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EZEMA, a political party in Ethiopia that is birthed out of remnants of EPRP, All-Amhara Organization, Medhin led by a fascist individual known as Goshu Wolde, and remnants of former landlords once again betrayed the ongoing revolution; first it stood by when Oromo comrades were killed and jailed; and then it temporarily ended up forming what could be a short unholy alliance with PM Abiy’s Prosperity Party (PP). The two joined hips not because they love each other but because they want to break the Oromo spirit. Their unholy unification is based on the ever-elusive pan-Ethiopianims – a crude ideology that sacrifices regional and local histories in favor of a never substantiated Solomonic history – a history that is more of a myth than a real history based on the histories of the peoples of Ethiopia.
To cement its image as the guardian of a radical version of Ethiopianism negotiated on the concept of Andinet-fusuminet, a narrative that seeks to protect the left-over of an old oppressive system, EZEMA has hastily released what could be perceived as its land policy. In it, it falters on the question of urban land of Addis Ababa. Reading EZEMA’s 15-pages report, I understand that there is an attempt to delineate the distribution of about hundreds of thousands of acres of vacant suburban land and the distribution of 96,000 condominiums. It would have been a high toll if their study was not politically charged.
EZEMA makes an accusation without showing any proof that a large portion of the 96,000 condominium units are reserved for workers belonging to the Oromia regional state. It adds that the rest is distributed to Dr. Abiy’s cronies.There are some truths to EZEMA’s accusation, especially when it accuses the government of PP of handing keys of finished units to government bureaucrats. Such a practice is common even in the regions. It is customary for both federal and regional governments to give prime land to cronies. PP functionaries in the regions are as guilty of this accusation as they come. In the process, often legitimate owners of such lands are pushed aside.Having said that, the spirit of EZEMA’s August 2020 report is to express its philosophy on the land question pertaining to Addis Ababa. In the report, EZEMA saws the unprovable suspicion that Dr. Abiy’s government is illegally handing finished units to Oromo. In a clever way, it reinvigorates the debate on the question of Addis Ababa and comes to saying that urban land is grabbed by Oromo with the approval of Dr. Abiy’s government. But how does this accusation sit with the killings of Oromo politicians and Oromo activists by the same government? It is this argument that makes EZEMA’s August report nothing but a false pretext to cleverly revive the debate over Addis Ababa at this sensitive time when Oromo advocates are in jail and have no freedom of expression.
The thin thread that holds EZEMA and PP has always been to silence the Oromo and other nationality voices so that urban land of Addis Ababa is “managed” without resistance. In other words, the EZEMA report is the tool for a fight for the control of one of the most important resources that belongs to Oromo – LAND. And this fight is an affirmation that Ethiopia’s history in the last century has been the looting and defending of land by different forces. The urban land question finally saws a wedge between two wrong sides whose unholy alliance is unsustainable. The clash over Oromo land will soon foment open conflict between EZEMA and PP. A Somali adage says: a stolen she camel will never produce a legitimate calf. The original sin of stealing Oromo land must first be corrected before land is legalized to consumers. We need a serious and democratic land policy.
Kuni gonkumaa fudhatama hin qabu. Wixineen kun Oromiyaaf waan tokko osoo hin kennin magaalattiin kan amma duraa daran akka babal’attee Oromoo lafaa buqqiftu kan godhuudha. Kuni salphina. Hasharbashar wixineen kun qabate facebook Addis Araggaa dubbihimaa OPDO jalaa argattu. Jawar Mohammed
In a country where federalism is opted, a given legal policy matter may be percieved by all states, or by group of states or by one state. Accordingly, one can divide states’ interest into three; universal, categorical, and special [particularistic] interest. Space will not allow a full flegde analysis of the first two types. I focus only on special [particularistic] interest.
In special state interest, legislation affects a single state only or same legislation may have differential effects on states. It is percieved either by a single state or by different states in different ways. A single state percieves an interest vis-a-vis the federal government that it shares with no other state[s].
The concept of special interest entered the Ethiopian legal regime in 1992, in Transitional peroid. A Proclamation enacted to establish fourtheen National Regional Self-governments, proclamation number 7/1992, Article 3(4) reads:
The special interests and political rights of the Oromo over Region Thirteen [Harari] and Region Fourtheen [Addis Ababa] are reserved. These Regions shall be accountable to the Central Transitional Government and the relations of these Self-governments with the Central Transitional Government shall be prescribed in detail by special law.
Article 49(5) of the FDRE Constitution articulates:
The special interest of the State of Oromia in Addis Ababa, regarding provision of social services or utilization of natural resources and other similar matters, as well as joint administrative matters arising from the location of Addis Ababa within the State of Oromia, shall be respected. Particulars shall be determined by law.
Pursuant to the second proviso of the same Article, the coming [law] proclamation should address the followings:
⃣. Provision of social services፡
Access to housing, education, health, water, transport, other matters needed for achieving adequate living standards constitute social services.
⃣. Utilization of natural resources፡
Water, forest, mineras, stones, and everything else natural are natural resources. However, one may note that there is hardly any natural resources that the City offers to Oromia. The City itself is dependent on the natural resources of Oromia, out of the City.
⃣. Joint administrative matters፡
Administration is a practical management and direction of the executive department and its agencies. In effect, it involves and starts from representation in the Council and Administration of the City. The word ‘joint’ is important as it impresses fifty fifty per adminstration.
⃣. Other similar matters፡
The phrase, ‘other similar matters’ have no objectivity. Two lines of interpretations can be accorded.
The narrow line of interpretation argues other similar matters is meant to show matters that are immediate to those expressly mentioned. Accordingly, it includes land administration, free access to infrastructures, buildings, halls, industry, naming of the City and sub cities, security matters, participation on policy matters concerning matters affecting interests, and the like.
The second line of argument is broad. It includes automatic representation without election or permanent allocation of a percentage of seats of Addis Ababa City Council, addition of Afaan Oromo as working language of the City, levy and collect revenues and taxes, and the like.
⃣. Addis Ababa as part of Oromia vs independent City:
During the Transitional Period, as established by ‘proclamation’ {not proclamation in strict sense} number 1/1991, Addis Ababa was a City State, proclamation number 7/1992, Article 3(1). This proclamation is repealed by the Federal Constitution, proclamation number 1/1995, by which Addis Ababa is omitted to be City State, by default of Article 47(1).
The Constitution spells out that Residents of Addis Ababa have full measure of self government, and shall be represented in the House of Peoples’ Representative, Article 49(2 and 4). These two Sub-articles give an impression that Addis Ababa is an independent City. It is by the same impression the Charters of the City are proclaimed, establishing the City as independent Chartered City Administration, proclamations number 87/1997 and 361/2003.
Further, Article 49(3) of the Constitution renders the Administration of the City responsible to the Federal Government. The Federal Government, hence, has interest over the City in this regard.
The same Constitution emphasizes the location of Addis Ababa is [with] in Oromia. In line with this scenario, Article 2(1) of the Revised Constitution of Oromia, proclamation number 46/2001, defines Oromia as an ‘… uninterrupted territory…’ The quoted phrase is intended to convey Oromia as landmass, the territory of which is connected from one point to the next without being interrupted. It, in effect, claims Addis Ababa as part and parcel of the State or City within the State.
The proclamation is expected to entertain and harmonize the status of the City as self government City while determining the special interest of Oromia as the location of the City is within the State.
⃣. Intergovernmental relations:
Federalism inevitably implies intergovernmental relations. Leave alone the existence of the interests of Federal Government and Oromia, which are two different governments in the Ethiopian Federation, over Addis Ababa, the recognition of special interest of Oromia in the City Administration, joint administration in particular, necessitates the existence of intergovernmental relations.
The recognition of special interest of Oromia despite the City has full measure of self government and the responsibility of the City to the Federal Government entails the tripartite interrelations, Article 49(2,3 and 5).
The proclamation should ascertain this trinity and establish a channeling institution among them.
⃣. Spillover effects:
Spill over effects are externalities those are not directly evolved in something. In one way or another, the recognition of special interest is a due acknowledgement of the existence of [negative] spill over effect.
Among different studies, a study conducted by Action Professionals Association for the People, aka APAP, indicated downstream users of rivers flowing out of Addis Ababa face health problems, environmental pollution and other human suffering due to the pollution by liquid and solid products of industries and garbages of dwellers of the City, APAP, press release, 20/12/2005. Hence, it seems, the Constitution is trying to disseminate the message that the spillover effect can only be redressed if and only if the special interest is recognized.
The proclamation, while determining the special interest, should address the scheme of redressing the spillover effects in particular.
The Constitution is general in general and Article 49(5) is general in particular. As the Constitution has these things to accomplish, the determining proclamation should address the same in detail. Failing in short of these, the proclamation does not fully and duly serve the purpose of the Constitution.
‘Bu’aa addaa Oromiyaan Finfinnee irraa qabdu: Qurrammi Oromoo Dargi finqilche waan biraa waliin hobbaatii heera saa aango 45/5 keessatt dabales argamsiisee jira. Suniyyuu naannaa waggaa 25f Mormii Oromoo lafa sossoosaa fi wareegama yeros baafameef malee awwaalamee ture. Amma TPLF wuxinee seeraa qabattee sana laalu irratt ifsa baasee jira. Sunis wuxinee seeraa kan dursee ambaaf dhimise ture. Yaa’a tumaa keessa maal fakkaatee akka bahu ta’innaan malee hin beekamu. Mootummaan TPLF ang’aa isa duraa ari’ee Finfinnee kan qabate akka boojuutt malee Oromoon yk ummati biraa fedheef miti. Kanaaf Finfinnee irratt angoo fi mirga, akkasumas abbaawummaa biyya Finfinnee marsee jiru irratt ejjennoo seeraa haa tahu safuu hin qabu. Akka ifsichi jedhutt Finfinneen laaqii Oromiyaa gidduutt argamtu utuu hin tahin qaama saatii. Haalli danuu seenaa, mooraa lolataa koloneeffataa taasiseen jijjiiramuu kan dandahu yoo Oromiyaan kolonummaa baate qofa. Koloneeffataa fi kanneen biroo waliin hariiroo ummachuun kan dandahamu yoo Oromiyaan kolonummaa baate qofa. Yoo haalli sun jijjiiramee Oromiyaan jara kaan waliin federeeshina uumuu barbaadde, finnooti federaawan hundi haala maaliin Finfinnee akka magaalaa muummitii federeeshinaatt dhimma bahan yk magaalaa biraa bu’uursuuf dhoofsisuu qabu. Itt gaafatammi bulcha magaalaa Finfinnee fi magaalota Oromiyaa hundaa federaalaaf utuu hin tahin finnaa Oromiyaaf taha. Seerri ittiin bulan dhimma federaalaa utuu hin tahin kan Oromiyaatii. Haasaan waa’ee bu’aa Oromiyaan Finfinnee irraa qabduu si’ana walmaraa jiru waa’ee mirgaaf utuu hin tahin gara dabarsuu fi malaammaltummaaf kan karoorfame.’ Ibsaa Guutamaa
Ten Preliminary Measures Oromia MayTake on Addis Ababa Until the Prodigal City will Submit to the Jurisdiction of Oromia
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Until the full ownership and territorial integrity of Oromia is fully and completely restored on Addis Ababa as an Oromia city, the Oromia Regional State and the Oromo people should start taking the following preliminary measures to force the submission of the prodigal city of Addis Ababa to the full legislative, executive and judicial power of Oromia National Regional Government, with immediate effect.
1. Oromia National Regional State should immediately and unilaterally delimit and demarcate the boundary between this prodigal city and Oromia National Regional State based on the 1991 border of this city, and ban this city from collecting any form of tax outside its borders and jurisdiction.
2. Oromia National Regional State should immediately adopt Afaan Oromo as the working language for all official and business communications with this prodigal city.
3. Oromia National Regional State should stop using Addis Ababa as the market hub for all Oromia business, and relocate to Oromia cities. All Oromia markets including but not limited to grain markets, vegetable and fruit markets, meat and live animal markets, coffee markets, hid and skin markets and all other resources of Oromia should be relocated to Oromia cities. Oromia should license Oromia based exporters for all Oromia resources and products; and ban Addis Ababa-based exporters from exporting Oromia commodities, goods, and products.
4. Oromia National Regional State should immediately stop using Addis Ababa general distributors and wholesalers, and start licensing Oromia general distributors and wholesalers to distribute imported goods and services throughout Oromia. Oromia National Regional State should immediately license Oromia importers of all goods and services sold in Oromia markets.
5. Oromia National Regional State should immediately issue laws that will impose tariff, taxes and sale price on water and electricity supplies Oromia provides to Addis Ababa, and start rebuilding Oromia from these proceeds.
6. Oromia National Regional State should immediately impose a toll on all Addis Ababa licensed cars including private and commercial cars, taxis, trains and buses that use Oromia roads. The proceeds collected from these road tolls will be used to rebuild Oromia infrastructures and maintain Oromia roads.
7. Oromia National Regional State should immediately issue laws that will impose dry port service fees for all imports and exports passing through the inland dry port at Mojo to Addis Ababa.
8. Oromia National Regional State should start charging lease and real estate taxes on all Addis Ababa owned properties located in Oromia including factories, businesses, and other facilities.
9. All Addis Ababa waste disposal facilities in Oromia should be closed until the health effect and environmental sustainability of those facilities are studied and Oromia determines the appropriate cost and fees Addis Ababa should pay to continue using these facilities, if at all.
10. Oromia National Regional State should issue laws that will totally ban Addis Ababa from getting any land either in the form of a lease or sale from private or government entities in Oromia except through limited term rent!
A man at a funeral holds up the portrait of Tesfu Tadese Biru, 32, a construction engineer who died during a stampede after police fired warning shots at an anti-government protest in Bishoftu during Irreecha, the thanksgiving festival of the Oromo people, in Denkaka Kebele, Ethiopia, October 3, 2016. REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri/File Photo
Academic Endalk Chala has been mapping the deaths of men and women killed in Ethiopia’s Oromia region, since violence erupted in November 2015By Sally Hayden
LONDON, June 29 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – It was late 2015 when Endalk Chala began documenting deaths in his home country of Ethiopia, scouring Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to piece together who had died and where.
Chala comes from Ginchi, a town 72 km (45 miles) from Addis Ababa where protests began in November 2015, initially over a government plan to allocate large swathes of farmland to the capital city for urban development.
The plan would have displaced thousands of Oromo farmers, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia.
“There were reports that people were killed in the protests and no one was reporting about it. No one cared who these people are,” Chala told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
“The information was all over the internet, not well organised. I just wanted to give perspective.”
While the land re-allocation project was officially scrapped by authorities, protests and conflict reignited over the continued arrest and jailing of opposition demonstrators with full-scale protests over everything from Facebook to economics.
Several hundred protesters were killed in the 11 months to October 2016 when the government declared a state of emergency and shut down communications, including the internet.
More than 50 people died at a single demonstration that month, after a stampede was triggered by police use of teargas to disperse anti-government protesters at a religious festival.
Watch: the map-maker’s mission
Witnesses also reported security forces firing live rounds into crowds of protesters at multiple locations.
A government report presented to parliament in April acknowledged a death toll 669 people – 33 of them security personnel – although activists believe it could be much higher.
For the government shutting off the internet for periods all but ended online contact across Ethiopia, leaving it to the Ethiopian diasporas to pull together the facts.
DIASPORA’S DATABASE
Enter Chala, a PhD student in Oregon, the United States, who decided to log every death he could on an interactive map, inspired by a similar Palestinian project.
“I started to collect the information from the internet: Facebook, Twitter and blogs. And I started to contact the people who had put that information out,” he said.
Once word spread that Chala was collating the deaths, Ethiopian friends and activists began to send details, including photographs of those injured and killed. They contacted Chala via social media and instant messaging applications like Viber.
Chala learned that Ethiopians in rural areas were driving miles to put evidence of the killings online, but he still feared there were information black holes.
In its report of 669 deaths presented to parliament, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission – which works for the government – blamed protesters for damaging land and property.
In the report, seen by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the Commission said the disturbances had damaged public services, private property and government institutions. It also cited harm to investment and development infrastructure.
However the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, criticised the government for a lack of accountability and called for access to protest sites.
Neither the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission nor the Ethiopian government responded to requests for comment.
FACEBOOK LEADS TO JAIL
In a country where fear of reprisals is common place, it is easier for those living outside Ethiopia to speak out, said Felix Horne, Ethiopia researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“Any time victims of human rights abuses share information with outside groups, with journalists – either domestic or international – there’s often repercussions, quite often from local security officials,” he said.
Protesters run from tear gas being fired by police during Irreecha, the thanks giving festival of the Oromo people in Bishoftu town of Oromia region, Ethiopia, October 2, 2016. REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri – RTSQE9N
Horne said Facebook was a key source of information in the early stages of the protests but this was quickly seized on by the government and security officials checked students’ phones.
Last month, an opposition politician was sentenced to 6-1/2 years in prison because of comments he wrote on Facebook.
Horne, whose organisation also attempted to document the deaths, agreed that numbers are important for accountability, but said a focus on the death toll alone can be de-humanising.
“We’ve talked to so many people who were shot by security forces. Many of them children. Many of them students. The numbers sort of dehumanises these individuals.”
COST OF FREE THINKING
Benta, a 29-year-old veterinarian and former government employee who took part in the protests, saw nine people shot.
Speaking to the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Kenya, his new home, he recalled how a soldier fired directly on a car in Aje town, West Arsi on Feb. 15 last year. Five people were shot, two died and three were wounded, he said.
