U.S. Senators Speak Loud and Clear: Human Rights Violations in Ethiopia Must Stop!

Last July, Barack Obama visited Ethiopia and declared the ruling Thugtatoship of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (T-TPLF) regime a “democratic government.”

The T-TPLF claimed with a straight face that it had won the 2015 “election” by 100 percent or all 547 seats in “parliament”.

The New York Times called it a “sham”.

Human Rights Watch called Obama’s  statement “shocking”.

I called it a low down dirty shame.

On April 20, 2016, Senators Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Patty Murry (D-WA), Ed Markey (D-MA), Chris Coons (D-DE), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Al Franken (D-MN), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Marco Rubio (R-FL)  sponsored a  Resolution condemning the crimes against humanity being committed by the  T-TPLF in Ethiopia today.

Well, they did not exactly use the phrase “crimes against humanity.” But that was exactly what they meant in their Resolution.

Senator Cardin  commenting on his introduction of the  Supporting Respect for Human Rights and Encouraging Inclusive Governance in Ethiopia said:

"I am shocked by the brutal actions of the Ethiopian security forces, and offer condolences to the families of those who have been killed.  The Ethiopian constitution affords its citizens the right to peaceful assembly and such actions by Ethiopian government forces are unacceptable. The government’s heavy-handed tactics against journalists and use of the 2009 Anti-Terrorism and Charities and Societies Proclamations to stifle free speech and legitimate political dissent demonstrate a troubling lack of respect for democratic freedoms and human rights. Given the challenges posed by the devastating drought and border insecurity, it is more important than ever that the government take actions to unify rather than alienate its people. It is critical that the government of Ethiopia respect fundamental human rights if it is to meet those challenges."

Senator Rubio echoed the same sentiment:

"Peaceful protestors and activists have been arrested, tortured and killed in Ethiopia for simply exercising their basic rights. I condemn these abuses and the Ethiopian government’s stunning disregard for the fundamental rights of the Ethiopian people. I urge the Obama Administration to prioritize respect for human rights and political reforms in the U.S. relationship with Ethiopia."

Obama turned a deaf ear to Senator Rubio’s plea. To add insult to injury, Obama stood up in Addis Ababa and shamelessly declared the T-TPLF is a “democratic government”.

It is to be recalled that Senator Rubio wrote a letter to Obama a few days before Obama visited Ethiopia in July 2015 “highlighting” his “concerns regarding ongoing human rights abuses by the Ethiopian government against its own people.” Senator Rubio warned in his letter:

"Although the United States and Ethiopia share an interest in fighting terrorism and securing stability through the region, it is essential that the U.S. does not turn a blind eye to Ethiopia’s human rights abuses. By shutting down avenues to express dissent through the political process, civil society, or media, Ethiopia’s government may fuel further instability in the country."

Brutality by government forces is a crime against humanity.

U.N. Security  Ban Ki-Moon said, “The acts of brutality [by the Syrian government] that are being reported may constitute crimes against humanity or war crimes. Such acts must be investigated and the perpetrators held to account.”

That is exactly what the U.S. Senators are saying and calling for in their Resolution.

The Senate Resolution states in plain words that crimes against humanity have been committed in Ethiopia under T-TPLF rule and there must be “a full, credible, and transparent investigation into the killings and instances of excessive use of force that took place as a result of protests in the Oromia region and  hold security forces accountable for wrongdoing through public proceedings.”

But the Resolution goes well beyond a simple statement of disapproval and criticism.

Why Are Oromo Refugees Getting Sent Back to Ethiopia?

Tariku Debela, in jeans, walks carefully through 

the streets of Eastleigh, Nairobi. Photo by Ebba Abbamurti.

On a warm evening last month, Tariku Debela was walking home from dinner in the immigrant enclave of Eastleigh, Nairobi, when he was jumped by four men who took his phone and more than $200 in cash. Getting mugged is bad enough, but what happened next is seared in Debela’s memory.

