nature of the Ethiopian state.
The starting point of this reflection is that election is a language. It is the new language one speaks in order to secure democratic legitimacy. Posited within the confines of liberal constitutionalism, it is a particular language with the idiom and vernacular of modern representative democracy. Whoever is proficient in this language technically ‘wins’ the election. In this piece, in a rather iterative manner, I reflect on the ‘facility’ or ‘proficiency’ of the contestants in this language within the context of Ethiopia in order to imagine what is beyond winning (or losing) this election.
The thrust of my argument is that there is much more work to do about the state than partaking in the motion of election. There is more to Ethiopia than mastering the language of election. I suggest that to EPRDF election is a mode of securing a technical legitimacy. To its adversaries, it is a mode of resistance to hegemonic oppression. Some of its adversaries resist its hegemonic position if only to replace it with their own. Others resist it and the State form it embodies and represents. For this latter group, the election is, more than anything else, a gesture of negating the status quo, it is a talking back to power, an utterance of societal pain long suppressed and contained. It is a way of sustaining a lamentation. It is yet another moment of reminding Ethiopia that all is not well. For the protagonists in this election saga, especially for the ruling EPRDF, the election is merely war by other means. As such, for EPRDF, it is a mode of entrenching its power by eliminating its opponents through the technology of election. Consequently, the election has little to do with the desired transformation of the state-society relations in Ethiopia.
As a result, I argue, there is little the election can do to tackle outstanding political issues that are contained in the unfinished business of state-building. In particular, there is little it can do to expand citizenship to the subject peoples of the wider South. EPRDF’s anti-democratic posture to disallow a political space where deeply political issues can be discussed (by reducing everything down to the technicalities of law and economic governance) is a proclamation of closure of politics by relegating the discussion to the realm of techniques. Election is thus reduced to a mode of enhancing what the French philosopher Michel Foucault calls ‘governmentality’, a technical-ideological apparatus of controlling and regulating the population by eliciting acquiescence in their own control and regulation. EPRDF’s adversaries, especially the north-central ethio-political class, also play their own role in this proclamation and enactment of closure of politics by aestheticizing a heavily contested political issue. As I shall argue in subsequent sections, they engage in exoticizing and aestheticizing an essentially political issue of the past and the future. They engage in a double movement that also politically demonizes – and excludes – the essentially political questions (such as the question of diversity [sameness and difference], historical political violence/injustice, misrecognition, inclusion-in-citizenship, and co-equal (re)founding of the polity. They thus aestheticize the inaugural violence by iconizing the leaders of the past through a raft of artistic products (images and lyrics, pictures and songs, etc) thereby rehabilitating them from the tyranny and oppression they represented, the tyranny and oppression they were once criticized for. At the same time, they demonize what could probably be the most important political question of modern Ethiopia—the question of diversity—by presenting it rather negatively as “politicized ethnicity.”
By so doing, i.e., by removing the important issues from the realm of the political to that of the aesthetic, they do their own bit of closing the political space for discussing the irreducibly political questions politically. The combined effect of these closures (by both groups)—born chiefly out of insecurity of EPRDF as a Government, only symptomatic of the greater insecurity of the ever more fragile Ethiopian State it runs, manages, and embodies—causes our judgement of the process and consequence of the election to be pessimistic. The insecurity of the ‘eternal kingdom’ assumed to have been established by Menelik, Haileselassie, and Mengistu; the insecurity born out of the incomplete nation-building project, prompts EPRDF’s opponents of the Amhara constituency to aspire for similar closure of the political space through aestheticization and exoticization of the infinitely political questions. 2. The Mood: Hope and Anticipation, or Angst and Despair?
Election is time-bound. Its temporality is its essence. The intensity or lack thereof is the function of its being limited in time. As a result, its process, outcome, and significance are dependent on the ‘political ecology’ of the time. It is dependent on what is ‘in the air’, what is troubling the polity, and what is exercising the large majority of the electorate. This is because election needs a particular kind of ‘democratic ambience’, as it were, a (more or less) festive atmosphere imbued with hope and anticipation (the subtext of which is fear and anxiety). Election has its own ‘mood’, sort of a national ‘political labor’. Understanding the mood – capturing the pulse of the polity in the electoral moment – helps us situate the election (the process, the result, and the context) in proper perspective. This underscores the supreme importance of a ‘right’ ‘political ecology’ that can engender hope (of winning) and of security (in the event of losing).
Hope and anxiety attend to all elections, the hope of winning and the angst of losing. However, in as much as possible, it is important that a proper balance is stricken between hope and fear, anticipation and despair. After all, the hope of renewal – the promise of exercising creative agency among the electorate – is an important ingredient of a healthy electoral democracy.
What attends Election 2015 in Ethiopia? Two areas of the public life of Ethiopia must be considered in order to map the electoral mood, namely the civic-political space for active citizens who can engage in politics on the one hand and the ‘nature’ of the state and its relation with the society on the other. 2.1 Civic-Political Space in Decline
The civic-political space has been a subject of controversy, especially since the 2005 election, the election that revealed not only the outer limits of the public sphere but also the foundational cracks in the State form in Ethiopia. In the wake of the 2005 election, the regime started to stiffen the rules of procedure in the parliament thereby limiting the discursive space even within the EPRDF-dominated parliament. That was followed by a raft of legislations on the civic/public space available for dissent, or its discursive and institutional articulation. These legislations constrained freedoms that are instrumental for, and constitutive of, democracy at a time. The Freedom of Mass Media and Access to Information Proclamation (Proclamation N0. 590/2008), the Anti-terrorism Proclamation (Proclamation No. 652/2009), and the Charities and Societies Proclamation (Proclamation No. 621.2009) were the three major legislative acts deployed by the Ethiopian government to (re)occupy the already limited space for political dissent and consequent pluralism. These laws, for all their preambular commitment to expand and implement constitutional right to freedom of expression, press and association rationalized and perfected the pre-existing streak noticed in the regime’s intolerance of expressed dissent. Self-censorship has become a way of being, a way of life, among journalists and other writers as a result. The prohibitive punishment/fines in the media and press laws and the expansion of the anti-terrorism law to press products (art 6 of Proc. 652/2009) [vi] have effectively muted an overt criticism. The extensive use of surveillance [vii], the blocking of several websites (perceived to be in opposition to the regime in power), jamming of other press/media outlets has contributed to the increasing undermining of the expression of robust dissent.
The challenge of financial self-sustenance faced by civil society organizations working on causes related to human rights, democracy, and conflict, among otbers, owing to the prohibition of external funding above the 10 % maximum has not only forced such bodies to close or re-organize themselves as purely humanitarian organizations or relocate themselves as foreign or ‘resident’ NGOs, it also severely limited their voice as an alternative articulation of socio-economic challenges of the people from the perspective of daily lived experience [viii]. The government increasingly became the only source of information on vital socio-economic and political issues of various sectors of the society.
The invocation of the anti-terrorism law for trivial reasons such as having a contact with foreign journalists, international non-governmental human rights organizations (such as Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch), or foreign diplomats and embassies has effectively smothered people into watching their contacts and relationships. People feel that their relationships and exchanges (physical and electronic) are monitored. The invocation of the anti-terrorism law in relation to the Muslim activists protesting government intervention in religious affairs [ix]and the ‘Zone 9’ [x] bloggers and journalists jailed and currently standing trial has unveiled to us how the law can be strategically deployed against those the government perceives as opponents. This and other cases have shown the extent to which one can freely and peacefully express dissent without harassment, intimidation, and the terror of standing trial under the anti-terrorism law.
The pattern of government denial of the right of assembly and peaceful political demonstrations, especially when organized by political groupings perceived as fierce opponents of the regime (such as the Semayawi Party), selective permission of such meetings to factions of parties the government seeks to weaken (e.g. the faction within Unity for Democracy and Justice, UDJ), denial of meetings even within the premises of private organizations such as hotels to some groups (e.g. UDJ at the Imperial Hotel, 2009), the constant outlawing of meetings and demonstrations by unreasonably exploiting the “notification” duty under the Freedom of Assembly Proclamation (Proclamation No-3/1991) – where the duty to notify the municipality is interpreted as the duty to seek and secure prior permission – have all contributed to the practical stifling of freedom of assembly and peaceful demonstration. Through this strategy – and the rhetoric of averting “street action” and “color revolutions” [xi] – the government has effectively silenced political protest to its decisions, policies, and laws. This in turn has weakened and subverted participatory democracy envisaged in the constitution (art 8(3)). In practice, such violation of the right to assembly and peaceful demonstration has been repeatedly witnessed in the Muslim protest to the government’s unconstitutional intervention in the choice of leadership of, and doctrines for, the Muslim population (since 2011).
Freedom of association of political parties has repeatedly been violated in the process of political party registration by the NEBE. The recent intervention by the NEBE to ‘recognize’ the leadership of factions within the UDJ and the All Ethiopian Unity Party (AEUP) is not only meddling with the internal issues of political parties, but also unconstitutionally limiting the freedom of association of members and their right to a choice of the leaders they deem fit to lead them.
Apart from this, one can say that there is a healthy ‘electoral climate’ only when – in addition to the right to vote and be elected – citizens have the right to administrative justice, i.e., the right of access to justice in a free, fair, and impartial court or tribunal, in the event that these rights are violated or threatened. The voter intimidation historically observed in the process of voter-registration by the kebeles (often suggesting possible deprivation of vital social and public services sought from local offices) are violative of the very basic political rights that are constitutive of the very essence of democratic practice. At times such intimidations tend to forget that their right to elect includes the freedom not to vote. They forget that in Ethiopia, voting is a right, not a duty.
The enhanced developmentalist gestures of the incumbent which views individual civil and political rights as less important in the face of the colossal “war on poverty”; the unabashed emphasis on growth (even in the Growth and Transformation Plan, GTP); its increasing turning away from its ‘original’ (1991) commitment to liberal policies (also charted out in the constitution); its continued neglect, or deliberate weakening, and strategic and manipulative use of democratic institutions (i.e., institutions of representation [House of Peoples’ Representatives, HPR, and House of Federation, HOF], empowerment [NEBE, Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Ombudsman], and of accountability and monitoring [e.g. the judiciary, Anti-corruption Commission, Auditor General] are not helping to create an environment conducive for a free and fair election. To that extent, there are complaints, grumblings, and disaffection among most of the opposition political actors who have a stake in the election. So, the rules and rulings around the process suggest that the mood is less than ideal. But a more complete account of the mood is revealed only when we examine the contradictions that come from the state form in Ethiopia. In the next sub-section [which will come in the form of a second instalment in this series of reflection around Elections 2015], I will turn to considering these contradictions that emanate from the state form and the constraints they impose on electoral democracy.
Endnote
*Tsegaye R Ararssa is a Constitutional lawyer currently in the process of completing his PhD studies at the University of Melbourne Law School. He can be contacted at tsegayer@gmail.com.
[1] The Transitional Charter of July 1991 starts with recognition of the supreme importance of the UDHR, especially civil and political rights such as freedom of expression, assembly, association. It explicitly made assertions about the need for comprehensive restructuring of the state by ensuring equality and sovereignty of the ‘nations, nationalities, and peoples” of Ethiopia and by foregrounding the right to self-determination as an organizing principle. It was negotiated principally among ethno-national liberation fronts (most centrally TPLF, OLF, EPLF but also others) who referred to themselves as “the peace-loving forces of Ethiopia”. See, Provisional Government of Ethiopia, ‘Transitional Period Charter,’ Negarit Gazetta, Proclamation No. 1/1991.
[2] Art 39 (1-3) entitles every “nation, nationality, and people” to the right to political, cultural, and economic self-determination.
[3] EPRDF was quick to work on disarming the army of the Derg and the fighters of the other liberation fronts that negotiated the Transition with it. It also proclaimed its TPLF fighters to serve as the Ethiopian Defence Force of the transitional period. The demobilization of some of the soldiers came later after the formal inauguration of the FDRE as per the Constitution. It is interesting that the first government-like institution set up everywhere immediately after the arrival of EPRDF on the scene was the “Peace and Stability Committees”. Most meetings it held in its attempt to build rapport with the people was invariably called “Peace and Democracy Conference”. The people who negotiated the Transitional Charter referred to themselves as “the peace Loving Forces of Ethiopia.” There was a rhetoric that privileged peace even in the leaders’ speeches/interviews on why relinquish Ethiopia’s right/interest over Eritrea without a fight. The climactic moment in this series of peace-venerating rhetoric came when a line is inserted even in the preamble of the FDRE Constitution to the effect that the constitution-makers are “determined to consolidate, as a lasting legacy, the peace and the prospect of a democratic order…” This flourish in rhetoric never matched with reality. The fact that TPLF’s army became the State’s national army and substantially remained to be so to date indicates not only the partisan nature of the army but also the fundamentally militarized nature of EPRDF’s politics that keeps a politicized guerilla fighters for a national army. Obviously, the needed separation of politics from (military) force in a democracy is absent in Ethiopia.
[4] The NEBE made a blunder around the election of the leadership of the All Ethiopian Unity p party (AEUP), the Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ).
[5] Some candidates of parties such as the UDJ and Semayawi (notably its leader Engineer Getinet Yilikal) were excluded allegedly because of the overcrowding of candidates that are running for elections in one electoral district.
[vi] Art 6 entitled “Encouragement of terrorism” reads as follows: “Whoever publishes or causes the publication of a statement that is likely to be understood by some or all of the members of the public to whom it is published as a direct or indirect encouragement or other inducement to them to the commission or preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism stipulated under article 3 of this proclamation is punishable with rigorous imprisonment from 10 to 20 years.” This article has been almost routinely (ab) used to arrest persons who run photocopy shops both in Addis Ababa and other towns.
[viii] The law on Charities and Societies limits the amount of foreign money that goes into the budget of an Ethiopian (activist) NGO to a maximum of 10 % of the total. The reason given is to limit an external influence on the local organization’s agenda of promoting human rights, democracy, peace and security, etc. In principle, the argument goes, these issues of governance are a matter under the sovereign jurisdiction of the government of Ethiopia and are not items to be shaped by financing external forces. In order to get more funding, one should be registered as a ‘resident’ or a foreign/international NGO who, if it seeks to work on issues of political governance (e.g. elections, democracy, human rights, conflict resolution, constitutionalism and rule of law, prisons, access to justice, minorities etc), should get a specific permission from the government. This has made it necessary for many of the NGOs to recast the focus of their work shifting mostly from human rights to humanitarian causes and their approach from human rights based approach (HRBA) to needs-based approach (NBA).
[ix] The Muslim activists have been protesting peacefully against the government’s interference in their religious affairs. They particularly called on the government to desist from assigning teachers and determining the content of the teachings to be delivered in Mosques. They also sought to exercise their right to select their own religious leaders without any influence by the government. After the arrest and indictment of the leaders of these protests (and those government claims are associated with them), the protestors continued to demonstrate demanding the release of their leaders. Their peaceful protest has been met by a series of violence, arrests, and various forms of intimidation by the government’s police and security forces. The arrested leaders have been tried for terrorism since. Their case has gone has been debated before regular and constitutional tribunals (CCI/HOF) and is even presented to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The Muslim protestors relentlessly insisted on a peaceful resistance throughout; when they are unlawfully forced to face trial, they tried to exhaust all the possible legal remedies both national and international with a hope that the government will have no excuse in accusing them of any form of violence let alone terrorism. By so doing, they are in effect putting the entire system on trial.
[x] In March 2014, six bloggers (whose blog is known as Zone 9) and three journalists were suddenly arrested and are now being tried for terrorism.
[xi] The term “Color Revolution” is often mockingly used in Ethiopia to invoke the memory of the Rose Revolution (of Georgia) and Orange Revolution (of Ukraine) and deny their possibility in Ethiopia. It is also used by EPRDF to suggest that, unlike the regimes in Georgia and Ukraine, they are too strong to be unseated by such street actions and unarmed/civilian struggles
Qaamni Qeerroo caasaa mootummaa keessaa fi kan magaalaa Naqamtee icciitii fi ijoo marii tikoota Wayyaanee kana akka saaxiletti, namooti lama man maqaan isaanii Yohaannis Abebee fi Beekkataa fi akkasumas barattoota keessaa basaasaa beekamaan Yuunibarsiitii Wallaggaa nama Tsaggaa Ashaabbir jedhamu ta’anii namooti shan waltajjicha kan geggeessan yeroo ta’u, walgahicha irratti kan akeekamee fi irratti mariyatamee kan murtaaye ukkamsitooti fi humni federaalaa uuffata sivilii uffatee uummata basaasus magaalaa Naqamtee fi Yuuniversitiilee irra akka tamsa’u irratti ta’uu Qeerroon saaxilee jira.
The Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC/Medrek) campaigning for the upcoming General Election (scheduled to be held on May 24, 2015) has continued in the State of Oromia. On Saturday, May 9, 2015, elder statesman Bulcha Demeksa and OFC Chairman Dr. Merera Gudina were in Naqamtee and Shashamane, respectively, to campaign for OFC with an unprecedented huge turnout at each location.
Naqamte Gadaa Otaa
Shashe Town
Over the last several weeks, the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC) has been criss-crossing Oromia to campaign for the upcoming General Election on May 24, 2015; despite intimidation and harassment of voters as well as candidates by the TPLF regime (as reported here: http://wp.me/p4JW8b-3d5), there has been a huge turnout at each campaign rally, including Ambo (as reported here: http://wp.me/p4JW8b-375)
Here are some photos from Adama (dated May 8, 2015), and Ginchi and Gedo from the last week.
UPDATED (May 9, 2015): The Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC/Medrek) campaigning for the upcoming General Election (scheduled to be held on May 24, 2015) has continued in the State of Oromia. On Saturday, May 9, 2015, elder statesman Bulcha Demeksa and OFC Chairman Dr. Merera Gudina were in Naqamtee and Shashamane, respectively, to campaign for OFC with an unprecedented huge turnout at each location.
