The Ethiopian government has launched a comprehensive campaign to stamp out the year-long Muslim protests against government interference in religious affairs.
According to the website Tigraionline, the government has deployed an array of potent weapons against the Muslim community. These weapons include: tax collection as a pretext to harass Muslim businesses, denial of bank loans and access to land.
Tigraionline is a website closely affiliated with the ruling Tigre liberation front and Ethiopia’s intelligence services.
“Over 50% of Mercato traders are Muslims and they have made huge amounts of money over the years but paid very little tax, “ writes Tigraionline. Denying new bank loans and harshly enforcing existing ones are among the array of weapons the government is using. Denying Muslims access to land is also yet another tool the government has actively pursued.
According to Tigraionline, “the government has been taking strong measures …. [against Muslims] and the actions are bearing results.”
The crackdown against Muslim merchants may also be used as an excuse to transfer businesses to a minority ethnic group that controls Ethiopia’s government.
Although the Ethiopian Muslim protest is home-grown, the Tigraionline article entitled “Who is Goading Ethiopian Islamic Militants,” desperately tries to link the movement to violent overseas groups
(Yemen Post) – An investigation conducted by al-Wethaq a couple of months ago – a right group organization based in Yemen – revealed that two years in its post revolution era Yemen is still home to hundreds of slaves.
Despite its many promises to address all grave human rights violations such as slavery, the central government has proven unable, or politically unwilling to impose its human rights agenda to Yemen, barely controlling its institutions.
Because of Yemen tribal structure and an overlapping of influences in between the state institutions and tribal leaders, Yemen’s government can often only “advice” Sheikhs, encouraging them to follow their directives rather than impose the rule of law.
It is this conflict of power and political authority which is preventing issues such as slavery, child labor and under-age marriages to be properly addressed and rooted out from society.
Yemen will have at one point or another to reconcile its desire for democracy and its tribal tradition, as both as they currently stand now cannot cohabit.
Al-Wethaq established in its six-months field study that slavery mostly persists in three north western provinces — Hodeidah , Hajjah and al-Mahwit –
UNHCR wrote in its 2012 report “while no official statistics exist detailing this practice, sources report that there could be 300 to 500 men, women, and children sold or inherited as slaves in Yemen, including in the al-Zohrah district of al-Hodeidah Governorate and the Kuaidinah and Khairan al-Muharraq districts of the Hajjah Governorate, north of the capital.”
In all three provinces slave markets are being operated by human traffickers and smugglers.
Most incredibly, deeds of ownership are exchanged between slave traders and the slave owners upon completion of the trade with a price tag running at around $2500 per person at any given moment.
The idea that “legal papers” are being exchanged warned activists is proof slavery in those areas has been standardized.
An activist in Hodeidah said under cover of anonymity he had himself witness slave trading. “Traffickers are operating quite freely in the region, slave trading has been normalized here. Given the economic difficulties Yemen is going through right now the government needs to put an immediate stop to such practices or more people will fall victims to slavery.
Farmers are always looking for cheap labor and nothing is as cheap as slaves. This is a dangerous situation as minority groups and African refugees are at great risk here.
Al-Wethaq recorded 190 cases of slavery so far which as far the foundation is concerned is 190 too many.
Human rights activists working for al-Wethaq have complained that despite their many pleas and reports to the government, officials had so far “politely” ignored their calls, only half-heatedly committing to support their anti-slavery campaign efforts.
While Human Rights Minister Hooria Mashour has been active in promoting anti-slavery and other human rights violations, her ministry alone cannot possibly hope to eradicate slavery on its own.
Activists made clear that unless the government as a whole is willing to actively pursue traffickers and hand out hefty prison sentences while rehabilitating slaves back into society, they had little hope things will ever get better.
“Yemen slavery problem is an economic one. People needs to make money, hence traffickers and others, buyers, are looking for cheap labor. The equation is really simple and there is plenty of money to be made on the misery of others,” said Ahmed an activist in Hodeida.
He added that while buyers were often local land owners, many were also acting on behalf of Gulf nationals — Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE and Qatar. And if some rich families are only buying the slaves to free them later on as an act of charity others will arrange for their smuggling over the border and use them as domestic help or some instances sex workers. A link has been made in between slave trading and prostitution, where women and sadly even children were sold into prostitution abroad.
