The Ogaden Today

Ethiopia forces thousands off land - Human Rights Watch

2012-01-18T15:45:00.000-08:00

Ethiopia forces thousands off land - Human Rights Watch

Published on 17/01/2012

Ethiopia's government has been accused of forcing tens of thousands of people off their land so it can be leased to foreign investors.

US-based Human Rights Watch says people are being forcibly relocated to new villages that lack adequate food, farmland and facilities.

Ethiopia has already leased out more than 3.6 million hectares (8.8m acres) of land - an area the size of The Netherlands - HRW says.

Addis Ababa rejects HRW's allegations.

"Human Rights Watch has wrongly alleged the villagisation programme to be unpopular and problematic," government spokesman Bereket Simon told Reuters news agency.

"There is no evidence to back the claim. This programme is taking place with the full preparation and participation of regional authorities, the government and residents," he said.

‘Weaker and weaker'

HRW says it has evidence that some 70,000 indigenous people were relocated against their will to new villages that "lack adequate food, farmland, healthcare and educational facilities".

The group said it spoke to more than 100 people in May and June last year for the report.

"My father was beaten for refusing to go along [to the new village] with some other elders," a former villager told HRW.

"He said: 'I was born here - my children were born here - I am too old to move so I will stay'. He was beaten by the army with sticks and the butt of a gun.

"He had to be taken to hospital. He died because of the beating - he just became weaker and weaker."

The government has said in the past that all the moves are voluntary, the new villages will have adequate infrastructure and everyone who moves will be given assistance to help their transition to a new livelihood.

But HRW says many of the new villages have no access to government services at all, and people are arriving at the worst time of year - the beginning of the harvest - to find the land has not been cleared and prepared for growing.

"The government failure to provide food assistance for relocated people has caused endemic hunger and cases of starvation," HRW says.

-BBC

Ethiopia’s secessionist group that is hunted in Kenya

2012-01-06T02:37:00.000-08:00

Ethiopia’s secessionist group that is hunted in Kenya

Published on 03/01/2012

By Boniface Ongeri

It is hard to find the leaders of Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), the rebel group fighting Ethiopian government for southeastern Ethiopia’s self determination, to talk to.

They are paranoid fearing that anyone seeking them is part of the Ethiopian intelligence network that they claim is hunting them down in Kenya.

But when they are certain that one is not an agent of the Ethiopian government, they open up.

Ogaden region is a no go zone for media, human rights activists and aid agencies. But from Kenya, the organisation’s leaders have managed to sneak journalists into Ethiopia where they try to justify their rebellion to the outside world.

Journalists’ ordeal

Indeed, two Swedish journalists were recently jailed for 11 years for illegally entering the country and associating with a terror group, the ONLF. It is claimed that they passed through Kenya on their way to the Ogaden region.

At face value the ONLF fighters looks like another rug tug group with their unkempt hair and overgrown beards.

But this group, said to have more than 30,000 armed youths scattered over the Ogaden region in south eastern Ethiopia, is said to be one of the well armed and organised group with commanders.

ONLF was founded in 1984. Led by Admiral Mohammed Omar Osman who is the current Chairman of the movement, ONLF went on a recruitment spree.

ONLF is a home-grown movement formed by Ethiopian Somalis who have grown disillusioned with the central government for alleged marginalisation of the area.

"We are bitter with the Ethiopian government and from here we will fight for our rights and if need be we will die for self determination," ONLF Foreign Affairs Secretary General Abdirahaman Mahdi says.

Fierce fighting in the region has persisted for over 20 years. The war coupled with hunger and diseases has left tens of thousands killed and thousands of others forced to flee from their homes to Kenya, Djibouti and of all places, Somalia.

The ONLF have on numerous occasions attacked oil fields explored by Chinese in Ethiopia leaving more than 70 people killed. The attacks trigger the government to unleash its forces on the residents.

Peace talks

The ONLF claims the Ethiopian Somalis in the region have been marginalised by the central government.

They have on several occasions sat with the government for round table peace talks, but each time the meetings have ended in stalemate.

The government wants the rebel group to disarm before engaging in meaningful talks. There have been numerous reports of a section of the ONLF surrendering to the Ethiopian government in an effort to slow down the violence in the Ogaden region.

The high profile surrenders and some seeking amnesty lead to claims that ONLF is divided.

However, each time this happens ONLF leadership comes out to deny any division in the movement.

"Those deals where ONLF members are claimed to surrender and seek amnesty are stage-managed and those who claim to lay down the arms were not ONLF members," Mahdi says.

"The deals are inconsequential. ONLF is still united and we will soldier on," he says.

From their bases, ONLF has infuriated the Ethiopian government by launching a series of hit and run attacks against government installations and even raided oil exploration by Chinese companies in the region.

Direct confrontations

The ONLF has also had direct confrontation with the government forces inflicting and suffering casualties in the process.

It has good relations with the villagers who provide it with shelter, food and intelligence and above all, a stream of willing young men ready to join the fighting.

The group occasionally attack trucks and kidnaps people suspected of being government agents. During such raids, it has been criticized for bringing villagers into the line of fire from Ethiopian forces who accuse them of harbouring the ONLF. This has caused many residents of the region to seek refuge outside Ethiopia.

The Ethiopian government has branded ONLF a terrorist group and accuses Eritrea, its historically bitter foe, of supporting it by supplying it with arms.