Olympic silver medallist Feyisa Lilesa makes a gesture while crossing the finish line at the Rio Olympics to protest Ethiopia’s treatment of his ethnic group, the Oromo people on August 21, 2016. REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha
Six months later, on Aug. 6, Benta was participating in another protest in Shashamane in the Oromia region, when he saw four people shot. He says he was detained and tortured for nearly two months and has now made a new life in Nairobi.
“If you’re expressing your freedom, you’ll be shot, and if you’re asking for your rights, you’ll be detained,” he said.
Chala said bullet wounds were the most common injuries visible on the photos that flooded in to him from Ethiopia and the brutality he witnessed has stayed with him.
“It really hit me very hard,” he said.
“People will forget. They’ll bottleneck their emotions and grievances and the government will just extend and buy some time, and there will be another bubble sometime in the future. That’s a vicious circle.”
Addis Abeba, Jan. 18/2017 – When Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn indicated last week that a draft law was prepared on the “special interest” of Oromia in Finfinnee (aka Addis Abeba), discussions have resurfaced on the issue of the status of the city and its relations with Oromia. Last week, I had the privilege of discussing the matter in a couple of radio interviews where, inter alia, I was asked what the content of the special interest is, what I anticipate the content of the draft law will be, and whether passing the law would address the concerns raised in the Oromo protests that has rocked the country for over two years now. What follows is a set of reflections on some of these issues.[1]
This announcement about the draft being prepared on the ‘special interest’ comes at a time when the country is under a state of emergency the end of which is indefinite even according to the Prime Minister.[2] The announcement comes at a time when, in the wake of the Oromo protests against the Master Plan, at least over 700 people are killed by the regime and thousands more are injured. In particular, it comes after key Oromo political leaders—such as Bekele Gerba and Dr Merera Gudina–and tens of thousands of protestors have been sent to jail and military detention centers, respectively, for demanding the right to ownership of their Oromo land including Addis Abeba. The announcement comes at a time when the Oromia and Amhara regions are chiefly being administered by the Command Post in charge of implementing the state of emergency law. The Master Plan, which was once said to be repealed, is reportedly being implemented within Addis Abeba. The boundary between the city and its Oromo suburbs that are still within the administrative jurisdiction of Oromia is not delimited. The repression of all forms of dissent continues. This immediate political context is not without a precedent. In fact, one can say that it is only the continuation of a long-drawn historical context.
Before the advent of Art 49(5)…
Historically, it is now a well-known fact that the notion of Oromia’s ‘Special Interest’ entered the Ethiopian legal universe in 1992 through the instrumentality of the Proclamation that established National/Regional Self Governments (Proclamation No. 7/ 1992). This is the proclamation that set the blue-print for what came later to be the constituent units of the Ethiopian Federation. Adopted to give effect to the decentralization that was envisaged in the Transitional Charter – and to valorize the right of ethno-national groups to self-determination – it established 14 self-governing national regions. Accordingly, Oromia became one of the 14 self-governing States. Addis Abeba, like the City of Harar, was also a region in its own right. Oromia’s ‘special interest’ over both cities was first recognized in this piece of legislation (1).In Article 3 (4), it is provided that:
“The special interest and political right of the Oromo over Region Thirteen [Harari] and Region Fourteen [Addis Abeba] are reserved. These Regions shall be accountable to the Central Transitional Government and the relations of these Self-Governments with the Central Transitional Government shall be prescribed in detail by a special law.”
Very much like the provision in Art 49 (5) of the Constitution that came later, it envisaged a ‘special law’ (meant to clarify the relation of accountability to the Central Government), but such a law was never promulgated. It is interesting to observe that, unlike in the constitution, in this transitional period law, the Oromo has not just a “special interest” but also a political right over the two self-government regions. It is also important to observe that there is no attempt to delimit the boundary of the city. As a result, it was not clear as to where exactly the jurisdiction of the government of Addis Abeba ends and that of Oromia commences.
While it looked like a city-state in a federation, Addis Abeba was also seen as a city within a larger state, i.e., Oromia. In other words, administratively, it was an enclave falling outside of Oromia while also housing the Government of Oromia as its capital. In a sense, Addis Abeba is in Oromia, but not of Oromia. Oromia was a State governing from Addis Abeba without, however, governing Addis Abeba itself. While the meaning of ‘special interest’ was understood to mean much more than having a seat for the Oromia government in the city, for the entire period of the transitional times, this remained to be the only ‘interest’ Oromia could obtain.
The concept of Oromia’s special interest was thus injected into the language of public law in the country accompanying the shift away from a formerly unitary state to what was subsequently to become a ‘multinational federation’. Acutely sensitive to the rights of sub-national groups (called ‘Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’) in Ethiopia, this ‘ethno-federalization’ was a reaction, and a push back, to the goings-on in history. We can thus see its immense historical import in its potency to speak both to the past and to the future. The ‘special’ in the ‘special interest’ phrase hails not only from the mere fact of geographic location of Addis Abeba in Oromia but also from the implicit recognition of the essentially Oromo identity of the city. Historians have routinely described the fact that, until it was violently raided and occupied by the forces of the Shoan Kingdom in the 19th century, the city was inhabited by the Oromo.
When it was ‘founded’ as the capital of the modern Ethiopian Empire in 1886, it was set as a launching pad for the campaigns of imperial conquest on the peoples of the Southern, South-Eastern, and South-Western peripheries. With a violent beginning marked by conquest and occupation of the land; raid, massacre, and displacement of the population; and transformation of the cultural and environmental terrain by the soldiers, it started as a garrison town. A cursory glance at writings by William Harris[3], Alexander Bulatovich[4], and even Evelyn Waugh[5], indicates that the State operated in Addis Abeba as an occupying force of settler colonialists bent on pushing out and displacing the indigenous Oromo peoples. Because the settlers generally spoke Amharic and confessed the Ethiopian Orthodox faith and because of the disproportionate concentration of modern urban facilities in Addis Abeba, it became increasingly different culturally from its surroundings.
Consequently, it projected a cultural life that is different from that of the Oromo. The culture, identity, and language of the Oromo became the constitutive outside of the cultural life in the city. In time, the Oromo were effectively marginalized and otherized. For most of the 20th century, the Oromo, although historically the host, was forced to live like the alien and the guest in what was their own homeland. Informed by this memory and propelled by years of national liberation struggles, the politicians that negotiated the Transitional Charter (Proc. 1/1991) and made the law (Proc. 7/1992) sought to emphasize the need to acknowledge the Oromo presence in the city’s affair through the ‘special interest’. The ‘special interest’ package was thus a way of making up for the artificial (created or intentionally produced) absence of the Oromo. In other words, it was a method of presenting the absent, a way of bringing back the Oromo to its own.
What does the Law Say about the Special Interest?: The Legal Context
When the constitution of FDRE was finally adopted in 1995, the ‘special interest’ clause was more or less carried over into art 49(5). To understand the full textual context of the special interest package in art 49 (5), it is important for us to reproduce the entirety of article 49 in full. Accordingly, the provision in art 49 reads as follows:
Addis Abeba shall be the capital city of the Federal State.
The residents of Addis Abeba shall have a full measure of self-government. Particulars shall be determined by law.
The Administration of Addis Abeba shall be responsible for the Federal Government.
Residents of Addis Abeba shall in accordance with the provisions of this constitution, be represented in the House of Peoples’ Representative.
The special interest of the state of Oromia in Addis Abeba regarding the provision of social services, or the utilization of natural resources and other similar matters, as well as joint administrative matters arising from the location of Addis Abeba within the State of Oromia, shall be respected. Particulars shall be determined by law.
Owing to the unclarity of the clause in art 49 (5), coupled with the lack, to date, of the law constitutionally envisaged to enunciate the content, it became imperative for people to ask “just what is the ‘special interest’?” And what is so special about it? In this section, we make a close reading of the provision to explore what could be in the package.
Developments: Toward Articulating the Content of the ‘Special Interest’
It is important at the outset to underscore that Addis Abeba is a Federal capital city within a State. In this, it is more like Berne (of Switzerland) or Ottawa (of Canada). It is not a city-state (in the style of Berlin or Brussels). Nor is it a federal capital territory or a federal district (in the style of Abuja, or Canberra, or Washington DC). Once that is recognized, i.e., that Addis Abeba is a city in Oromia, one should have an explicit discussion and mutual understanding about what it means to be a federal capital because that automatically indicates that the Federal Government does not have a ‘natural’ right to be in the city. Unfortunately, that discussion did not happen. That was a historical blunder about a city mired in several historical misdeeds and mistakes.
That it was made accountable solely to the Federal Government was the second big blunder committed at the time of adopting the constitution. Given the fact that the city is Oromia and that it is also a ‘natural’ capital of the government of Oromia, it should have been made accountable to Oromia. Or, at the very least, it should have dual accountability to both the Federal and Oromia Governments. That did not happen. Commanding exclusive say on the administration of the city (in the name of ultimate accountability), the federal government ‘banished’ the Oromia government at will in 2003 and allowed it back into the city in 2005. In this, the federal government expanded and re-enacted the original violence of dispossession and displacement of Oromos from the city thereby perpetrating a new wound before the historical wounds could heal. Had it not been for this contemporary constitutive mistake, this ‘original sin’ of constitutional drafting in 1995, there wouldn’t have been anything special about the special interest of Oromia. If there would be ‘special interest’, it would have been that of the Federal Government or the non-Oromo residents of the city. These twin mistakes of recent history led to events of dire consequence that continue to claim lives and limbs to date.
The Host made a Guest
Having made a guest out of the host through the legal fiction of excision, i.e., by excising the city out of the political and administrative jurisdiction of Oromia, it became necessary for Ethiopia, almost as an afterthought, to ‘concede’ a lame ‘special interest’ to Oromia in Art 49(5). Over the years, the government of Oromia and Oromos in general hung on this provision more as a symbolic rallying point to interrogate Ethiopia for what is actually beyond the specific content of the Oromo interest in the city.
To the Oromo public, the city became the metaphor for what Ethiopia has made of the Oromo in general: an invisible, non-speaking, non-acting other who inhabits the interior of the territory but the exterior of the polity. It became the concentrated expression of the ‘life’ and the agony of the Oromo in the Ethiopian polity: their present-absence and their absent presence at a time.
Today, the Federal State presided over the coalition of four parties that make up the EPRDF became the new empire in a federal form, and the leaders became the new emperors in a democratic-republican garb. This forced the quip from many commentators that in Ethiopia ‘plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose’ (‘the more it changes, the more it remains the same’).
Hence, the wide Oromo discontent over the whole arrangement with regard to Addis Abeba. Taking advantage of the historic asymmetry in power, the city administration, mostly prompted by the federal government, has consistently acted in complete neglect or wilful defiance of the interests of Oromia and Oromos.
Legal Silence Exploited
Taking advantage of the undefined territorial boundary of the city, the administration continued to expand its competence over the suburbs surrounding Addis Abeba. Routinely, the Federal and the City Governments exploited the legal silence on the matter of special interest. Thus, the Addis Abeba Land Administration office often acted as the authority in charge of land administration in areas such as Labbuu, the Laga Xaafo-Marii continuum, Bole-Bulbula, Buraayyuu, Sabbata, Sululta, and districts beyond the Aqaqii-Qaallittii corridor (such as Galaan, Dukam, etc). The Federal Government continued to implement its industrialization policy by reserving Industrial Zones, Recreation Parks, and designated investment sites (much like Special Economic Zones). In doing all these things, the Federal Government and the city never took the trouble to consult with Oromia, much less the Oromo people. Evictions of farmers with little or no compensation became a routine practice.
Pollutions, Waste, Deforestation, Evictions
Pollutions from industrial emissions were sustained with no sense of accountability from the part of the city. Waste was dumped recklessly causing massive health risks. Deforestation and soil degradation was intensified in the neighboring districts, especially after the rise of investment in flower farms, dairy farms, and poultry farms. Homelessness of the evicted farmers and residents started to be felt among the people.
Oromia and Oromos Respond Resentfully: #Oromorprotests Emerges
The response from the Government of Oromia was late, but it did come in the form of a 2009 Caffee Oromia proclamation that established a Special Zone of 17 districts and 36 towns in the area. Its attempt at legislative articulation of the ‘Constitutional Special Interest of Oromia over Addis Ababa’ remained a draft to date. Its demand for enunciation of the content of the ‘special interest’ by the Constitutional Inquiry Council (CIC) was rejected on the ground that the CIC and the House of Federation do not give an advisory opinion in the absence of litigation.
Also, Oromo residents of the inner city resented the absence of Schools and cultural centers that operate in Afaan Oromo. The fact that the city has become anything but Oromo over the years made Oromo residents lament the complete cultural insensitivity to the needs of the Oromo in the city. Increasingly, the demand for schools in Afaan Oromo and cultural centers began to be vocally expressed in the last decade or two (resulting in efforts to construct an Oromo Cultural Centre and to open public schools that operate in Afaan Oromo)[6].
While such demands were gaining momentum steadily over the years, the Integrated Regional Development Plan (alias the Master Plan) was announced to the public in 2014. Immediately, it provoked a resistance in all corners of the Oromia region.
The day-to-day encroachment of Oromia’s jurisdiction with the informal expansion of the city; the general spill over effects of the city; its becoming the dumping ground for Addis Abeba waste for no gain; the pollution of the rivers, the soil, and the general environment of the surrounding districts and towns; the evictions with ‘compensations’ whose lower limits are legally left unregulated; the insensitivity to the cultural and linguistic needs of Oromo residents; the temperamental behaviour the Federal Government showed vis-à-vis Oromia’s claim to Addis Abeba as its capital city; these and other resentments fed the anger that emerged in the wake of the revelation of the Master Plan.
Apart from its violation of the principles of federalism and a healthy intergovernmental relation that should exist in a working federation, one of the reasons given for resisting the Master Plan was that it liquidates the ‘special interest’ of Oromia. As was noted above, the particulars envisaged to ‘be determined by law’ were never determined.
Giving Content to the ‘Special Interest’
According to art 49 (5), the articulation of the content of the ‘special interest’ is hoped to revolve around the meaning of four broad phrases:
‘Provision of social services’
‘Utilization of natural resources’
‘Joint administrative matters’
‘Other matters’ similar to provision of social services or utilization of natural resources.
In the endeavor to give content to the special interest clause, one is expected to interpret these phrases in a judicious manner that can also satisfy the popular discontent that was ignited into full manifestation in the protest to the Master Plan.
Social Services
In particular, we must identify the kind of social services that Addis Abeba should provide to Oromia. Normally, ‘social services’ connote services such as access to housing, education, health, water, transport, and other matters needed for achieving adequate living standards. From experience, we know that one of the unmet needs of Oromia in Addis Abeba is access to public buildings and properties for their offices and residential places for their officials and civil servants. And the need for designated plots of land on which to build houses for the employees of the state.
Organizing public schools that operate in Afaan Oromo is another kind of social service seen as a pressing need. Related but not often articulated is the need for building or making spaces for public libraries run in Afaan Oromo, exhibition centres, concert halls, theatres, museums, galleries, cinema halls, printing presses dedicated to the nurture and development of Oromo cultural lives, shows, performances, plays, memories, arts/paintings, movies, books, etc. This need to give attention to culture also requires the need for memorializing personalities and historical moments of the Oromo through naming streets, places, squares; and erecting statues. In addition, subsidizing Oromo arts and printing and publications as part of making the Oromo presence felt to anyone who comes to and inhabits the city is an important aspect of social service. In other words, the provision of social services also extends to the cultural representation of the Oromo in the life of the wider city.
Similarly, health facilities and other utilities such as public transport services that operate in Afaan Oromo should be considered part of the social services to be provided to Oromos. One way of addressing this could be making Afaan Oromo the co-equal working language of the City Government. The move to make Afaan Oromo and other languages to become working languages of the Federal Government will also help curb part of the problem of access to social services and facilities such as public transport, celebration and registration of vital events (birth, marriage, death, certification, authentication, licensing, etc).
Natural Resources
The proposed law must also clarify the type of ‘natural resources’ Addis Abeba has, resources that Oromia uses, and identify the modes in which it continues to use them. The effort to give content to this phrase becomes confounding when we note the fact that there is hardly any natural resource that the city offers to Oromia. Anything ‘natural’ in the city is ipso facto that of Oromia because the city itself is of Oromia anyway. The city actually is dependent on the natural resources of Oromia. Water, forest products, hydroelectric supply, minerals, sand, cement products, precious stones, food products, and everything else that Ethiopia (beyond and above Addis Abeba) needs come from outside of the city, Oromia and the other regions.
In the course of articulating this interest, one needs to consider the benefits Oromia should get from the delivery of these resources. One way of doing this is to agree on the percentage of income that should go back to Oromia’s revenue based on what is often called the principle of derivation in federal countries. If the federalism was properly functioning, this would have been handled through a negotiated channel of financial intergovernmental relations.
Joint Administration
The proposed law to be prepared must determine the scope and method of exercise of the envisaged ‘joint administration’. For this, we will first need to identify what tasks are matters for joint administration. Secondly, we need to decide who is responsible for what aspect of the administration. In the area of inter-jurisdictional roads (say maintenance); border management; managing trans-boundary forests, rivers, etc.; inter-jurisdictional legal cooperation (whose police takes responsibility for cross-border criminal activities); these and some such activities need to be spelt out.
One obvious area of joint administration is management of land. Because legislative power over land issues is a matter for the federal government and administration is for the States, issues such as town planning, mapping, cadastre, land redistribution among residents, designing construction regulations, etc should have been a matter for states, districts, and local/municipality governments. And in these areas, local governments of Oromia and the city administration (i.e., sub-cities and districts) could find some collaboration. Accordingly, the government of the state of Oromia and the government of the Addis Abeba City could coordinate their activities as they have overlapping jurisdictions (i.e., Oromia has a territorial jurisdiction while the city has a self-administrative jurisdiction) because the city is also the capital city of Oromia.