Ethiopian and Somali women and children travel voluntarily to Yemen with the hope of working in other Gulf countries, but some are subjected to sex trafficking or domestic servitude in Yemen. Others migrate based on fraudulent offers of employment as domestic servants in Yemen, but upon arrival are subjected to sex trafficking or forced labor. Some female Somali refugees are forced into prostitution in Aden and Lahj governorates, and Yemeni and Saudi gangs traffic African children to Saudi Arabia. Smugglers capitalize on the instability in the Horn of Africa to subject Africans to forced labor and prostitution in Yemen,” read UHCR 2012 trafficking in person report.
Mohammed Naji Allaw a former member of parliament explained while most slaves in Yemen were freed after September 26 Revolution – 1962 – the practice had somehow survived through the decades, the remnants of Yemen old feudal system.
Najeeb al-Saadi, an activist working for al-Wethaq noted the government had tried on many instances to quiet his organization, denying slavery was an issue in Yemen as to avoid answering embarrassing questions.
Back in 2010 HOOD, – most prominent rights organization in Yemen – launched an anti-slavery campaign calling on the country’s general prosecutor to pursue all slave masters and for the government to build housing complexes on fertile plots of land to help those emancipated from slavery get a new start.
“We asked the government to look into the problem and the general prosecutor to investigate,” said Khaled al-Anesi, a lawyer with the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms in 2010.
Despite the campaign and calls from local and international rights organizations nothing of consequence was ever achieved. Slavery continues to be an issue in modern Yemen.
Activists now hope that the momentum created by 2011 revolution and a sense of civic duties will mean the government will eventually come through and devise a plan action which will translate into real change. Because beyond being set free Yemen’ slaves need to be given a chance to re-integrate society as well as receive compensations for their suffering.
Ancestral land that for generations has served as home and livelihood for hundreds of thousands of indigenous people in Ethiopia is being leased out, on 99-year renewable contracts at nominal sums to foreign corporations. The land giveaway or agrarian reforms as the government would prefer to present them began in 2008 when the Ethiopian government, under the brutal suppressive Premiership of Meles Zenawi invited foreign countries/corporation to take up highly attractive deals and turn large areas of land over to industrial farming for the export of crops. India, China and Saudi Arabia were all courted and along with wealthy Ethiopians have eagerly grabbed large pieces of land at basement prices; rates vary from $1.10 to $6.05 per hectare (HA), comparable land in India would set you back $600 per ha.
A total of 3,619,509 ha, the Oakland Institute (OI), a US based think tank, estimate has been leased out. Land made available by the forced re-location of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people under the government’s universally condemned Villagization progamme, which aims to forcibly re-locate over 1.5 million people from their homes.
India corporations have taken the lion’s share, acquiring around 600,000 ha concentrated in Gambella and Afar, split between 10 investing companies. The term ‘investing’ implies benefits for Ethiopia, which is misleading; ‘profiteering’, or ‘exploiting’ sits closer to the truth of these land deals, as the OI make clear, “taking over land and natural resources from rural Ethiopians, is resulting in a massive destruction of livelihoods and making millions of locals [farmers and pastoralist communities] dependent on food handouts”. With small scale farmers being evicted from their land, prices of staples such as Teff, used by millions throughout Ethiopia to make Injera (bread), has rocketed in price, according to Ethiotribune 22/5/2012, increasing fourfold since 2008.
Corporate expansionism: small change big profits
In line with its ambitions of diversity and world food dominance – Karuturi Global, the world’s largest grower of roses, leads the Indian charge, leasing 311,700 ha in Gambella. Not satisfied with this, GRAIN (an international NGO, working to support small farmers) report Mr.Karuturi “wants to set up farming operations [throughout Eastern and Southern Africa] on more than 1 million [ha]” – too much never enough in corporate expansionism.
Almost a quarter of Gambella’s 25 million ha has been earmarked by the federal government for agricultural ‘development’. Karuturi, whose profits “rose 55.13% to Rs 1.21 crore [10 million] in the quarter ended June 2012”, took their chunk without even seeing it, paying only $1.10 per ha. For the Indian giant it is, John Vidal in ‘Land Grab Ethiopia (LGE)’ says, “the sale of the century”. ‘Green Gold’ is how Mr. Karuturi in GRAIN (‘Who’s Behind the Land Deals’), describes his 300,000 ha of Ethiopian soil, “for which he pays $46 per ha per year including water and labour and expects at least $660 [per ha] in profit per year”. (Ibid)
In addition to paddy, Indian farmers are being sub-contracted to grow maize, cereals, palm oil and sugarcane amongst others. All of which are destined for export, either to India or Europe, where companies farming in Ethiopia (and other Sub-Saharan African nations), benefit from lower import duties applied to developing countries, notwithstanding the fact that the land is leased to, and the crops produced and sold by, multi million-rupee rich companies.