UPDATED (May 11, 2015): The Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC/Medrek) campaign tour has continued in small and big towns in Oromia. Most recently, the campaign train made a stop at Dodola in central Oromia; yet again, the OFC rally drew a crowd of thousands of potential voters, who braved the constant harassment and intimidation of Ethiopia’s TPLF regime to express their solidarity with OFC/Medrek. It is to be noted that Dr. Beyene Petros of the Ethiopian Social Democratic Party (ESDP/Medrek) revealed once again the ongoing abuses by the TPLF regime on Medrek voters and candidates, as reported by OMN over the weekend: https://www.oromiamedia.org/2015/05/amharic-news-may-9-2015/
Dr. Beyene Petros of the Ethiopian Social Democratic Party (ESDP)/Medrek speaks about the unprecedented levels of intimidation and harassment his organization’s candidates are facing ahead of the May 2015 General Election (April 2015)
The greatest crisis facing Africa is a leadership crisis in all areas of people activity.In terms of natural resources, Africa is the world’s richest continent. It has 50% of the world’s gold, most of the world’s diamonds and chromium, 90% of the cobalt, 40% of the world’s potential hydroelectric power, 65% of the manganese, millions of acres of untilled farmland, as well as other natural resources. Yet, despite this vast resource the bulk of African people live as if they were citzens of deserts. Despite being home to millions of skilled and talented innovators, African leadership struggles to stimulate and retain it strongest resource — the people: They either live in unnecessary frustration, hopelessness and poverty, die of preventable disease, or run to the West to gain appreciation. The greatest crisis in Africa is not due to HIV, religion, or famine, or even war. Because all of those things are tied to leadership in some capacity. The failure to produce an African brand from the billions of tons of raw material Africa exports to the West, is primarily due to the Faustian, myopic, selfish, backward type of non-progressive leaders who are planted as candidates in post-colonial empires. Top traits are either naive, vision-less, proxy implants, opportunistic/parasitic and totally compromised.
“The Cheetah Generation refers to the new and angry generation of young African graduates and professionals, who look at African issues and problems from a totally different and unique perspective. They are dynamic, intellectually agile, and pragmatic. They may be the ‘restless generation’ but they are Africa’s new hope. They understand and stress transparency, accountability, human rights, and good governance. They also know that many of their current leaders are hopelessly corrupt and that their governments are contumaciously dysfunctional and commit flagitious human rights violations.” George Ayittey, the distingushed Ghanaian economist.
TALL ORDER: An extra 450 million jobs need to be created in the next 20 years to match expansion in the number of working-age people in the region.
Young people without opportunities are getting angry all over Africa – and there are hundreds of millions of them. (Photo/AFP).
PROTESTS from Burkina Faso to Burundi have been sparked by youthful populations with little hope of employment and by leaders who have in some cases ruled for decades.
The discontent, which began in Burkina Faso in October, spread to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in January, and has now crossed the continent to Burundi, prompting regional leaders to call an emergency meeting after two weeks of protests and at least 14 deaths. Mass demonstrations in Burkina Faso ended Blaise Compaore’s 27 years in power.
“Underpinning a lot of these protests is anger about stalled development, rising food prices and cutting fuel subsidies,” Clive Gabay, an expert on African politics at the Queen Mary University of London, said. “You have this youthful, unemployed population that has been sidelined.”
While sub-Saharan Africa has grown faster than every region except developing Asia in the past 10 years, there aren’t enough jobs for the 1 billion people on the continent. An extra 450 million jobs need to be created in the next 20 years to match the expansion in the number of working-age people in the region, the International Monetary Fund said last month.
About 40% of people in Africa are under 15 years old, the most of any region, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The unemployment rate for people 15 to 25 years old living in Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura, is three times higher than the rest of the working population, according to the African Development Bank (AfDB).
Rwanda President Paul Kagame has warned that the violence in neighbouring Burundi threatens stability in East Africa. Youth have led two weeks of protests to prevent President Pierre Nkurunziza from seeking a third term in office next month. The Constitutional Court approved his request, despite the opposition claiming it violates a 15-year-old peace agreement that sets a two-term limit.
Protest risk
The nations that will likely watch closely what happens in Burundi are those with elections scheduled in the next two years, Yolande Bouka, a researcher on conflict prevention at the Institute for Security Studies in Johannesburg, said. Congo, Rwanda and Tanzania and Uganda all have polls during that period.
There is “serious discontent with the type of governance offered by the leaders,” Bouka said. Given the large youth population and unemployment rate “it is not surprising that people take the street to address unresponsive government.”
Burundi ranks eighth-lowest on the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures indicators such as income, child mortality and education. Congo is second-to-last on the 190-member list.
“In many countries it’s a risky thing to go on a protest and you’re not going to risk getting arrested or shot unless there’s something real at stake,” Gabay said. “There’s something else that’s propelling people onto the street and for me they’re economic issues.”
https://magic.piktochart.com/embed/6055699-africa-bombUsing social media like Twitter and Facebook, young activists can mobilise faster than in years gone by and can collaborate across borders. The movements in Congo and Burkina Faso draw inspiration from Senegalese artists, who began protests in 2011 against power outages. The Senegalese movement was key in mobilising youth to vote President Abdoulaye Wade, who had ruled for 12 years, out of power a year later.
Demonstrations erupted in Congo in January when lawmakers tried to change electoral laws in a way that could have delayed elections. That would have extended the 14-year rule of President Joseph Kabila, who took over when his father was assassinated in 2001.
Congolese activists met with artists and musicians from Senegal and Burkina Faso in March. The police arrested them in the Congolese capital and accused them of “promoting violence.” Kabila, who faced criticism from Human Rights Watch, said he will not run for office next year.
Presidents for life
While there are countries in sub-Saharan Africa with leaders who have been in power for more than three decades, including Zimbabwe, Angola and Equatorial Guinea, political opposition there says they are suppressed.
Rwanda’s Kagame, who has been president since 2000, also hasn’t faced popular opposition as he says he is open to staying another term. Parliament is reviewing a petition signed by 2 million people who support changing the constitution to allow for a third term.
“African people are tired of presidents who aren’t delivering to their people and they’re tired of presidents who want to stay for life,” Thierry Vircoulon, Central Africa director for the International Crisis Group, said by phone. “There’s a sort of exasperation because governments aren’t delivering.”
-With assistance from David Malingha Doya in Nairobi and Michael J. Kavanagh in Kinshasa.
The following is a statement from the Oromo Community of Minnesota.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
94 rue de Montbrillant
Geneva, Switzerland
Subject: Urgent Appeal on Behalf of Oromo Refugees Stranded in Yemen
The Oromo Community of Minnesota (OCM) is sending an urgent appeal to all governmental, non-governmental and UN humanitarian agencies, on behalf of Oromo refugees stranded in Yemen due to the ongoing fighting in that country.
The Oromo in Minnesota, the largest Oromo community outside East Africa, is following the plight of refugees in Yemen with great trepidation. Our compatriots make the difficult decision to flee from their beloved homeland due to rampant and persistent persecution by successive Ethiopian regimes. Their choices are either to stay in their country and remain silent over the daily injustices or speak up and get sent to prisons for the simple reason of asserting their inalienable rights; dare to oppose violations of human rights and face disappearance, long incarceration without trial, and extra-judicially killings simply because, to use the words of Amnesty international’s recent report, they are Oromo.
These refugees had to cross through harsh environments to get to the Gulf of Aden and then board overcrowded boats. They took these risky steps to escape more serious dangers at home. As the situation in Yemen deteriorates, most of the Yemenis have moved out to the relative safety of the countryside, while other refugees have left to other countries. The only helpless ones still stranded in urban centers are Oromo refugees. We are gravely concerned for their safety.
Our urgent appeal is for the protection of their critically endangered lives based on humanitarian grounds and their evacuation to a safer country. We humbly request that repatriation to Ethiopia not be an option as they are going to face persecution by the Ethiopian government, which is what drove them to make the excruciating choice of becoming refugees in the first place.
Therefore, the Oromo Community of Minnesota is appealing to all humanitarian agencies and all individuals of goodwill to do all things in their means to assist our brothers and sisters caught up in the present tragic situation in Yemen. Our community is ready and on standby to cooperate with humanitarian agencies in their concerted efforts to save the lives of our people.
Sincerely,
The Oromo Community of Minnesota
CC:
– International Organization for Migration
– International Red Cross and Crescent Societies
– American Refugee Committee
– European Union
– US Department of State Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration
– American Red Cross Society
– MN Congressional Delegation
– Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton
‘Dilute the vote’:- Despite the large number of parties registered, the opposition alleges many are allied with the ruling party.
“No more than two to three parties are real opposition parties. The others don’t run to win, their role is to dilute the vote for the opposition,” Merera Gudina, associate professor of political science at Addis Ababa University and a leading opposition figure, told Al Jazeera.
Elections: Development and democracy debate ahead of Ethiopia vote
Opposition critics say May 24 elections will not be free and fair, but the government praises the democratic climate.
If Ethiopians ever possessed a strong desire to express their political views through the ballot, that sentiment seems to have dwindled in the run-up to national elections on May 24.
One 28-year-old student, who requested anonymity fearing reprisals, shrugged at the thought of the upcoming vote.
“To say we have elections, there have to be real alternatives,” he said. “This election is just so we can tell Western governments we are a democratic country,” the finance and accounting master’s degree student told Al Jazeera at Addis Ababa University’s Siddist Kilo campus.
Such views are not uncommon among the electorate and opposition members in the capital, many of whom have dismissed the upcoming vote as a formality.
The results of the 2010 election left the opposition with a single seat in the 547-seat parliament, and afterwards the EU said Ethiopia’s electoral process failed to create “a level playing field for political parties“.
It wasn’t always this way.
In 2005, the then high-school student took part in political rallies in support of the Oromo National Congress Party running under one of the main opposition coalitions, the United Ethiopian Democratic Front.
Back then, he said, the opposition was strong and united, and people thought supporting it would bear fruit.
In the election that year – preceded by a relatively open political climate – the opposition surprised the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) by taking 31 percent of parliamentary seats.
Professor Beyene Beyene Petros [Simona Foltyn/Al Jazeera]
However, the aftermath of the vote was marked by mass arrests of student protesters and opposition leaders.
The student told Al Jazeera he was detained for months, a fate he shared with thousands of students who took to the streets.
The country’s controversial 2009 anti-terrorism proclamation has been criticised for its broad application to journalists and opposition members in the run-up to this year’s vote, including six “Zone9” bloggers currently on trial for terrorism-related charges.
Registration complaints
According to Ethiopia’s National Electoral Board, 47 parties and 5,819 candidates are contesting the ballot for the national parliament and the regional councils.
The ruling party has fielded 501 candidates for the 547-seat parliament, followed by the Ethiopia Federal Democratic Union Form (MEDREK) and the Blue Party with 270 and 139 candidates, respectively.
Opposition members complain that navigating the political landscape ahead of the election has proven difficult.
“We are more consolidated and better positioned compared to previous elections, but the space is more closed,” Professor Beyene Petros, chair of the centre-left MEDREK, told Al Jazeera.
Both MEDREK and the Blue Party have also cited difficulties registering candidates.
Blue Party chairman Yilkal Getent [Simona Foltyn/Al Jazeera]
The Blue Party’s chairman said more than half of the party’s 380 registered candidates were removed from the party list in February on administrative grounds.
“This is politically motivated to hinder Blue Party activities. The electoral board is not independent,” Yilkal Getent told Al Jazeera.
The cancellation of candidates, Getent said, has thwarted the party’s ability to mobilise voters through ongoing political debates aired on state media, as time allocations are determined based on the number of candidates.
The Blue Party considers itself centre-right and wants to appeal to the country’s young electorate, but government officials dismiss it as a far-right movement.
The government also accused the Blue Party of inciting violence last month at a government-organised rally in Addis Ababa following the killing of Ethiopian migrantsin Libya by ISIL – allegations the party’s leaders dismissed.
‘Dilute the vote’:- Despite the large number of parties registered, the opposition alleges many are allied with the ruling party.
“No more than two to three parties are real opposition parties. The others don’t run to win, their role is to dilute the vote for the opposition,” Merera Gudina, associate professor of political science at Addis Ababa University and a leading opposition figure, told Al Jazeera.
Merera Gudina [Simona Foltyn]
Some also criticised the voter registration process that ended in February, allegedly covering more than 80 percent of the eligible electorate.
Selam Gebrehiwot, a 19-year-old philosophy student, said the government is pressuring voters by tying registration to government services.
“The officials came to my house to give me the registration card although I didn’t ask for it. I was scared, so I took the card.”
The deputy chairman of the National Election Board, Addisu Gebreigzabhier, denied such allegations.
“We are just doing civic education,” Gebreigzabhier said. “The high voter registration is a result of the electorate’s desire to exercise their democratic rights.”
The pre-election process, he added, has been professionally run according to the country’s electoral laws and has been “to the satisfaction of all parties”.
Development first, democracy later
Yohannis Getachew, a 32-year-old taxi driver in Addis Ababa, has been following the ongoing political debates on the radio. He said the opposition has failed to present a convincing alternative.
“At least the government is building roads and railways. I think that’s good. I don’t know what the opposition would do,” said Getachew.
Addisu Gebreigzabhier [Simona Foltyn]
The ruling party’s growth and transformation plan has resulted indouble-digit economic growth over the past five years.
Government officials often cite EPRDF’s economic track record as its main source of voter support.
“It’s very difficult for any party to come up with an idea that can match an 11 percent growth rate,” said Ganenu Asefa, a political adviser at the Government Office for Communication Affairs.
Opposition parties, however, say that growth has benefited only a small elite aligned with the ruling party.
“The so-called growth agenda has been impressing the foreigners, not the citizens,” Professor Gudina, whose Oromo Federalist Congress party runs under MEDREK’s ticket, told Al Jazeera.
“Development without democracy is very difficult to sustain,” he added.
The government Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP) – characterised by state intervention in the economy as well as massive public investments in infrastructure – aims to turn Ethiopia into a middle-income country by 2025.
International institutions have largely praised the EPRDF’s growth agenda.
“The targets they set in the GTP were very ambitious, and even if they achieve 75 percent of those targets, it will be a tremendous achievement for a country coming from such a low base,” said the World Bank’s country director for Ethiopia, Guang Z Chen.
Chen said in order to sustain strong growth going forward, the government will need to make policy adjustments so as to stimulate the industrial sector, which currently contributes only 12 percent to the GDP.
With urbanisation advancing at twice the rate of overall population growth, job creation for Ethiopia’s idle urban youth is another priority. Analysts say although the government has recognised the need for structural reform, corruption and insufficient technical capacity could hamper its ability to manage the process. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/04/confidence-ethiopia-electoral-process-slumps-150424102856756.html
Oromia Support Group Australia Appeal for Urgent Action:
To: Committee on Enforced Disappearances and Committee against Torture
Human Rights Treaties Division (HRTD)
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
Palais Wilson – 52, rue des Pâquis
CH-1201 Geneva (Switzerland)
Ethiopia: Kidnapped and disappearance of Oromo civilians Magarsa Mashsha And Urgessa Damana:
Oromia Support Group Australia Inc. (OSGA) expresses its deep concern regarding the kidnapping a nd disappear an ce of two Oromo civilians by the Ethiopian security forces. Mr Magarsa Mashasha Ayansa was kidnapped and diapere d on April 23rd, 7pm local tim e while Urgessa Damana was on May 4th, 2015. Mr Magarsa, community health worker, a student of Ambo University is the local area resident. He was kidnapped by Ethiopian security forces from the country’s central city Fifinna (Addis Ababa) – Bole area – while he was on a trip for his personal business. In a similar situation, Mr Urgessa Damana a former Rift Valley University Student and resident of Ambo town also captured on 4th of May 2015 by Ethiopian security forces. Since then the whereabouts of theses Oromo civilians remained unknown.
OSGA believes that th e Ethiopian government conduct violated the fundamental rights. The right to freedom from torture and the UN Body of Principles for the Protection of All Per sons under Any Form of Detention and Imprisonment including the UN Standard Minimum Treatment of Prisoners is entirely denied. We are concerned that this pattern will continue to worsen.
We respectfully believe that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) – Human Rights Treaties Division (HRTD) has a duty to use its diplomatic relationships with the reciprocal expectation of protecting human rights and legitimate democratic governance. These accusations reveal serious violations of human rights and legal process, and without external accountability, many vulnerable people will suffer in the country.
We, therefore, urge you to:
1. Request the Ethiopian Government to reveal the whereabouts of these two Oromo civilians and immediate and unconditional release of them including all
political prisoners under their captivity.
2. Request to investigate, amongst other things, actions taken by the Ethiopian
Government security forces in the state of Oromia and the suffering of Oromo
civilians in hundreds of official and hidden torture chambers.
3. Raise this case with the international community and other relevant
United Nation bodies. Stress the righ t to remedy, restitution,
compensation, non-repetition, and punishment of the perpetrators, in line
with the UN Guidelines on the right to treat.
We denounce the attacks on peoples who are exercising their fundamental and democratic rights.
Thanks for considering of OSGA appeal
Oromia Support Group Australia
More than 50 Oromo students arrested by Ethiopia’s tyrannic TPLF regime in Ambo, Oromia; 20 being tortured
The following is a statement from the Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA).
——-
Ethiopia: The Endless Violence against Oromo Nationals Continues
Fear of Torture | HRLHA Urgent Action
For Immediate Release
May 7, 2015
Harassment and intimidation through arbitrary arrests, kidnappings and disappearances have continued unabated in Ambo and the surrounding areas against Oromo youth and intellectuals since the crackdown of last year (April 2014), when more than 79 Oromos, mostly youth, were killed by members of the federal security force.
According to HRLHA correspondents in Ambo, the major targets of this most recent government-sponsored violence were Ambo University and high schools Oromo students in Ambo town. In this incident, which started on April 20, 2015, more than 50 university and high school students were arrested; more than 20 were severely beaten by the security force and taken to the Ambo General Hospital for treatment.
Although it has been difficult to identify everyone by their names, HRLHA correspondents have confirmed that the following were among the arrestees:
Those who were badly beaten and are being hospitalized in the Ambo General Hospital:
According to HRLHA reporters, the arrests were made to clear out supporters and members of the other political organizations running for the 5th General Election to be held May 24, 2015. The EPRDF, led by the late Meles Zenawi, claimed victory in the General Elections of 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010. The TPLF/EPRDF government of Ethiopia has started a campaign of intimidation against its opponents. Extrajudicial arrests and imprisonments, particularly in the regional state of Oromia, the most populous region in the country, began late October 2014.