Ideally, ‘joint administration’ could have happened if the city was made accountable to the Government of Oromia rather than to the Federal Government. At the very least, joint administration could have been achieved through making the City government accountable to both the Federal and the Oromia governments. Settling on one of these options would mitigate the injustice of the original constitutional arrangement that: a) made Addis Abeba the capital city of the Federal government without the consent of Oromia and Oromos; and b) made the city’s self-government accountable exclusively to the Federal Government.
‘Other issues’
The meaning of the ‘other issues’ over which Oromia has a special interest is to be decided contextually on the basis of issues that rear their head in the course of day-to-day life experience. One cannot be definitive about the list of things to be included in this category.
However, twenty years of experience should have brought forth several such issues that may need to be specified while leaving others to the discretion of administrators subject to judicial review.
Who Takes Initiative?
Even assuming that the content of the ‘Special interest’ is clear, there is another issue left for us to determine: who comes up with the law that “determines” the “particulars”? Is it the Federal Government, the City Government, or the Government of Oromia? So far, the federal government had hesitated to legislate on the matter even in the face of a repeated demand by the government of the state of Oromia. That is of course because the federal government wants to exploit the ambiguity that remains because of the legal vacuum.
Legal silence is strategically deployed by the Federal and Addis Abeba Council to avoid their part of the obligation and to continue to enjoy what doesn’t rightfully belong to them in the absence of a law that proscribes it. Oromia’s attempt in the past (2006) to legislate on the matter could produce only a draft piece of legislation that couldn’t ultimately be presented to and passed by the Caffee Oromia.
Beyond the Content: Reconciled Relationship between the City, the Region, and the Country-Redemption via Relocation?
If there was an inclusive participatory constitutional moment that acknowledges the presence of the Oromo in the polis-to-be between 1992 and 1994, one or more of the following scenarios might have been negotiated:
a) Find a (new) site that is commonly agreed upon by all the constituent members of the Federation to be the Federal District Territory;
b) Designate another city in another State or in Oromia as the seat of the federal government accountable to that state;
c) Designate different cities that can serve as seats for the different branches of the Federal Government;
d) Agree to have a roving capital city for the federal government every decade or so;
e) Designate Addis Abeba as the capital city with a self-governing council ultimately accountable to Oromia—an essentially Oromo city in which the federal government may have some form of ‘special interest’
f) Designate Addis Abeba as a federal capital city whose self-governing council will be accountable to both the federal and the Oromia governments.
Towards a Redemptive Discourse
We all know that the constitution-making process was less ideal than one would hope for. It was marked by lack of legitimacy on procedural and substantive accounts.[7] The work required now, while attending to the immediate needs of giving content to the ‘joint administrative issues’, is to identify potential areas of constitutional amendments that would overcome the problems caused by original flaws in the constitution. This will force us to engage in—and engage the public with–what I called, elsewhere, a ‘redemptive constitutional discourse,’ a discourse that overcomes the deficits in original legitimacy, a discourse that ‘corrects’ the imperfect beginnings of the constitution by also attending to the trauma caused by inaugural violence with which the city was incorporated into, and made the capital of, the modern imperial Ethiopian state.
Relocating the Capital
While that is being done, the search for a lasting solution to the violent Ethio-Oromia relations, especially regarding Addis Abeba needs to begin and continue. In particular, it is imperative that we consider the possibility of relocating the Federal Government elsewhere. Removing the Federal government will help undo the trauma of the violent occupation at the moment of ‘founding’ and subsequent displacement of the Oromo through the ‘settlement’ of others. Relocation has the advantage of:
Dissolving the altercation over ownership of the city;
Securing the socio-cultural interests of the Oromo in the city;
Restoring full jurisdiction of Oromia over its territory;
Rescinding the legal excision of the city from the administrative jurisdiction of Oromia through the provision of article 49;
Enhancing the Oromo’s right to exercise of ultimate political power in the city;
Restoring the host, the Oromo, to its rightful position and securing the rights of the guests, the non-Oromo inhabitants, in a context of mutual recognition;
Arresting the continued lawless expansion of the city and the concomitant land grab, eviction, and ethnocide thereof;
Responding to, and thereby dissolving, the question of the so-called ‘special interests’ within the context of Oromia and Oromia alone;
Comprehensively responding to the demands of the #Oromoprotests whose rallying cry has been “Finfinnee belongs to Oromo” (“Finfinneen kan Oromooti!”).
The legal relocation of the Federal capital has more transformative potential for the entire polity than the obvious advantages outlined above. It is a restoration of Oromo agency and authority over the decision on what matters to their life in their land and in the wider country. The issue of choosing a negotiated site for a federal capital city is an opportunity to help the wider country to agonize over its history, its state system, its capacity to deal with historical injustice, and its hope of re-building the state on a fairer, more just, and more plural foundation. In short, it allows for a redemptive constitutional discourse to emerge.
It has to be explicitly stated however that to remove the Federal Government is not synonymous with removing the inhabitants of the city. The inhabitants will be part of Oromia and like all other people living in the wider Oromia, their rights shall be respected. Yes, there may be some people who work for the federal government institutions that may have to commute to and from work if they choose to continue living in Addis Abeba after the relocation of the capital. Yes, there will also be people who might move to the new capital altogether. But they don’t have to. No one has to. It is important to remember, incidentally, that not all the inhabitants of the city are employees of the Federal Government as such. The federal Government is merely its institutions, agencies, and its workers. That is not the (entire) population of the city.
Pending Redemption…Shift Accountability
Until that is done through constitutional revision or amendment, it may be necessary to consider the shift of accountability of the city government from the Federal to the Oromia government. It may be imperative for the Federal Government to start paying rent to the Oromia government as a token of acknowledgement to their being hosted by Oromia.
The quest for a lasting solution should start with identifying unconstitutional laws and policies that violate Oromia’s rights and special interests. Laws such as the one that promulgated the Addis Abeba Charter of 2003 (Proc. 361/2003, especially its article 5), the Investment Amendment Proclamation of 2014 (Proc. 849/2014, especially its provisions regarding ‘Industrial Development Zones), and projects like the World Bank sponsored Industrial Zone Projects (such as the Resettlement Action Plan [of] the Qilinxo Industrial Zone (April 2015) should all be rescinded.
New laws may need to be issued. An example is a proclamation that governs the lowest threshold for rates and modes of compensation awarded to a farmer in the event of eviction from her/his land. To be sure, there was a 2005 Proclamation (Proc. 455/2005) that provides for expropriation of land holdings and compensation. However, this proclamation, apart from enhancing the dispossessive regulatory and police powers of the Ministry of Federal Affairs, federal and local governments, and of several other agencies, it says little about the substance of the compensation, especially for collective landholdings (about which it says nothing). Needless, to say, as the actual practice of expropriation has routinely demonstrated, even the normative gesture in the law of providing a replacement remains to be more a legal rhetoric than an actual reality, more a juridical promise than a political practice.
Not so Special
Recognition of special interest is exception-making. Through a ‘special interest’ package, a rightful entity extends some rights, as part of underserved acts of grace, to another that cannot lay claim to these rights. To Oromia and Oromos, there is hardly anything special about the ‘special interest’. The city is naturally and intrinsically part of Oromia. As such, Oromos and Oromia have pre-eminence over the city. They lay claim over the city as their own natural territory. Oromo interests are not supposed to be granted to them by others as some kind of favor. They have the more fundamental right of an owner. As such, they do not need others to make exception in their favor in order to guarantee the protection of the interest of the Oromo in the city. If anything, it is the Oromo that should make exception to the other inhabitants in granting them, for instance, the right of self-government at the municipal level. In other words, if anything was to be ‘special’, it was the ‘interest’ of other peoples who live in the city that should have been so designated as to constitute the ‘special interest’ of non-Oromos in this inherently and primarily Oromo city.
However, owing to the legacy of imperial conquest and violent occupation of the city and the consequent dispossession and displacement of the Oromo from the city, it is now the guests that are extending (and so far denying) the ‘special interest’ of the hosts. This is a testament to the total lack of self-awareness on the part of the Federal and City Governments about the land they stand on. It is a testament to their moral blindness and (and the consequent incapacity) to pay attention, to see the original owners of the land, and to recognize their natural rights thereof. The result is the failure to understand the pain of dispossession and relentless quest of the Oromo for restoration.
The more consequential result is that this moral blindness is blocking the redemption of the relationship between the city (Addis Abeba), the Region (Oromia), and the Country (Ethiopia). That is why it comes as no surprise that the contestation over the city is pivotal to the making or breaking of the Ethiopian state in our own time. AS
ED’s Note: Tsegaye R Ararssa, Melbourne Law School. Email: tsegayer@gmail.com.
[1] The substance of most of these reflections were extensively discussed elsewhere. Here, in most sections, I present a rehash of those reflections. See Tsegaye Ararssa, “The Special Interest in Addis Ababa: The Affirmation of Denial,” Addis Standard (Jan 18, 2016) available at http://addisstandard.com/the-special-interest-the-affirmation-of-denial/.
[2] Technically speaking, this government which needed a special—emergency–measures to secure peace and stability, does not have a legal mandate to enact a law before repealing the emergency declaration and calling the army back to its barracks. Nor does it command a moral authority to make a legislation for the people it killed, maimed, arrested, detained, and tortured unaccountably only because they protested.
[3]William Harris, The Highlands of Ethiopia (1844).
[4] Alexander Bulatovic, Ethiopia through Russian Eyes: A Country in Transition, 1896-1898 (Richard Seltzer, Tr), (2000).
#OromoProtests, Australian Oromo Community solidarity rally in front of Austerelian Parliament, 17 March 2016
Canberra delegate, Australian Oromo Communities leaders and Oromo activists
#OromoProtests, South Africa, Oromo global solidarity rally, 14 March 2016
#OromoProtests – Global Solidarity Rally, March 11, 2016
March 11, 2016In North America, protest rallies took place in Washington, DC., Maryland and Virginia; Utah; USA Los Angeles, California; Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota; Lansing, Michigan; Seattle, Washington; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Syracuse, New York; Phoenix, Arizona; Raleigh, North Carolina; Saskatoon, Calgary, Toronto, Canada and other cities.In Europe, rallies took place in Berlin, Germany; Brussels, Belgium; Rome, Italy; Oslo, Norway; Stockholm, Sweden; Paris, France; London, United Kingdom; and Berne, Switzerland.
Worship at San Francisco Theological Seminary in Solidarity with OromoProtests. Most of people you see here are local church leaders, Pastor and Professors. 10 March 2016.
#OromoProtests global solidarity rally organised by the Australian Oromo community in Melbourne, 10 March 2016
#OromoProtests Global solidarity rally in Oslo, Norway, 11 March 2016.
#OromoProtests Global solidarity rally in Winnipeg, Canada , 11 March 2016.
#OromoProtests: The Oromo Solidarity Project Concordia University, Montreal ( Canada) March 3, 2016
Star Tribune: Minnesota’s Oromo community rallied at the State Capitol to protest treatment at the hands of the Ethiopian government. February 29, 2016
News Fulton County (#OromoProtests Global Rally) : Oromians in SA protest in Pretoria over killings at home. Demonstrators say government scheme to expand capital Addis Ababa endangers farmers
Thousands of Oromo in North America Gathered in New York in front of the UN to Protest against the Brutal & Fascist TPLF Regime in Ethiopia
Ayyaantuu.net | January 15, 2016
Thousands of Oromo protesters and supporters of Oromo struggle turned out in masse, in front of the United Nations (UN) building in New York, to oppose the brutal repression in Ethiopia. The protesters demanded an immediate investigation into the indiscriminate killing of peaceful demonstrators in Oromia region of Ethiopia. The brutal repression by the authority against the Oromo demonstrators has resulted in the killing of well over 140 people and wounding thousands of others.
Seattle: Protests over civil rights abuses in Ethiopia: The protesters, many of them members of the East African community — want Washington senators to pressure Ethiopian leaders or cut U.S. aid in the wake of the ongoing mass killings that they say are targeting ethnic Oromos in Ethiopia. #OromoProtests 29 December 2015
(Times of Malta) — Members of the Oromo community in Malta this morning held a protest in Valletta over the treatment of Oromo people in Ethiopia.
The group of about 30, holding placards and many with chains around their arms and hands, walked up Republic Street to the new Parliament, calling on the Ethiopian government to treat their people better.
According to international media, some 75 protesters were killed and hundreds injured in month-long protests across Ethiopia.
Diaspora continues to expose crimes of Ethiopian government on Oromo protesters
#OromoProtests in Little Oromia (St Paul) in solidarity with #Oromo students in Oromia against TPLF Ethiopian tyrannic regime’s ethnic cleansing (master plan).
December 10, 2015
Yaa Oromo dhageefadhaa Oromo student being killed by Ethiopian dictator protest in St Paul(1)
Yaa Oromo dhageefadhaa Oromo student bing killed by Ethiopian dictator Protest in St Paul(2)
#OromoProtests in London in solidarity with #Oromo students in Oromia against TPLF Ethiopian tyrannic regime’s ethnic cleansing (master plan). Hiriira magaalaa Londonitti ta’e, Muddee 10 bara 2015.
Nairobi, Oromo Peaceful rally in solidarity with #OromoProtests in Oromia against TPLF Ethiopian regime’s ethnic cleansing (Master plan), December 10, 2015
TVOMT: Oromo Protest Saartuu Roraas fii Hiriira Toronto
#OromoProtests global solidarity rally, South Africa (Johannesburg), 10 Dec. 2015
Egypt: Oromo Peaceful rally in solidarity with #OromoProtests in Oromia against TPLF Ethiopian regime’s ethnic cleansing (Master plan), December 10, 2015
Sweden, Oromo Peaceful rally in solidarity with #OromoProtests in Oromia against TPLF Ethiopian regime’s ethnic cleansing (Master plan), December 10, 2015
Germany, Oromo Peaceful rally in solidarity with #OromoProtests in Oromia against TPLF Ethiopian regime’s ethnic cleansing (Master plan), December 10, 2015
Join the global demonstration to stand with the Oromo Students and denounce the violent actions of the Ethiopian government on innocent and peaceful protesters who simply oppose the displacement of millions of Oromo farmers. We call on the international media to break the silence on the massive crackdown on the protesters, its unjust to keep quiet while scores are being killed on school grounds and university campuses across Oromia by Ethiopian security forces, the same regime that receives millions of dollars from UK, US and the EU. #OromoProtests, #Justice for Oromo students#NO Democracy No AID!
CITY: BERLIN, GERMANY, EU DATE/TIME: December 16, 2015 | STARTING at 9am VENUE: At Willy-Brandt-Straße 1, 10557 Berlin, Germany LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/WAbICA
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UPCOMING SOLIDARITY RALLIES FOR DECEMBER 17, 2015
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CITY: ATLANTA, GEORGIA, U.S.A. DATE/TIME: December 17, 2015 | STARTING at 11am VENUE: In Front of the Georgia State Capitol Building (Capitol Avenue SW) LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/OIbNqr
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CITY: BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A. DATE/TIME: December 17, 2015 | STARTING at 9am VENUE: In Front of the Massachusetts State House LINK TO FLYER – N/A
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CITY: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A. DATE/TIME: December 17, 2015 | STARTING at 9am VENUE: In Front of the John C. Kluczynski Federal Building (230 S Dearborn St, Chicago, IL 60604) LINK TO FLYER – N/A
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CITY: COLUMBUS/CINCINNATI, OHIO, U.S.A. DATE/TIME: December 17, 2015 | STARTING at 12pm VENUE: In Front of the Ohio State House in Columbus, Ohio LINK TO FLYER – N/A
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CITY: DENVER, COLORADO, U.S.A. DATE/TIME: December 17, 2015 | STARTING at 7am VENUE: In Front of the Colorado State Capitol Building (City Park; 2001 Colorado Blvd – West Steps) LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/xL4Ffm
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CITY: LANSING, MICHIGAN, U.S.A. DATE/TIME: December 17, 2015 | STARTING at 9:30am VENUE: In Front of the Michigan State Capitol Building LINK TO FLYER – N/A
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CITY: OAKLAND CITY, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A. DATE/TIME: December 17, 2015 | STARTING at 9am VENUE: In Front of the Federal Government Building/Office LINK TO FLYER – N/A
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CITY: PHOENIX, ARIZONA, U.S.A. DATE/TIME: December 17, 2015 | STARTING at 9am VENUE: In Front of the Arizona State Capitol Building LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/fPFOJk
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UPCOMING SOLIDARITY RALLIES FOR DECEMBER 18, 2015
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CITY: BERLIN, GERMANY, EU DATE/TIME: December 18, 2015 | STARTING at 10am VENUE: At Willy-Brandt-Straße 1, 10557 Berlin, Germany [and Berlin Ethiopian Embassy at 11am – Boothstraße 20A, 12207 Berlin] LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/WAbICA
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UPCOMING SOLIDARITY RALLIES FOR DECEMBER 19, 2015
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CITY: BERGEN, NORWAY, EU DATE/TIME: December 19, 2015 | STARTING at 1pm VENUE: ? LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/t3apt4
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CITY: TROMSØ, NORWAY, EU DATE/TIME: December 19, 2015 | STARTING at 12pm VENUE: Torgsenteret, Storgata 9008 Tromsø LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/urzmPi
The following is the schedule of the Oromo Diaspora Solidarity Rallies; Oromo Diaspora stands with Oromo protests against the Addis Ababa Master Plan; this schedule will be frequently updated to include all rallies as much as possible.