Another major Indian company leasing land in Gambella is the decidedly green sounding BHO Bioproducts. Following the corporate rhetoric, BHO Chief Operating Officer Sunny Maker told Bloomberg in 2010 that, they have “plans to invest more than $120 million in rice and cotton production”, which, by 2017, should “generate about $135 million a year from sales divided equally between domestic [Indian] and international markets.” He added that the “incredibly rich fertile land”, will all be “cleared within the next three years”. Cleared yes, violently, indiscriminately and totally; villages, people, forests, woodland, all destroyed, burnt, relocated, displaced, desecrated. The governments promise to such prized investors is that the land is handed over stripped of everything and everyone. Dissent is not allowed and dealt with brutally should it occur, as Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of OI makes clear. “The repression of social resistance to land investments is even stipulated in land lease contracts, [it is the] state’s obligation to ‘deliver and hand over the vacant possession of leased land free of impediments’ and to provide free security ‘against any riot, disturbance or any turbulent time.”
The ‘rich fertile land’, lovingly cultivated at the hands of the men and women who have farmed it for generations, is unlikely to be nurtured so carefully by Indian (or indeed Chinese or Saudi Arabian) corporations with their thirsty ‘GM seeds’ (Ibid). For as Oxfam in their detailed report ‘Land and Power’ diplomatically point out, “investors short time scales may tempt them into unsustainable cultivation, undermining agricultural production.”
The devolution of development
Land is a prime cut asset in the commercialisation of everything, everywhere, and the “rich fertile land” in Ethiopia is cheap, even by Sub-Saharan African standards. Along with long-term leases, the government offers a neat bundle of carrots, including tax incentives and unrestricted export clauses, incentives that the OI state “deny African countries economic benefits” from land deals that the Ethiopian regime wraps up neatly in its complete disregard for the human rights of the indigenous people. Government indifference encouraging corporate irresponsibility – and they need little encouragement. Businesses hardly seem to be grabbing the land, so much as accepting it as a gift, parceled up and ready to be torn open.
In exchange for such attractive deals, the Ethiopian government has been extended, the OI reports “a $640 million line of credit… over five years to boost sugar production in the country’s Lower Omo region”. Not a philanthropic gesture, more a sales trap by India’s EXIM (export and import) Bank, who stipulate, “Ethiopia must import 75% of the value of the credit line in the form of Indian goods and services.”
The government-owned sugar plantations in the Lower Omo are themselves attracting a great deal of concern and criticism from human rights groups, who highlight the environmental and human damage being perpetrated. Government acts of violence and abuse, in the various land deal regions, are justified under the overused and misleading title of ‘development’; a term appropriated by the international monetary machine – the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) primarily – misunderstood and distorted by government development agencies, acting in line with foreign affairs policies by promoting national self interest and perverted by the corrupt ideologically-blinkered governments of developing nations.
An undeveloped ideological trinity whose actions have drained the 21st century sacred cow and its stable mate ‘growth’ – dry of any true and relevant meaning. Far from supporting human and or social development the “unfair terms and near give-away prices [of land deals]… are hindering development…. Foreign corporations and the World Bank are pressuring African leaders to give them exemptions from taxes, import and export duties, and local labor laws – not to mention water and mineral rights that could be worth billions”, the OI confirm.
More concerned with sitting at the top table and cultivating the right international allies than with doing their constitutional duty and serving the needs of the people, the Ethiopian government is in danger of giving away, and for peanuts, it’s ‘rich and fertile’ land to overseas companies who have no interest in Ethiopia, it’s environment, its culture and even less in its people.
