Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PANA) – The Foreign Affairs Ministry in Ethiopia has lambasted the human rights report issued by the US State Department on Ethiopia. In a statement released here Wednesday by the ministry, the Ethiopian government said the report was “a deliberately Jaundiced view about Ethiopia’s progress on human hights”.
This is the second recent statement by the ministry criticizing such reports.
The Ethiopian dictatorial regime has similarly mocked at accusations of the Human Rights Watch late last year after the rights group accused Ethiopia of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Human rights watchdog said late last year that Ethiopian troops burnt down villages and killed, raped and tortured civilians in a counter-insurgency campaig n against the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front after its fighters had killed 74 Ethiopian and Chinese oil-exploration workers in 2007.
Ethiopia’s government was so incensed by the description of “systematic atrocities” in the Ogaden that it commissioned a report of its own that dismissed Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) allegations as hearsay and its methods as slapdash.
Ethiopia has now labeled the new report a carbon copy of the report by the HRW, describing its approach very similar to that of Human Rights Watch.
According to the report, the report is bizarre “and, the methodology appears equally flawed”.
The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour, in its 2008 country reports on Human Rights Practices issued on 27 February, accused Ethiopia of various human rights violations.
Few of the human rights abuses the Bureau highlighted include limitations on citizens’ right to change their government in local and by-elections; unlawful killings, torture, beating, abuse, and mistreatment of detainees and opposition supporters by security forces, usually with impunity; poor prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detention, particularly of suspected sympathizers or members of opposition or insurgent groups.
The ministry expressed government’s dismay over the US State Department’s continued reports of allegations from opposition groups, which, it said, kept on misre presenting the human rights situation in Ethiopia.
“The report was no more than a collection of unsubstantiated accusations from groups seeking to undermine Ethiopia’s process of democratization,” read the statement.
Addis Ababa – 05/03/2009