The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA) expresses its deep concern over the safety and well-being of these Oromo nationals who have been arrested without any court warrant, and are being held at police stations and unknown detention centers. The Ethiopian government has a well documented record of gross and flagrant violations of human rights, including the torturing of its own citizens, who were suspected of supporting, sympathizing with and/or being members of the opposition political organizations. There have been credible reports of physical and psychological abuses committed against individuals in Ethiopia’s official prisons and other secret detention centers.
HRLHA calls upon governments of the West, all local, regional and international human rights agencies to join hands and demand the immediate halt to such extrajudicial actions against one’s own citizens, and the unconditional release of the detainees.
RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to the Ethiopian Government and its officials as swiftly as possible, written in English, Ahmaric, or your own language. The following are suggested:
– Indicate your concern about citizens being tortured in different detention centers, including the infamous Ma’ikelawi Central Investigation Office; and calling for their immediate and unconditional release;
– Urge the Ethiopian authorities to ensure that detainees will be treated in accordance with the regional and international standards on the treatment of prisoners, and that their whereabouts be disclosed, and
– Make sure the coming May 24, 2015 election is fair and free
My Home, My Land is a graphic representation of much of the Oakland Institute’s work on land grabs. Illustrated by the Institute’s Intern Scholar, Abner Hauge, this publication dismantles the many myths promoted by so-called donor countries, development agencies, and corporations about the positive effects of foreign direct investments through large-scale land acquisitions.
Over the past seven years, the Oakland Institute has exposed the actual impact of the land grabs on indigenous, pastoralist, and smallholder farming families around the world. The powerful illustrations of My Home, My Land remind us of the beauty and complexity of the world’s ecosystems and indigenous cultures, and call upon us to take action now to stop exploitative land grabs internationally. My Home, My Land
Spring equinox known as Irreecha Arfaasaa in Oromo culture colorfully celebrated in Oromia on 5th April 2015. Dressed in cultural costumes, Oromians revel in the return of spring by visiting the ancient sites including mount Furii in Central Oromia.
Ayyaani Irreecha Arfaasaa Oromoo haala ho’aa fi gammachiisaan Dilabata Ebla 5, bara 2015 Tulluu Furii irraatti kabajamee oole. Tulluun furii Tulluuwwaan Ulfoo Oromoon qabu keessaa ishee tokkodha. Guyyaa kana Waaqeffattoonni fi jiraatonni Magaalaa Finfinnee, Sabbataa fi Naannawaa ishee Irrati argamanii Haala Addaan Kabajameera.
Irreecha Arfaasaa Oromoo, Oromia, 5th April 2015. Spring Celebration. Celebration of Spring equinox in Oromo Culture.
Oromo culture from ancient to present, Irrechaa time
Oromo nation and Gadaa system
Please do not call the Oromo people (the Oromians) a tribe and by extension all African nations and nationalities:
You know Why?
Read the following: What Achebe wrote referring to his Igbo people is equally applicable to the Oromo.
Chinua Achebe the renowned African novelist and poet, the author of Things fall apart, the best known and best selling novel ever in his book Home and exile (Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.3-5) says the following:
“The Igbo people of south eastern Nigeria are more than ten million and must be accounted one of the major peoples of Africa. Conventional practice would call them a tribe, but I no longer follow that convention. I call them a nation. ‘Here we go again!,’ You may be thinking. Well, let me explain. My Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines tribe as follows: ‘group of people (esp. primitive) families or communities linked by social , religious or blood ties and usually having a common culture and dialect and a recognized leader.’ If we apply the different criteria of this definition to Igbo people we will come up with the following results:
a. Igbo people are not primitive; if we were I would not be offering this distinguished lecture, or would I?;
b. Igbo people are not linked by blood ties, although they may share many cultural traits;
c. Igbo people do not speak one dialect; they speak one language which has scores of major and minor dialects;
d. and as for having one recognized leader, Igbo people would regard the absence of such a recognized leader as the very defining principle of their social and political identity.
Therefore, all in all, Igbo people would score very poorly indeed on the Oxford dictionary test for tribe.
My little Oxford dictionary defines nation as, ‘ a community of people of mainly of common descent, history or language, etc, forming a state or inhabiting a territory. This may not be a perfect fit for the Igbo, but it is close. In addition I like it because, unlike the word tribe, which was given to me, nation is not loaded or derogatory, and there is really no good reason to continue answering a derogatory name simply because somebody has given it to you.”
We see the word everywhere: throughout news reports of African struggles, in old films and on the latest television shows. You’ve probably even heard it used in a recent class covering topics related to history or anthropology.
“Tribe” has become a well-known, frequently used word to describe a particular group of people, specifically within a non-Western nation. The word seems to predominantly flood media outlets when an African ethnic group is involved in conflict or famine.
According to the Oxford Dictionaries’ newest definition of the word, a tribe is described as, “A social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader.”
But what exactly are we implying when we use the word “tribe?” In an African context, when did this word originate and what words can we use as alternates?
Assan Sarr, assistant professor of history at Ohio University, says the word tribe first began spreading throughout Africa during the Scramble for Africa, or the period of European colonization of the continent.
“For much of Africa it seems that the word tribe became associated with the continent more during the 19th century, which means that it coincided with European imperialism,” Sarr says. “So, for Africans, the use of the word is really wrapped up in colonialism and that is one of the major reasons why Africans, or scholars who work on Africa, do not prefer the use of the term tribe to describe Africans.”
With a powerful history and past, the word “tribe” reflects social theories of the 19th century regarding stages of evolution and primitivism.
Even today, many negative connotations and falsities have continued with the use of the term to describe certain peoples within continents like Africa. The fallacies provoked by this pejorative language can include visuals of ethnic groups as clusters of half naked, barbarous, uncivilized and uneducated individuals with long feathers in their hair or spears in hand.
Definitions of the word also seem to point toward a society that exists outside of the state, one that is simple, small and static, and without the same structure as that which may be found in other complex societies and civilizations.
Sarr says the discrepancies are easily noticeable when comparing a commonly labeled tribal group, such as the Igbo, with that of Flemings, or the Flemish. The Igbo and Flemings are similarly categorized by their language and culture, and the Igbo are actually drastically greater in size — yet only the Igbo are considered a tribe.
“You don’t hear of the Irish tribe, or the Italian tribe, or the Spanish tribe. It’s always the various Arab tribes, or the Indian tribes, or the African tribes and that, for me, is one of the most potent issues that we need to be aware of. Here we are essentializing these people, we’re making them look distinctive,” Sarr says. “You are using it to refer to a group of people that share a certain historical experience, certain cultural traits, a language. This seems to me to be the perfect definition of an ethnic group, so why use the word tribe?”
Americans and Westerners are not the only people using this term, as some Africans refer to themselves as a part of a tribe. However, Sarr says that Africans do not use this word with the same assumptions and implications as those who brought it to the continent in the 19th century, or as those who may use it today in Westernized states.
In fact, as mentioned in Talking About Tribe by Africa Action, when some Africans are taught English, they are told that the correct, recognizable word to describe their ethnic group is “tribe.” In their own language, such as Zulu, the word used to describe their ethnic group actually translates to “people” or “nation.”
People and nation are two alternatives of tribe that can also be used in English to portray these multifaceted groups. Using the term “ethnic group” is also acceptable, or just simply calling them by their names – the Mende, the Wolof, the Hausa and so on.
“If they call themselves Igbo that means that word itself has a cultural meaning that the people themselves can associate with, rather than this foreign concept, this idea, that is used by others to describe them that does not capture all of their complex sets of ideas and histories and relationships,” Sarr says.
Using words like tribe and continuing to view places such as Africa as one place with one culture and one type of people is common, yet very detrimental. It is vital to be conscious of the history of the language we are using, and what our words may be negatively implying or stereotyping.
“How do we talk about Africa in a more intelligent, culturally sensitive, and helpful way? It’s this idea of unpacking all of the things that one acquired and grew up with,” Sarr says. “You have all these assumptions, these Eurocentric views, but once you start unpacking that and seeing that this is not true, then you begin to see some real interesting facts about the world.”
There’s always going to be space for reading, curating and cheering on others’ work. But there should also be a space for building on it and creating stuff of one’s own. Each of us has something to say, and we have the responsibility and privilege of adding to the discourse. It’s up to us to find and nurture the right balance and feel inspired by—not intimidated by–the work that others do. After all, everything is a remix.
Oromo historian Obbo Edao Boru narrates the life of Badhoo Dachaasaa and Muhe Abdo. Muhe Abdo was one of Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) senior leaders and founders. It was Muhe Abdo who wrote the first OLF manifesto.
Badho Dachaasaa was the first to join the Oromo Liberation armed struggle lead by Jarraa Abbaa Gadaa, Baaro Tumsaa and Lenchoo Lataa.
Hayyuun seena Obbo Edao Boru akka jedhanitti, Muhe Abdo warra ABO dhaabanii fi calqaba ogganuun nama tajaalilan keesa isa tokko. Labsa ABO calqbaa kan barreesse Muhe Abdo akka ta’e Obbo Edao Boru ibsan. Badhoo Dachaasaa sabboontota Oromoo calqaba WBO seenani qabsoo geggeesan keessa isa tokko.
Mr. António Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees
Case Postale 2500 CH-1211 Genève 2 Dépôt Switzerland
Your Excellency Mr. Guterres,
The Board of Directors of the Macha-Tulama Association, USA, is writing this urgent letter to bring to your attention about the suffering of thousands of Oromo refugees and other nationals in Yemen, South Africa, Libya as well as in the Middle East and Africa. Among these refugees were individuals who were killed or beheaded by terrorists and other criminal elements. Furthermore, the most vulnerable elements of these refugees such as the sick, women, children and elderly are dying every day. At this moment no calling is more urgent and noble and no responsibility greater for the leadership of UNHCR than trying its very best for saving the lives of thousands of Oromo refugees and others who are trapped among warring factions in Yemen and attacked by terrorists in Libya and burned by criminals in South Africa.
The Macha-Tulama Association (MTA) is a non-profit organization legally registered in the United States of America for advancing the objective for which the main MTA was established in Oromia (Ethiopia) in 1963. For your information, the Oromo constitute the single largest national group in Ethiopia. And yet, they are political minority in that country. Consequently, successive Ethiopian governments, including the present one, have banned MTA, the only civic institution of the Oromo people in the Ethiopian Empire. The MTA envisioned mobilizing Oromo citizens for fighting illiteracy, diseases, constructing schools, building roads and clinics, promoting Oromo self-consciousness, and reviving Oromo language, culture and history. It also struggled to restore the human dignity and inalienable rights of the Oromo people that have been suppressed by successive Ethiopian regimes.
Continuing the policies of the previous regimes of Ethiopia, the current minority Ethiopian government has intensified political repression as well as land-grabbing and transferring other economic resources of the Oromo and other peoples to the current government officials, their supporters and foreign corporations. It is the Ethiopian government’s policy of illegal land grabbing and political persecution of the Oromo and others that have forced the young, old, women and children to flee from their fatherland and get exposed to dangerous conditions in foreign lands. Oromo refugees and other nationals who have been forced to leave their homeland by the political and economic repression of the current minority Ethiopian government are exposed to gross human rights violations and terrorism. These refugees have been forced to flee from their homeland in order to seek protection from persecution, arbitrary imprisonment, torture and extra-judicial killings because of their ethno-national and religious identities, political opinions and their economic resources. According to Amnesty International report, entitled ‘Because I am Oromo: Sweeping Repression in the Oromia Region of Ethiopia, between 2011 and 2014 at least 5000 Oromo were arrested, tortured, and faced extra-judicial executions because of being Oromo, and for also peacefully demonstrating against the regime’s land grabbing policies and the so-called Addis Ababa Master Plan that has been intended to evict millions of Oromo farmers from their prime land around Addis Ababa (Finfinnee), the capital city of the Ethiopian Empire.
Unfortunately, global powers and international financial institutions indirectly finance the gross violations of human rights of the Oromo and other people claiming that the current minority Ethiopian government is “democratic” and promotes “development.” For the Oromo and other people who have been terrorized and evicted from their ancestral lands, the claims of democracy and development are just propaganda ploys. In fact, the policies of this dictatorial regime are exposing the Oromo and others to unimaginable misery. When the people have resisted illegal removal from their ancestral lands, the current Ethiopian government’s police force and soldiers have beaten and detained them without trial, and many have been killed. It was for the purpose of saving their lives that thousands of Oromo and others have fled from Ethiopia to foreign lands. However, those who fled to South Africa, Yemen and Libya have faced torture, looting, and burning; they have been also beheaded, raped, tortured and killed by criminal elements and extremists. (Please see the following sites and videos for further information). http://www.ayyaantuu.net/ethiopia-muslim-martyr-among-those-killed-by-isis/; http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/20/south-africa-xenophobic-violencemigrant-workers-apartheid; http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/terrorism-security/2015/0420/Islamic-Statemurders-30-African-migrants-in-Libya-while-up-to-700-died-off-coast-video
Particularly, there are thousands Oromo refugees in Yemen alone in areas including Sana, Eden and other refugee camps. The current political crises and turmoil in Yemen has put the lives of these refugees in a very dangerous condition. These refugees are trapped among warring factions without any help from international and regional organizations such as yours. Many of these refugees have been raped, imprisoned, wounded or killed. They are also exposed to terrorists, fundamentalists, slavers and human traffickers. We are gravely concerned about the deteriorating conditions of Oromo and other refugees in Yemen, South Africa and Libya. These refugees are concentrated in camps and other places without adequate food, shelter and medical services. Therefore, we appeal to the UNHCR and your leadership to take the following urgent actions:
• First, we request that the UNHCR demand that the governments in Yemen, Libya and South Africa provide protection for Oromo and other refugees who have sought protection and safety in their countries.
• Second, we request that the UNHCR provide material support urgently for those Oromo refugees and others who are trapped among warring factions, especially in Yemen.
• Third, we appeal to the UNHCR to arrange suitable conditions with other countries for these refugees to have an opportunity for permanent settlement in third countries.
• Fourth, we request that the UNHCR seeks permanent solutions through the United Nations for eliminating political and economic conditions that have produced tens of thousands of Oromo and other refugees from Ethiopia.
• Fifth, we request that the UNHCR persuade big powers and international financial institutions not to finance the Ethiopian government’s policy of land grabbing, which has evicted tens of thousands of Oromo nationals and others from their ancestral lands.
We believe that as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the principal voice on refugee issues, you have an extraordinary opportunity to alleviate the incredible human sufferings of the Oromo and other refugees in Yemen, Libya and South Africa and in other countries. We urgently request you to take a concrete measure that will save the lives of Oromo and other refugees who are trapped among warring factions in Yemen. Additionally we request you to urge the government officials of Libya and South Africa to protect Oromo and other nationals in their countries. Finally, we thank you for your interest in the wellbeing of the Oromo and other refugees from Ethiopia and for taking concrete actions to protect them.
Sincerely,
Abera Tefera,
For the Board of Directors of the Macha-Tulama Association, USA
By Felix Horne, Horn of Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Since the last election, the ruling party has exerted more control and increased its repression of basic liberties.
Dissent of any type, particularly in rural areas, is dealt with harshly. The long-standing 5:1 system of grassroots surveillance – under which one individual is responsible for monitoring the activities of five households – has let local officials clamp down on dissent before it spreads beyond the household level.
This is what an election campaign looks like in Ethiopia, where the ruling coalition took 99.6 percent of parliamentary seats in the last national elections, in 2010.
Jirata, who asked that his real name not be used, is a 19-year-old student who was campaigning for a legally registered opposition party recently, when security officials arrested him.
They told him that he was working for a “terrorist group” that sought to forcibly bring down the government. He was badly beaten over the course of three nights and released on the condition that he end his involvement in politics. He is still limping from his injuries, and he told me he no longer has any interest in getting involved in politics. He says he will vote for the government party “because life is easier that way”.
Jirata was working for an Oromo party, representing an ethnic group long targeted by the government. But as Ethiopians go to the polls in late May, the prospects for opposition parties to fully and fairly campaign are grim.
Since the last election, the ruling party has only exerted more control and increased its widespread repression of basic liberties, including the rights to free expression, assembly, and association.
The courts provide no justice in cases of political importance. While election day is unpredictable, it’s clear that the avenues by which opposition parties can fully function and citizens can engage on political issues are largely closed.
While there are 75 registered opposition groups, several of the largest parties have talked of boycotting the elections because of flawed electoral processes. Challenges with registering candidates, acquiring the funds they are legally entitled to, mobilising their supporters, and keeping their members out of prison have taken their toll.
In short, there is limited space for government critics to play a peaceful and constructive role.
Suppression of non-governmental voices
The Ethiopian media provides little coverage of relevant political issues ahead of the election since what vestiges of independent media existed have largely been eliminated since 2010.
Reporters critical of the government are regularly harassed, threatened and detained. In 2014 alone, over 30 journalists fled Ethiopia and at least six publications were closed down.
Sources providing information to media and human rights groups are regularly targeted. Many diaspora media websites, while heavily politicised, remain blocked in Ethiopia. Journalists must choose between self-censorship, harassment, imprisonment, and exile.
The situation hasn’t been much better for opposition parties that want to organise peaceful protests and rallies ahead of the election. The Semayawi party (Blue Party), for example, is one of the newcomers in Ethiopia’s electoral landscape, and since 2013 has tried to hold regular and peaceful issue-based protests.
Protesters and organisers have frequently been arrested and harassed, their equipment has been confiscated, and permits unfairly denied. One of their leaders is on trial on trumped-up terrorism charges.
The lone opposition parliament member is not running this time due to a split in his party, the Union of Democracy and Justice, in which Ethiopia’s national electoral board played favourites. The net effect is that the government awarded the party name to an offshoot of the party that is more closely aligned to government policies and interests.