Increasing hunger
Hunger and poverty stalk the land of both Ethiopia and India. 12 – 15 million people survive on food aid in Ethiopia, which ranks bottom of the World Hunger Index at 76. India, with the highest rate of malnourished children in the world, where 25% (around 270 million) of the world’s hungry live, despite the fact that, according to the World Food Programme (WFP), “the country grows enough food for its people”, it comes in 65th of the hungriest nations, below Niger and the Sudan – neither of which, to my knowledge, boast 61 billionaires and 200,000 dollar millionaires unlike India. And whereas “most countries have made consistent progress in reducing hunger, India has seen hunger rise over the last decade compared with the late 1990s.”(Ibid) This so-called economic miracle nation refuses to feed it’s own people.
Food insecurity, the WFP makes clear is caused not by lack of produce, but by an unwillingness to share the Earths bounty equitably. The states in India with the greatest numbers suffering from hunger and malnutrition, WFP records “include Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh”; these are the states where the poorest (Adivasi – indigenous and Dalit) people in the country and quite possibly in the World happen to live. The poor are dying of hunger not because India cannot feeed everyone, as the United Nations report on regional cooperation makes crystal clear, “the root cause of hunger across the sub-region and the world today is not a lack of food. It is the economic and social distribution of that food which leaves populations undernourished and hungry.”
Men women and children living in dire poverty starve to death, in India, Ethiopia and throughout the world. They starve and die for want of the food that is rotting in warehouses, food served up to rats or destroyed by the Indian government, because it is cheaper to burn it than to distribute it to those in need. As Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (26/01/13) said, “globally, a third of all food produced is wasted, and… if one could avoid this waste it would be possible to feed all the hungry people [in the world] and have food to spare.” Food to spare!Such is the inhumane ethos that underpins market fundamentalism, that allows men women and children, young and old to starve – simply because the do not have the financial means to feed themselves. Shame on governments Indian and the rest, that allow such inhumane injustice to prevail, as a wise teacher said, “throughout the world there are men, women and little children who have not even the essentials to stay alive; they crowd the cities of many of the poorest countries in the world… My brothers, how can you watch these people die before your eyes and call yourselves men”.
The commercialization of the countryside in India and Ethiopia, which is displacing large numbers of small-scale farmers and concentrating crop production in the hands of multi-nationals, is intensifying existing levels of hunger. Substantive agricultural reform and real development would see the army of skilled small scale producers, with generations of local knowledge and love of the land, supported with the needed capital and technology, given access to markets that corporations bring. Such an agrarian revolution, ethically founded, environmentally healthy and socially sustained, would build long-term food security and feed the hungry.
Soft targets easy profits
India as the WFP makes clear, has no domestic need for food produced by the overseas industrial farms that are causing such far-reaching damage, to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people of Ethiopia as well as the natural environment. The movement in Ethiopia mirrors what is taking place to a much greater degree in India. The government has shifted all support away from Indian farmers and is supporting the transfer of land from the rural poor to large companies – wealthy government benefactors, causing the displacement of millions (60 million to date, according to Arundhati Roy) of indigenous people.
Corporations are targeting countries Oxfam 7/02/2013 makes clear, with “poor governance”, that “allow investors to secure land quickly and cheaply…. [They] “Seem to be cherry picking countries with weak rules and regulations”. Needy nations like hungry people make easy targets for multi-national man, whose pockets governments are desperate to nestle inside. The driving force behind such destructive land developments, undertaken by corporations obsessed by an insatiable desire for growth and world leading economic development, is, as Oxfam suggests, profit and profit alone.
Graham Peebles is director of the Create Trust. He can be reached at: [email protected]
The film seeks to transform the “demands for freedom of religion” into a joint criminal enterprise with terror groups.
Awol K Allo | Aljazeera
March 4, 2013
The government’s uncanny response to “basic demands of religious freedom” has created a rare opportunity for a decisive break with a docile political past and for the “formation of a new collective consciousness” [AP]
On February 5, 2013, Ethiopia’s only and publicly funded Television Station, ETV, aired a controversial documentary during prime time in violation of an outstanding court injunction. Oddly subtitled “Boko Haram in Ethiopia”, Jihadawi Harekat – Arabic for “jihadi movement” – denounces leaders of Ethiopia’s year-long protest movement for alleged links to foreign terrorists.
Muslims in Ethiopia have been protesting the government’s control of the Supreme Islamic Council and its imposition of al-Ahbash, an unknown Islamic sect across mosques in Ethiopia. In a press statement last year, the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom said: “The Ethiopian government has sought to force a change in the sect of Islam practiced nationwide and has punished clergy and laity who have resisted.” Elected to represent the movement, the accused Muslim leaders were arrested and charged under Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism law when negotiations with the government failed last July.