Debela is an Oromo political leader residing in Kenya as a refugee. The men who robbed Debela delivered a message in Amharic—a verbal threat from across the border—”side with the Ethiopian government or only death awaits you.”
When Debela decided to flee Ethiopia, after years of brutal political persecution, including torture and imprisonment, he expected to be protected as a refugee in Kenya. Indeed, under international law he is. But, Debela and thousands of other Ethiopian refugees who enter neighboring countries have found themselves still within reach of the Ethiopian state, resulting in mistreatment from local governments and neglect from the international organizations ostensibly meant to protect them.
Amnesty International confirmed from sources on the ground that in early January 2016, Kenyan security forces deported 25 Ethiopian refugees from Kenya. This is disputed by Stanley Mwango, spokesperson for the Kenyan government’s Department of Refugee Affairs, who denies the deportations, telling Okayafrica that “Kenya is not sending away anyone who is legally seeking asylum.”
But Amnesty’s account corresponds to reports from Oromo community leaders in Nairobi that Ethiopian refugees are routinely subject to surveillance, harassment, violence and deportation from Kenyan police and border authorities, who they say work in close collaboration with the Ethiopian government.
The outgoing Oromo community leader in Nairobi, Shaga Arado, 38, says most of the Oromos forcibly returned to Ethiopia are detained in military barracks near the border where they are interrogated and in some cases tortured. There are also incidents of Oromo refugees in Kenya disappearing—such as the case of Dabassa Guyo Saffaro, a well known Oromo oral historical and cultural leader who vanished off Nairobi’s streets in late September 2015. He has not been heard from since.

Debela nostalgically shows off a photo of him with the 

OFC party leader—Merera Gudina at a past function.

Although Ethiopians have consistently sought asylum for years on the basis of political persecution—UNHCR estimates there were 160,427 Ethiopian refugees in 2015—human rights organizations say they expect the number to grow in light of the ongoing Ethiopian government violence against Oromo protesters.
Peaceful protests began in November 2015 after the Ethiopian government announced plans to expand the municipality of Addis Ababa into the bordering Oromia region. The government has since abandoned the plan, but Human Rights Watch reports that over the past five months, Ethiopian security forces are suspected of killing over 200 protesters and detaining thousands without cause. Oromos, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, have consistently faced persecution and discrimination from the rulingEthiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) party, which has been in power since 1991. The Ethiopian government did not respond to a request for comment.
Debela, 33, is a member of the Oromo Federalist Congress, a political party that is constantly monitored and harassed by the Ethiopian government. In 2005, following Ethiopia’s disputed national elections, Debela was arrested and accused of inciting violence against the government. He spent nine months in prison. Debela was later released on conditions that he should support the government, withdraw his support for the opposition party and refrain from any political activities. But for Debela, abandoning his political activism wasn’t a choice.
“It was hard for me to wrench my mind away from the reality,” he says. “Seeing the Oromos being dispossessed and systematically impoverished while their land is stolen and dished out to politically correct individuals from the ruling class was what made me speak my mind.”
Debela continued his political organizing, and in February 2009 he was arrested and taken to Maikelawi prison. Debela’s second prison sentence was much worse than the first. In Maikelawi, Debela says he was regularly beaten and tortured. After some of the beatings, often with electrical wires, the prison guards poured ice-cold water over his bleeding body. The pain reverberated in his bones; he slept naked on his cell floor in the water. At times he was interrogated at gunpoint, blindfolded and threatened with execution. Other times bottles were tied on his penis and testicles. Debela lost track of his location, and of time.
Human Rights Watch has documented political prisoners being taken to Maikelawi and tortured to try and coerce confessions. Since the recent Oromo protests, the Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa issued a brief that Oromo activists arrested and imprisoned in Addis Ababa’s Kalitti Jail have also experienced torture that lasted over ten hours and resulted in life-threatening injuries.
Debela was released in July 2009; he would later be again arrested and imprisoned three times. In October 2015, Debela decided he could no longer stay in Ethiopia and expect to survive—he was receiving death threats. In November 2015, Debela traveled from Mandi, Oromia to Addis and then onward to the border towns of Moyale and Hiddi Lola. He then crossed into Kenya and passed through Marsabit and Isiolo before reaching Nairobi.
Arado says other refugees who crossed into Kenya since the beginning of 2016 report paying smugglers to help them evade border guards and make it to Nairobi safely. But their safety is not guaranteed—at least two Ethiopian women refugees who recently arrived in Nairobi via smugglers said they were raped on the journey.
Debela is now registered with the UN Refugee Agency; he was given an appointment for a refugee status determination interview in November 2017. Although Debela has yet to make his case for asylum in Kenya, there are indications that many Ethiopians do not receive fair asylum hearings in other countries, making it

Oromo Protest:Deafening Silence from Ethiopia

Since November, state security forces have killed hundreds of protesters and arrested thousands in Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region. It’s the biggest political crisis to hit the country since the 2005 election but has barely registered internationally. And with the protests now in their fifth month, there is an almost complete information blackout.