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UPCOMING SOLIDARITY RALLIES FOR DECEMBER 10, 2015
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CITY: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, U.S.A. DATE/TIME: December 10, 2015 | 10am VENUE: To be announced later LINK TO FLYER – N/A
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CITY: FRANKFURT, GERMANY DATE/TIME: December 10, 2015 | FROM 9am to 3pm VENUE: Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/k434KG
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CITY: OSLO, NORWAY DATE/TIME: December 10, 2015 | FROM 10am to 2pm VENUE: Oslo Central Station LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/KY9R7b
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CITY: LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM DATE/TIME: December 10, 2015 | FROM 12pm to 4:30pm VENUE: UK Parliament Square (SW1P 3BD) LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/S8pc6U
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CITY: ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, U.S.A. DATE/TIME: December 10, 2015 | FROM 12pm VENUE: Minnesota State Capitol Building LINK TO FLYER – http://goo.gl/xuygli
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INSPIRING SPEECHES FROM THE MAY-2014’s OROMO DIASPORA SOLIDARITY RALLY IN SEATTLE | #OromoProtests
The following is a statement from the Oromo Communities’ Association of North America (OCA-NA).
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Dear Oromo Communities and Friends:
The Board and Executive Committee of the Oromo Communities’ Association of North America (OCA-NA) are extremely concerned about the current Ethiopian government’s attempt to implement the controversial Master Plan at any cost, with aggressive crackdown on student demonstrators and peaceful protesters. We believe that we have a collective obligation to support the students who are brutally attacked, and Oromo farmers who are being evicted from their lands in the name development and urban planning. We know that many of you and your communities are planning to stage demonstrations, and organizing for sustained action in support of our people.
To facilitate this effort, we recommend that that each community chooses one of the following days for their demonstrations.
– Thursday, December 10, 2015
– Thursday, December 17, 2015
– Wednesday, December 23, 2015
– Wednesday, December 30, 2015
– Thursday, January 7, 2016
If necessary, additional dates will be announced later.
In your planning, please use the following suggestions:
1. Set your rally in your area or coordinate with nearby communities;
2. Contact your Congressional Representatives’ and Senators’ Offices (both State and U.S.) and alert them about the Oromo rallies ahead of the scheduled event;
3. Send press releases to all media;
4. Create, if you do not have already, fundraising committees to support Oromo students;
5. After the event, assess your activities and provide us with feedback for future improvement.
Remember, a one-time activity alone will not solve our historic problems, or deter a determined and brutal government from displacing peaceful people and destroying great nations like the Oromia. Organization, careful planning and sustained actions are vital for the ultimate success of our people. So, let us put our minor differences aside and focus on the great danger that we are all facing.
OCA-NA calls on all Oromo communities, civic and professional organizations in Diaspora to participate in the scheduled demonstrations. We also call on all Oromo political organizations to put their tactical and other differences aside and join Oromo communities in protest. We expect all Oromo political leaders to provide collective leadership and avert the looming danger for the Oromo people.
Our nation will rise again in victory.
History will be our witness.
Oromo Communities’ Association of North America (OCA-NA)
Support the victims of the Addis Ababa “Master Plan”
December 5, 2015Many of us have been following the Oromo students who have been demonstrating in all parts of Oromia, unequivocally rejecting the Addis Ababa (Finfinnee) “Master Plan”. As usual, the Ethiopian government opted to shed blood instead of responding the demands of the students that have been demonstrating peacefully.Based on our culture of helping fellow Oromos in thier time of sorrow, Macha-Tulama Association (MTA) hereby launches an online fund raising drive to support the families of those students who are killed by Ethiopian security forces across Oromia while peacefully protesting the “Master Plan”. We would like also to announce that MTA has allocated $1,000.00 U.S. dollars to support the victims and their families, and also to lead the fund raising effort.The fund will also be used to support students in their needs who are incarcerated for months in notorious gulags because of again protesting the Addis Ababa “Master Plan”. Please click on the“Donate“ button on our website – machatulama.org – and follow the instructions to contribute.It’s our plan that if sufficient funds are collected, MTA will reach out to the victims of the 2014 violence of the government.In the mean time, we would like to request for your help in gathering the following information and sending them to us via our Facebook message or our email – contact@machatulama.org:
Names of the students killed by the Ethiopian government security forces,
School grade or academic year and field of study if s/he is a university student,
Name of family members (at least two) to whom money can be sent and their telephone number,
Picture of the deceased student (if available), and
Age, place of birth, brief life history of the deceased if known
Please do not hesitate to contribute as much as you can. Every penny adds up and makes a difference in the lives of the victims!
Respectfully,
Macha-Tulama Association
Washington, D.C.
Related:-
Oromo Diaspora Mobilizes to Shine Spotlight on Protests in Oromia – Ethiopia
Ethiopia security forces kill up to 50 people in crackdown on peaceful protests
Independent, 17 December 2015
Attempted land grab by Ethiopian government has led to violence against ethnic group
People from the Oromia region, close to Addis Ababa, have been discriminated against by Ethiopia’s ruling ethnic groups Reuters
The violence-torn Horn of Africa is seeing a fresh wave of repression as Ethiopian authorities crack down on protests by the country’s largest ethnic minority.
Human rights groups say an attempted land grab by the federal government has seen violence flare in the Oromia region, with up to 50 protesters killed by security forces so far this month.
Campaigners from the Oromo ethnic group say they have been labelled “terrorists” by Ethiopian authorities as they fight the government’s plan to integrate parts of Oromia into the capital Addis Ababa.
Some Oromo protesters fear that they will be forcibly evicted from their land as part of the rapid expansion of the capital, which they call a federal “master plan”.
The government has claimed that the protesters are planning to “destabilise the country” and that some of them have a “direct link with a group that has been collaborating with other proven terrorist parties”.
International observer groups have condemned the violent crackdown on protest movements, however.
“Instead of condemning the unlawful killings by the security forces, which have seen the deaths of more than 40 people in the last three weeks, this statement in effect authorises excessive use of force against peaceful protesters,” said Muthoni Wanyeki, Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.
“The suggestion that these Oromo – protesting against a real threat to their livelihoods – are aligned to terrorists will have a chilling effect on freedom of expression for rights activists,” he said.
The latest round of protests, now in their third week, has seen the federal government mobilise its Special Paramilitary Police units from other states, as well as army units, against the ethnic Oromo people, Ethiopia’s biggest ethnic group of about 25 million people out of a population of approximately 74 million.
Statement of Oromo American National Foundation (OANF) on the Massacre of Oromo Youth by TPLF/EPDRF Regime
The monsters in the Tigre ruling goons committed an odious and grisly massacre on Oromo youth who were peacefully demonstrating against the expulsion of Oromo farmers from their ancestral lands. The demonic thugs spilt the blood of courageous Oromo youth who had fortitude and backbone of steel to resist the ravenous land-grabs from Oromo farmers in the vicinities of Finfinnee/Addis Ababa! The bloodbath of our youth and other innocent victims of their crime will not be forgotten or forgiven! The roaring wave of the spilt blood of Oromo youth will drown them and the next generation of our gallant fighters will avenge the dastardly acts of the TPLF henchmen and their Oromo quislings!
These rapacious vultures have sold already millions of acres of Oromo lands to foreign speculators and to their own supporters that have come from their desolate land in Tigre province! They are hoodwinking the international community and other citizens of the Empire that Finfinnee/Addis Ababa is becoming overcrowded and congested due to population influx from the far-flung of the decaying Empire and to rectify the growth of the Capital city, they want to evict Oromo Farmers and confiscate their lands outside of the Capital City limits to build, a modern metropolis! They call their devilish scheme “The Integrated Regional Development Master Plan”
The Oromo Youngsters showed them the courage and lessons in honoring the sacred lands by paying the ultimate sacrifices of dying in the fields of battle against the rodents who came to dig into our sacred Dachee (sacred lands) that for centuries has been the inheritances of the Gulalee, Gaalan, Ekaa,Mettaa and other clans of the Oromo Nation!
The brutality and grotesque acts of these intruders eclipses civilized international standard of crowd control! They used live bullets to quell teenagers whose only weapons were their love of their lands and Oromo farmers who have been forcefully evicted from their farms! Wayannee’s vulgar acts of expelling Oromo peasants from their ancestral lands will be defended to the last drops of our blood! The smoldering anger of the Oromo nation will devour Wayannee thugs and their Oromo collaborators, and the inviolability of our sacred lands will be honored by continuous resistance and sacrifices of a new generation of Oromo youth.
In the depth of their protest lies the beauty of their youth and love of their Nation. They had no fear of death—it was and is an honor for them to fight the barbarians who came to claim Oromo lands under various pretexts! They paid the ultimate martyrdom for their country without the privilege to know that they were beautiful young men and women whose promises were to grow-up and be exemplary citizens as well as to love their lands and Oromummaa. They fought a fearless fight with courage and valor!
Their resistance and martyrdom made them the stars of our Oromia sky, the succeeding generation to this struggle will inherit and defend their dignity in martyrdom and our youthful fallen angels will be honored with badge of courage and reverence to and of heroes! Dry your eyes friends, their souls are soaring because they died for unbound freedom of farmers and all other Oromo citizens. We must draw upon their courage and confront the Tigre leeches and their Oromo collaborators who oppressor our Nation!
Brothers and sisters, the vultures whose decaying Empire is crumbling will not stop their ravenous plunder of our lands, we need to be united and confront the barbarians, the dawn of our freedom will come, and the sun will rise on our struggle against these depraved criminals!
For now, we need to reckon with the supreme sacrifices of our best and brightest youth, shut their gazed eyes of death down, and honor them with grace— to die for ones cause is an honor and privilege!
Oromo-American National Foundation (OANF) condemns the vile and gruesome massacres of Oromo Youth by the TPLF regime, we make an earnest appeal to all international community and other citizens of the Empire for solidarity and express their utter disgust and denounce the Wayannee massacres of Oromo youth!
It’s been said that cowards die a thousand times while a hero dies only once—it is the ignoble coward’s fear of the Oromo nation that will die a thousand times ! The Oromo youth’s valiant courage, to confront the Wayannee’s ghoulish act without fear is a testament to the heroic ethos of Oromo élans who continue to confront the Tigre thugs and their Oromo traitors all-over Oromia undaunted!
The revolting massacre of our youth is our anguish, but in any struggle, lives will be lost. The struggle and its glory, like a diamond will sparkle, and the memory will live in the villages, farm fields, valleys, and mountains of Oromia for generation to come! The best, the brightest and the courageous will continue to be martyred for the dignity of our nation. We inherit our courage to confront the enemy from our forefathers and mothers! Oromia with its brave sons and daughters will be defended with a revolutionary zeal! All the spilled blood of Oromo martyrs will soak the fertile farm soil of Oromia to rise up like the seeds of spring to bloom our farm lands, hills and magnificent valleys of Oromia to urge us to fight-on! The Wayannee lunatics and their Oromo collaborators hoped to kill our nobility and the splendor of our youth. Lunatic may kill an Oromo revolutionary, but they cannot kill the revolutionary idea of free Oromia! The idea of free Oromia will never die! A new generation of gallant Oromo youth will pick-up the torch for the next thousand years or till Oromia becomes a freeland!
Hence the struggle to free Oromia will continue and these new generation of Oromo youngsters are willing to pay any price, confront any foe, engage friends and allies of our cause until the political, cultural and social conditions of our people is emancipated! And so, all the Oromo youth and countless Oromo martyrs, we are proud that in this struggle, your valiant life will be celebrated, your heritage be honored.
Today, it is the Oromo people, once they’ve done with the Oromo, other citizens of the Empire will be next! We appeal for solidarity from all citizens of the Empire in general and to the 2nd largest ethnic group of the Empire—the Amhara citizens in particular.
Pastor Martin Niemöller, a German anti-Nazi theologian/activist during WWII, lamented the following observation regarding the complicity of German protestant churches through their silences about the Nazi atrocities:
In Germany they first came for the communist, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist
Then they came for the Jews, I didn’t speak up because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a protestant.
Then they came for me – and by that time no one was left to speak up. !
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the distinguished African American theologian and civil rights activists of the 1950 and 60’s in the Jim Crow South of the United States, said in his letter from Birmingham Jail, “injustice anywhere is threat to justice everywhere”
William Ernest Henley, an influential British poet of Victorian era wrote an inspirational poem titled “Invictus” or unconquered as testimony to one’s responsibility to one’s destiny and freedom. We dedicate a version of this poem to the Oromo youth who are refusing to be bowed to the Wayannee monstrosity!
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul
Oromo-American National Foundation (OANF)
Some version of this statement was issued in May 2014 when the wicked Wayannee slaughtered Oromo Youth.
A plan to expand the capital’s administrative control into the Oromia region has sparked deadly protests.
The government has accused Oromo protestors of links with terrorist groups and trying to topple the state.
Amnesty says the claims aim to justify repression of those protesting against feared land seizures.
The Oromo make up Ethiopia’s biggest ethnic group, at about 27 million people.
Oromia is the country’s largest region, surrounding the capital Addis Ababa.
Authorities say five people have died in protests so far, but opposition parties and human rights groups say the number is closer to 40.
Protesters also say they fear cultural persecution if what has been dubbed a “master plan” to integrate parts of Oromia into Addis Ababa go ahead.
‘Chilling’
Some have also raised the prospect that they will be forcibly evicted and their land taken amid the rapid expansion of the capital.
“The suggestion that these Oromo – protesting against a real threat to their livelihoods – are aligned to terrorists will have a chilling effect on freedom of expression for rights activists,” said Muthoni Wanyeki, Amnesty’s Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.
Protesters have been labelled ‘terrorists’ by Ethiopian authorities in an attempt to violently suppress protests against potential land seizures, which have already resulted in 40 deaths, said Amnesty International.
A statement issued by state intelligence services today claims that the Oromia protesters were planning to “destabilize the country” and that some of them have a “direct link with a group that has been collaborating with other proven terrorist parties”.
“The suggestion that these Oromo – protesting against a real threat to their livelihoods – are aligned to terrorists will have a chilling effect on freedom of expression for rights activists,” said Muthoni Wanyeki, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.
“Instead of condemning the unlawful killings by the security forces, which have seen the deaths of more than 40 people in the last three weeks, this statement in effect authorizes excessive use of force against peaceful protesters.”
The latest round of protests, now in their third week, are against the government’s master plan to integrate parts of Oromia into the capital Addis Ababa.
Similar protests against the master plan in April 2014 resulted in deaths, injuries and mass arrest of the Oromo protesters.
Ethiopia’s Anti-Terrorism Proclamation 652/2009, permits the government to use unrestrained force against suspected terrorists, including pre-trial detention of up to four months.
People that have been subject to pre-trial detention under the anti-terrorism law have reported widespread use of torture and ill treatment. All claims of torture and ill treatment should be promptly and independently investigated by the authorities.
“The government should desist from using draconian anti-terrorism measures to quell protests and instead protect its citizen’s right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly,” said Muthoni Wanyeki.
The following is a report by the Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA) …
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Ethiopia: Extreme Cruelties and Brutalities against Oromo Children and Youth
HRLHA Urgent Action
For Immediate Release
The Oromo students’ protests(1), which were re-ignited in November 2015, in opposition to the so called “Addis Ababa Integrated Master Plan” – Ethiopian Federal Government’s plan of systematic ethnic cleansing aimed at the Oromo People, and which spread in a few days to almost all schools and universities in the Regional State of Oromia, have already claimed the lives of dozens of Oromo students; and is threatening hundreds of others. Below in the table is the list of nine Oromo students who have been confirmed dead in the past seven days being shot at and killed in cold-blooded by the Ethiopian armed squad of the Agazi Force:
Four Oromo youth from Fincha, Horro Guduru: Zarihun Raggassa, Wakjira Gaddisa, Meseret Tilahun (female), and Alemu Likkisa were taken to hospital on the 6th of December 2015, with life-threatening wounds and injuries from shots and assaults; and no words regarding their situations since then.
The unarmed and defenseless Oromo students are facing extreme and fatal brutalities (see below) while staging peaceful protests to seek answers to their legitimate questions regarding the expansion of the city of Addis Ababa without the consultations and consents of the local people, which is likely to cause the evictions of millions of Oromo farmers from their livelihoods. Although there are no confirmed fatalities at this point, about 200 children from Sululta High School, Northern Showa, have been rushed to St. Paul Hospital in the Capital, Addis Ababa, on the 6th of December 2015, after being poisoned in a classroom with yet unknown chemical that was sprayed into the air by the security forces.
Innocent children and youth are being shot at and killed, threatened with mass murders with poisonous chemicals just while attempting to exercise their fundamental rights within the limits of the provisions of both the federal and regional constitutions. The biggest of all ironies is that forces like the federal military, the federal and the regional police, who were established and hired to defend the constitutions of all levels are instead engaged in violating and breaking such legal provisions intended to protect the citizens. The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa is receiving continuous and credible reports from different corners of the Regional State of Oromia in Ethiopia that members of TPLF special squad of the Agazi Force as well as the police are taking such fatal actions and assaults in the open air in daylights in front of the local residents in order to terrorize, intimidate and harass the whole communities.
The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA) strongly believes that the Ethiopian Government’s cruel actions against humanity, against its own citizens, are purely genocidal. HRLHA would like to express its deep concerns that, given the situations witnessed in the past seven days, more human casualties could take place; and, therefore, calls for unconditional interference by the world communities in order that such extreme brutalities be stopped before inflicting further losses of lives and other human damages.
The HRLHA is a non-political organization that attempts to challenge abuses of human rights of the people of various nations and nationalities in the Horn of Africa. It works to defend fundamental human rights, including freedoms of thought, expression, movement and association. It also works to raise the awareness of individuals about their own basic human rights and those of others. It encourages respect for laws and due process. It promotes the growth and development of free and vigorous civil societies.