No dissent allowed
There are few ways for Ethiopians to peacefully express dissent or to contribute to the national political dialogue. Dissent of any type, particularly in rural areas, is dealt with harshly. The long-standing 5:1 system of grassroots surveillance – under which one individual is responsible for monitoring the activities of five households – has let local officials clamp down on dissent before it spreads beyond the household level.Telephone surveillance is commonplace, and the ongoing trial of a group of bloggers called Zone 9 has resulted in increased self-censorship online.
In short, there is limited space for government critics to play a peaceful and constructive role. The only international observers to the election will be the African Union. The European Union is not sending observers, noting that Ethiopia has not implemented recommendations by previous election observers. As Human Rights Watch documented after the 2010 elections, those who complain about election irregularities risk arrest and harassment.
“If we have an issue with government where do we go?” an Ethiopian who lives in a rural area recently told me, summing it up: “There is no media that will write our story, there are no more organisations that work on issues that the government does not like, if we take to the streets we are arrested, and if we go to their office to question we are called terrorists. If we go to the courts, there is no independence – we go to jail. There are no large opposition parties to vote for in the election, and even if there were, if we vote for them our lives then become very difficult. So what can we do? The elections are just another sign of our repression.”
Felix Horne is a Horn of Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
-George Orwell, Animal Farm
“The very common way that the EPRDF and its agents try to shift the public attention from lack of human and democratic rights and the daylight looting of the country’s resources, is by referring to the ‘impressive’ economic development registered in their rule. If they are talking about the only region that they are exclusively devoted to developing, then, they are absolutely right.”
In TPLF /Tigray dominated minority tyrannic regime of Orwellian social and development policy, all nations and nationalities in theory are equal in Ethiopia, but in reality Tigray is more equal than others. This is not a development process.
According to UNDP report, while more than 45% of children in Tigray have achieved Net Lower Secondary Enrollment, the statistics for Oromia is only 16.9%, very huge inequality variations. The report indicated that while Human development Index (HDI) of Tigray is the highest (above national average), states such as Oromia, Afar, Ogaden and Amhara have the lowest HDIs, below the national HDI of 0.461. These are the outcomes of Tigray only, exclusionist, social, economic and development policies of the ruling regime. UNDP is not exposing the Tigray only growth and development strategy but we can read from its data and graphs.
As the TPLF has been engaged (https://oromiaeconomist.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/amnesty-internationals-report-because-i-am-oromo-a-sweeping-repression-in-oromia/) in destabilizing, robbing and massive evictions of people from their ancestral home and land grabs in Oromia, by all sorts of engagement, resource and soil transfers, it has conducting massive subsidized development in its Tigray home. In other studies, BBC Magazine in its 20th April 2015 publication under the title ‘ Turning Ethiopia’s desert green,’reports: ” A generation ago Ethiopia’s Tigray province was stricken by a famine that shocked the world. Today, as Chris Haslam reports, local people are using ancient techniques to turn part of the desert green. In the pink-streaked twilight, a river of humanity is flowing across Tigray’s dusty Hawzien plain. This cracked and desiccated landscape, in Ethiopia’s far north, occupies a dark corner of the global collective memory. Thirty years ago, not far from here, the BBC’s Michael Buerk first alerted us to a biblical famine he described as “the closest thing to hell on earth”. Then Bob Geldof wrote Do They Know It’s Christmas? – a curious question to ask of perhaps the world’s most devoutly Christian people – and thereafter the name Tigray became synonymous with refugees, Western aid and misery. The Tigrayan people were depicted as exemplars of passive suffering, dependent on the goodwill of the rest of the planet just to get through the day without dying. But here, outside the village of Abr’ha Weatsbaha, I’m seeing a different version. From all directions, streams of people are trickling into that human river.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32348749.
Martin Plaut’s analysis which is based on world banks report is also interesting and important to refer here which is as follows:-
The World Bank has just published an authoritative study of poverty reduction in Ethiopia. The fall in overall poverty has been dramatic and is to be greatly welcomed. But who has really benefited?
This is the basic finding:
In 2000 Ethiopia had one of the highest poverty rates in the world, with 56% of the population living on less than US$1.25 PPP a day. Ethiopian households experienced a decade of remarkable progress in wellbeing since then and by the start of this decade less than 30% of the population was counted as poor.
There are of course many ways of answering the question – “who benefited” – were they men or women, urban or rural people. All these approaches are valid.
The Ethnic Dimension
But in Ethiopia, where Ethic Federalism has been the primary driver of government policy one cannot ignore the ethnic dimension.
Here this graph is particularly telling:
Tigray first
The answer is clear: it is the people of Tigray, whose party, the TPLF led the fight against the Mengistu regime and took power in 1991, who benefited most. What is also striking is that the Oromo (who are the largest ethnic group) hardly benefited at all.
This is what the World Bank says about this: “Poverty reduction has been faster in those regions in which poverty was higher and as a result the proportion of the population living beneath the national poverty line has converged to around one in 3 in all regions in 2011.”
The World Bank does little to explain just why Tigray has done (relatively) so well, but it does point to the importance of infrastructure investment and the building of roads. It also points to this fact: “Poverty rates increase by 7% with every 10 kilometers from a market town. As outlined above, farmers that are more remote are less likely to use agricultural inputs, and are less likely to see poverty reduction from the gains in agricultural growth that are made. The generally positive impact of improvements in infrastructure and access to basic services such as education complements the evidence for Ethiopia that suggests investing in roads reduces poverty.”
Not surprisingly, the TPLF under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and beyond concentrated their investment on their home region – Tigray. The results are plain to see. https://martinplaut.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/ethiopias-poverty-reduction-who-benefits/
In its 2014 National Human Development Report, which has been written on the theme of “Accelerating Inclusive Growth for Sustainable Human Development in Ethiopia,” UNDP indicates that 25 million Ethiopians currently remain trapped in poverty and vulnerability. This and many Ethiopians just above the poverty line are vulnerable to shocks and food insecurity. Maternal health care has lagged well behind other health statistics and the availability of effective health care is inconsistent across the country. UNDP’s educational indicators suggest ongoing problems with the quality of education, as shown by retention rates and educational performance markers. UNDP says, perhaps most worrying from the standpoint of inclusive growth are the high rates of un- and underemployment in both urban and rural areas, especially as large numbers of productive jobs for the poor and near-poor are needed under current and projected labour market trends. Economic growth over the past decade has generally meant an increase in productivity and output levels in some parts of the economy, but these have been accompanied by increasing severity of poverty. The absolute number of the poor is roughly the same as 15 years ago and a significant proportion of the population hovers just above the poverty line and is vulnerable to shocks. Moreover, the severity of poverty 2 increased from 2.7 per cent in 1999/2000 to 3.1 per cent in 2010/11 (MoFED, 2013b). The prevalence of vulnerabilities and food insecurity are on the rise.
According to UNDP report, during the last three years (2010/11-2012/13), inflation was in double digits. The inflation rate, which was 18 per cent in 2010/11, increased to 33.7 per cent in 2011/12, declined to 13.5 per cent in 2012/13 and fell further to 8.1 per cent in December 2013. Other studies demonstrate that inflation figures have always been in double digits including 2013 and 2014 and at present.
Further, UNDP says with a Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.435 in 2013, the country is still classified as a “low human development” country, based on UNDP’s Human Development Index. Even though Ethiopia is one of the 10 countries globally that has attained the largest absolute gains in its HDI over the last several years, in the most recent Human Development Report (2014) Ethiopia ranks 173rd out of 187 countries. Thus, its Human Development Index (HDI) has not moved appreciably during the past decade, when compared with other developing countries that have registered similar growth rates. Looking at the HDI values of Seychelles, Tunisia and Algeria, which are in the high HDI bracket, and the other 12 African countries, which are in the medium HDI bracket, the major reasons why Ethiopia is still in the low HDI bracket are low education performance (particularly low mean years of schooling) and low GNI per capita. The minimum mean years of schooling and GNI per capita for medium HDI countries were 3.5 years and US$3,000, respectively in contrast to Ethiopia’s mean years of schooling of 2.6 years and GNI per capita of US$1,300. The inequality-adjusted Human Development index (IHDI), which is basically the HDI discounted for inequalities, is also computed for Ethiopia. Between 2005 and 2013, the IHDI increased from 0.349 to 0.459 indicating an average human development loss of 0.5 per cent per annum due to inequalities in health, access to education and income. According to (UNDP 2014), Ethiopia’s IHDI for 2013 was 0.307 in contrast to HDI of 0.435 indicating an overall human development loss of 29.4 per cent.
With regard to regional disparities in HDI values, while Tigray is significantly above national average, the four states of Afar, Somali, Amhara and Oromia have the lowest HDIs, below the national HDI of 0.461.
The outcome of the development strategy of Tigray only when mathematically averaged to the whole regions cannot hide TPLF’s Apartheid policy on Oromia and the rest as it is only the development focus for 5% of the 94 million population. Thus, Tigray is rich but Ethiopia is poor. Ethiopia is rich and fast growing only for development tourists those who lodge in Finfinne and tour to Tigray to take a sample and conclude the result for the whole states.
With regard to regional disparities in HDI values, while Tigray is significantly above national average, the four states of Afar, Somali, Amhara and Oromia have the lowest HDIs, below the national HDI of 0.461.
Another social indicator which demonstrates that Tigray is more equal than others is health services. UNDP’s report confirms that there are wide inequalities in the immunization status of children in Ethiopia. Children of educated women, rich households, and Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) and Tigray State have higher chances of being fully immunized. Children from the richest and middle income households are less likely to have no immunization at all (by 74 per cent and 57 per cent respectively) compared with those from the poorest households. Children from SNNPR, Oromiya and Amhara are 3.82, 7.00 and 3.65 times less likely to be fully immunized compared with those from Tigray, which has the second highest proportion of fully immunized children. According to UNDP, a report by Save the Children (2014) also raises concerns about equity in health services citing how immunization coverage is different among different income groups, and between urban and rural areas. According to the report, children from richest households are twice as likely to be immunized compared to those from the poorest households and children in urban areas are twice as likely to be immunized as those in rural areas. Based on revised data from the National Water Sanitation and Health Inventory, national potable water supply coverage increased from 58 per cent to 68.4 per cent between 2009/10 and 2012/13, reflecting an increase in both rural and urban coverage. Even though many health outcomes have improved significantly over the last decade, Ethiopia is still lagging behind on some measures. For example, Ethiopia has still higher than expected shares of malnutrition compared with countries at the same income level. What is especially striking about Ethiopia’s health data is the exceptionally high level of maternal mortality, given Ethiopia’s income level.
UNDP argues that that development can be inclusive and reduce poverty only if all people contribute to creating opportunities, share the benefits of development and participate in decision making.
Ethiopia at a Glance (UNDP Report Data)
Population: 85.8 million (2013)
GDP: US$46.6 billion (2013)
GDP per capita: US$550 (2013)
Annual Average Br/US$ exchange rate: 18.3 (2012/13)
Life expectancy at birth (years): 62.2 (2013)
Primary school gross enrolment rate (%): 95.3 (2012/13)
Births attended by skilled health professional (%): 23.1 (2012//13)
Contraceptive prevalence rate (%): 28.6 (2011)
Literacy rate (% of both sexes aged 15 and above): 46.7 (2011)
Unemployment rate (urban) (%): 16.5 (2012/13)
Unemployment rate among urban youth (15-29) (%): 23.3 (2011/12)
Areas further than 5 km from all-weather roads (%): 45.8 (2012/13)
Mobile phone subscribers (million): 23.8 (2012/13)
Poverty can be an outcome of inefficient use of common resources and a result of exclusive mechanisms. Weak policy environment, inadequate infrastructures, weak access to technology and credits can cause poverty. Poverty can also result from the use of mechanisms by some groups in a society or community to exclude others from participating in democratic and economic development process (Ajakaiye and Adeyeye, 2002). This is defined by Hazell and Haddad ( 2001) as social deprivation…From the different reasons mentioned above in relation to poverty in developing countries, it is clear that strategies to alleviate poverty and help poor people must aim at improving the productivity and the living conditions of smallholder farmers and landless agriculture workers who constitute the majority of poor people. Furthermore, agriculture is seen as central to rural development. It is the major economic driver, the hub of rural activities, and permanent estate (IRG, 2002). The improvement in agriculture productivity is based on agricultural research and improved technologies. In many developing counties government must play an important role in this domain. However poor people may benefit from agriculture productivity only if favorable macroeconomic and trade policies good infrastructure and access to credit, land, and markets is in place.
As far as land is concerned, government in many developing countries must undertake land reform program not only for a better distribution of land but also to create mechanism capable to define and enforce property right. Land reform can promote smallholder entry into the market, reduce inequalities in land distribution, increase efficiency and thus boost output.
The ubiquitous problem of poverty continues to confound development practitioners, politicians and researchers alike. In spite of countless efforts to eliminate poverty over the past decade, 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day and 880 million people still live on less than $1. Most of these depend on agriculture for their livelihoods (World Development Report, 2008). While some progress has been made in some countries, the ambitious goal of halving poverty by the year 2015 appears like it will not be achieved. The objective of this paper is to characterize the problem of poverty and attempt to proffer possible insights on pathways that may jettison the rural poor out of misery into prosperous economic agents with a brighter hope for the future.
An Anatomy of Poverty
Poverty is a multifaceted concept. It affects many aspects of the human conditions, including physical, moral and psychological. According to Sen…
The levels of poverty and authoritarianism are higher in the Horn of Africa than anywhere else in the continent. Civil liberties are collateral victims. Post-Zenawi Ethiopia – a missed chance to liberalize Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s death in August 2012 and his replacement by Hailemariam Desalegn raised hopes of political and social reforms that would benefit freedom of information. Sadly, these hopes have been dashed. The repressive anti-terrorism law adopted in 2009 is a threat that continues to hang over journalists, forcing them to censor themselves. Media that dare to violate the code of silence, especially as regards government corruption, are systematically intimidated. …There is no sign of any loosening of the vice that grips the Ethiopian media and the regime is unlikely to tolerate criticism before the elections in 2015. http://rsf.org/index2014/data/index2014_en.pdf
Ethiopia has been ranked at 176th spot among 199 countries on press freedom by US-based non-governmental organisation Freedom House.
In its Press Freedom Report 2014, not surprisingly, Ethiopia achieved a press freedom score of 81 and is categorized as “not free”, with North Korea, Belarus, Syria and the like. Ethiopia’s score in 2015 is 83 which is a declining trend.
According to Freedom House, each country or territory is given the press freedom score from 0 (best) to 100 (worst) on the basis of 23 methodology questions which are divided into three sub categories: economic environment, political environment and legal environment.
The total scores determine the status designation of free, partly free or not free.
A total score of 0-30 means press freedom status of “free”, 31-60 is categorised as “partly free”, and 61-100 is “not free”.
Neighboring Kenya and Uganda are with 122nd and 125th ranking spots respectively.
The top nations which scored the highest in press freedom are the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, as well as European countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Freedom House noted that global press freedom declined in 2014 to its lowest point in more than 10 years.
It said the steepest decline relates to two factors – the passage and use of restrictive laws against the press, often on national security grounds, and the ability of local and foreign journalists to physically access and report freely.
Press freedom in Ethiopia declined in 2014 as the government launched a crackdown on journalists and bloggers ahead of the May 2015 elections. Among those arrested were six members of the Zone 9 blogging collective who regularly wrote on issues of human rights and governance. The government of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn continued to use the draconian antiterrorism law to stifle dissent, targeting both print and online journalists, with some prosecuted in absentia. Others faced charges such as defamation. With 17 journalists behind bars as of December 1, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Ethiopia was the second-worst jailer of journalists in Africa, after Eritrea.
Legal Environment
While the constitution guarantees freedom of the press, the 2005 criminal code contains many provisions that limit this right, including restrictions on “obscene” communication, defamation, and criticism of public officials. In April 2014, the state-owned broadcaster—the Ethiopian Radio and Television Agency (ERTA)—was found guilty of defaming the opposition Unity for Democracy and Justice party in a multipart documentary. The court ordered ERTA to air a correction, though an ERTA journalist who served as a presenter for the film was acquitted. In October, Temesghen Desalegn, the former editor and owner of the now-defunct independent weekly Feteh, was sentenced to three years in prison for incitement, criminal defamation, and false publication related to 2012 articles that criticized the government’s repression of student activists and ethnic minorities.
The 2009 antiterrorism law, ostensibly designed to address crimes related to armed insurgencies, has been used extensively against journalists. Most journalists prosecuted under the law have been accused of collaboration with government-designated terrorist organizations simply for publishing information about such groups or conducting interviews with their leaders. In February 2014, Somali journalist Mohamed Aweys Mudey was sentenced to 27 years in prison on terrorism charges. He had been arrested in November 2013 and detained for four months for allegedly possessing information about the operations of Somali extremist group the Shabaab in Ethiopia. In April 2014, six bloggers associated with the Zone 9 collective were arrested along with three independent journalists. The nine detainees were charged in July with receiving aid and instructions from terrorist groups with the intention to destabilize the country. In August, the government also brought criminal charges against five magazines—Lomi, Enqu, Fact, Jano, and Addis Guday—and the weekly newspaper Afro-Times. They were accused of “encouraging terrorism, endangering national security, repeated incitement of ethnic and religious hate, and smears against officials and public institutions.” The publishers of three of the magazines fled the country, but they were convicted in absentia and sentenced to over three years in prison. At least five other journalists were already serving sentences or in pretrial detention for alleged terrorism offenses, while two Eritrean journalists have been imprisoned without charge since 2006, also for suspected terrorist activities. Several additional journalists have been convicted in absentia.
Other restrictive laws that impede the practice of journalism include the 2008 Freedom of the Mass Media and Access to Information Proclamation, which imposes onerous licensing and registration requirements and harsh sanctions for violations, and the 2012 Telecom Fraud Offences Proclamation, which prescribes significant fines and up to eight years in prison for those convicted of using the telecommunications network to disseminate a “terrorizing message.” The latter law also criminalizes the use of popular voice over internet protocol (VoIP) communications software such as Skype for commercial purposes, or to bypass the telecommunications monopoly of state-owned Ethio Telecom.
The government’s selective enforcement of the laws and the lack of an independent judiciary mean that journalists have few guarantees of due process or a fair trial. Charges are often filed arbitrarily in response to personal disputes. Court cases can continue for years, and many journalists have multiple charges pending against them.