A teacher arrested in December told me, “In Oromia the world doesn’t know what happens for months, years or ever. No one ever comes to speak to us, and we don’t know where to find those who will listen to our stories.”

Part of the problem is the government’s draconian restrictions on news reporting, human rights monitoring, and access to information imposed over the past decade. But restrictions have worsened in the last month. Some social media sites have been blocked, and in early March security officials detained two international journalists overnight while they were trying to report on the protests. As one foreign diplomat told me, “It’s like a black hole, we have no idea what is happening. We get very little credible information.”

With difficulty, Human Rights Watch interviewed nearly 100 protesters. They described security forces firing randomly into crowds, children as young as nine being arrested, and Oromo students being tortured in detention. But the Ethiopian media aren’t telling these stories. It’s not their fault. Ethiopian journalists have to choose between self-censorship, prison, or exile. Ethiopia is one of the leading jailers of journalists on the continent. In 2014 at least 30 journalists fled the country and six independent publications closed down. The government intimidates and harasses printers, distributors, and sources.

International journalists also face challenges. Some do not even try to go because of the personal risks for them, their translators, and their sources. And when they do go, many Ethiopians fear speaking out against government policies—there are plenty of cases of people being arrested after being interviewed.

Diaspora-run television stations have helped fill the gap, including the U.S.-based Oromia Media Network (OMN). Many students in Oromia told me that OMN was one way they were able to learn what was happening in other parts of the region during the protests. But since OMN began broadcasting in March 2014 it has been jammed 15 times for varying periods. Radio broadcasts are also jammed–as international broadcasters like Voice of America and Deutsche Welle have experienced intermittently for years.

In December OMN began transmitting on a satellite that is virtually impenetrable to jamming. But security forces then began destroying private satellite dishes on people’s homes. Eventually the government applied pressure on the satellite company to drop OMN, which has now been off the air for over two months.

Social media has partially helped fill the information gap. Photos of injured students and videos of protests have been posted to Facebook, particularly in the early days of the protests. But in some locations the authorities have targeted people who filmed the protests on their phones. At various times in the last month, there have been reports of social media and file-sharing sites being blocked in Oromia, including Facebook, Twitter, and Dropbox. Website-blocking has been documented before – in 2013, at least 37 websites with information from Ethiopia were blocked. Most of the sites were operated by Ethiopians in the diaspora.

Independent non-governmental organizations that might be reporting what is happening face similar restrictions. The government’s Charities and Societies Proclamation of 2009 virtually gutted domestic nongovernmental organizations that work on human rights issues. The independent Human Rights Council released a report on the protests in March. It was a breath of fresh air, but the council released it at great risk. As the first report from Ethiopian civil society on an issue of great political significance, it was a damning indictment of the limits of freedom of expression in Africa’s second-largest country, with a population of 100 million.

Oromo protest , displacement and death

Members of the Oromo community in Melbourne protest against the Ethiopian regime

“This government is at least better than previous ones,” remarked a 74-year-old Eritrean man to me last month in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, his longtime residence.

As it turned out, his assessment of the relative superiority of the current Ethiopian administration was for good reason: two of his children had been killed by a previous ruling outfit, the Derg military junta that took power in 1974 and began eliminating suspected opponents in droves.

Although that particularly bloody epoch came to an end in 1991, many a resident of Ethiopia might nowadays still have cause to complain about homicidal activity by the state.

In the Oromia region surrounding Addis Ababa, for example, there are claims that more than 200 people have been killed by Ethiopian security forces since November 2015, when protests broke out in response to the government's so-called “Master Plan” to expand the boundaries of the capital by a factor of 20.