– HRLHA
—– Copied to:
– UNESCO Headquarters
– UNESCO – Africa Department
– UNESCO – Africa Regional Office
– Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
– Office of the UNHCR
– African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR)
– Council of Europe
– U.S. Department of State – Ethiopia Desk
Ethiopia opposition tells government to stop killing protesters
From left: Ethiopian opposition Medrek party Vice-Chairman Merera Gudina, Chairman Beyene Petros and Public Relations head Tilahun Endashaw at press conference in Addis Ababa December 15, 2015
By ANDUALEM SISAY | NATION MEDIA GROUP
The Opposition has accused Ethiopian security forces of killing at least 32 people in Oromia in the outskirt of Addis Ababa in the past few weeks.
The dead, claimed the opposition, include the Oromo students who took part in two demonstrations.
Presenting the names, the relatives and the homes of the victims, the Ethiopian Federal Democratic Unity Forum (Medrek), urged the government to stop the killings as they were a violation of the constitution.
Medrek urged the government to respond to the demands of the protesters in a peaceful and civilised manner. Their brothers
“How could the military shoot and kill children demonstrating against the killings of their brothers and relatives? We keep on recording such crimes of this regime, and will one day bring the people who committed the crimes before an international court to account,” said the Medrek Chairman, Prof Beyene Petros,
Medrek came third in the May General Election in which the ruling party and its allies won with a landslide.
Expansion plan
A 10-year-old boy was among the protesters killed by security forces in Burayu Monday, according Dr Merera Gudina, the Vice-chairman of Medrek.
The Oromo students have been protesting against the Addis Ababa city’s expansion plan, which they claim will encroach on the land owned by smallholder farmers in Oromia.
Dr Merera claimed the government was buying one square meter of land for 4 to 5 birr (a quarter of US dollar) and selling it to the so called investors for 20,000 birr ($1,000) per square metres.
“Where is this money [profit] going? Is it really going to change the lives of the farmers who used to live on that land? Are we doing something that sustains the lives of the farmers, such as helping them to own bank shares that protect them from becoming beggars after finishing the money?” Dr Merera asked.
The death
He claimed that some 150, 000 farmers were evicted from around Addis Ababa following the disputed May 2005 General Election in which 193 demonstrators were killed.
The government maintains that the new Addis Ababa masterplan aimed at benefitting the Oromo people living around the city through better infrastructures, among others.
A week after the protests erupted and the death of some students was reported, the government also indicated in public media that the masterplan was at a draft stage and would not be implemented without consultations with the people.
Oromo Protesters’ funeral processions turn into protest as government carries violence to burial grounds
(Finfinne Tribune/ Gadaa.com, Muddee/December 15, 2015 ): The Oromo protests have expand in scope and size to stop, what protesters have put as decades-old marginalization, evictions, and politically-motivated killings and imprisonments of Oromos in Oromia, in addition to stopping the Addis Ababa Master Plan. As the Oromo protests grow in depth and size, Oromo students are joined, according to media reports, by Oromo farmers, teachers, factory workers, medical practitioners, athletes and other sectors of the society to wage the Oromo protests. In response to these Oromo civilian protests, the Ethiopian Federal government has mobilized its Special Paramilitary Police forces from other States, such as the Somali State and the Amhara State, in addition to dispatching mechanized army units to protest areas in Oromia. The government’s heavy-handed response to the escalating Oromo protests have led to the deaths of more than 50 Oromo civilians, as per the latest estimates.
While undertaking this paramilitary-police invasion of the State of Oromia, the Ethiopian government’s officials have taken to airwaves on state-owned media outlets to promise that the Master Plan ‘would be brought forward for public deliberations’ – the government has been promising this for the last year and half, but to no avail; rather, some parts of the Master Plan are said to be already underway. According to observers, this has exacerbated the situation since the Ethiopian government’s officials have blatantly continued to dismiss the ongoing peaceful Oromo protests as legitimate voices of the people saying “NO” to the Master Plan; having been given no other channel for protests, Oromo students in particular, and the Oromo public in general, are paying with their lives to say “NO” to the Master Plan. The government’s heavy-handed response emanates from its basic lack of understanding that the Oromo protests are legitimate broad-based people’s demands for rights; when protest movements reach such a point, no amount of military repression can stop them; rather, each death leads to more affected people to join and continue the protests.
According to new reports, the Ethiopian government has carried the violence into burial grounds: disrupting and harassing, and in some cases, shooting to maim and kill, mourners as they weep for and bury their loved ones. For this reason, funeral processions are no longer sober moments only, but moments to stage protests against the Master Plan and against the killings — and against the overall unjust system the Oromo have been subjected to for far too long — funeral processions have become moments to vow to continue the protests of the martyred. When the government refuses to bring forward those responsible for the killings of the unarmed peacefully-protesting Oromos and when the government refuses to take the ongoing Oromo protests as a “NO” say of the people against the Master Plan, justice becomes carrying the torches of the martyred and moving on the Oromo National protests to their final victory.
A Call for a Broader Solidarity with the Oromo Students Protesting against the Plan that will displace the Oromo Farmers
December 13, 2015
By Sidama Human Rights ActivistsIn the past three weeks, high school and university students across the Oromia region have staged peaceful protests against the Addis Ababa (Finfine) “Master Plan” that will integrate the city and the surrounding areas in the Oromia region inhabited by the Oromo farmers. The students and the Oromo communities living in the areas adjacent to the city stress that the so-called Master Plan will displace thousands of farmers from their ancestral farm lands thereby undermining their livelihood security and social cohesion. They condemn the ‘Master Plan’ as a pretext for a land grab. They argue that economic development and transformation should benefit people living on the land first, not displace them. Like many other urban centers in Oromia and the south, Finfine is a garrison city built on the ancestral lands of the Oromo people. In such urban centers, the interests of the indigenous inhabitants should be carefully balanced with the need for expansion of the urban space.Peaceful protests by students to voice these legitimate concerns of millions of the Oromo people, have been met with extraordinary violence and brutality by the Ethiopian federal police and paramilitary forces. According to the latest reports, the federal police and paramilitary forces have killed about 20 students in various parts of the Oromia region in the past three weeks. Similar peaceful protests in May 2014 against the same ‘Master Plan’ led to death of about 11 Oromo students (Oromo activists put the death toll at 47).The Oromo people are the single largest nation in Ethiopia accounting for 37% of Ethiopia’s population of about 96 million in 2014. The Oromia region remains the backbone of the Ethiopian economy. Nonetheless, the Oromo people never enjoyed the fruits of their natural resource endowments nor had equitable political representation commensurate to their stature in the country since their land was annexed into the Ethiopian Empire in the late 19th century. Instead, like many other oppressed nations, they remained systematically marginalized and continued to be treated as minorities by the successive Ethiopian regimes. Successive regimes continue to grossly violate human rights of the Oromo and other oppressed peoples. An October 2014 Report by Amnesty International revealed that “at least 5,000 ethnic Oromos have been arrested between 2011 and 2014 based on their actual or suspected peaceful opposition to the government.” The report highlights widespread violations of human rights in the Oromia region and “exposes how Oromos have been regularly subjected to arbitrary arrest, prolonged detention without charge, enforced disappearance, repeated torture and unlawful state killings as part of the government’s incessant attempts to crush dissent.”
Widespread violations of human rights were also observed in Sidama following the Loqqe Massacre of 70 peaceful protestors on 24 May 2002. The Loqqe protest was against the proposal to relocate the Sidama administrative capital from Hawassa city to a district town. In exactly the same manner in which the Addis Ababa ‘Master Plan’ envisages to grab the surrounding lands inhabited by the Oromo farmers, the Hawassa city administration continues to displace thousands of the Sidama farmers living adjacent to the Hawassa city today without commensurate compensation, destroying their livelihood security and plunging them in to destitution.
The demands of the Oromo students therefore echo the suffering not only of the Oromo framers but also of the Sidama farmers, the Somali farmers, the Afar farmers, the Benishangul-Gumuz farmers, the Gambella framers, and the farmers in all oppressed regions of Ethiopia. In light of this, the silence of the high schools and the university students in Sidama, Somali, Afar, Benishangul Gumuz, Gambella, as well as Wolayita, Gamogofa, Kaffa, and everywhere else is unwarranted. We call up on all high school and university students in oppressed lands in Ethiopia to join hands in peaceful solidarity with the Oromo students as a matter of urgency. It is naïve to think that the Oromo problems are not our problems. Injustice against one oppressed people, is injustice against all oppressed peoples! You will never be free unless your neighbor is free.
We have witnessed the Oromo solidarity demonstrations in various cities in North America and Europe. This is emboldening. We call up on all the oppressed peoples in Diaspora to join hands in solidarity with the Oromo protesters in North America and Europe and elsewhere.
We also call up on the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Union, China, and the African Union to exert pressure on the Ethiopian government to immediately halt the use violence against peaceful students echoing legitimate grievances about the livelihood securities of their people.
Finally, on behalf of the Sidama people, we express our deepest condolences for the tragic losses of the lives of young and aspiring Oromo high school and university students in the past three weeks.
According to a media report, just last month alone, 600 Oromo farming families were evicted from Sululta, one of the towns in Oromia affected by the Addis Ababa Master Plan of the Ethiopian Federal government. The Master Plan evictions in Sululta came in November 2015, just before the latest escalations of Oromo protests as Oromo students in particular, and the Oromo public in general, engage the Federal government to stop the Addis Ababa Master Plan as well as the overall land-grabbing campaigns being undertaken by the Federal government in the name of “development” across Oromia. The report about the Master Plan evictions of 600 Oromo households in Sululta contradicts the Ethiopian Federal government’s stated position that the Addis Ababa Master Plan is still in its drafting phase awaiting public deliberations. Last year, during the April-May 2014’s #OromoProtests, the government promised to open the Master Plan for public deliberations only to forego that phase of the policy-making altogether. Protesters say the government’s promise of public deliberations are only tricks to buy time to fully implement the Master Plan and other land-grabbing campaigns across Oromia.
Here’s an excerpt from the DW report:
One Oromo farmer from Sululta, a town part of the ‘integrated master plan’ located 26 kilometers (16 miles) to the north of Addis Ababa, spoke to DW on condition of anonymity. He claimed that in late November alone, the government evicted 600 farming families on the grounds that their land was needed for the construction of a factory. When asked if they had received fair compensation and a new home, the farmer told DW that the money given to them was ‘very meager,’ and that the families had so far not been given a place to relocate to.
Mergitu Argo, who helped organize a march on Thursday in support of Oromo student protestors in Ethiopia. (Photo by Goorish Wibneh)
Oromos from the Seattle area gathered downtown yesterday to condemned the Ethiopian government’s lethal response to student protests sparked around the south of the country this week.
The protests of high school and university students were in response to the government’s “master plan” that will integrate the capital and surrounding areas now belonging to the Oromo Region, which protestors say will displace farmers.
“I believe people should have the right to protest without feeling like they are gonna be beaten, or killed or jailed.” said Sartu Adem, 18, who was among about 200 solidarity protesters who gathered in front of the Federal Building on 2nd Avenue. “But I feel like the people should have a say whether they want [the development plan] or not — not just the government saying ‘oh we are developing the country!’”
The action was coordinated by Oromo Community Services of Seattle, and began in the rainy noon hour with march from Yesler Community Center.
Despite being the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, the Oromo people have historically been politically and economically marginalized. In 1991 a federal constitution was instituted to address the issue, but some Oromo elites remain unconvinced that the region or the people are as autonomous as they should be.
Oromia, which physically includes Addis Ababa (knowns as “Finfine” in the Oromo language), is the largest region in Ethiopia.
Muktar Kedir, the administrator of Oromia Regional State, explained in a press conference earlier today that the development plan will not be implemented before public discussions and agreement.
But Abubeker Ali, one of the organizers of the Seattle protest, said displacement is already happening.
“The extent that we know so far is, in Finfine/Addis Ababa area, thousands of people have been displaced already. Homes have been demolished, people have been arrested,” Ali said.
Ali said he opposed the master plan, which he referred to as “master killer.” He called it a “land grab” designed to displace millions of farmers without any compensation.
Demonstrators gathered outside the Federal Building asking the U.S. government to apply diplomatic pressure on Ethiopia to end the crackdown on protests. (Photo by Goorish Wibneh)
There are conflicting accounts of the number of students that were killed.Bloomberg reported 10 Oromo students have been killed by security forces, quoting Bekele Nega a leader of the Oromo Federalist Congress, an opposition party. On Wednesday, Horn Affairs reported it was able to confirm five deaths but officials only acknowledged four fatalities.
The protesters in Seattle also delivered a letter to Senators Murray and Cantwellrequesting that the U.S. urge the Ethiopian government to stop violent responseagainst peaceful student protesters and conduct independent investigation into the deaths.
The U.S. has a longstanding military relationship with Ethiopia to fight terrorism. At the rally protestors could be heard chanting for the U.S. to stop “supporting the Ethiopian government” and “funding a terrorist government.”
The protesters included some ethnic Somalis from the Ogaden region in eastern Ethiopia who were there in solidarity.
While the “master plan” has not been officially implemented yet, Addis Ababa has been fast expanding already for several years.
Naboni Amenu who was at the rally with her husband said the farmers that had already been displaced are now stranded on the streets without resources.
FBC, a media outlet affiliated with the government, reported that Muktar Kedir, the administrator of Oromia, said “the violence had occurred due to limitation to clarify the master plan and this has created uncertainty among the community as well as led the public to raise question[sic].”
According to Ethiopia-based blogger Daniel Berhane, protests around the Oromia region are ongoing, with many businesses and public institutions closed. The situation is still fragile.
“I feel like in Ethiopia people only care about which region they’re from,” Adem said yesterday, decrying the regionalism that she sees hurting the country. “Everyone should care about each other. Everyone should think about ‘Has this person eaten?’ ‘How’s this person living?‘”
Depuis 10 jours, de violents affrontements ont lieu entre les forces de l’ordre et des manifestants dans la région d’Oromia en Éthiopie. Les militants, pour beaucoup des étudiants, dénoncent un projet “d’accaparement des terres” mené par le gouvernement.
Fin novembre, le gouvernement éthiopien a annoncé un plan d’extension de la capitale Addis Abeba, située dans la région d’Oromia. Appelé “Master Plan”, ce projet a pour objectif, selon les autorités éthiopiennes, de contrôler l’expansion rapide des grandes villes pour atténuer l’exode rural. Mais ce projet fait craindre aux habitants un accaparement des terres agricoles. Il avait déjà été annoncé en 2014 et avait alors suscité une vague de manifestations à travers la région, coûtant la vie à 70 étudiants, selon un communiqué de l’association des étudiants de l’Oromia.
“Ni les habitants ni le gouvernement de l’Oromia n’ont été concertés”
John B
John B (pseudonyme) est étudiant à Ambo University dans la région d’Oromia. Il était sur le campus durant les premiers jours de la manifestation. Il nous explique ce conflit compliqué entre les Oromos et le gouvernement central.
L’Éthiopie est une République fédérale divisée en neuf régions. Selon la constitution, chaque région à le droit à son propre gouvernement. Mais nous avons un problème dans l’Oromia : la capitale du pays, Addis Abeba, est située dans la région et elle est gouvernée par le gouvernement fédéral.
Il y a toujours eu des différents entre la population d’Oromia et le gouvernement central, mais en Éthiopie, il y est difficile de se rebeller. Le mois dernier, le gouvernement a de nouveau mis sur la table son “Master Plan” . Avec ce projet, le gouvernement veut étendre son contrôle administratif dans l’Oromia. C’est une sorte d’extension d’Addis Abeba.
Mais le “Master Plan” remet totalement en cause notre frontière et nous avons peur que cela passe par un accaparement des terres. Des fermiers oromos pourraient-être expulsés. Ni les habitants ni le gouvernement de l’Oromia n’ont été concertés. C’est pour cette raison que la population manifeste : personne ne veut céder ses terres ! Surtout que nous savons que ce plan de “développement” de la ville ne va bénéficier qu’à une minorité de dirigeants, pas aux habitants oromos.
Selon Bekele Nega, le secrétaire général du Congrès Fédéral d’Oromia [parti d’opposition en Éthiopie], 13 étudiants auraient été tués et une centaine jetés en prison suite aux manifestations. Sur Facebook et Twitter, de nombreuses photos d’étudiants blessés et de policiers armés ont été relayées.
Ce sont les étudiants qui se sont mobilisés en premier. Dans mon université, les manifestations ont commencé la semaine dernière. C’était très pacifique et d’ailleurs, selon la Constitution éthiopienne, nous avons le droit de manifester. Trois jours après le début des manifestations, la police est entrée dans le campus. Les forces de l’ordre se sont montrées très violentes, des étudiants se sont fait frapper, beaucoup avaient du sang sur le visage et les mains. Tout le monde s’est mis à courir. Ceux qui n’ont pas eu le temps de s’échapper ont été arrêtés et emmenés au poste de police.
Les fermiers et les habitants de l’Oromia ont rejoint les manifestations étudiantes. Photo prise à Inango – Oromia.
Je sais que dans d’autres universités, les policiers ont utilisé des armes à feu mais pas dans la mienne. En ce moment il n’y a presque plus personne sur le campus : les étudiants ont peur. Dans d’autres villes, les manifestations continuent et les étudiants ont été rejoints par les habitants et les fermiers. Je n’ai jamais vu un mouvement de contestation si important dans la région.
Les médecins de l’hôpital Jimma dans la ville d’Agaro dans l’Oromia expriment leur soutien aux manifestants.
Le mouvement de contestation ne s’arrête pas aux frontières éthiopiennes. Selon le compte Twitter “Oromo Press”, la communauté oromo aux États-Unis s’est mobilisée ce vendredi pour dénoncer le “Master Plan” et demander l’intervention du président américain.