Ethiopia has one of the continent’s most progressive freedom of information laws, but access to public information is largely restricted in practice, and the government has traditionally allowed only state-owned media outlets to cover official events.
The 2009 Proclamation for the Registration and Regulation of Charities and Societies has crippled the ability of nongovernmental organizations to monitor and advocate for media freedom and other human rights issues, in part by restricting foreign funding and imposing rigid and intrusive spending rules.
In April 2014, a staff member of the international advocacy group Article 19 was detained upon arrival in Ethiopia from Kenya, held without access to a lawyer for more than a day, and deported with a warning not to return. He had been scheduled to provide journalists with security training. International organizations and activists have mounted public campaigns on behalf of jailed Ethiopian journalists, but they have had little concrete effect. Eskinder Nega, a journalist and blogger who was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2012 for his critical reporting, was named as the recipient of the 2014 World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) Golden Pen of Freedom Award. The Zone 9 bloggers received significant international support after their arrest, particularly on social media. Nigerian and Tanzanian bloggers organized the first Africa-wide “tweetathon” to call for their release, and legal petitions were submitted to the African Union and the United Nations.
Political Environment
Censorship and self-censorship are routinely practiced. Many private newspapers report that officials attempt to control content through article placement requests and telephone calls to editors about stories that are critical of the government. In June 2014, 20 journalists from the state-owned Oromia Radio and Television Organization were fired with no formal explanation. The journalists said the mass dismissal could be linked to their views on a student protest movement that challenged a government plan to cede parts of Oromia State to the federal capital region of Addis Ababa.
The government obstructs access to numerous websites, including independent and international news sites, opposition websites, and the sites of groups designated as terrorist organizations. Controversial political blogs, many of which are based abroad, are blocked, preventing important voices from contributing to the local political debate. Tor, a software package that allows users to circumvent internet filtering and browse the web anonymously, has been blocked since Ethio Telecom adopted deep packet inspection (DPI) to control internet traffic in 2012. In 2013, employees of the independent Ethiopian Satellite Television Service (ESAT), a satellite broadcaster run by diaspora journalists operating abroad, were targeted with sophisticated spyware that can be used to copy files, obtain passwords, and intercept Skype calls and instant messages.
Media outlets face significant restrictions on coverage of mass protests, particularly those by the Muslim community against policies that threaten their religious freedoms, which began in 2012. Journalists who cover the demonstrations have faced arrests and harassment. In July 2014, photojournalist Aziza Mohamed of Addis Guday was arrested and held without charge for supposedly inciting protesters to violence. The editor and the managing director of the defunct Muslim weekly Ye Muslimoch Guday were similarly arrested for coverage of the protests in 2012 and 2013, respectively, and their trials on terrorism charges were ongoing in late 2014.
Harassment and intimidation of critical journalists in Ethiopia remains a common practice among law enforcement officials. A 2013 Human Rights Watch report documented dozens of cases of abuse and mistreatment of inmates at the Maekelawi detention center—a key federal facility for journalists and other political prisoners in Addis Ababa—including unlawful interrogation tactics and denial of access to basic needs, as well as to family members and lawyers, in order to obtain coerced confessions. Growing concerns about politically motivated charges and possible imprisonment have led a record number of Ethiopian journalists to flee abroad. According to CPJ, more than 30 journalists left the country during 2014, twice as many as in the previous two years combined.
Economic Environment
The number of print outlets covering politics decreased significantly after 2005, while weekly papers and magazines on business and lifestyle topics—catering to the growing urban middle class—are proliferating. The state operates the only national television station and owns almost all radio outlets, the primary sources of information for Ethiopians. State-controlled media are biased in favor of the government and the ruling party. Broadcasting law prohibits any political, religious, or foreign entities from owning stations, though the owners of the few private radio stations are generally seen as friendly to the authorities. The signals of international broadcasters such as Deutsche Welle and Voice of America (VOA) have occasionally been jammed, reportedly with technical support from the Chinese government.
Fear of prosecution and heavy taxes on the publishing process have effectively concentrated the printing industry in the hands of the largest state-run printer, Berhanena Selam Printing Press. In 2012, Berhanena Selam introduced a revised “standard contract” that allows it to refuse distribution of content deemed to be contrary to state interests. Publishers must submit to the contract or risk losing their printing privileges. The printer voided agreements with Feteh and the opposition dailyFinote Netsanet that year, effectively putting the former out of business. By giving the state enterprise the power to vet and review articles before printing them, the new contract essentially reestablished official prepublication censorship in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia and neighboring Djibouti, which has a population of less than a million, are the only countries in Africa to maintain a complete monopoly on telecommunications, including provision of internet service. With the support of the Chinese government, Ethio Telecom managed to raise mobile connectivity to nearly 29 percent of the population in 2013, though internet connectivity remained at a meagre 2 percent. The government’s control of the telecommunications sector has allowed it to contain the potential of new communication technologies to enable civic and political mobilization, but it continues to invest massive resources in these technologies to support its own state surveillance apparatus and development agenda.
Global press freedom hits decade low – survey
AFP, Washington, 29 April 2015
Freedom of the press around the world has plummeted to the worst level in a decade, a survey warned Wednesday, with the United States and China both tightening the noose.
Journalists globally encountered more restrictions from governments, militants, criminals and media owners, the annual report by the human rights group Freedom House said.
“Journalists faced intensified pressure from all sides in 2014,” said Jennifer Dunham, project manager of the report.
“Governments used security or antiterrorism laws as a pretext to silence critical voices, militant groups and criminal gangs used increasingly brazen tactics to intimidate journalists, and media owners attempted to manipulate news content to serve their political or business interests.”
One factor was the passage and use of restrictive laws, often on national security grounds.
“One of the most troubling developments of the past year was the struggle by democratic states to cope with an onslaught of propaganda from authoritarian regimes and militant groups,” Dunham said.
“There is a danger that instead of encouraging honest, objective journalism and freedom of information as the proper antidote, democracies will resort to censorship or propaganda of their own.”
Of the 199 countries and territories studied in 2014, a total of 63, or 32 percent, were rated “free” for the news media, while 71 (36 percent) were “partly free” and 65 (32 percent) “not free.”
Only 14 percent of the world’s inhabitants live in countries with a free press, Freedom House said.
The rating for the United States fell due to detentions, harassment, and rough treatment of journalists by police during protests in Ferguson, Missouri, the report said.
Elsewhere in the Americas, declines in press freedom were seen in Honduras, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico and Ecuador.
The report said only five percent of people in the Asia-Pacific region have a free press, and that the rating for China fell as “authorities tightened control over liberal media outlets.”
Europe as a region had the highest score but also experienced the second-largest decline over the past 10 years.
The report also cited tougher conditions for journalists in Russia, Syria, Algeria, Nigeria and Ethiopia, while Tunisia “registered the best score of any Arab country.”
When we are condemning J-Zuma and his fellow Zwelithini‘s statement, we must not skip the fundamental question of “why are citizens running away from their countries in Africa? Why Zimbabweans, Nigerian, Mozambicans etc. are so many in South Africa? What Malian, Senegalese, Eritreans… are doing on the Mediterranean Sea? What Ethiopian, Eritreans… are looking for in Libya on their way to cross the sea? And Why African Leaders and institutions are silence on these questions? Close to 2000 migrants died crossing the Mediterranean to Europe this year only, many times more than during the same period in 2014…
Many in our continent, many of our leaders and institutions know the answers to these questions. Unfortunately, there are no actions being taken to resolve them; there are not even any honest acknowledgements of the problem; rather we are served with empty diplomatic statements everyday with no decisive action for change. We are turning around and the situation is getting worse.
Within a week, Ethiopians were hit with a quadruple whammy. On April 19, the Libyan branch of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) released a shocking video purporting to show the killings and beheadings of Ethiopian Christians attempting to cross to Europe through Libya. This came only days after an anti-immigrant mob in South Africa killed at least three Ethiopian immigrants and wounded many others. Al Jazeera America reported that thousands of Ethiopian nationals were stranded in war-torn Yemen. And in the town of Robe in Oromia and its surroundings alone, scores of people were reportedly grieving over the loss of family members at sea aboard a fateful Europe-bound boat that sank April 19 off the coast of Libya with close to 900 aboard.
These tragedies may have temporarily united Ethiopians of all faiths and ethnic backgrounds. But they have also raised questions about what kind of desperation drove these migrants to leave their country and risk journeys through sun-scorched deserts and via chancy boats.
The crisis comes at a time when Ethiopia’s economic transformation in the last decade is being hailed as nothing short of a miracle, with some comparing it to the feat achieved by the Asian “tigers” in the 1970s. Why would thousands of young men and women flee their country, whose economy is the fastest growing in Africa andwhose democracy is supposedly blossoming? And when will the exodus end?
After the spate of sad news, government spokesman Redwan Hussein said the tragedy “will be a warning to people who wish to risk and travel to Europe through the dangerous route.” Warned or not, many youths simply do not see their dreams for a better life realized in Ethiopia. Observers cite massive poverty, rising costs of living, fast-climbing youth unemployment, lack of economic opportunities for the less politically connected, the economy’s overreliance on the service sector and the requirement of party membership as a condition for employment as the drivers behind the exodus.
A 2012 study by the London-based International Growth Center noted (PDF) widespread urban unemployment amid growing youth landlessness and insignificant job creation in rural areas. “There have been significant increases in educational attainment. However, there has not been as much job creation to provide employment opportunities to the newly educated job seekers,” the report said.
One of the few ISIL victims identified thus far was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 2013. (Saudi deported more than 100,000 Ethiopian domestic workers during a visa crackdown.) A friend, who worked as a technician for the state-run Ethiopian Electricity Agency, joined him on this fateful trek to Libya. At least a handful of the victims who have been identified thus far were said to be college graduates.
Given the depth of poverty, Ethiopia’s much-celebrated economic growth is nowhere close to accommodating the country’s young and expanding population, one of the largest youth cohorts in Africa. Government remainsthe main employer in Ethiopia after agriculture and commerce. However, as Human Rights Watch noted in 2011, “access to seeds, fertilizers, tools and loans … public sector jobs, educational opportunities and even food assistance” is often contingent on support for the ruling party.
Still, unemployment and lack of economic opportunities are not the only reasons for the excessive outward migration. These conditions are compounded by the fact that youths, ever more censored and denied access to the Internet and alternative sources of information, simply do not trust the government enough to heed Hussein’s warnings. Furthermore, the vast majority of Ethiopian migrants are political refugees fleeing persecution. There are nearly 7,000 registered Ethiopian refugees in Yemen, Kenya has more than 20,000, and Egypt and Somalia have nearly 3,000 each, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
As long as Ethiopia focuses on security, the door is left wide open for further exodus and potential social unrest from an increasingly despondent populace.
Ethiopians will head to the polls in a few weeks. Typically, elections are occasions to make important choices and vent anger at the incumbent. But on May 24, Ethiopians will be able to do neither. In the last decade, authorities have systematically closed the political space through a series of anti-terrorism, press and civil society laws. Ethiopia’s ruling party, now in power for close to 24 years, won the last four elections. The government has systematically weakened the opposition and does not tolerate any form of dissent.
The heightened crackdown on freedom of expression has earned Ethiopia the distinction of being the world’sfourth-most-censored country and the second leading jailer of journalists in Africa, behind only its archrival, Eritrea, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
There is little hope that the 2015 elections would be fundamentally different from the 2010 polls, in which the ruling party won all but two of the 547 seats in the rubber-stamp national parliament. The ruling party maintains a monopoly over the media. Authorities have shown little interest in opening up the political space for a more robust electoral contest. This was exemplified by the exclusion of key opposition parties from the race, continuing repression of those running and Leenco Lata’s recent failed attempt to return home to pursue peaceful political struggle after two decades of exile. (Lata is the founder of the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front, fighting since 1973 for the rights of the Oromo, Ethiopia’s marginalized majority population, and the president of the Oromo Democratic Front.)
A few faces from the fragmented and embittered opposition maybe elected to parliament in next month’s lackluster elections. But far from healing Ethiopia’s gashing wounds, the vote is likely to ratchet up tensions. In fact, a sea of youth, many too young to vote, breaking police barriers to join opposition rallies bespeaks not of a country ready for elections but one ripe for a revolution with unpredictable consequences.
Despite these mounting challenges, Ethiopia’s relative stability — compared with its deeply troubled neighbors Somalia, South Sudan, Eritrea and Djibouti — is beyond contention. Even looking further afield, across the Red Sea, where Yemen is unraveling, one finds few examples of relative stability. This dynamic and Ethiopia’s role in the “war on terrorism” explains Washington’s and other donors’ failure to push Ethiopia toward political liberalization.
However, Ethiopia’s modicum of stability is illusory and bought at a hefty price: erosion of political freedoms, gross human rights violations and ever-growing discontent. This bodes ill for a country split by religious, ethnic and political cleavages. While at loggerheads with each other, Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups — the Oromo (40 percent) and the Amhara (30 percent) — are increasingly incensed by continuing domination by Tigreans (6 percent).
Ethiopian Muslims (a third of the country’s population of 94 million) have been staging protests throughout the country since 2011. Christian-Muslim relations, historically cordial, are being tested by religious-inspired violence and religious revivalism around the world. Ethiopia faces rising pressures to choose among three paths fraught with risks: the distasteful status quo; increased devolution of power, which risks balkanization; and more centralization, which promises even further resistance and turmoil.
It is unlikely that the soul searching from recent tragedies will prompt the authorities to make a course adjustment. If the country’s history of missed opportunities for all-inclusive political and economic transformation is any guide, Ethiopians might be in for a spate of more sad news. As long as the answer to these questions focuses on security, the door is left wide open for further exodus and potential social unrest from an increasingly despondent populace.
*Hassen Hussein is an assistant professor at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota.
OROMO LIBERATION FRONT (OLF) AND OTHER PROMINENT OPPOSITION POLITICAL GROUPS AND SOME CIVIC SOCITIES OF ETHIOPIA HELD A CONFERNCE IN EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
On 23 of April 2015, a high level conference entitled ‘Cartoon Democracy – Authoritarian Rule and Elections in Ethiopia’ was held in European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium. The conference was organised by some members of European Parliament from different Party Groups and member states and UNPO. The conference was unique in a sense it is standing against the established mind set-ups and traditional working system of politics in the Ethiopia Empire. It managed to assemble a diversified gathering that includes various opposition leaders, journalists, international experts, politicians and human rights advocators. The conference was aimed at consulting and coordinating various voices on the ever worsening political landscape in Ethiopia.
This Conference which was held a week after the US official Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman praised Ethiopia as a democracy, suggesting Ethiopia made great strides toward an open and inclusive electoral process. Despite the US official already endorsed the outcome of Ethiopia’s traditional National election, on the other side the Atlantic Ocean, the Europeans are showing a firm stand against endorsing Sham and ceremonial election. The keynote speaker of the conference clearly indicated that assisting Authoritarian one party rule might lead the country to formidable civil conflict. The current prevalent inter- and intra-regional armed conflict, popular uprising, desperate repressive acts of the regime against civilians, rampant corruption, mismanagement, Hunger, population growth, Environmental degradation, displacement of peoples as a result of land grabbing, high rate of the expansion of pandemic diseases, government-instigated ethnic conflicts as an instrument of divide-and-rule, etc. are all indicative for Ethiopian regime’s authoritarian nature and lack of democracy in the country. Read More:-Report of EU conference 23042015 Brussels
United in Opposing Ethiopian Cartoon Democracy: European Parliament Conference Offers Platform for Dialogue ahead of 24 May Election
Overall, there seemed to be a strong agreement among the speakers on two main points: firstly, that any real democratic change and cessation of ongoing human rights abuses in Ethiopia can only be achieved through joint action involving all ethnic and political opposition movements; and secondly, that the EU and other major donors must hold the Ethiopian government accountable for its actions, by conditioning and better overseeing the flow of funds, thus ensuring that foreign aid is not being misused to perpetrate human rights violations and oppress the people it is supposed to serve. Following this successful conference, UNPO, together with its partners, will continue to work towards ensuring the Ethiopian peoples’ voices are better heard on the international stage, and encourage different ethnic and political groups to put their differences aside and work together towards positive change in Ethiopia.
Chinese-African investment has been dubbed ‘neo-liberalism with Chinese characteristics’. Africa’s trade links with Asian economies, where Africa supplies primary commodities and Asia supplies manufactured goods, simply replicate Africa’s relationship of dependency with Western traditional partners. There are grounds for this argument as many academics and policy-makers perceive China as another capitalist state following its corporate interest and profit motives (Li, Wenping, and Mbaye, 2010). Bond (2006) reiterates, ‘Chinese penetration only presents the ugly face of predatory capitalism’.
The Ethiopian Government is Responsible for the Inhuman Treatments against Ethiopian Refugees and Asylum Seekers around the World
HRLHA Press Release
25th April 2015
The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa has been greatly saddened by the cold-blooded killing of 30 Christian Ethiopian refugees and asylum seekers in the past week in Libya by a group called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria/ ISIS. The HRLHA also highly concerned about thousands of Ethiopian refugees and asylum seekers living in different parts of Yemen were victimized due to the political crises in Yemen and hundreds have suffered in South Africa because of the unprecedented actions taken by a gang opposing refugees and asylum seekers in the country. The suppressive policy of the EPRDF/TPLF government has forced millions of Ethiopians to flee their country in the past twenty-four years. The mass influx of Ethiopian citizens into neighboring countries every year has been due to the EPRDF/TPLF policy of denying its citizens their socioeconomic and political rights. They have also fled out of fear of political persecution and detention. It has been repeatedly reported by human rights organizations, humanitarian and other non – governmental organizations that Ethiopia is producing a large number of refugees, estimated at over two hundred fifty thousand every year.
The HRLHA calls upon the Ethiopian government to unconditionally release the detained citizens and allow those who have been injured during the clash with police to get medical treatment.In connection with the incident that took place in Libya, on April 22, 2015 tens of thousands of Ethiopians marched on government- organized rallies against the killing of Ethiopian Christians in Libya. However, with the demonstrators’ angry expressions were directed at the authorities, the police used tear gas against them and hundreds of people were beaten on the street and arrested. On the 23rd and 24th of April 2015 others were picked up from their homes and taken to unknown destinations according to the HRLHA reporter in Addis Ababa.