As a Newsweek article explains, the Oromo inhabitants of the region viewed the plan as “an attempted land grab that could result in the forced eviction of Oromo farmers and the loss of valuable arable land in a country regularly plagued by drought.”

This was no doubt a valid concern given the government's established tradition of wantonly displacing Ethiopians in the interest of “development” — that handy euphemism for removing human obstacles to the whims of international and domestic investment capital.

Apparently, torture has also been a difficult habit for security forces to break.

Comprising some 35% of the population, the Oromo are Ethiopia's largest ethnic group and have regularly decried discrimination by the ruling coalition party, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which is dominated by ethnic Tigrayan interests.

Politically motivated detention, incarceration, and other abuses have long characterised the landscape in Oromia, and the current protests have seen children as young as eight arrested.

And while the government has opted to shelve the Master Plan for now, protests in Oromia have continued. When I recently visited the town of Woliso, one of many protest sites in the region, residents pointed out that cancelling the plan wouldn't bring back the dead people.

Events in Oromia have been described as the worst civil unrest in a decade.
Even without the Master Plan, meanwhile, the government is doing a decent job of courting investors. As I travelled west from Addis Ababa toward Woliso – a journey of about two hours — I passed sprawling factory complexes, including one featuring a Turkish flag flying alongside its more indigenous counterparts.

Launched in 2010 with a price tag of US$140 million, the Turkish-owned Ayka Addis factory is said to occupy several hundred thousand square meters of land.

The website of the Ethiopian Investment Commission furthermore lists Ayka Addis as one of “a number of private Industrial Zones” in Ethiopia, described as “success stories.”

Indeed, the EPRDF can point to double-digit economic growth over recent years to justify plowing ahead with its development model. But there's more to life than GDP – as sizable poverty-stricken sectors of the Ethiopian population can presumably confirm.

About 200,000 people were reportedly in danger of trachoma-induced blindness in Oromia alone.

Oromo Protests and Ethiopian Repression: Overview

The current round of Oromo protests is a continuation of previous peaceful protests against the government’s illegal land grabbing. The Ethiopian government massacred over 78 university students in Ambo in 2014 but left their questions unanswered. The current protests ask the same unanswered questions but they also raise deeper grievances and longstanding issues of injustice, identity and fundamental human rights. They particularly focus on the brutalities of the last 25 years of totalitarian repression to which the international community has turned a blind eye.

Ethiopia and the World

Ethiopia is a darling of both the West and the East of the now unidentifiable Cold War divide. In the West, Ethiopia is praised for being a key ally in the war on terror and for hosting refugees. In the East and the Middle East, she is celebrated for opening up the country for land grabbing. Both sides applaud Ethiopia for creating the fastest growing economy in Africa and for allowing their banks and companies access to land and investment for economic development.

What is hidden in the praise for hosting refugees is the mind-boggling number of refugees that Ethiopia herself produces by turning the country into a bloodbath for dissidents. What is hidden is that some of those who flee atrocity cannot make it to asylum or resettlement because the Ethiopian regime hunts them down and captures them, because they are eaten by wild animals, or because they drown in oceans and big seas in their desperate attempt to reach safety.

What is hidden in the praise for Ethiopia’s alliance against terrorism is the barbaric terrorism of the Ethiopian state itself. What is hidden is that Ethiopia uses its anti-terrorism proclamation as a weapon for silencing any form of dissent. What is hidden is that many thousands of innocent political opponents, journalists, artist, musicians and peaceful protestors are marked as terrorists and beaten, jailed, tortured, killed, or otherwise exiled.

What is drowned out in the applause of economic development is the staggering human cost of land grabbing and the brute bestiality of Ethiopian state terrorism to snuff out indigenous land claims. The savage massacre of thousands of innocent indigenous peoples in Gambella, Ogaden, Oromia, Tepi, and Wolkayet are only a few examples of genocidal ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity that the Ethiopian government commits in the name of development.

Social Engineering: Minoritizing the Majority

Ethiopia is an incredibly diverse multinational and multi-faith state of 100 million people. The Ethiopian government is admired for its bold attempt at ethnic federalism in order to address the controversial national question and foster democratic relations among its diverse polity.