Le commissaire de police de la région s’est justifié lors d’une conférence de presse la semaine dernière. Selon lui, les manifestants auraient été particulièrement violents. Les forces de l’ordre ne seraient alors intervenues que pour maintenir le calme dans les universités et écoles.
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English Translation (Google)
For 10 days, violent clashes took place between police and protesters in the Oromia region in Ethiopia. The activists, many of them students, denounce a project “land grab” led by the government.In late November, the Ethiopian government has announced a plan to extend the capital Addis Ababa, located in Oromia. Called “Master Plan”, the project aims, according to the Ethiopian authorities to control the rapid expansion of large cities to mitigate the rural exodus. But this project fears the inhabitants a farmland grab. It had already been announced in 2014 and was then sparked a wave of protests across the region, claiming the lives of 70 students, according to a statement of the association of students of theOromia.
With nearly 25 million inhabitants, Oromia is the most populated region of Ethiopia. The Oromos, the largest ethnic group in the region, denounce their marginalization for many years.
“Neither the people nor the government of the Oromia have been concerted”
John B
John B (pseudonym) is a student in Ambo University in the Oromia region. He was on campus during the first days of the event. He explains this complicated conflict between the Oromo and the central government.
Ethiopia is a federal republic divided into nine regions.According to the constitution, each region has the right to his own government. But we have a problem in Oromia: the capital, Addis Ababa, is located in the region and it is governed by the federal government.
There have always been different from the population of Oromia and the central government, but in Ethiopia, it is hard to rebel. Last month, the government again put on the table his “Master Plan”. With this project, the government wants to extend its administrative control in the Oromia. This is a kind of extension of Addis Ababa.
But the “Master Plan” runs counter to our border and we fear that it goes through a land grab. Of Oromo farmers could be expelled. Neither the people nor the government of the Oromia have been concerted. This is why the population manifesto: nobody wants to surrender its land!Especially since we know that this plan “development” of the city will benefit only a minority of leaders, not the Oromo people.
According to Bekele Nega, the general secretary of the Federal Congress Oromia [opposition party in Ethiopia], 13 students were killed and hundreds jailed following protests. On Facebook and Twitter, many photos of students injured and armed police were relayed.
These are students who mobilized first. At my university, the demonstrations began last week. It was very peaceful and elsewhere, according to the Ethiopian Constitution, we have the right to demonstrate. Three days after the protests began, the police entered the campus. The security forces have been very violent, students have been hit, many had blood on his face and hands. Everyone started running. Those who have not had time to escape were arrested and taken to the police station.
Farmers and people of Oromia joined student protests.Photo taken at Inango – Oromia.
I know that in other universities, police used firearms but not in mine. Right now there is almost no one on campus: students are afraid. In other cities, the protests continue and the students were joined by local residents and farmers. I have never seen such a large protest movement in the region.
Doctors at the hospital in Jimma town in the Oromia Agaro express their support for protesters.
The protest movement does not stop the Ethiopian border. According to the Twitter account “Oromo Press”, the Oromo community in the US rallied on Friday to denounce the “Master Plan” and request the intervention of US President .
The region’s police commissioner was justified at a press conference last week. He said the demonstrators were particularly violent. The security forces would do that then intervened to maintain calm in universities and schools.
In the last two weeks, protests have spread to more than 50 towns as part of a larger and years-long movement against the Ethiopian government’s controversial development plan. It’s not the first protest against the so-called Master Plan; there was a similar uprising in April and May of 2014 after the development plan was approved. A crackdown by security forces left dozens dead and hundreds arrested.
By all accounts, according to Jawar Mohammed, the founder of Oromo Media Network, the recent movement is much bigger than its predecessor. The Minnesota-based Ethiopian said reports indicate farmers and other citizens have even begun to join in on the demonstrations over the last few days.
“This is the biggest protest by far that I have seen in the last 25 years,” Mohammed said.
In addition to being more widespread than previous demonstrations, this year’s protests have reportedly been better organized, according to American-based Ethiopian journalist Mohammed Ademo. While improved access to social media has played a role, Ademo said the size can also be attributed to a growing dissatisfaction among the public with what he called the “government’s top-down, non-participatory approach to development.”
“Gone are the days when the central government can displace Oromo farmers and forcibly implement any policy,” he said. “Continued crackdown on the protesters only ensures Oromos’ growing estrangement from the state.”
The estrangement has a strong economic component. The expansion of Addis Ababa, the headquarters of both the African Union and the international airline carrier Ethiopia Airways, is a symptom of both the wider urbanization in sub-Saharan African cities and the booming success of national economy.
Addis Ababa has seen growing foreign and economic investment in recent years, while at the same time becoming a regional business hub, Bill Moseley, a geography professor at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minnesota, said.
“Ethiopia’s seen as this kind of up-and-coming country with a lot of investment that’s posturing to make Addis more of a global city, so I’m sure that’s feeding into this sort of push to expansion,” Moseley explained. “It’s these small farmers that lose out, but it’s rationalized in sort of these broader development goals.”
Generally, said Moseley, when governments pave the way for urban growth they often use this development as a way to justify land grabs. According to Moseley, this situation is not exclusive to Addis Ababa and Ethiopia, but one seen in other cities across sub-Saharan Africa and around the world.
For the Oromo, specifically, activists claim they have not benefited from the country’s growth and prosperity. The regional ethnic group, which counts Oromia as its homeland, makes up more than 80 percent of the state’s 27 million people. Nationally it represents upward of 35 percent.
Literacy rates are bleak and the group is underrepresented in government. According to Mohammed, nearly a dozen Oromo clans have been swallowed up in the city’s horizontal expansion as they are forced off their lands. In Ethiopia, the government owns all of the land, but the constitution does provide some protections for the public. Oromo activists say these rights have been ignored in the rush to expand.
“The capital city is in the middle of Oromia, but you don’t see any Oromo identity in it,” he said. “Every time [Addis Ababa] expands it just destroys them. They’re saying the development has to incorporate us…. You can’t just leave us stranded.”
The planned development has also hit home for the Oromo, who have a very close connection with their land, according to Human Rights Watch Horn of Africa researcher Felix Horne.
“They’re concerned if a large portion of land outside of Addis Ababa comes under control of the city administration that farmers will be displaced from the land,” he explained. “[That] they won’t receive compensation from their livelihoods. And they won’t have the ability to feed their families.”
The government has a history of cracking down on the Oromo people, who represent a majority of the population and a perceived threat to power to the minority-led coalition. Horne said that anytime Oromos expresses dissent or simply asks a question about land development policies, they can be subject to arbitrary detention and mistreatment.
Beyond discrimination and crackdown on the Oromo, freedom of press and other expression is heavily curtailed in the country as a whole. Horne said coverage of the recent protests has been almost non-existent.
“Ethiopia is often applauded internationally for its economic growth and development initiatives, but that’s only one part of the story,” he said. “Anyone who expresses any form of dissent in Ethiopia is in trouble.”
Violent clashes in Ethiopia over ‘master plan’ to expand Addis
Extending capital into surrounding farmland is part of ongoing discrimination against Oromo people, say protesters. Global Voices reports
Men parade in the Oromia region outside Addis Ababa. Photograph: STR New/Reuters
Endalk Chala for Global Voices, part of the Guardian Africa network
Friday 11 December 2015
At least 10 students are said to have been killed and hundreds injured during protests against the Ethiopian government’s plans to expand the capital city into surrounding farmland.
According to Human Rights Watch, the students were killed this week when security forces used excessive force and live ammunition to disperse the crowds.
The students were protesting against a controversial proposal, known as “the master plan”, to expand Addis Ababa into surrounding Oromia state, which they say will threaten local farmers with mass evictions.
According to the Ethiopian constitution, Oromia is one of the ninepolitically autonomous regional states in the country, and the region’s Oromo people make up the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia.
It’s not the first time the security forces have reacted violently to protests in support of the group. At least nine students were killed in May 2014 while defending the rights of famers in the region when the “master plan” was first announced.
In response to the violence, Amnesty International issued a report on government repression last year, noting that “between 2011 and 2014, at least 5,000 Oromos [were] arrested based on their actual or suspected peaceful opposition to the government.”
The human rights organisation found that in numerous cases “actual or suspected [Oromo] dissenters were detained without charge or trial, killed by security services during protests, arrests and in detention.”
The ruling elite and members of government are mostly from the Tigray region, which is located in the northern part of the country.
Social media
The Ethiopian media has paid little attention to the protests. Demonstrators have been taking to Facebook and Twitter to report the clashes, with additional coverage coming from diaspora media.
“The Oromo youth are a powerful political entity capable of shaking mountains,” one Facebook user, Aga Teshome, wrote in support of the protesters. “This powerful political entity is hell bent on exposing the [ruling party] EPRDF government’s atrocious human rights record and all round discriminatory practices.”
Another user said more should be done to shine light on the movement: “The silence has truly been deafening. We need to see and hear the inspiring actions undertaken by huge numbers of #Oromo in #Ethiopia.”
Desu Tefera echoed the calls for better media coverage: “We call upon the media to investigate the conditions that these students died trying to expose and resist,” he wrote.
“Oromia needs a new kind of reporting by the international media, which gives voice to the voiceless Oromo people, who for a very long time have been killed, mistreated, abused, neglected and repressed in Ethiopia.”
Dubious development
For many Ethiopians, this week’s clashes show that the issue of Oromo rights refuses to go away.
Protests against the master plan for expansion first began in April last year, when students from outside the capital argued that if the proposal was implemented, it would result in Addis further encroaching into the surrounding territory, allowing the capital to subsume surrounding towns and leaving informal settlements vulnerable to government redevelopment.
The government rejected the accusation, claiming that the plan was intended only to facilitate the development of infrastructure such as transportation, utilities and recreation centres.
The unrest halted the development until now, but in November resentment boiled over again when it became clear the government had resumed its plan.
Since the highly contested 2005 national election forceful evictions and urban land grabbing have become frequent in Addis and its environs, opposition groups say. The city’s rapid growth has resulted in increasing pressure to convert rural land for industrial, housing or other urban use.
The population of the capital is estimated to have grown at a rate of 3.8% per year since 2007, but the repurposing of land in order to accommodate the expansion has been a particularly contentious issue.
Ermias Legesse, a high profile government defector, has argued that since 2000 the Addis Ababa city municipality, with the support of the federal government, has enacted five different pieces of legislation to “legalise” informal settlements, allowing them to be sold on to private property developers.
“Sometimes the informal settlers are given only a few days’ notices before bulldozers arrive on the scene to tear down their shabby houses and lay foundations for new investors,” Legesse said in an interview last week.
To: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
United Nations Office at Geneva 1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
Fax: + 41 22 917 9022
Oromia Support Group Australia (OSGA) extremely shocked about the killings and torture of innocent Oromo students including Primary School Children in Oromia. Oromo student peaceful protests are spreading throughout Ethiopia, Oromia region, as people demonstrate against the endanger that hundred thousand of Oromo farmers, residents and their families living near the capital, Finfinnee (Addis Ababa), could be evicted from their lands by the name of Addis Ababa expansion policy.
Since the first week of December 2015, horrifying, and heartbreaking images and videos of Oromo children peacefully marched on a street and voiced their anger being beaten to death and killed by shootings. There are credible reports of severe injuries and arbitrary arrests in many locations that the Ethiopian government armed forces and authorities are unable to deny and publicly admitted the killings of Oromo children.
Since the first week of December 2015, horrifying, and heartbreaking images and videos of Oromo children peacefully marched on a street and voiced their anger being beaten to death and killed by shootings. There are credible reports of severe injuries and arbitrary arrests in many locations that the Ethiopian government armed forces and authorities are unable to deny and publicly admitted the killings of Oromo children.
The Ethiopian Federal forces, racially affiliated and heavily armed, known as Agazi and part of the select force of the dominant Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), violently respond when Oromo students and children from various universities and institutions in the country protested against the Master Plan since the beginning of December 2015. (please see attached further statements and evidence).For full document Oromia-Support-Group-Australia-Statment, December 11, 2015 (1)
Oromia-Support-Group-Australia-Statment, December 11, 2015 (1)
The following is a statement from the Oromo Studies Association (OSA).
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Oromo Studies Association (OSA)
P. O. Box 5641
Minneapolis, MN 55406-0541 www.oromostudies.org
Email: admin@oromostudies.org
For Immediate Release
December 9, 2015
Statement on the Addis Ababa Integrated Development Master Plan and Oromo Student Protests against Its Implementation
The Oromo Studies Association (OSA) decries and denounces extreme measures taken by Ethiopian security forces, ongoing from late November 2015, killing and maiming peaceful student protesters.
Oromo students at every level of the educational system in Ethiopia, from elementary school to university, began peaceful demonstrations in late November 2015, to protest the implementation of a federally designed Addis Ababa Integrated Development Master Plan (AAIMP), which usurps the authority of the Oromia regional government. The students have been met by heavily armed and equipped special Ethiopian police force units who fire into the crowds with deadly impact. There are ten (10) confirmed deaths at this writing, with the confrontation escalating.
The “Master Plan” refers to the federal government’s controversial design for expanding the territorial boundaries of the capital city, Addis Ababa, increasing the city to twenty times its present size by taking over prime agricultural land from Oromo farmers. This plan, developed in secrecy, was first exposed in April 2014, a disclosure that prompted widespread protests at that time. In April and May 2014 the Oromo students’ peaceful protest against the imposition of the Master Plan in all of Oromia region was met with deadly force and live ammunition, which resulted in the confirmed deaths of more than 70 students, maiming of hundreds and imprisonment of thousands of university students.
Since late November, the demonstrators have started to resist specific steps taken to implement this Plan. It calls for the Federal jurisdiction of the Capital City to seize fertile, well-watered and centrally located parts of the Oromia Regional State. The blueprints for this undertaking were developed without the participation of the Oromia regional government. Since the revelation, there has been no opportunity for public discussion of the plan. Now as Federal forces have begun to move these arable lands out of the domain of indigenous Oromo and into the control of the central government, Oromo students have responded with renewed protests. The scale of the Master Plan is such that it engulfs enough ancestral farmland to affect the lives and livelihoods of nearly six million Oromo people and dismembers the Oromia Regional State by dividing it into two separate zones. There is universal opposition among Oromo both in Oromia and in the diaspora to this Federal action, taken without due process.
OSA members belong to Oromo public and political organizations representing a wide spectrum of ideological and institutional positions. They share a clear focus and mission to produce verifiable data that reveal the real conditions of life of the Oromo people. They also find it within their mission to inform the public of the value and relevance of those findings. In this regard, OSA members have studied and produced research data on multiple dimensions of this very complex and problematic crisis of land use and proprietary rights in the east, west, north, south, as well as centre of Oromia. Findings reveal a longstanding but largely ignored pattern of land confiscation from the Oromo – of which this Master Plan is the latest expression.
OSA believes that the Master Plan is unconstitutional. It violates the principle of federalism, illegally alters the boundaries and jurisdiction of the Oromia regional government, violates citizens’ human right to property and security, and ignores the constitutional principle of transparency for good governance.
OSA believes that the Master Plan is harmful to human development. Contrary to the principles of participatory policy-making for sustainable development, the Master Plan was developed by the federal government to apportion land, in the name of investment, to the economic elite who are already at the top of the social hierarchy. The plan disregards the livelihood of Oromo farmers who will be displaced to face extreme poverty and an increasing unemployment rate. OSA views the plan as having uneven and detrimental impacts by contributing to policy-driven poverty among the Oromo and exacerbating intra-nation/ethnic economic inequality.
OSA believes that the Master Plan is injurious to the environment. Developed in secrecy, the Master Plan violates established principles and practices pertaining to environmental protection clauses. Under the Master Plan, the expanded city will continue dumping toxic substances and industrial wastes on the surrounding cities, towns and lands of Oromo people. Oromo communities in the outlying zones and the ecosystem will remain on the receiving end of the environmental harm.
OSA members fully support the rights of the students who initiated the protests and the rights of those who have now joined them in massive numbers. OSA officers and members will assist their effort to the fullest extent in its capacity as an academic, non-partisan association of Oromo and non-Oromo scholars. We are deeply concerned that the government is using excessive, often deadly, force against unarmed students, including even elementary school students. These incidents are followed by attacks against parents and townsfolk who come out to protect their children against the very security personnel who are constitutionally mandated to provide protection and maintain law and order. It should be a matter of grave concern when an internationally recognized government uses excessive force against its own citizens. It is extremely grievous that the Ethiopian government has called up its well-armed special forces to move against unarmed students. This violates every international human rights principle and rights enshrined in the Ethiopian constitution that officially guarantees extensive, regional and individual rights.
Let us be clear. The issue is not an abstract debate about whether a government has the duty to develop and implement policies to improve the conditions of lives for its citizens or to conduct urban planning necessary to accommodate natural migration of people from rural areas to urban centers. The issue is the unjust process in this instance developed and designed to implement a massive land transfer from Oromia Regional state control to Federal jurisdiction. Even more troublesome is the government’s utter disregard of the people’s inalienable right in a purported democracy to protest policies and to exercise rights guaranteed by the Ethiopian constitution.