A joint production of the Ethiopian National Security Agency, the Federal Police and ETV, the film draws a parallel between a local protest movement recognised for its peaceful acts of resistance with Africa’s most notorious terrorist groups such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram, Mali’s Ansar Din and Somalia’s al-Shabaab.
With dozens of journalists, politicians and activists already charged or convicted under its vague and broad anti-terrorism law that criminalises all forms of dissent, the fight against terrorism has become the primary juridical framework within which to legitimise and justify war against political foes. It is the new legal ideology in which these political motives are institutionalised to provide long-standing relationships of domination some legal pretext. In Ethiopia today, America’s “war on terror” is used to short-circuit both the constitution and international criticism.
Making fiction intelligible
Made to portray the Muslim community’s struggle for religious freedom as a terrorist ploy designed to “establish an Islamic state”, Jihadawi Harekat is less about what it describes so much as the alternative reality that it depicts and crystallises. By drawing politically explosive parallels between groups with radically different political presuppositions, the film dramatises and escalates the gravity of the threat. It replays deeply held narratives of the past and accentuates the “evil” embodied by the committee in its attempts to frame them as “public enemies” working towards a common goal with groups that inhabit an entirely different political universe.
To amplify this new reality, that is, the cinematic production of new subjects of terrorism, the film appropriates pre-existing frames of reference that sociologists call “processes of signification”. To augment the parallel, it situates the protest movement in the context of terrorism – a discourse whose antecedent is always Islamic and “whose stereotypical characteristics are already part of socially available knowledge”.
“The film is designed to portray the Muslim community’s struggle for religious freedom as a terrorist ploy to ‘establish an Islamic state’.”
Just because the protest movement shares the antecedent “Islam” with al-Shabaab and Boko Haram, the signification equates a peaceful movement that operates within the framework of Ethiopia’s own constitution with violent groups on the sole basis of their imputed common denominator. The exemplar images of violence embodied by al-Shabaab and Boko Haram are situated within the geopolitical context and cultural idiosyncrasies of Ethiopia to essentialise the association and ultimately render its absurd collocation socially intelligible.
There are temporal, spatial, material and editorial questions that the film cannot account for. By connecting events that took place from East Africa to West Africa, from North Africa to the Middle East, by gathering actors of differing ideological persuasions into unity, by reducing complex and contingent historic and political issues into self-evident mathematical varieties, Jihadawi Harekat inadvertently slips into a crisis it cannot contain or suppress.
One excellent example is a hinge the film uses to connect the leaders of the protest movement to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. In an unedited interrogation clip wrongly broadcasted after the film, the interrogators coerce Abubakar Ahmed – the chairman of the committee chosen to be representative of the Muslim community – into accepting their conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis have the ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic world under Sharia law.
While the reduction of such complex and contingent issues of historical and theoretical specificity into an either-or binary is emblematic of the logic through which the film establishes its central thesis, I am interested in the logic used to connect the ideologies of the Brotherhood in the Middle East to the protest leaders in Ethiopia. This pivot is a distinguished Qatari public intellectual, Jassim Sultan whose teachings two members of the protest leaders were said to have attended.
In an article that examined the increasing role of Qatar in the politics of the Middle East, The Economist holds up Sultan as an exemplary figure known for his “middle-of-the road” politics, not the extremism depicted in Jihadawi Harekat. Sultan, whom the film accuses of being a middle man between the “extreme ideological orientations” of the Brotherhood and Ethiopia’s “jihadists”, was praised by The Economist as, “a renowned Qatari intellectual, [who] strikes a chord by rejecting the Brotherhood’s demand for strict obedience… derides its slogan, ‘Islam is the solution’, as facile”.
By editing conversations about conversations, copy-pasting interrogations about different spatial, temporal and material co-ordinates into a coherent Ethiopian story, the film seeks to transform the most basic demands for freedom of religion into a joint criminal enterprise with terror groups near and far. Nowhere else is the conjuncture between words and images, facts and fictions, times and spaces, persons and events manifestly absurd as in Jihadawi Harekat.
Instead of generating a moral panic that serves as the material fabric for social control, the film generated consequences that are destabilising the regime. In a statement to the press, a coalition of 33 political parties emphatically denounced the film as yet another spectacle that epitomises the ruling party’s contempt for the constitution and the rule of law.