Recommendations:
The Ethiopian government must stop political suppression in the country and respect the human rights treaties it signed and ratified
The Ethiopian Government must provide the necessary lifesaving help to those Ethiopians stuck in crises in the asylum countries of Yemen, South Africa and others.
The EPRDF/TPLF government must release journalists, opposition political party members, and others held in Ethiopian prisons and respect their right to exercise their basic and fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution of Ethiopia and international standard of human rights instruments.
In measuring national progress, Ethiopia as in its GDP per head records one of the lowest in Social Progress Index 2015. Ethiopia ranks 126 of 133 countries.
‘The Social Progress Index offers a rich framework for measuring the multiple dimensions of social progress, benchmarking success, and catalyzing greater human wellbeing…. Economic growth alone is not enough. A society that fails to address basic human needs, equip citizens to improve their quality of life, protect the environment, and provide opportunity for many of its citizens is not succeeding. We must widen our understanding of the success of societies beyond economic outcomes. Inclusive growth requires achieving both economic and social progress.’
Ethiopia (126), Niger (127), Yemen (128), Angola (130), Afghanstan (131), Chad (132) and Central African republic (133).
Ethiopia’s outcome:
One of the lowest in GDP (Income) and in SOCIAL PROGRESS Index. Social Progress Index : 41.04 (126th) Basic Human Needs: 44.04 (120th) Opportunity: 28.59 (126th) Foundations of Wellbeing: 50.49 (126th)
Water and Sanitation: 23.50
(Access to piped water, Rural access to improved water source, Access to improved sanitation facilities).
Personal Rights: 25.76
(Political rights, Freedom of speech, Freedom of assembly/association, Freedom of movement, Private property rights).
Access to Information and Communications:33.09
(Mobile telephone subscriptions, Internet users, Press Freedom Index)
Tolerance and Inclusion: 34.01
(Discrimination and violence against minorities, Religious tolerance,Community safety net).
Access to Advanced Education:5.74
(Years of tertiary schooling, Women’s average years in school,Inequality in the attainment of education, Globally ranked universities).
Ten countries in the world have been ranked as Very High Social Progress Countries as these countries generally have strong performance across all three dimensions. The average dimension scores for this tier are: Basic Human Needs is 94.77, Foundations of Wellbeing is 83.85, and Opportunity is 83.07.
As with most high-income countries, the top 10 countries score lowest on Ecosystem Sustainability and Health and Wellness.
Nearly all of the top 10 are relatively small countries, with only Canada having a population greater than 25 million.
The top three countries in the world on Social Progress are Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland with closely grouped scores between 88.36 and 87.97.
Canada is the only country among the G7 countries that has been ranked in top ten on SPI 2015
Under the High Social Progress Countries tier, there are 21 countries. This group includes a number of the world’s leading economies in terms of GDP and population, including the remaining six members of the G7: the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, the United States, France, and Italy. The average dimension scores for this tier are: Basic Human Needs is 90.86, Foundations of Wellbeing is 77.83, and Opportunity is 73.82
The third tier of Upper Middle Social Progress Countries comprises of 25 countries. This group reveals that high GDP per capita does not guarantee social progress. Average scores for this tier are: Basic Human Needs is 80.66, Foundations of Wellbeing is 73.52, and Opportunity is 57.73.
The fourth tier Lower Middle Social Progress Countries comprises of 42 countries. The average dimension scores for this tier are: Basic Human Needs is 72.34, Foundations of Wellbeing is 66.90, and Opportunity is 47.14
Under the Low Social Progress Countries tier, there are 27 countries which include many Sub-Saharan African countries. The average dimension scores for this tier are: Basic Human Needs is 50.03, Foundations of Wellbeing is 58.01, and Opportunity is 38.35.
Under the Very Low Social Progress Countries tier, there are 8 countries. The average dimension scores for this tier are: Basic Human Needs is 38.46, Foundations of Wellbeing is 48.55, and Opportunity is 26.05.
The lowest five countries in the world on Social Progress are Ethiopia, Niger, Afghanistan, Chad, Central African Republic.
The Social Progress Index, first released in 2014 building on a beta version previewed in 2013, measures a comprehensive array of components of social and environmental performance and aggregates them into an overall framework. The Index was developed based on extensive discussions with stakeholders around the world about what has been missed when policymakers focus on GDP to the exclusion of social performance. Our work was influenced by the seminal contributions of Amartya Sen on social development, as well as by the recent call for action in the report “Mismeasuring Our Lives” by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.
The Social Progress Index incorporates four key design principles:
Exclusively social and environmental indicators: our aim is to measure social progress directly, rather than utilize economic proxies. By excluding economic indicators, we can, for the first time, rigorously and systematically analyze the relationship between economic development (measured for example by GDP per capita) and social development. Prior efforts to move “beyond GDP” have comingled social and economic indicators, making it difficult to disentangle cause and effect.
Outcomes not inputs: our aim is to measure the outcomes that matter to the lives of real people, not the inputs. For example, we want to measure a country’s health and wellness achieved, not how much effort is expended nor how much the country spends on healthcare.
Holistic and relevant to all countries: our aim is to create a holistic measure of social progress that encompasses the many aspects of health of societies. Most previous efforts have focused on the poorest countries, for understandable reasons. But knowing what constitutes a healthy society for any country, including higher-income countries, is indispensable in charting a course for less-prosperous societies to get there.
Actionable: the Index aims to be a practical tool that will help leaders and practitioners in government, business and civil society to implement policies and programs that will drive faster social progress. To achieve that goal, we measure outcomes in a granular way that focuses on specific areas that can be implemented directly. The Index is structured around 12 components and 52 distinct indicators. The framework allows us to not only provide an aggregate country score and ranking, but also to allow granular analyses of specific areas of strength and weakness. Transparency of measurement using a comprehensive framework allows change-makers to identify and act upon the most pressing issues in their societies.
These design principles are the foundation for our conceptual framework. We define social progress in a comprehensive and inclusive way. Social progress is the capacity of a society to meet the basic human needs of its citizens, establish the building blocks that allow citizens and communities to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives, and create the conditions for all individuals to reach their full potential.
This definition reflects an extensive and critical review and synthesis of both the academic and practitioner literature in a wide range of development topics. The Social Progress Index framework focuses on three distinct (though related) questions:
Does a country provide for its people’s most essential needs?
Are the building blocks in place for individuals and communities to enhance and sustain wellbeing?
Is there opportunity for all individuals to reach their full potential?
These three questions define the three dimensions of Social Progress: Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity.
‘Colonial laws and practices have not imposed themselves on the independent Africa; the real and biggest problem has been the unwillingness of the current African leadership to change and/ or repeal the many unjust colonial laws. If anything, colonial laws and practices have either at worst been maintained to protect whites and the black African elite interests or at best been adapted to suit the needs of the African leadership, needs of ruling tribes or clans or nations at the expense of all others….If there is anything that Africa should learn from the latest xenophobic attacks in South Africa, it is that the continent has yet to command its independence and seriously address tribal prejudice and stereotypes. Governments continue to show little or no interest in respecting people and dealing with simmering internal social injustices. African independence has perpetually shown no empathy towards any black communities carrying a different social identification from those wielding authority. Historically, we have struggled with accommodating internal diversity.
The starting point towards correcting one’s mistakes is owning them. Africa needs to stop hiding behind colonialism and accept most of the problems we face today are our internal creation and only we can make the necessary changes required. Africans can conveniently blame colonialism all they want but the majority of conflicts between nations and communities show more internal prejudice and less external intervention as the cause.’
If there is anything that Africa should learn from the latest xenophobic attacks in South Africa, it is that the continent has yet to command its independence and seriously address tribal prejudice and stereotypes. Governments continue to show little or no interest in respecting people and dealing with simmering internal social injustices. African independence has perpetually shown no empathy towards any black communities carrying a different social identification from those wielding authority. Historically, we have struggled with accommodating internal diversity.
Macha Tulama USA: Urgent Call to Help Refugees in Yemen, Libya and South Africa
April 21, 2015
As we all have been following the events happening in Yemen, South Africa and Libya and other countries in the Middle East and Africa, Oromos and other nationals are facing gross human rights violations, brutal and cold blooded murder. Oromos are appealing to Macha Tulama Association (MTA) to stand for them in any capacity as soon as possible. The appeal and plea are coming to MTA email address daily in large number. Our people are in desperate situation in the countries where they are seeking refuge to save their lives.
In the past, MTA-USA offered modest help in the wake of such emergencies. What is happening now is even more dangerous for Oromo nationals. MTA is now ready to facilitate the collection and delivery of financial support to those who are in desperate need. Time is of the essence in this issue. MTA is also planning to find the ways to support the resettlement works of the UNHCR and International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Therefore, we hereby request all Oromos and friends of Oromos to respond to these emergency calls for support of our brothers and sisters by contributing as much as we can online or by mailing check or money order to our address. We have created a separate account for this specific purpose. The board of MTA will look in to the means and ways of disbursing the funds soon and will announce on our website and social media.
To donate online, click on the “Donate” button below which takes you to “Emergency Reponse – Yemen, Libya and South Africa” page.
If you want to send check or money order, please make it payable to Macha Tulama and mail to the address below. If you have any question, email us at machatulama.usa@gmail.
“Under Secretary Sherman’s comments today were woefully ignorant and counter-productive,” said Daniel Calingaert, executive vice president of Freedom House. “Ethiopia remains one of the most undemocratic countries in Africa. By calling these elections credible, Sherman has tacitly endorsed the Ethiopian government’s complete disregard for the democratic rights of its citizens. This will only bolster the government’s confidence to continue its crackdown on dissenting voices.”
In response to today’s comments by Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Wendy Sherman, in which she referred to Ethiopia as a democracy and the country’s upcoming elections free, fair, and credible, Freedom House issued the following statement:
“Under Secretary Sherman’s comments today were woefully ignorant and counter-productive,” said Daniel Calingaert, executive vice president of Freedom House. “Ethiopia remains one of the most undemocratic countries in Africa. By calling these elections credible, Sherman has tacitly endorsed the Ethiopian government’s complete disregard for the democratic rights of its citizens. This will only bolster the government’s confidence to continue its crackdown on dissenting voices.”
Background:
Since coming into power in the early 1990s, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has dominated politics through a combination of political cooptation and harassment. The country experienced a degree of democratization through the early 2000’s, culminating in the most competitive elections in the county’s history in 2005. Since these elections, the EPRDF has restricted political pluralism and used draconian legislation to crack down on the political opposition, civil society organizations, and independent media. In the 2010, EPRDF and its allies won 546 out of 547 parliamentary seats.
Freedom House is an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors the status of freedom around the world, and advocates for democracy and human rights.
U.S Department of State Endorsing of Upcoming Elections: Denial and Disrespect
The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA)
HRLHA Statement:
The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA) strongly opposes to the position that the U.S State Department has taken in regards to the upcoming Ethiopian election and the overall democratization process in the country in the past twenty-four years; and describes the comments by the Under Secretary of State as a sign of disrespect for ordinary citizens of Ethiopia and disregard for the human miseries that hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian have gone through under the EPRDF/TPLF-led government.
The HRLHA has no doubt at all that the U.S Government in general and U.S Department of State in particular, with the biggest and highly staffed of all Western embassies in Ethiopia, are very well aware of the political realities that have been prevailing in the country over the past two decades. An excellent proof is the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices that is issued annually by the US Department of State itself. Suppressions and denials of fundamental human rights in Ethiopia under the EPRDF/TPLF Government were being reported on by various human rights and humanitarian as well as government and diplomatic agencies; and, based on the facts revealed in such reports, the Ethiopian Government has repeatedly been ranked as the worst both at the regional and global levels.
In a country that has witnessed the highest number of political incarceration in its history, where unarmed students and other civilians were gunned down in hundreds simply because they attempted to exercise some of their fundamental rights, in “one of the ten most censored countries” where the existence of independent media has become impossible and, as a result, press freedom has been curtailed completely, where all sorts of socio-economic rights have been tied to political sympathy and supports, it would be an insult and disrespect to its ordinary citizens, and a disregard for the precious lives of innocent people that have been taken away by brutal hands to say that such a country is a democracy, and that the upcoming elections would be free and fair while intimidations and harassments of opposition candidates, as well as potential voters, were taking place out in the field even while the Under Secretary of State was making the comments. While encouraging the most repressive government and governing party towards becoming more dictatorial, the Under-Secretary of State’s comments discourage and undermine the sacrifices that the Ethiopian peoples have paid and are still paying to realize their century-old dream of building free and democratic country.
The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA) requests that the Under Secretary of State retract the wrong comments and apologize to the Ethiopian peoples. It also urges the U.S State Department to recognize and acknowledge the realities in Ethiopia and use the close ties that exists between the two governments to put pressure on the ruling EPRDF/TPLF party so that it allows the implementation of a genuine democracy.
This is the state terrorism of the TPLF-led Ethiopian regime that continues to drive thousands of Oromo and other nationals in the Ethiopian empire to seek refuge in uninhabitable, volatile and inhospitable corners of the world. During today’s incident (watch the video below), it’s only because Finfinne is the Capital (with many international watching eyes) that the Tigrean regime’s elite killing squad had not used live bullets to violate the mourners’ freedom of assembly. Almost a year ago, on April 30, 2014, in Ambo (some 100 or so kilometers away from the Capital), the same federal militarized police force used deadly force during a nonviolent Oromo students protest against the ‘Addis Ababa Master Plan’ for Oromo Genocide; in a single day, more than 100 Oromo students and non-student civilians were killed by the federal security force in Ambo on April 30, 2014.
On April 20, 2015, Oromos in Ambo defied TPLF’s ban of Oromo’s freedom of assembly and filled a stadium, where Dr. Merera Gudina, Chairman of the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC), was campaigning for the upcoming election (watch the video below). It’s to be noted that the TPLF regime tried to subdue Ambo a year ago during the Oromia-wide #OromoProtests against the ‘Addis Ababa Master Plan’ for Oromo Genocide. Almost a year ago, on April 30, 2014, more than 100 Oromo students and non-student civilians were killed by the Tigrean regime’s elite killing squad known as the Agazi Force; and thousands have been arrested just because they are Oromos, as an Amnesty International report revealed in October 2014. Shortly after April 2014, TPLF imposed on Oromia a sort of martial law where Oromos have been prohibited from assembly. On April 20, 2015, Ambo once again showed that it can never been subdued into submission by the TPLF state-sponsored terror by defying TPLF’s ban on Oromo’s freedom of assembly – and holding a rally to express support for OFC.
Meanwhile, another top OFC official, Obbo Baqqalaa Nagaa, is on campaign tour overseas to solicit support for his organization. According to the schedule, Obbo Baqqalaa Nagaa will be meeting with supporters in Las Vegas on April 23, 2015, and in Seattle on April 25, 2015.
OFC/Medrek Election Campaign in Ambo with Dr. Merera Gudina:
OFC/Medrek Election Campaign in Gindeberet:
Read more at: http://walabummaa43.blogspot.no/2015/04/ambo-defied-tplfs-ban-of-oromos-freedom.html
Letter to UN from Oromo Community in Seattle on Plight of Refugees in Yemen
Open letter to UNHCR from the Oromo Community Services of Seattle (OCSS)
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Antonio Guterres, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Case Postale 2500
CH-1211 Genève 2 Dépôt
Switzerland
Dear Commissioner Guterres,
We, the Oromo Community in Seattle*, are writing this letter to express our deep concern and dismay regarding the inhuman suffering of Oromo refugees in Yemen. Thousands of Oromo refugees have fled their homeland to neighboring countries, including Yemen, seeking protection from persecutions, large-scale arbitrary detentions, disappearances, tortures and extra-judicial killings they would be subjected to from the Ethiopian government due to their ethnic identity and political opinions. According to the Amnesty Internationalreport ‘Because I am Oromo’ – Sweeping Repression in the Oromia Region of Ethiopia, that was released on October 2014, between 2011 and 2014, at least 5000 Oromo have been arrested, tortured, and faced extra-judicial executions due to their peaceful opposition to the government. This report is self-evident that Oromo were forced to escape to rescue their lives from possible harassment of the Ethiopian government.
Currently, it is estimated that over ten thousands Oromo refuges reside in refugee camps in Yemen, including Sana and Eden. The current political turmoil in Yemen put the refugees’ lives in dire situation. Reports reaching us from Yemen indicate that refugees are trapped with no help in situation beyond their control. We have also received a report that a number of Oromo refugees have been killed, and some of them wounded by the flying bullets and indiscriminate ongoing fighting due to lack of adequate protection. Lives that they clenched to save are again put them in grave danger.
We are gravely concerned about the deteriorating condition of Oromo refugees in Yemen unless your leadership and international community intervene as soon as possible, and necessary steps are taken immediately to save the lives of the refugees. Oromo refugees in Yemen are also suffering from lack of food, shelter and medical care. Furthermore, the Ethiopian government security agents follow Oromo refugees and abduct some individuals using the current political crisis as an opportunity. This situation also jeopardizes the safety of the refugees.
We believe that, at this critical juncture, your leadership and the active engagement of the international community could mean the difference between life and death for many Oromo refugees. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1948 and 1951, have articles that recognize the rights for refugees. Any country that has signed these declarations is obliged to respect them. When every letter of these declarations violated, member countries of the UN and humanitarian organizations should not keep silent.
Your Excellency,
We strongly believe that as a UN refugee agency, you are sanctioned to making a lasting impact on the lives of refugees and other displaced communities around the world by focusing on the basic needs and rights for refugees – like shelter, water, food, safety and protection from harm. Silence about the dire situation of Oromo refugees in Yemen is not only inhuman, but it is also a flagrant violation of the letter and spirit of the 1951 UN Convention, the 1967 Protocol Relating to Status of Refugees, and the UN General Assembly Resolution 2198 (XXI).