The Master Plan is designed to be put into effect over a span of 25 years with a final phase occurring in 2038. When it is fully complete, it will:
o Incorporate 36 towns and 17 rural districts of the Oromia region into the Greater Addis Ababa territory. This includes, Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) Sululta, Dukem, Chancho, Adama, Ambo, Sabata, Mojo and other towns;
o Encompass a total area estimated to be 1.1 million hectares, of which the share of rural and urban areas amount to 85% and 15% with a corresponding population size of 2 million and 11.5 million respectively;
o Accumulate land “to increase rental housing by building 86,000 units every year under what the government calls “Rental Building Cooperative Sector” (10%), “Public Rental Housing Sector” (30%) and “Developmental Owners/Real Estate Sector(15%). As the result, it will uproot millions of Oromo farmers, disrupting not only their lives and livelihoods but dismantling their central position in the territorial and cultural landscape. The takeover disconnects Oromia’s current reach from the eastern to western boundaries of Ethiopia;
o Achieve 30% and 50% level of urbanization in 2023 and 2038 respectively. Given the limited urbanization among the Oromo because of the state-wide discriminatory language and economic policy against the Oromo, the plan will effectively erase Oromo identity, culture and language from the aggrandized Greater Addis Ababa. Even Oromo physical and economic presence would be totally cleared out of this crucially situated zone.
Generally, the plan has the direct effect of forcible transfer, displacement, dislocation and dispossession of the Oromo population from the area in which they are historically indigenous.
The Master Plan reveals that the incumbent policies continue longstanding patterns of historical injustice by denying the Oromo freedom of association, press and expression; by ostracizing residents and the Oromia Regional officials from political decision-making; by stifling and intimidating dissent through invoking arbitrary laws which depict even peaceful protest as terrorism; and by taking repressive measures such as capture, torture, extra-judicial murder, and massive arbitrary detention – all of which were used against Oromo protesters in 2014 and are being actively imposed again as the world witnesses on social media the massacre in broad daylight of the Oromia region’s young and brightest lives.
Cognizant of all of these issues, the Oromo Studies Association calls upon the following:
To the Ethiopian government: o Release immediately all protesters currently being held in open and secret detention; o Stop immediately the use of excessive force by security forces against peaceful protesters; o Honour and protect the rights of citizens to freedom of association, freedom of the press and to freedom of expression; o Protect the constitutionally-guaranteed right of citizens to protest any policy, a right also protected by all international human rights agreements that this government is a contracting party to; o Allow independent investigation into the actions of security forces that have resulted in the death and imprisonment of protesters; and o Bring to justice members of the security force and government officials responsible for the killing and injury of peaceful protesters. o Halt the implementation of the Integrated Development Master Plan for Addis Ababa and submit it to a constitutionally mandated review, giving the citizens a voice in their own governance.
To Foreign Governments, Donors and Consultants engaged in giving expert advice and financial support to the Ethiopian government in the implementation of the Master Plan: o OSA offers our considerable research, data – historical, economic, ecological, cultural and social –to all agencies and government who seek to know the full scope of the impact of their engagement with the Ethiopian government. o OSA acknowledges that all foreign parties in Ethiopia will better pursue their own best interests when operating with full knowledge of the circumstances in the country. We suggest to all parties that reliable information as well as consultation and analysis pertaining to the majority Oromo population of 40 million people is available through Oromo Studies Association. o Examine the evidence that demonstrates that Oromos are a force for peace and stability in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Peace and justice (nagaa fi haaqa Oromoo) are the principles that undergird governance among Oromos.
To Oromo Students all over Oromia and Ethiopia as a whole: o OSA is aware and supportive of your efforts and rights to peaceful protest. We understand that you are risking your lives and well-being simply for exercising your democratic right to peacefully protest a policy that directly impacts you, your family, community and nation. o OSA applauds your commitment to clearly observable forms of peaceful protest. o OSA affirms its commitment to continue to provide the institutional support and intellectual materials to those who will support you in any venue and to document the ongoing crisis.
To the Public in Oromia and in all of Ethiopia: o We offer all possible intellectual and scholarly assistance to those who will create avenues to support Oromo protests against the implementation of the Master Plan, realizing that Oromo cultural identity and livelihood is threatened by this design for unvetted, unexamined land confiscation. o Comparative research by OSA scholars demonstrates that the Ethiopian government’s unconstitutional actions in dealing with one aggrieved the Oromo, indicate an absence of democratic process which inevitably affects all groups. o OSA reaffirms our commitment to providing research and documentation useful to those who wish to create or strengthen avenues for democracy, citizens’ empowerment and peace within and among peoples who are in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.
To Non-Governmental, Inter-Governmental and International Community in general: o OSA calls upon you to investigate thoroughly the conditions that the Oromo student protesters are suffering and in many cases, dying, to bring to the world attention. OSA members are committed to work with you to examine the conditions that have given rise to this renewed voice. We call on you to alert your respective governments about the widespread violations of fundamental rights in the Oromo region of Ethiopia. o OSA commends the excellent courageous work of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and International Crisis Group in investigating crises affecting the Oromo over the years. We urge you to continue to document the tragic events underway to bear witness to the sacrifice of the intelligentsia among Oromo youth to draw attention to this issue which is critical to their people’s existence. OSA will provide you with any possible assistance.
To International and Foreign Media Outlets: o There has been a virtual blackout of information and awareness of the Oromo plight in Ethiopia in general and of this immediate crisis in particular. o OSA calls upon all forms of print, broadcast and online media to document and publicize the events underway in the implementation of the Master Plan, the widespread Oromo student protests and the harsh response to them. OSA pledges to supply information as needed. o OSA urges Voice of America to employ at least one, if not several, Oromo correspondents on the ground in Oromia region. o OSA commends BBC for establishing an Oromo language service and anticipates in depth coverage of these issues in near future.
Re-iterating that Oromo livelihood, language, cultural identity and economic survival is threatened by this design to confiscate land in Oromia, OSA affirms its commitment to support the legitimate rights of all citizens to peacefully protest the Addis Ababa Integrated Master Plan. We are committed to offer all possible intellectual and scholarly assistance to strengthen the efforts of those who create avenues to resist its unexamined and unconstitutional implementation.
OROMO FIRST. Continued marginalization, discrimination and brutal crackdown against peaceful civilian Oromo protest is fast driving the resurgence of ethnic Oromo nationalism in Ethiopia.
Student protests are spreading throughout Ethiopia’s Oromia region, as people demonstrate against the possibility that Oromo farmers and residents living near the capital, Addis Ababa, could be evicted from their lands without appropriate – or possibly any – compensation. Social media is filled with images of bloodied protesters; there are credible reports of injuries and arrests in a number of towns; and local police have publicly acknowledged that three students have died so far.
The current protests echo the bloody events of April and May 2014, when federal forces fired into groups of largely peaceful Oromo protesters, killing dozens. At least hundreds more students were arrested, and many remain behind bars. Both then and today, the demonstrators are ostensibly protesting the expansion of Addis Ababa’s municipal boundary into the surrounding Oromia region, which protesters fear will displace Oromo farmers from their land. But these protests are about much more: Many Oromos have felt marginalized and discriminated against by successive Ethiopian governments and have often felt unable to voice their concerns over government policies.
Of the student protesters detained in 2014, some have been released. Those I spoke with told me about the torture they endured as part of interrogations. But countless others remain in detention. Some have been charged under Ethiopia’s draconian counterterrorism law for their role in the protests; others languish without charge in unknown detention centers and military camps throughout Oromia. This week, five students were convicted of terrorism-related offenses for their role in the protests.
There has been no government investigation into the use of live ammunition and excessive force by security personnel last year.
Ethiopia’s tight restrictions on civil society and mediamake it difficult to corroborate the current, mounting allegations and the exact details of the ongoing protests emerging from towns like Haramaya, Jarso, Walliso, and Robe. The government may think this strategy of silencing bad news is succeeding. But while the fear of threats and harassment means it is often months before victims and witnesses come forward to reveal what happened in their communities, they eventually do, and the truth will emerge.
The government should ensure that the use of excessive force by its security personnel stops immediately. It should then support an independent and impartial inquiry into the conduct of security forces in the current protests – and last year’s as well. Those responsible for serious abuses should be fairly prosecuted. This would be the best way for the Ethiopian government to show its concern about the deaths and injuries inflicted on the students, that it does not condone the use of live ammunition against peaceful protesters, and that those who break the law are appropriately punished.
In this brief commentary, I will address some general conceptual issues related to resistance against development intervention and then I will proceed to the specific case about the ongoing contested master plan of Finfinne city called “integrated urban development”. This assessment is aimed to achieve multiple purposes; namely to contribute academic inputs to policy making, to clarify to the readers on the nexus between development interventions and resistance, and to indicate that the ongoing resistance from the Oromo is within the context of rights enshrined in the constitution of the country.
Like elsewhere in the modern world, successive Ethiopian governments have been engaged in translating various versions of development discourses into practice – albeit posited within different ideological orientations. The imperial and military regimes had put in place hegemonic systems in channeling down policies and programs that they also tried to sell to the populace under the buzz concepts such as ‘development’ and ‘modernization’. In this regard, historical accounts remind us the social, economic, cultural and political consequences of such modernist development discourses and practices of different groups in the country among which the Oromo were significantly affected. To mention one, the collectivization (villagization) program of the military regime disrupted social ties, economic practices and cultural connectedness of the people to their land. This hints at the repercussions of development projects that are conceived, implemented and managed within hegemonic systems of governance because absence of democratic systems opens the path to external interventions without proper consultation of citizens. Nevertheless, the post-1991 political order in Ethiopia has put in place for the first time in the history of the country a system whereby nations and nationalities are given rights of self-determination to decide on matters that affect their communities including the right to administer resources and development projects, and to promote the language, culture and history of their people to mention a few – no matter how the practical implementation is still the subject of contestation.
2. Development Interventions and Popular Resistance: An Overview
High modernist development practices all over the world entailed the exercise of top-down and expert-based scientific knowledge that considered participation of ordinary citizens and local knowledge at odds with the development visions of the state and/or non-state actors. High modernist development discourses give limited room for participatory approaches of development and government-public partnership. This approach was practiced by colonial powers and continued in the post-colonial periods as well. The general assumption behind high modernist development discourses was that few elites would plan development programs and mobilize the mass for its implementation under strict control of ‘experts’. However, as a famous scholar on peasant resistance, James Scott, has noted, the power of domination often produces the power of resistance from the group that is seemingly powerless as seen in literal conceptions of power. Since the mid-1980s, scholars began not to underestimate the agency of the “weak” who under conditions of domination can use different strategies of resistance against development interventions that they define from their own values, identity, worldviews and history.
However, it is misleading to construe local communities’ resistance against development intervention as if the people are against development – despite controversies revolving around the concept itself. Although the term can be given different meanings and manifestations according to the interest, ideology and worldviews of various actors, what local communities often resist is not the conventional understanding of the concept per se – referring to improvement in the overall wellbeing of human society and their environment. Rather, the approach, strategy and consequence of development programs, projects and practices constitute contestable meanings.
3. The “Integrated Urban Development Plan and the Question of the Oromo
3.1. Background
According to the 1995 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia (Article 49) Finfinne (Addis Ababa) became the capital city of the Federal government while at the same time it has been the seat of Oromia regional state. Finfinne is adjoined by Oromia region in all directions. Article 49.5 of the constitution gives special right for Oromia to get special benefit from Finfinne as it is the heartland of Oromia besides being its administrative capital. According to the constitution (Article 49.5), “The special interest of the State of Oromia in AddisAbaba, regarding the provision of social services or the utilization of natural resources and other similar matters,as well as joint administrative matters arising from the location of Addis Ababa within the State of Oromia, shall be respected. Particulars shall be determined by law”. Nevertheless, there are critiques that Oromia has not yet benefited from Finfinne. On this topic, because of lack of empirical evidence whether the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO) tried to utilize the constitutional rights given to Oromia in getting benefit from Finfinne or not, I would not push this assertion forward.
The plan, according to the government, is intended to create integrated urban development between Addis Ababa city administration and Oromia towns surrounding the capital city such as Burayu, Sabata, Sululta, Bishoftu, Laga-Xafo Laga-dadhi, Galan and other semi-urban centers adjoining these towns. From this perspective, the government tries to disseminate its development programs by presenting to the public the advantages of the plan in terms of infrastructural and social provisions. On the other hand, the Oromo from different walks of life, including some members of the OPDO officials are skeptical whether the Master Plan has been planned for mutual benefit of Finfinne and Oromia regional state or is just a systematic strategy of incorporating Oromia towns into Finfinne. Thus, it is crucially important to analyze some underlying reasons behind Oromo’s resistance and discontent to the Master Plan. In the following section, I will try to discuss it situating within historical experiences, political scenarios and procedural drawbacks in the planning process. However, one should boldly know that no one is against development project that changes the lives of its people if carefully planned and implemented.
3.2. Why do the Oromo Resist the Master Plan?
Memories and experiences of past evictions and dispossessions
Like other nations and nationalities in the country particularly those who faced the brutal conquest under emperor Menelik II during the late 19th century, the Oromo people have lived memories and experiences of ‘development’ induced displacement, dispossession and oppressions under the successive regimes. Moreover, the assimilationist and hegemonic systems in the past have left enduring repercussions on Oromo culture, language and identity with the case in Finfinne more appalling still today. Historical accounts of the establishment of Finfinne city in 1886 illuminate that the territory was inhabited by different Oromo clans until they were eventually displaced by the imperial regimes. The city was built on the ancestral land of the Oromo through policies of land alienation, dispossession and displacement of indigenous peoples in similar approaches to many other urban centers in the conquered regions of the South. It is, thus fair to argue that Finfinne city was established as a garrison town predominantly occupied by war generals and soldiers. There is no need to turn history books or archives to understand the displacement of indigenous Oromo communities from Finfinne and to comprehend the impacts of the assimilationist projects under the imperial and military regimes. It is rather enough to see the current ethnic composition of the Addis Ababa city where one can clearly see that people who identify themselves as Oromo are immensely few in contrast to Finfinne’s being the heartland of Oromia. Therefore, resistance against the Master Plan should be understood within the historical antecedents the Oromo experienced with regards to dispossession of their land, displacement from their ancestral land and the socio-economic, cultural and political repercussions of development interventions.
In response to the constitutional rights
The Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE Constitution 1995: Article 43.2) clearly stipulates the right of each nation, nationality and people of Ethiopia to be fully consulted and involved in development projects that affect their community. In addition, Article 39 of the same constitution gives unconditional rights of self-determination to the nations, nationalities and peoples of Ethiopia that include the right and autonomy to determine which development program to envisage and the right of self-government on territories they historically inhabited. These are a few of the fundamental principles of ethnic federalism that are enshrined in the constitution. In this specific context, Oromia regional state and the Oromo people have constitutional rights to decide on the urban development programs through democratic, transparent, bottom-up and inclusive approaches of participation. They have the right to decide whether they opt to go for the integrated urban development or not. The resistance from Oromo intellectuals, politicians, students, peasants and business people should be understood as a response to interventions that to a large extent violated their constitutional right, particularly Article 43.2 of the FDRE’s constitution – the right to be consulted and involved in development projects.
Mistrust generated from lack of genuine participation
Resistance to state development projects to a large extent reflects the nature of state-society relations, questions of legitimacy and trust. Governments have the leverage of building legitimacy and trust or become victims of legitimacy crisis based on their policies, programs and overall political systems vis-à-vis citizenship rights of the society. It has been evident from discussions during public sensitization programs on the Master Plan that the planning process was top-down and did not involve citizens who will be affected by the project. A higher official from EPRDF presumably acknowledged the importance of involving grassroots communities through bottom-up approaches though he maintained the view that there was no problem with the top-down approach in development intervention. Here comes the fundamental disparity between constitutional promises and practices.
Under such circumstances where citizens are not consulted and involved in the planning process, one should not be surprised if they resist the project because any conscious society does not accept something without knowing its benefits, impacts and implications. Therefore, resistance is a function of procedural incongruity with the constitutional promises.
Anticipated Repercussions on the identity, culture and livelihood of the Oromo
Development projects such as urban expansion, dam projects, large scale agricultural projects, and protected areas conservation have significant repercussions on the livelihood, culture and identity of indigenous peoples all over the world unless critically handled. Because of historical experiences the Oromo faced under successive regimes in Ethiopia – experiences of displacement, suppression, exploitation and dispossession – the current project is also seen by the majority of the Oromo as a continuation of the past trends. Rhetoric and discourses can’t simply convince people who have lived-in scars and experiences in their minds, around their homesteads and in their neighbors that are reflected in their culture, identity, language, economy and politics. The government can rather convince the people on the benefits they would enjoy from the project not by injecting them with high modernist discourses of development but through practical and genuine involvement of the people in the projects.
Still another challenge that awaits the government is whether it has really delivered in other areas of development, whether other development projects didn’t have socio-economic and cultural impacts on local inhabitants elsewhere in the country and whether there is independent judiciary system that citizens can use as a guardian of their human rights in cases any development program threatens their right. I leave this question open to the readers. In practice, according to those who think it would incorporate Oromia towns surrounding Finfinne city, the current Master Plan will adversely affect the Oromo by reducing peasants into landlessness and in exacerbating land expropriation under the guise of investment. Like situations in the capital city, Oromo language, culture and other related rights would be suppressed if these towns are incorporated into the city without clear negotiation on who administers these “integrated” cities.
A way forward?
The development project should not be imposed, rather it should involve stakeholders particularly local communities who will be affected by the project from inception to implementation.
The integrated urban development can serve the interest of all stakeholders if and only if it is participatory and if it doesn’t violate constitutional rights of Oromia regional state and its geographical boundaries.
Finfinne City has the potential to develop by its own given that the city administration makes inward looking to develop a system of modernizing the city not necessarily through horizontal expansion. The unanswered question is: why Finfinne city administration started this integrated plan while there are immense critiques that it is unable to solve its own municipal problems. Therefore, before launching ambitious and ambiguous projects like this, the city administration should have utilized all available opportunities within its administrative boundaries to develop and modernize the city.
The regional government of Oromia has to claim its constitutional right to get special benefit from Finfinne (if not yet).