Boomerang effects
The film, along with the ongoing trial, offers an important window into the cleavage that divides the old Ethiopian Muslim subjectivity from the new. Thanks to the government that never ceases to generate crisis and mobilise the law and its court system to cement this crisis, these events have opened up a space for critical cultural-political awareness.
Muslims in Ethiopia, who conceive their religious subjectivity as apolitical and go about their lives, have begun to realise that their religious identity can be a potent site of subjectification and domination. As one of 20th century’s prescient political thinkers, Hannah Arendt formulates this point; an attack against a specific identity creates spontaneous moment of political self-awareness. “If one is attacked as a Jew,” Arendt said, “One must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.”
Because of the events of last year, there emerged a critical space in which a society that rarely, if at all, engages in questions of law and politics, protested the usurpation of its constitutional guarantees. In their struggle, Muslims in Ethiopia began to see unfair closures and systematic subjections taking place at sites and moments they could not have seen before. The government’s uncanny response to basic demands of religious freedom has created a rare opportunity for a decisive break with a docile political past and for the formation of a new collective consciousness.
Awol K Allo, is the Lord Kelvin Adam Smith scholar at the University of Glasgow Law School, UK. Previously, he was a lecturer in law at St Mary’s University College, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
With the coming of industrial-size farms in Ethiopia, local people, villagers and pastoralists (deemed irrelevant to the Government’s, economically-driven development plans) are being threatened, and intimidated by the military; forcibly displaced and herded into camps, their homes destroyed. Along with vast agricultural complexes, dams are planned and constructed, water supplies re-directed to irrigate crops, forests burnt, natural habitats destroyed. Dissenting voices are brutally silenced – men beaten, children frightened, women raped, so too the land.
Over 80% of the 85 million population of Ethiopia live in rural areas, in settlements and villages, and work in agriculture. Many are small-scale farmers who, according to government figures, farm “eight percent (about 10,000,000 ha) of the national land area”, and traditional pastoralists who have, for generations, lived simple lives, culture, nature and livelihood entwined.
Huge tracts of agricultural land with water supplies are being leased to foreign companies for food export. The Oakland Institute (OI), a US- based policy think-tank and leader in the field, have produced in-depth reports on worldwide land sales stating that, between 2008 and 2011, “3,619,509 hectares (ha) were transferred to domestic investors, state-owned enterprises and foreign companies”. Amounting to a third, if government figures are correct, of the land farmed by Ethiopians themselves, an area the size of a small country, e.g. Holland.
Government Genocide
Land grab (and associated water appropriation), Oxfam states, occurs when “governments, banks or private investors buy up huge plots of land to make equally huge profits”. Since 2008 such speculation has vastly expanded; in 2009 alone the OI recorded that “foreign investors acquired 60 million ha of land [worldwide] – the size of France – through purchases or leases of land for commercial farming,” up from an annual average, pre-2008, of 4 million ha. Three quarters of all land deals take place in sub-Saharan Africa, in some of the most food-insecure, economically vulnerable, politically repressive countries in the world; precisely, some say, because of such advantageous commercial factors.
In Ethiopia, land sales are occurring in six key areas. Oromia and Gambella in the south, Amhara, Beneshangul, Gumuz, the Sidaama zone, or SNNP and the Lower Omo Valley – an area of outstanding natural beauty with acclaimed UNESCO World heritage status. The Ethiopian government’s conduct in Omo and Oromia, Genocide Watch (GW) considers “to have already reached stage 7 [of 8], genocidal massacres”. A statement that shocks us all, and casts shame upon the government and indeed slumbering donor nations, who act not, who speak not, but know well the cruel methods, which violate a plethora of human rights laws, employed by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). A regime whose loyalties, it seems, rest firmly with investors, corporations, multi-nationals and the like, and who cares little for the people living upon the land, or indeed in the cities.
Forced from Home
Conditional within land lease agreements is the requirement that the government will clear the area of ‘encumbrances’, meaning indigenous people – families, children, pastoralists, cattle, wildlife, forests, anything in fact that will interfere with the leveling of the land, building of [foreign] workers’ accommodation, roads and the eventual sowing of crops.