It is a duty of the United Nations High Commissioners for Human Rights, UNHCR and the international community to take a swift action to rescue the refugees whose lives and freedom have fallen in a grave danger. We earnestly demand the UNHCR and member nations to extend their humanitarian assistance so as to find a way in which the refugees could be rescued from that imminent humanitarian disaster that may result in carnage. We believe Oromo refugees, as any other people in the world, are entitled to get protection and humanitarian from the UNHCR and governments that signed 1951 Geneva Convention.
We, therefore, appeal to the UNHCR, all UN member nations and other humanitarian organizations to put all necessary pressure on the governments and groups to refrain from violating the rights of refugees in Yemen and territories under their control. As the current situation in Yemen exposes Oromo refugees to further threats, we demand respectfully the UNHCR Office to find urgently durable solutions in which the lives of the refugees can be saved. We also request urgent medical care, food and shelter for Oromo refugees in Yemen.
Sincerely Yours,
Oromo Community Services of Seattle
C.C:
H. E. Ban Ki-moon
Secretary-General
The United Nations
New York. NY 10017
E-mail: Inquiries@UN.Org
Fax: 212-963-7055
U.S. Secretary of State
John Kerry
Washington, DC 20520
E-mail: Secretary@state.gov
European Union
E-mail: public.info@consilium.eu.int
Fax: Fax (32-2) 285 73 97 / 81
U.S. Committee for Refugees
1717 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036
Tel: 202-347-3507
Fax: 202-347-3418
E-mail: uscr@irsa-uscr.org
Amnesty International
International Secretariat
1 Easton Street
London
WC1X 0DW, UK
Fax: +44-20-79561157
Human Rights Watch
Rory Mungoven
Global Advocacy Director
350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor
New York, NY 10118-3299 USA
Tel: 1-(212) 290-4700
Fax: 1-(212) 736-1300
———– * Oromo Community Services of Seattle
Address: 7058 32nd Avenue S. Suite # 101 – Seattle, WA 98118
Tel: (206) 251-1789
‘We live in a era of big data, but developing countries are suffering from a data drought: governments and the international community know less about the world’s poorest than they think….While the World Bank estimates that the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day is 1.01 billion, the report claims the number could be up to 350 million more than that…The report, which was based mostly on secondary research, publicly available databases, and original interviews, also claims that maternal mortality figures for sub-Saharan Africa in 2013 could be double the stated 133,000, and the number of people living with HIV/AIDS could have been overstated by 20%…“We take for granted that statistics are based on fact, and that they’re scientific or empirical when often they’re not—they’re estimations or political negotiations,” Elizabeth Stuart, a research fellow at the ODI tells Quartz…There are many reasons for this data dearth. Populations in developing countries often live either in highly spread out or dense, shifting communities like urban slums, making traditional data collection methods, such as censuses and household surveys, expensive, too infrequent and potentially dangerous. Over 40% of countries in sub-Saharan Africa have not had a survey in seven years.’
Belonging–why South Africans refuse to let Africa in
Sisonke Msimang, AFRICASACOUNTRY.COM
This piece was first published on October 22, 2014, but with the new wave of xenophobic violence against black African migrants and refugees in South Africa’s Kwazulu-Natal province fueled by hateful and offensive remarks by the Zulu King, for which he refuses to apologize, we feel it is important to republish this today. The South African President, Jacob Zuma, has been slow to condemn the King and now some traditional leaders, like this guy, are backing the King. Not surprising the King also his supporters on social media. That violence is now threatening to spread to Johannesburg (locals talk of racist, violent messages against non-South African blacks being shared on social media like Whatsapp), so we feel it is important to republish the piece again today. Meanwhile, the twitter handle #XenophobicSAis a good way to keep up with these shameful events-Ed. Any African who has ever tried to visit South Africa will know that the country is not an easy entry destination. South African embassies across the continent are almost as difficult to access as those of the UK and the United States. They are characterised by long queues, inordinate amounts of paperwork, and officials who manage to be simultaneously rude and lethargic. It should come as no surprise then that South Africa’s new Minister of Home Affairs has announced the proposed establishment of a Border Management Agency for the country. In his words the new agency “will be central to securing all land, air and maritime ports of entry and support the efforts of the South African National Defence force to address the threats posed to, and the porousness of, our borderline.” Political observers of South Africa will understand that this is bureaucratic speak to dress up the fact that insularity will continue to be the country’s guiding ethos in its social, cultural and political dealings with the rest of the continent. Perhaps I am particularly attuned to this because of my upbringing. I am South African but grew up in exile. That is to say I was raised in the Africa that is not South Africa; that place of fantasy and nightmare that exists beyond the Limpopo. When I first came home in the mid 1990s, in those early months as I was learning to adjust to life in South Africa, I was often struck by the odd way in which the term ‘Africa,’ was deployed by both white and black South Africans. Because I speak in the fancy curly tones of someone who has been educated overseas, I was often asked where I was from. I would explain that I was born to South African parents outside the country and that I had lived in Zambia and Kenya and Canada and that my family also lived in Ethiopia. Invariably, the listener would nod sympathetically until the meaning of what I was saying sank in. ‘Oh.’ Then there would be a sharp intake of breath and a sort of horrified fascination would take hold. “So you grew up in Africa.” The Africa was enunciated carefully, the last syllable drawn out and slightly raised as though the statement were actually a question. Then the inevitable, softly sighed, “Shame.” In the early years after I got ‘home,’ it took me some time to figure out how to respond to the idea that Africa was a place that began beyond South Africa’s borders. I was surprised to learn that the countries where I had lived – the ones that had nurtured my soul in the long years of exile – were actually no places at all in the minds of some of my compatriots. They weren’t geographies with their own histories and cultures and complexities. They were dark landscapes, Condradian and densely forested. Zambia and Kenya and Ethiopia might as well have been Venus and Mars and Jupiter. They were undefined and undefined-able. They were snake-filled thickets; impenetrable brush and war and famine and ever-present tribal danger. Though they thought themselves to be very different, it seemed to me that whites and blacks in South Africa were disappointingly similar when it came to their views on ‘Africa.’ At first I blamed the most obvious culprit: apartheid. The ideology of the National Party was profoundly insular, based on inspiring everyone in the country to be fearful of the other. With the naiveté and arrogance of the young, I thought that a few lessons in African history might help to disabuse the Rainbow Nation of the notion that our country was apart from Africa. I made it my mission to inform everyone I came across that culturally, politically and historically we could call ourselves nothing if not Africans. What I did not fully understand at that stage was that it would take more than a few lectures by an earnest ‘returnee,’ to deal with this issue. This warped idea of Africa was at the heart of the idea of South Africa itself. Just as whiteness means nothing until it is contrasted with blackness as savagery, South African-ness relies heavily on the construction of Africa as a place of dysfunction, chaos and violence in order to define itself as functional, orderly, efficient and civilised. As such, the apartheid state was at pains to keep its borders closed. The savages at the country’s doorstep were a convenient bogeyman. Whites were told that if the country’s black neighbours were let in, they would surely unite with the indigenous population and slit the throats of whites. By the same token, black people were told that the Africans beyond South Africa’s borders lived like animals; they were ruled by despots and governed by black magic. When apartheid ended, the fear of African voodoo throat slitting should have ended with it. Indeed on the face of things, the fear of ‘Africa,’ has abated and has been replaced by the language of investment. South African capital has ‘opened up’ to the rest of the continent and so fear has been taken over by self-interest and new forms of extraction. In the parlance of South Africans, our businesses have ‘gone into Africa.’ Like the frontiersmen who conquered the bush before them they have been quick to talk about ‘investment and opportunity’ to define our country’s relationship with the continent. The pre-1994 hostility towards ‘Africa’ has been replaced by a paternalism that is equally disconcerting. Africa needs economic saviours and white South African ‘technical skills’ are just the prescription. Amongst many black South Africans, the script is frightfully similar. The recent collapse of TB Joshua’s church in Nigeria, in which scores of South Africans lost their lives has highlighted how little the narrative has changed in the minds of many South Africans. Many have called in to radio shows and social media asking, what the pilgrims were doing looking for God in such a God forsaken place? In the democratic era we have converted the hatred of Africa into a crude sort of exceptionalist chauvinism. South Africans are quick to assert that they don’t dislike ‘Africans.’ It’s just that we are unique. Our history and society are too different from theirs to allow for meaningful comparisons. See – we are even lighter in complexion than them and we have different features. I have heard the refrain too many times, ‘We don’t really look like Africans.’ Never mind the reality that black South Africans come in all shades from the deepest of browns to the fairest of yellows. This idea that South Africans are so singular in our experience; that apartheid was such a unique experience that it makes us different from everyone else in the world, and especially from other Africans, is an important aspect of understanding the South African approach to immigration. As long-time researcher Nahla Vahlji has noted, “the fostering of nationalism produces an equal and parallel phenomenon: that of an affiliation amongst citizens in contrast and opposition to what is ‘outside’ that national identity.” In other words, South Africans may not always like each other across so-called racial lines, but they have a kinship that is based on their connection to the apartheid project. Outsiders – those who didn’t go through the torture of the regime – are juxtaposed against insiders. In other words foreigners are foreign precisely because they can not understand the pain of apartheid, because most South Africans now claim to have been victims of the system. Whether white or black, the trauma of living through apartheid is seen as such a defining experience that it becomes exclusionary; it has made a nation of us. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which sought to uncover the truth behind certain atrocities that took place under apartheid, was also an attempt to make a nation out of us. While it won international acclaim as a model for settling disputes that was as concerned with traditional notions of justice as it was with healing the wounds of the past, there were many people inside South Africa who were sceptical of its mission. As Premesh Lalu and Brendan Harris suggested as the Commission was starting its work in the mid 1990s, the desire for the TRC to create the narrative of a new nation led to a selection of “elements of the past which create no controversy, which create a good start, for a new nation where race and economic inequality are a serious problem, and where the balance of social forces is still extremely fragile.” This is as true today as it was then. Attending the hearings was crucial for me as a young person yearning to better understand my country, but I am objective enough to understand that one of the consequences using the TRC as the basis for forging a national identity is that ‘others’ – the people who were not here in the bad old days – have found it difficult to find their place in South Africa. Aided and abetted by the TRC and the discursive rainbow nation project, South Africans have failed to create a frame for belonging that transcends the experience of apartheid. Twenty years into the ‘new’ dispensation, many South Africans still view people who weren’t there and therefore who did not physically share in the pain of apartheid as ‘aliens.’ The darker-hued these aliens are, the less likely South Africans are to accept them. Even when black African ‘foreigners’ attain citizenship or permanent residence, even when their children are enrolled in South African schools, they remain strangers to us because they weren’t caught up in our grand narrative as belligerents in the war that was apartheid. While it is easy to locate the roots of xenophobia in our colonial and apartheid history, it is also becoming clear that our present leaders do not understand how to press the reset button in order to remake our country in the image of its future self. They have not been able to outline a vision for the new South Africa that is inclusive of the millions of African people who live here and who are ‘foreign’ but indispensable to our society for cultural, economic and political reasons. America – with all its problems – offers us the model of an immigrant nation whose very conception relied on the idea of the ‘new’ world where justice and freedom were possible. Much can be said about how that narrative ignores those who were brought to the country as slave cargo. It is patently clear that America has also denied the founding acts of genocide that decimated the people of the First Nations who lived there before the settlers arrived. Indeed, one could argue that while oppression and murder begat the United States of America, the country’s founding myth is an inclusive one, a story of freedom and the right to life. In South Africa murder and oppression also birthed a new nation, but the founding myth of our post 1994 country has remained insular and exclusive, a story of freedom and the right to life for South Africans. The South African state has always been strongly invested in seeing itself as an island of morality and order in a cesspool of black filth. The notion of South Africa’s apartness from Africa is deeply embedded in the psyche that ‘new’ South Africans inherited in 1994 but it goes back decades. For example, the 1937 Aliens Act sought to attract desirable immigrants, whom it defined in the law as those of ‘European’ heritage who would be easily assimilable in the white population of the country.’ This law stayed on the books until 1991, when the National Party, in its dying days, sought to protect itself from the foreseeable ‘deluge’ of communist and/or barbaric Africans. The Aliens Control Act (1991) removed the offensive reference to ‘Europeans’ but it kept the rest of the architecture of exclusion intact. As a result, when the new South Africa was born the old state remained firmly in place, continuing to guard the border from the threats just across the Limpopo, as it always had. It was a decade before the Bill on International Migration came into force in 2003 and it too retained critical elements of the old outlook. The ANC politicians running the country somehow began to buy into the idea that immigrants posed a threat to security. Immigration continued to be seen as a containment strategy rather than as a path to economic growth. As President Jacob Zuma tightens his grip on the security sector, and extends the power and reach of the security cluster in all areas of governance, this attitude seems to be hardening rather than softening. None of South Africa’s current crop of political leaders seem to be asking the kinds of questions that will begin to resolve the question the role that immigration can and should play in the building of our new nation. South Africa’s political leadership sees Africa in one of two ways: either as a market for South African goods, differentiated only to the extent that Africans can be sold our products; or as a threat, part of a deluge of the poor and unwashed who take ‘our jobs and our women.’ No one in government today seems to understand that post-apartheid South Africa continues to be the site of multiple African imaginations. One cannot deal with ‘Africa’ without dealing with the subjectivity of what South Africa meant to Africa historically, and the disappointment that a free South Africa has signified in the last decade. So much of the pan-Africanist project – even with its failings – has been about an imagined Africa in which the shackles of colonialism have been thrown off. South Africa has always been an iconic symbol in that imaginary. Robben Island and Nelson Mandela, the burning streets of Soweto, Steve Biko’s bloodied, broken body: these images did not just belong to us alone. They brought pain and grief to a continent whose march towards self-determination included us, even when our liberation seemed far, far away. With the invention of the ‘new’ South Africa the crucial importance of African visions for us have taken a back seat. South Africans have refused to admit that we are a crucial aspect of the African project of self-determination. In failing to see ourselves in this manner, we have denied ourselves the opportunity to be propelled – transported even – by the dreams of our continent. What would South Africa be like without the ‘foreign’ academics who teach mathematics and history on our campuses? How differently might our students think without their deep and critical insights about us and the place we occupy in the world? How might we understand our location and our political geography differently if ‘foreigners’ were not here offering us different ways of wearing and inhabiting blackness? What would our society look like without the tax paying ‘foreigners’ whose children make our schools richer and more diverse? What would inner city Johannesburg smell like without coffee ceremonies and egusi soup? What would Cape Town’s Greenmarket square be without the Zimbabwean and Congolese taxi drivers who literally make the city go? In an era in which borders are coming down and becoming more porous to encourage trade and contact, South Africa is introducing layers of red tape to the process of moving in and out of the country. The outsider has never been more repulsive or threatening than s/he is now. This is precisely why Gigaba’s announcement of the Border Management Agency is so worrisome. Yet it was couched in careful language. Ever mindful of the xenophobic reputation that South Africa has in the rest of the continent, Gigaba asserts, “We value the contributions of fellow Africans from across the continent living in South Africa and that is why we have continued to support the AU and SADC initiatives to free human movement;but [my emphasis] this cannot happen haphazardly, unilaterally or to the exclusion of security concerns.” Ah, there it is! The image of Africa and ‘Africans’ as haphazard, disorderly and ultimately threatening is in stark contrast to South Africa and South Africans as organised, efficient and (ahem) peace-loving. The subtext of Gigaba’s statement is that South Africans require protection ‘foreigners’ who are hell bent on imposing their chaos and violence on us. Nowhere has post-apartheid policy suffered from the lack of imagination more acutely than in the area of immigration. Before they took power, many in the ANC worried about the ways in which the old agendas of the apartheid regime state would assert themselves even under a black government. They understood that there was a real danger of the apartheid mentality capturing the new bureaucrats. Despite these initial fears, the new leaders completely under-estimated the extent to which running the state would succeed in dulling the imaginations of the new public servants and burying their intellect under mountains of forms and rules and processes. They also didn’t understand that xenophobia would be so firmly lodged in the soul of the country, that it would be one of the few phenomena would unite blacks and whites. South Africa’s massive immigration fail is a tragedy for all kinds of reasons. At the most basic level, the horrific levels of violence and intimidation that many African migrants to South Africa face on a daily basis represent an on-going travesty of justice. Yet in a far more complex and nuanced way, South Africa’s rejection of its African identity is a tragedy of another sort. All great societies are melanges, a delicious brew of art and culture and intellect. They draw the best from near and far and make them their own. By denying the contribution of Africa to its DNA, South Africa forgoes the opportunity to be a richer, smarter, more cosmopolitan and interesting society than it currently is. In spite of ourselves South Africans still have a chance to open our arms to the rest of the continent. The window of opportunity for allowing our guests to truly belong to us as they have always allowed us to belong to them is still open. I fear however, that the window is closing fast. http://africasacountry.com/belonging-why-south-africans-refuse-to-let-africa-in/
Fincha Elementary School is a typical example of all primary schools in Oromia: No lights, no sits, no books, no toilets and overcrowded with 185 students per class.
(Oromo Refugees in Aden) – Yemen seeking for international attention to the excessive discrimination made against us, in particular all the last two decades. The right delayed is the right denied.
Subject: problem of the Oromo Refugees in Yemen remains unsolved, while Other refugees enjoy with fair protection and the rights (to live or move with free, education, health, resettlement out of Yemen just for better changes of life etc) which the Oromo refugees are denied even, after more than 17 years of deprivation and discrimination. And now under fire of the war
Who is behind and why is this all about? Is it sensible to think or say that such huge discrimination and inhuman treatment against the Oromo refugees, in particular is made out of the sight of or, does the international community including the relevant law intends to discriminate against the Oromo refugees? And what will the outcome or effects of the closed eyes (of the governments, human rights etc) to the abuses facing the Oromo refugees in Yemen be on future of the human rights?
Despite the prevailing situation is serious in general and probable to deteriorate our situation from bad to worse or to expose us more to the dangers anticipated/ intended, but it is not seemed however to be much different from the war of the excessive discriminations inflicted on us, in particular since more than 17 years as refugees in Yemen. As Oromo refugees we were under constant threats, intimidation, systematical discrimination and deprivation of the rights as refugees and, or the right to seek /claim against or for fair protection and treatment as equal as the other refugees in Yemen.