What guarantee does the regional government of Oromia have as to whether Finfinne administration eventually incorporates the surrounding Oromia towns to its administration or not? This is critical question the federal government, Finfinne city administration and particularly the regional government of Oromia should address. More importantly, the failure to put this agenda on the front line in negotiating with the other actors will be a critical test to the legitimacy of OPDO in representing the Oromo people.
In conclusion, two fundamental issues should be made clear regarding resistance against the “Integrated Urban Development Master Plan” of Addis Ababa City:
1) It has been evident that people are not against development per se. However, where development projects are perceived to be threatening fundamental rights and needs of the citizens, it becomes a policy to be resisted rather than a program to be embraced. On the other hand, under contexts where the people are recognized as rightful citizens whose voices, views and knowledge contribute to the overall development vision through genuine participatory approaches, it would be expected, to a large extent, that development mobilizes the society towards similar goals of the state.
2) Regardless of the power of domination the intervening actor might have, development intervention faces the utmost resistance from the people whose livelihood, culture, language, identity and history will be affected. Therefore, the government should not overlook the potency of local resistance in impacting on its legitimacy and trust.
Meles Zenawi is in #Landgrabs Even from Grave: TPLF Fascist Ethiopian Government Has Taken 1200 Hectares of Land from Sabbataa Oromo ( Indigenous) Farmers in Oromia in the Name of Meles Zenawi Who Died 20 August 2012 in Brussels, Belgium.
4) Labsiin Magaalota Oromiyaa dhihoo kana bahe shira Maastar Pilaanii Oromoon mormu kana kara biraatin hojiirra oolchuuf kan saganteeffame waan ta’eef ni balaaleffanna.
The Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC) has written a letter to the various organs of the Ethiopian government – urging the government to stop the genocidal Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) Master Plan, whose goal is to evict millions of Oromo farmers from their ancestral land in the name of ‘development’ around the city of Finfinne; in the same letter, OFC has also urged the Ethiopian government to respect the constitutional rights of the people, especially Article-49 of the Constitution – which deals with the special interests of the State of Oromia over Finfinnee.
OFC will also hold a public meeting in Burraayyuu town in Oromia at the town’s stadium on Sunday, 8th November 2015 – from 9am to 1pm to discuss with the public about the genocidal Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) Master Plan.
Maqaan Magaalaa tokkoo fedhii fi waliigaltee jiraattota magaalichaatiin jijjirama inni jedhu aangoo Caffeen Oromiyaa kan dhiibuu fi Caffeen Oromiyaa labsii heera naanichaa fi mirga caffee dhiibu akka baase illee tumaan labsii kanaa ni mullisa.
Miseensonni Caffee Oromiyaa haara filatamanii seenaan danbii fi seeraa Caffichaa utuu hin hubatin jalqabumaan murtii bara dheeraaf lafa irra harkifachaa ture fi Oromiyaa guutummaatti mormamaa jiru murteesisuun bulchiinsa naanichaa jeequmsa keessa akka galchu danda’u fi ummanni ija shakiin akka ilaalu kan godhee ta’uumis beekameera.
Hundreds of Oromo (and friends of the Oromo) Facebook and Twitter users have changed their ‘profile pictures’ to the “Say No” graphic asnews broke out earlier on September 30, 2015, that the Tigrean-led Ethiopian government was advancing to finalize the “Addis Ababa Master Plan” through its agent OPDO. The “Addis Ababa Master Plan” aims to evict millions of Oromo farmers from the Oromia Federal State’s localities around Finfinne (Addis Ababa) in order to take the land for Tigrean investors, Tigrean real-estate developers and Tigrean commercial farmers while Oromo farmers will become day-laborers (unskilled workers), guards, housemaids, etc. (i.e. low-wage earners) on the Tigrean investment hub (called “Industrial Zone”) in Central Oromiyaa. In addition to Central Oromiyaa, these Tigrean “Industrial Zones” are to be built all over Oromiyaa near major cities/towns, such as the Dire-Dawa Industrial Zone near Dire-Dawa, the Jimma Industrial Zone near Jimma city, and so on – more details can be read here.
Target: Federal Government of Ethiopia, National Regional State of Oromia, City Gov’t of Addis Ababa
Petition Background (Preamble):
We, the Oromo people in Ethiopia, the Oromo diaspora across the globe, friends of the Oromo people in and outside of Ethiopia, all other progressive forces in Ethiopia and beyond, and all forces dedicated to the ideas and ideals of justice and democracy, and those of us committed to the principles of liberty and equality of all peoples everywhere, stand together in protest to the proposed Addis Ababa Integrated Regional Development Plan (otherwise known as the Master Plan).
In particular, we request the Federal Government of Ethiopia, that of the National Regional State of Oromia, and of the City of Addis Ababa to immediately stop the implementation of the Master Plan. As the Caffee Oromiyaa meets to adopt the Urban Development Bill of the Region (Wixilee Labsii Magaalota Motummaa Naannoo Oromiyaa Hundeessuf [dhiyaate]), a bill in which the matter of the Master Plan is to be passed in disguise, we like to remind the members that they are at a rare historical moment, a moment when each of them should try and align the call of their conscience and their constituency to that of their party. We urge them to vote the bill down and stop the implementation of the Master Plan. We urge them to start wide-ranging, consultative, and participatory meetings directly with the people in order to address discontents that emerged in relation to, and triggered by, the release of the Master Plan.
So doing is of utmost urgency to the people of Oromia (whose human rights are being violated), the Government of Oromia (whose right to self-governance is defied, whose territorial jurisdiction is bypassed, whose special interest is ignored, and whose stability is endangered), and the government of Addis Ababa (whose people’s rights and interests are ignored, whose right to just administration is repeatedly violated, and whose peace and stability is increasingly at stake).
We demand the interruption of the implementation of the Master Plan and a reconsideration of its process, content, and consequence anew. We do so fully aware of the fact that, as it stands now, the proposed Master Plan lacks legitimacy in the process of its making, in its content, and in its consequence. We believe that the process was not consultative, transparent, and participatory. Its content violates the right of Oromia to self-governance, the rights of the inhabitants to socio-economic rights (such as the right of farmers to subsistence, of people to adequate standard of living, of the Oromo inhabitants to cultural rights such as language, education, and other social services), and the power of Oromia to co-equal administration of the city as its capital. Moreover, its content illegally excises the towns and Woredas of the Special Zone out of the jurisdiction of Oromia and unconstitutionally unites them with the city of Addis Ababa. In short, it expands the territorial and jurisdictional extent of the city to Oromia. In its consequence, it is neither legally defensible nor morally justifiable.
We believe that it will have, as it already had, a negative impact on the people and governments of Oromia and the inhabitants in the area. Thousands of farmers are, and will be unjustly deprived of their only means of subsistence. They are, and will be, removed from their ancestral land and displaced by the wealthy few that favour the regime in power. These farmers and their families are and will be dispossessed, homeless, and unemployed urban poor. The development the regime claims to bring about are not development of the people but an illegal and unjust enrichment of the few. To the Oromo people, its result is eviction en masse through a systematic state act of ethnic cleansing. Its result is the unconstitutional usurpation of the region’s power. It is a forced incorporation of the Oromo territory and people into a city administration that is illegally made already outside of the administrative jurisdiction of Oromia, an administration to which the hosts, i.e., the Oromo, are made the guests. The implementation of the Master Plan exacerbates the already grave conditions in which the Oromo of the area live. It dissolves the constitutionally recognized special interest of Oromia in the city. It imposes a forced cultural assimilation of the Oromo mass by marginalizing their language, invisibilizing their culture, and misrecognizing their identity. It poses a major threat to peace by intensifying conflict between investors and the local inhabitants. It poses a major threat of pollution caused by liquid waste and other acts of environmental degradation. (This, too, is against the constitutional right to a clean and pure environment.)
The implementation of the Master Plan has provoked an Oromia-wide mass protest in 2014. In response, the government brutally murdered over 70 Oromos, wounded hundreds, and illegally detained many more. Not a single one of the perpetrators have been brought before justice to date. To continue to implement the plan now is to invite another round of protest that may result in an even worse violence that might in turn result in a more intensely violent clash between the government and the people and among interest groups in the area.
Petition:
Therefore, we the undersigned seek to draw the regime’s attention to these flaws in the process, content, and consequence of the Master Plan and we urge the government to stop causing an imminent disaster even as it disguises the issue in the new Urban Development Bill. We stand united as a voice of the underprivileged and silenced poor. We stand as a voice of conscience, a voice for justice.
We demand an immediate cessation of the implementation of the Master Plan because we believe it is legally indefensible (as it violates the constitution and other laws of the country), politically implausible (as it has been comprehensively rejected by the people, even through sacrifice in lives, limbs, and futures), and morally unjustifiable (as it is an unfair eviction of poor farmers from their land, denial of their right to the only means of subsistence, deprivation of their identity, a systematic act of mass displacement, and a blunt attempt to cleanse of the land of its Oromo inhabitants).
We also urge that the government starts to enforce the special interest of Oromia over Addis Ababa in accordance with the constitutional imperative in Article 49. We demand that the governments of FDRE, Oromia, and the city of Addis Ababa to establish, jointly or separately, independent and impartial commission(s) to inquire into the government’s violence unleashed on the protestors in 2014 and to address the discontents around it.
Hiraarrii fi cunqursaan saba Oromoo irra sirna abbaa irree wayyaaneen geessifamu har’allee babal’atee dameelee hedduu yaafatee gidiraa fi dhiphuu ummata Oromoo akkaan hammeessee jira. Hidhaan, ajjechaanii fi baqi akkuma jirutti ta’ee, maqaa guddina biyyaa, misoomaa fi investimentii jedhuun qonnaan bultootni Oromoo lafa isaanii irraa buqqaafamanii maatiin diigamaniiru. Duulli maqaa misooma biyyaa fi investimentiin geggeeffamaa jiru jireenya Oromoo hundee irraa kan qoree fi lafa akaakilee fi abaabilee irraa buqqisee ilmaan Oromoo hedduun kadhattuu fi harka ormaa ilaaltuu akka ta’an taasisuun dhugaa dirreetti mul’atuu dha.
Gartuun TPLF/EPRDF sirna cunqursaa fi saaminsaa itti fufsiisuuf Oromiyaa dhabamsiisee ummata Oromoo biyya dhablee taasisuuf karoora diinummaa bal’aa lafaa akka qabu dhokataa miti. Karoora isaa keessaa tokko kan ta’ee fi bara 2014 keessa hojii irra oolchuuf yaalee kan dura dhaabbannoon ummata Oromoo isa mudachuu irraa yeroofis ta’u jalaa gufatee ture Karoora Master Plaanii Magaalaa Finfinnee fi naannawa ishee ti.
Karoorri Master Pilaanii Magaalaa Finfinnee fi naannawa ishee jedhamu dhuguma akka sirnichi ololu Oromoo lafa isaa irraa kan hin dhiibnee fi hin buqqisne, jiruu fi jireenya isaa kan hin gaagaane, aadaa, seenaa fi afaan isaa irratti gaaddidduu kan hin buusne osoo hin taane, dhugaa qabatamaan lafa irraa mul’atu Oromoota Finfinnee fi naannawa sana marsanii jiran, kanarra iyyuu darbee haga fageenyaa irratti argaman kan buqqisuu fi diigu, aadaa, seenaa fi afaan Oromoo kan dhabamsiisuu fi bulchiinsa alagaa kan warra gita bittootaa Oromoo irratti kan goobsu akka ta’e qabatamaan mul’ata. Alagaa investara taasisee Oromoo kumoota dhibbaan kan hiyyeessa gadadaawee fi kadhataa taasisuu dha.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (The Post Post)–France with the help of the World Bank has embarked on missions that destroyed many lives in some African countries. One of those countries in which this duo operates is Ethiopia. Mali, Burkina Faso and Benin are the other victims of the “urbanization for the 21st century,” which mainly advocates building cities around public transportation.
In May 2014, university student protesters of Oromo ethnic origin took to the streets of Ethiopia in opposition to the “Integrated Development Master Plan.” Some student protesters quoted by social media activists dubbed it “a master killer,” because dozens of students and people who protested were gunned down by Ethiopian security forces. Some of them pointed to its “unconstitutionality,” saying it encroaches on Oromia’s land. Ethiopian government security forces effectively silenced the protesters.
However, the real victims of the urbanization projects were the low-income families who lived in Addis Ababa and vicinity. Bekele Feyissa, a farmer in Sebeta, complained to Bloomberg’s reporter in 2014 that he got paid $36 for 1.5 acres of land. Even though the government owns the land, Mr. Feyissa, a father of six has customary rights to the land. He has at least eight people to feed. People like Fayissa are the ones who have gotten the short end of the stick.
It all started with the 1999-2000 urbanization projects. There were multiple moving parts—lender [World Bank Group], contractor [Lyon Town Planning Agency], Addis Ababa city government, French government agencies and German Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ).
A document detailing the zenith of a 15-year-old mission is buried in the deep web pages of UrbaLyon—The Planning Agency of the Lyon metropolitan area. Coincidentally, “Mission from 19-26 May 2009” is displayed in bold letters under a picture of Addis Ababa on a cloudy day. According to the header, the document was a result of a collaboration of three organizations. They were Addis Ababa City Government, Lyon Town Planning Agency, and Ville de Lyon—city municipal of Lyon—France’s second-largest city after Paris. The page after the agenda for the seven-day mission, splashes a photo of Ethiopian Herald, with a title that reads, “Officials of Ville De Lyon keen to work with Addis.”
Ethiopian Herald’s title was misleading as it implied working with Addis was a new venture. The “technical cooperation” started ten years before, and the May 2009 mission was to transform it into “city to city cooperation.”
In the historical background section, the document emphasizes the cooperation of Addis Ababa city government and the French (Grand Lyon and the French Embassy). It further states the decision by the French to fund the revision of the 2002 master plan was to establish pre-operational project processes, implying they were there to collect the return.
This rich French city also has other contracts with other African cities like Bamako, Ouagadougou, Porto-Novo and Rabat, whose stories are not too far from that of Addis Ababa. Some of those countries were a little generous to their displaced people due to urbanization planned by Lyon Urban Planning Agency, even though the displaced still suffered consequences.
The most significant part of this document shows the involvement of the World Bank, which is not a surprise by any stretch. However, investigative reports showed the organization’s involvement in projects which ruined at least 3.4 million lives worldwide. These contracts Grand Lyon signs with sub-Saharan cities, do not seem to involve financial planning even though it appears they often made sure the World Bank funded the projects. Three World Bank officials were listed in this document among the contacts: Abebaw Alemayehu (senior development specialist), Yoshimichi Kawasumi (senior highway engineer), and Yitbarek Tessema (senior water and sanitation specialist).
Reports by International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Huffington Post, and The Investigative Fund found that The World Bank Group repeatedly failed to enforce own rules to protect communities in its projects’ path. One of the stories featured by these reporters includes Ethiopian Anuak family who were beaten, raped, and displaced from their land as a result of The World Bank Group funded Ethiopian government villagization program.
The disconcerting and destructive quote to The World Bank’s mission came from the World Bank’s Ethiopia program director, Greg Toulmin. “We are not in the physical security business,” ICIJ quoted him saying at the time. Despite his dismissive quote towards human rights and his contradicting of the World Bank Group’s mission, Mr. Toulmin is currently the acting Country Director for Ethiopia.
The World Bank, whose private lending arm, International Finance Corporation (IFC) is a defendant in a class action lawsuit filed in District of Columbia, sent a link to a press release in response to The Horn Post’s request for a budget document showing financial compensation for the displaced people in the outskirts of Addis Ababa. In the press release, in March 2015, the World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said, “We took a hard look at ourselves on resettlement and what we found caused me deep concern.” He also goes on to acknowledge failures in overseeing projects involving resettlement, implementation and enforcement of own policies.
The World Bank’s Operational Policies (OP 4.12) clearly states involuntary displacement needs special attention in paragraph 2.
“Involuntary resettlement may cause severe long-term hardship, impoverishment, and environmental damage unless appropriate measures are carefully planned and carried out. For these reasons, the overall objectives of the Bank’s policy on involuntary resettlement are the following:
Involuntary resettlement should be avoided where feasible, or minimized, exploring all viable alternative
Where it is not feasible to avoid resettlement, resettlement activities should be conceived and executed as sustainable development programs, providing sufficient investment resources to enable the persons displaced by the project to share in project benefits should be meaningfully consulted and should have opportunities to participate in planning and implementing resettlement programs.
Displaced persons should be assisted in their efforts to improve their livelihoods and standards of living or at least to restore them, in real terms, to pre-displacement levels or to levels prevailing prior to the beginning of project implementation, whichever is higher.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, the press release came after both the ICIJ report and the lawsuit accusing International Finance Corporation of irresponsible and negligent conduct in appraising, financing, advising, supervising and monitoring a coal-fired powered plant in India.
Countries like China and Turkey are operating in Ethiopia, but France takes the lead in displacing the poor with near zero compensation in the outskirts of Addis Ababa.
An email from The Horn Post to Lyon city officials seeking comments regarding Addis Ababa Master plan did not get a response at the time of this publication.
Say no to the master killer. Addis Ababa master plan is TPLF’s grand genocidal plan against Oromo people.
”As we have heard #TheMasterKiller implementation is just around to evict thousands of Oromos from their land and homes. More then that to destroy Oromummaa as well. In addition also The So Called Master Killer will cut Oromiyaa into two like Gaza and West-bank. Guess what will happen then?. We must all stand together and stop this, remember last time mostly students were participated but this time around we must all prepare for inclusive resistance (all of us) to save guard Oromiyaa and Oromummaa. Remember without OROMIYAA NO OROMOS!” OFC