The national three-year Villagisation program, initiated in 1985, aims to move 1.5 million people from their ancestral homes, over four states, into large settlements. The process is well under way, as these 2010 figures from Cultural Survival show, “by February 1987, 5.7 million people (15 percent of the rural population) had been moved into 11,000 new villages. By the end of this year, 10 million rural inhabitants (25 percent of the population) are expected to be villagized in 12 of Ethiopia’s 13 provinces.” Government propaganda justifying the policy states these new village centers will, “facilitate the provision of human social services by concentrating scattered homesteaders into central communities”, and facilitate ‘agrarian socialism’ – hence the leasing of mega chunks of land to multi-national corporations, without the participation of local people, whose land is being taken from them: a totalitarian version of socialism then.
Contrary to federal and international law, which requires the free, informed and prior consent of the people, this mass movement is being carried out without consultation or compensation, no matter the official claims to the contrary. Human Rights Watch (HRW) (28/08/12) reports how “Villagers who have been unwilling to move, or who refuse to mobilise others to do so, have been arrested and mistreated by the soldiers.” Once forcibly emptied, villages are destroyed and cattle killed or confiscated, the OI state, by government troops. Along with pastoralists, who number around 300,000 in Gambella alone, villagers are herded, sometimes literally, always metaphorically at the end of rifle, into Villagisation camps. And these, despite Government promises to, “provide basic resources and infrastructure, the new villages”, HRW found “have inadequate food, agricultural support, and health and education facilities”.
Resistance to moving is met with abuse and violence. HRW’s detailed report “Waiting for Death”, found that in Gambella, where the government plans to ‘relocate’ 225,000 people, “soldiers frequently beat or arrested individuals who questioned the motives of the program or refuse to move to the new villages [Villagisations]. Community leaders and young men are targeted [scores are arrested without due process]. There have also been credible allegations of rape and sexual assault by government soldiers. Fear and intimidation was widespread.” In a disturbing account of life within and without the Villagisation centers, the OI discovered, most disturbingly, that pastoralists (whose lifestyle and nature is to wander) if “encountered [by the military] outside of villages are told to relocate to the villages immediately”. Such restrictions conjure images of prison life rather than a peaceful, communal village, and contradict the government’s message of willing relocation, good community relations, participation and social harmony.
A Culture of Fear
Such abuse is not limited to Gambella – in the Lower Omo region, where huge, state-owned sugar plantations and the massive Gibe III Dam project are being developed, dissenting voices are, the OI report, subjected to “beatings, abuse and general intimidation”, in addition to extra-judicial prison sentencing.
“Fear and intimidation” is endemic, not just in areas associated with land sales, but throughout the country; suppression is common and freedom of expression greatly restricted. The media – TV, radio, press as well as print companies, are state-owned, so too the sole telecommunication company, restricting access to the internet, which is monitored. The judiciary is simply an extension of government, lacking credible independence, the political opposition marginalised and completely ineffective. International media are frowned upon and, in some areas (e.g. Ogaden) completely banned, such are the paranoid actions of the ruling EPRDF, which, it would seem, has much to hide.
Resentment and anger simmers amongst many displaced oppressed villagers. In April 2012 a group of men attacked the Saudi Star compound in Gambella and killed four employees. The men were quickly labeled ‘rebels’ and a military manhunt was instigated. The criminal act should be treated as such and the men brought to justice, however government forces have reacted with unwarranted unjustifiable violence and aggression to innocent civilians, as HRW (28/08/12) reported: “Ethiopian soldiers went house to house… arbitrarily arresting and beating young men and raping female relatives of suspects”. Any excuse, it seems, to unleash state violence, perpetrated by a regime that mistrusts even it’s own people. After the attack on Saudi Star, a company that has leased some 10,000 ha of prime Gambella land, the Ethiopian military accused four Anuak guards on duty at the time, of involvement in the attack and carried out extra- judicial killings (murder) on them all. Local villagers “alleged they were tortured”, and “women and girls raped either in their homes or in detention” (ibid). Illegal acts by the Ethiopian State that by any reasonable reading fits the definition of terrorism stated by the US military as, “the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.” Terrifying tactics employed by the military in the search for information about ‘the rebels’ – a meaningless term evoking negative stereotypes, used alongside the ‘T’ word (terrorist) to demonise anyone who disagrees with disagreeable government policies and justify all violent measures by the benevolent regime – such is the perverse and dangerous use of language, facilitated by the international mainstream media that has infiltrated our imaginations.