Specific details
Threats: harassment and extortion the Oromo refugees with UNHCR mandates (in the streets, at their work places and even, in their home etc) by the police just for they are” Oromo refugees” that compelled the Oromo to hide under the pretense of Somalis on need (during movement out of the living area etc). Intimidation: frightening the Oromo refugees by threatening situation or forcibly deportation for claiming for the right to protection, equal treatment to other refugees, Or for claiming against the abuses. Systematical discrimination: whenever we seek for the right to (protection, education, etc), the response for this by UNHCR (national staffs) in Aden is to say that we are not allowed to have or to seek for these rights in Yemen because the authority doesn’t recognize or that it does consider the Oromo refugees as illegal.
We are honest that we should respect the irregular policy of the Yemeni government towards us because it has been clear to be unwilling to grant the Oromo refugees as others. But we are seriously pointing to UNHCR which fails a pinnacle of its obligation towards us by procrastination with our refugee protection.
Oromo refugees particularly, in Aden are trapped in the moist of systematical pressures and deprivation by UNHCR , which was and still having political outlook towards us and practicing very scathing criticism( as to blame us as though we behave to contravene against the law etc) and misinformation against us excessively as a pretext to disprove or deny as well as to blur the international attention towards the well-founded and flagrant threats facing the Oromo refugees, in particular in Yemen. Whatever we seek or claim for (e.g. Refugee protection, assistance, the rights etc as refugees) is distorted as being for resettlement (: as if our entire claim intends for resettlement) even though it is for specific assistance. On the contrary, UNHCR is giving resettlement in third countries just for better change, for non-Oromo refugees those are granted all the rights as equal as the host community. Sometimes UNHCR claims that they are treating the Oromo refugees as same as the others by offering them assistance needed including resettlement. And at the same time they contradict what they’ve already mentioned by saying that ‘our refugee status has been deaden for belonging to the (OLF), which has lost its political legitimacy in the world. But they are still unable to respond to the question says “ how could the Oromo Refugees in Aden – Yemen seeking for international attention to the excessive discrimination made against us, in particular all the last two decades. The right delayed is the right denied. failure of the” OLF” policy in the world effect on only the refugees in Yemen apart from those in other countries of asylum”?
We are under influence of the national staffs who struggle hard to hide and confuse the actual facts related to our prolonged sufferings. UNHCR expatriate doesn’t perceive severity / situation facing us, because we are denied the right to access to persons of concern, and any written letter is interceded by the staffs intend to fail our reasonable claim before reaching the person of concern. So, they use to deter and eliminate us even, our committee leaders by their guards or the police. The staffs just then give the expats distorted information and persuade them wrongly about our intention.
What kind of the humanity is this, of which the deserving people are deprived while offered for those who should be considered as secondary concern?
In spite of such flagrant abuses, unkind treatment and discrimination treated against Oromo refugees, but the international community uses to turn a blind eye towards us by relying on the distorted information given by its customers (UNHCR) concern problems of the Oromo refugees.
All this discrimination is made to us because we are defenseless and without advocate, although the situation necessitates because the general attention to the refugee protection has become less and complicated unless international advocacy is made on behalf of these refugees according to the relevant laws. But the silence of the international community, Human Rights watch etc towards these inhuman treatments against the Oromo in particular has discouraged humanity and courage much more the abusive policy of the Ethiopian government against Oromo in Yemen.
UNHCR has played very crucial role in getting the Oromo refugees deprived of not only the rights as refugee in Yemen, but also of humanitarian intervention endeavored by some government interests and supports humanity such as( the government of Canada, which made great attempts two consecutive years [ 2004, 2005 ] willingly intending to give the Oromo refugees citizenship. But UNHCR in Aden denied the two times missions preventing them even, from visiting location of the Oromo refugees. However, we never forget the praiseworthy attempts intended by government of Canada.
The prolonged deprivation or discrimination treated against us has now been affecting our children those were born under the flag of UNHCR in Yemen. If the law itself discriminates against the parents, isn’t there any of the laws which support the right of the children?
This is not for the first time but we wrote a lot of petition to you since 2004 but never brought any positive change. Instead, we have been made to face worse and badly overreacted pressures resulted from the petitions applied, because no intervention or attention has been made towards us, excepting the amnesty’s very humanitarian Endeavour which should never be forgotten. But UNHCR blocked the process before reaching destination.
Comment on the Oromo communities in (the global continents) On behalf of the Oromo refugees living under appalling condition in Yemen, we would like to mention fraternal regards to all the Oromo communities in the world and we hope for you great success in your efforts aiming for the Oromo problems inside and outside of Oromia in general and for the Oromo Refugees in Aden – Yemen seeking for international attention to the excessive discrimination made against us, in particular all the last two decades. The right delayed is the right denied. Refugees those have threatened by the abusive policies emanating from the despotic government of Ethiopia in countries of asylum.
As we believe Oromo has lots of intellectuals in many countries in the word but we are disappointed and surprising about their silence on the sufferings of their people (refugees). What is the main role they have played in bringing a possible solution for their threatened refugees particularly, those in the Arab countries although a massive petition to you has been applied? We hope this time should not be as before.
You are aware of what is going on in Yemen that has compelled the international community to take its peoples from Yemen. Refugees (Somalis) have been leaving and others even, the Eritrean refugees have been promised by the Ethiopian authority to be taken from Yemen. But what about the Oromo refugees who have nowhere to return although Oromo is the most vulnerable, the most threatened refugee in Yemen? UNHCR in Aden also has left us heedlessly and without even, a piece of advice concern the dangers surrounding despite we are the most liable refugees to any possible threats on the ground more than any others.
Effects expected from this deterioration towards us: Oromo refugees in Yemen are beset by Ethiopian abusive policy through the Saudi which is striking on Yemen.
As we know the last aggressive deportation process made against thousands of Ethiopian from Saudi Arabia was carried out by the request from the Ethiopian authority through its friendly relationship with kingdom of Saudi. And now it is controlling completely all over Yemen and it is intending to deploy its forces that can be very harmful to us in Yemen. It is believable that Saudi will carry out forcibly deportation against us on the request of Ethiopia. In addition there is rumor information that some political faction in Yemen uses to recruit and exploit peoples (refugees) in struggling. And this can make us target to any possible revenge.
As remembered last year on 7 March 2014 Ethiopian authority came to our settled area called Basateen with Yemeni authority to make plane how to deport Ethiopian refugees In Aden/ Yemen. The other side is the Ethiopian government is planning and made agreement with Djibouti government to deport Oromo refugees in Yemen by sea if by the plane is impossible, as we hearing information and we seen in this month they taken 30 Ethiopian embassy community from Aden to Ethiopia by the sea.
Therefore, we are writing this urgent appeal letter to international community( US government, human rights organizations and others) seeking your urgent attention and assistance to get us rid of this threatening situation as soon as possible.
Finally, we would like to insist you( the Oromo communities and representatives wherever they are) to give a good support to this petition and enable it reach to all peoples of concern and governments possible to give us lasting solution as humanitarian.
Thank you
You can contact to: Abdulmalik Mohamed Ahmed. Mobile No, +967-771361374
Ahmed Kamal Abdalla, Mobile No. +967-771605410/+967-734420407
Over 250,000 East African refugees trapped in Yemen
Many refugees and asylum-seekers from Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea say they have nowhere else to go
Tens of thousands of East African refugees and asylum-seekers are at risk of being left behind in Yemen’s roiling violence, deprived not only of safe options for evacuation but also of a home country that might take them in, activists and U.N. officials said this week.
Since pitched fighting between Yemen’s Houthi rebels and forces loyal to the ousted president erupted in March, escape from the country has been arduous even for foreign citizens and wealthy Yemenis. Airports are under fire and commercial transportation cut off, forcing the most desperate to charter simple power boats and make harrowing journeys across the Red Sea.
But for the over 250,000 registered Somali, Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees and asylum-seekers, the situation is even more trying. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its partners have a contingency plan to receive 100,000 refugees in Somalia’s relatively stable regions of Somaliland and Puntland, and another 30,000 in Djibouti, but that process will unfold over the next six months. And it is barely underway.
“The reality is that there are limited options for people to get out,” said Charlotte Ridung, the Officer-in-Charge for the UNHCR in Yemen. “Some have fled by boat, but many ports are closed, and fuel is an issue so the options for escape are indeed limited.”
As gunbattles and aerial bombardment engulf the port city of Aden, at least 2,000 people have fled urban areas to take shelter in the nearby Kharraz refugee camp, Ridung said. Thousands more refugees and Yemenis alike have begun to make the dangerous voyage across the water, including 915 people who fronted $50 each for boats from the Yemeni port of Mukha to Somalia — among them Somalis returning home for the first time in decades.
There, the UNHCR registered “women and children who arrived extremely thirsty and asking for water,” Ridung said. They included a pregnant woman who was immediately transferred to a hospital to deliver her baby.
Meanwhile, asylum-seekers and migrants traveling in the opposite direction from East Africa continue to arrive in war-wracked Yemen. Last Sunday, the UNHCR registered another 251 people, mostly Ethiopians and Somalis, who arrived by boat at the port city of Mayfa’a. Whether they were unaware of the violence in Yemen or hopeful mass evacuations from the country might take them somewhere safer is unclear.
“Many people think when they reach Yemen they’ll get passage to Europe right away, but it is wrong information,” said Sana Mohamed Nour, 21, an Eritrean refugee and community leader in the Yemeni capital city of Sanaa. “We are trying our best to get out.”
For those like Nour, whose parents brought her to Yemen from politically oppressive Eritrea when she was just an infant, Yemen’s violence has made the daily hardships of refuge that much worse. Many refugees, who are only able to find informal work as maids, construction workers or day laborers, have lost their jobs in recent weeks as businesses shut down and people hole up in their homes. The closure of ports means food and other supplies are dwindling in the country, which imports roughly 90 percent of its food. “At night, we can’t sleep,” she said. “And when we go out during the day, we’ll be asked for ID or passport [by security forces], and there’s a lot of people [being] taken to prison.”
The options for escaping Yemen are somewhat more acceptable to Somalis, the largest refugee contingent in Yemen at over 236,000, according to UNHCR estimates. While violence has plagued Somalia since the early 1990s — including the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabab insurgency that still terrorizes pockets of the country — many Somali refugees have taken the war in Yemen as their cue to finally return, if not to their home towns then to the Somaliand and Puntland regions.
The situation is different for political refugees, who include most of the over 14,000 Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees or asylum-seekers left in Yemen. They say returning home would mean political persecution, imprisonment or violence. “The Somali refugees can go back to their home country, because there was no problem, and it will take them,” said Abdulmalik Mohamed Ahmed, a 42-year-old ethnic Oromo refugee from Ethiopia, who lives in Aden with his five children. “But we have no place or country to welcome us. We are just waiting.”
Ahmed said many of the estimated thousands of Oromos in Yemen are fearful that the Ethiopian government, which denies it persecutes Oromos and considers them economic migrants, will try to use evacuation efforts to whisk his people back home and perhaps into prison. In recent days Ethiopian embassy officials have deployed in Oromo neighborhoods in Aden, hoping to round up volunteers for government-run charter flights back to Ethiopia, he said.
But the idea of relocating anywhere in the Horn of Africa, as the U.N. is planning, is unfeasible, Ahmed said. Somalia, which borders Ethiopia to the east, is within reach of the government in Addis Ababa that imprisoned Ahmed once and still holds his father. “If we go back it is clear, we will face our fate there,” he said.
The U.N. has told refugee community leaders that it is “working on” getting them out, Nour said, but there has been little sign of progress. Members of the Eritrean diaspora have been called upon to help negotiate transportation for refugees, but she fears “no one else is talking about refugees in Yemen.”
“We are waiting, and every day the situation gets worse.”
‘According to ICIJ, which studied 7,200 World Bank financed projects between 2004 and 2013, at least 3.4 million people have lost their land or their jobs because of them and there’s little follow up on how these residents fare after they have been relocated. In some cases, World Bank funding may have funded forced relocations that turned violent: two former Ethiopian officials told ICIJ that funds diverted from a $2 billion health and education initiative have gone toward mass evictions in western Ethiopia where soldiers raped and beat locals.
Of the studied World Bank projects, which range from dams to schools and oil pipelines, more than 400 caused the displacement of locals. This happened mostly in Asia and Africa: 2.72 million have been displaced in China, India and Vietnam, and almost 100,000 in Ethiopia.’
The investigation’s key findings include:
Over the last decade, projects funded by the World Bank have physically or economically displaced an estimated 3.4 million people, forcing them from their homes, taking their land or damaging their livelihoods.
The World Bank has regularly failed to live up to its own policies for protecting people harmed by projects it finances.
The World Bank and its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp., have financed governments and companies accused of human rights violations such as rape, murder and torture. In some cases the lenders have continued to bankroll these borrowers after evidence of abuses emerged.
Ethiopian authorities diverted millions of dollars from a World Bank-supported project to fund a violent campaign of mass evictions, according to former officials who carried out the forced resettlement program.
From 2009 to 2013, World Bank Group lenders pumped $50 billion into projects graded the highest risk for “irreversible or unprecedented” social or environmental impacts — more than twice as much as the previous five-year span.
A team of more than 50 journalists from 21 countries spent 11 months documenting the bank’s failure to protect people moved aside in the name of progress.
Caamsaa 9,2015 Godina Lixa Shaggar Aanaa Midaa Qanyitti uummatni Oromoo gita bittaa mmootummaa Wayyaanee Abbaa irree EPRDF/TPLF/ jalatti hin bulluu jechuun mormii isa jabeesse, Mootummaan Wayyaanee Qeerroo barattoota Oromoo qabee hidhaatti darbuun dararuu itti fufe.
Oromian Economist 
Freedom House: U.S. Wrong to Endorse Ethiopia’s Elections. #Africa #Oromia April 23, 2015
Posted by OromianEconomist in Africa, Ethiopia's Colonizing Structure and the Development Problems of People of Oromia, Ethnic Cleansing, Free development vs authoritarian model, Groups at risk of arbitrary arrest in Oromia: Amnesty International Report, Sham elections, The Tyranny of TPLF Ethiopia.Tags: Africa, African Studies, Ethiopia's sham elections, Freedom House in response to comments by Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Genocide against the Oromo, The Tyranny of Ethiopia, Under Secretary Sherman’s comments, Wendy Sherman
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https://freedomhouse.org/article/us-wrong-endorse-ethiopias-elections#
U.S. Wrong to Endorse Ethiopia’s Elections
(Frredom House, Washington, April 16, 2015)
In response to today’s comments by Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Wendy Sherman, in which she referred to Ethiopia as a democracy and the country’s upcoming elections free, fair, and credible, Freedom House issued the following statement:
“Under Secretary Sherman’s comments today were woefully ignorant and counter-productive,” said Daniel Calingaert, executive vice president of Freedom House. “Ethiopia remains one of the most undemocratic countries in Africa. By calling these elections credible, Sherman has tacitly endorsed the Ethiopian government’s complete disregard for the democratic rights of its citizens. This will only bolster the government’s confidence to continue its crackdown on dissenting voices.”
Background:
Since coming into power in the early 1990s, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has dominated politics through a combination of political cooptation and harassment. The country experienced a degree of democratization through the early 2000’s, culminating in the most competitive elections in the county’s history in 2005. Since these elections, the EPRDF has restricted political pluralism and used draconian legislation to crack down on the political opposition, civil society organizations, and independent media. In the 2010, EPRDF and its allies won 546 out of 547 parliamentary seats.
Ethiopia is rated Not Free in Freedom in the World 2015, Not Free in Freedom of the Press 2014, and Not Free in Freedom on the Net 2014.
Freedom House is an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors the status of freedom around the world, and advocates for democracy and human rights.
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https://freedomhouse.org/article/us-wrong-endorse-ethiopias-elections#
Ethiopians dispute US official’s assessment of their ‘democracy’
U.S Department of State Endorsing of Upcoming Elections: Denial and Disrespect
The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA)
The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA) strongly opposes to the position that the U.S State Department has taken in regards to the upcoming Ethiopian election and the overall democratization process in the country in the past twenty-four years; and describes the comments by the Under Secretary of State as a sign of disrespect for ordinary citizens of Ethiopia and disregard for the human miseries that hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian have gone through under the EPRDF/TPLF-led government.
The HRLHA has no doubt at all that the U.S Government in general and U.S Department of State in particular, with the biggest and highly staffed of all Western embassies in Ethiopia, are very well aware of the political realities that have been prevailing in the country over the past two decades. An excellent proof is the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices that is issued annually by the US Department of State itself. Suppressions and denials of fundamental human rights in Ethiopia under the EPRDF/TPLF Government were being reported on by various human rights and humanitarian as well as government and diplomatic agencies; and, based on the facts revealed in such reports, the Ethiopian Government has repeatedly been ranked as the worst both at the regional and global levels.
In a country that has witnessed the highest number of political incarceration in its history, where unarmed students and other civilians were gunned down in hundreds simply because they attempted to exercise some of their fundamental rights, in “one of the ten most censored countries” where the existence of independent media has become impossible and, as a result, press freedom has been curtailed completely, where all sorts of socio-economic rights have been tied to political sympathy and supports, it would be an insult and disrespect to its ordinary citizens, and a disregard for the precious lives of innocent people that have been taken away by brutal hands to say that such a country is a democracy, and that the upcoming elections would be free and fair while intimidations and harassments of opposition candidates, as well as potential voters, were taking place out in the field even while the Under Secretary of State was making the comments. While encouraging the most repressive government and governing party towards becoming more dictatorial, the Under-Secretary of State’s comments discourage and undermine the sacrifices that the Ethiopian peoples have paid and are still paying to realize their century-old dream of building free and democratic country.
The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA) requests that the Under Secretary of State retract the wrong comments and apologize to the Ethiopian peoples. It also urges the U.S State Department to recognize and acknowledge the realities in Ethiopia and use the close ties that exists between the two governments to put pressure on the ruling EPRDF/TPLF party so that it allows the implementation of a genuine democracy.
http://www.ayyaantuu.net/u-s-department-of-state-endorsing-of-upcoming-elections-denial-and-disrespect/