The Myth of Development
The government proclaims land sales are part of a strategic, long-term approach to agriculture reforms and economic development, that foreign investment will fund infrastructure projects, create employment opportunities, help to eradicate hunger and poverty and benefit the community, local and national. The term development is itself an interesting one; distorted, linked and commonly limited almost exclusively to economic targets, meaning growth of GDP, established principally by the World Bank, whose policies and practices in relation to land sales, the OI discovered, “have glossed over critical issues such as human rights, food security and human dignity for local populations”, and its philanthropic sister, the International Monetary Fund; market fundamentalism driving the exported (one size fits all) policies, of both ideologically entrenched organisations, that promote models of development that seek to fulfill corporate interests first middle and last.
Defined in such limited ways, Ethiopia, having somehow achieved impressive GDP growth figures since 2004, (with a dizzy 9.8%, average, similar to that of India) would seem to be in the premiership of development. Inflation, though, sits at 30% and, whilst unemployment in urban areas has dropped to around 20%, over a quarter of young people aged 18-24 remain out of work; high unemployment in urban areas means young women are often forced into commercial sex work or domestic servitude.
Statistics compiled by The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), provide a broader, less GDP-rosy picture of the country. They place Ethiopia 174th (from 187 nations) on the Human development index (HDI), with average life expectancy of 59 years and 40% of people living in poverty (on less than $1.25 a day). The 2012 Global Hunger Index makes Ethiopia the 5th hungriest country in the world (IFPRI), with between 12 and 15 million people a year relying on food aid to keep them alive. What growth there is benefits the rich, privileged minority. There is a growing divide between the 99.9% and the small number of wealthy Ethiopians – who, coincidentally, are mainly members of the ruling party trickle down, gushing up’, concentrating wealth with the wealthy; as the Inter Press Service (IPS) 22/08/12 reports, “development has yet to reach the vast majority of the country’s population. Instead, much of this wealth – and political power – has been retained by the ruling party and, particularly, by the tiny Tigrayan minority community to which [former Prime Minister] Meles belonged.”
“Protect, Respect and Remedy”
Protagonists laying claim to the all-inclusive healing powers of agriculture and agro-industrial projects, contradict, the OI states, “the basic facts and evidence showing growing impoverishment experienced on the ground”. What about the bumper benefits promised, particularly the numerous employment opportunities? It turns out industrialised farming is highly mechanised and offers few jobs; overseas companies are not concerned with providing employment for local people and care little for their well-being, making good bedmates for the ruling party. They bring the workers they need, and are allowed to do so by the Ethiopian government, which places no constraints on their operations.
Such shameful indifference contravenes the letter and spirit of the United Nations (UN) “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework. Endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council on 16th June 2011, the guiding principles outlined, “provide an authoritative global standard for preventing and addressing the risk of adverse impacts on human rights linked to business activity.” Corporations have a duty under the framework to “prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations… even if they have not contributed to their impacts”i Although not legally enforceable, these principles of decency offer recourse to human rights organisations and community groups, and should be morally binding for multinationals, whose profit-driven activities in Ethiopia, facilitated by a brutal regime that ignores fundamental human rights, are causing intense suffering to hundreds of thousands of indigenous people.
Graham Peebles is director of the Create Trust. He can be reached at: [email protected]
Cover of 1898 edition of the Paris weekly, Le Petit Journal. Europe was stunned by the Italian defeat. Courtesy of private collector, New York.
Ethiopian forces led by Emperor Menelik annihilated invading Italian colonial troops on March 2, 1896 at the Battle of Adwa. Ethiopians killed over 6,000, wounded and captured thousands more in a mere eight hours.
The Ethiopian camp was ably led by Menelik & Taytu, Rases Mekonnen, Takle Haymanot, Mikael, Mengesha and Alula. The self-confident Italians were led by generals Oreste Baratieri, Guisseppe Arimondi, Guisseppe Ellena, Mateo Albertone and Vittorio Dabromida
The myth of invincibility of white colonial troops was forever shattered in the valleys and hills of Adowa. Likewise, Adwa shattered the myth of Africans as helpless victims of colonial aggression. Adwa was an affront to white supremacy, giving rise to black self-confidence, pride and Pan-Africanism.
![The government's uncanny response to "basic demands of religious freedom" has created a rare opportunity for a decisive break with a docile political past and for the "formation of a new collective consciousness" [AP]](http://www.ethiopianreview.com/2011/Addis_scene.jpg)