The government also says that some Ethiopians in the Diaspora fund the group.

ONLF leadership was reluctant to disclose its source of arms supply that includes tanks, anti aircraft missiles and landmines.

Other guerillas

The ONLF is only one of the guerilla groups rebelling against Ethiopian government.

The other group, that is equally vicious, is the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) that is based on the southern tip of Ethiopia bordering Kenya’s Counties of Wajir, Moyale and Marsabit.

ONLF senior leadership is scattered all over Europe where they fled fearing assassination.

"We have been asking for democracy and equal rights. Is that too much to ask for?" Mahdi poses.

Fleeing Ethiopians decry atrocities in own country

2011-12-21T17:33:00.000-08:00

Published on 20/12/2011

By Boniface Ongeri

Sometime last year, security officers in Mandera County came across a group of terrified people at an unofficial entry point on Kenya’s border with Ethiopia.

They listened as the group told of a horrid encounter with men in military uniforms.

They claimed they were members of Ethiopia’s military who shot at them, raped women and set ablaze their homes and harvests in south eastern Ethiopia.

Ethiopia’s Ogaden National Liberation Front rebels with their weapons. [PHOTO: BONIFACE ONGERI/STANDARD]

The security officers did what has become routine: They recorded the foreigners in the Occurrence Book (OB) and later escorted them to Dadaab refugee camp, some 600km away.

According to the OB, some of the people had deep wounds they claimed were inflicted with knives and machetes. They wanted refuge in Kenya.

Records at the Mandera law court also show most of the Ethiopians charged with being in the country illegally opted to be taken to the refugee camp than being deported.

"Ordering us back to Ethiopia is a sure way to death. Please take us to camps as that is where we were headed before we were intercepted," Haye Bedel, 40, told the court.

Teeming Camp

At the teeming camp, he is among the latest arrivals fleeing turbulence pitting the Ethiopian government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and the Ogaden National Liberation Front rebels. The militia is fighting for the Ogaden region’s self-determination.

"Thank God I am alive; I have watched many others in my Shilawe District village being killed," said Bedel, whose two legs were cut off by soldiers.

Dadaab refugee camp is synonymous with Somali refugees. Yet the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) says close to 100, 000 Ethiopian Somalis are in the camps. Most have fled the brutal campaign in the Ogaden region.

Aid workers and human rights crusaders say the abuses that have rocked the Ogaden region has uprooted tens of thousands from their homes to neighbouring Kenya, Somalia and Djibouti. Human Rights Watch has also documented thousands of killings and rapes.

The international community has been silent. However, the European Union and in particular Ana Gomes, who is a member of the European Parliament, has been the sole voice.

Addressing the EU parliament on December 11, Gomes accused the world of turning a blind eye on the atrocities.

"It is time the international community takes responsibility and unite against the domestic and international threat of Ethiopia’s repressive government and apply stricter sanctions and aid conditions to limit the arbitrary use of government power," she said.

The Ethiopian military roam the Ogaden region in tanks, carry swoops in villages, shoot, rape and burn huts, according to a Human Rights Watch report, Ethiopia Collective Punishment – War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in the Ogaden Area. Witnesses make similar claims.

However, Ethiopia’s ambassador to Kenya, Shamsudiin Ahmed, said there were no atrocities committed by his government in the region. He said the government would investigate claims by human rights organisations and victims. He said insecurity in the area is the work of terrorists seeking to destabilise Ethiopia.

Another refugee, Fatumo Ahmed Ali, said: "I was arrested and jailed in the barracks. They took off all my clothes, raped and tortured me. My husband was shot dead during the swoop," she added.

She was detained without trial for years, and had a stillbirth in detention.

"I was among several women who were released to decongest the prison and I fled to Kenya arriving here last November," she added.

Pockets of farmers

Most of the 6.5 million people in the Ogaden region are pastoralists with pockets of farmers. The region is reported to have oil reserves especially in Obale, Jehdin, Onadhere and Gerare. For long, locals have said they have been marginalised.

Those complaints gave birth to ONLF to protest against the government’s neglect.

Abdirahaman Mahdi, ONLF’s Foreign Affairs General Secretary, says they are fighting for the rights of Somali-speaking Ethiopians who have been marginalised by Addis Ababa. "We are ready for dialogue with the Ethiopian government. But this should be spearheaded by a neutral country. All we are asking is equal rights, or the Ogaden to go its separate way," Mahdi said.

"The African Union and UN have been coerced into silence on what is happening. They should wake up to the atrocities and the current blockade," he added.

As a result civilians have also been targeted for allegedly colluding with the insurgents and Human Rights Watch says the government has slapped a blockade of the region, banning media and aid organisations.

A report by Amnesty International says the government has deliberately and repeatedly attacked civilian populations in an effort to root out the insurgency.

"Villagers have been forced to watch demonstration killing to instil fear. Obstruction of commercial traffic and humanitarian assistance have been used as weapons in an economic war aimed at cutting off ONLF supplies," says organisation’s 2011 annual report on Ethiopia.

ONLF is accused of counter attacks including placing landmines on roads used by Government convoys.

Ogaden region’s long years of oppression

The Ogaden region is Ethiopia has a long history of oppression and violence.

In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia and captured it along with the region.

Then the British defeated Italy in the Horn of Africa in 1941, and it administered the Ogaden for eight years until it transferred part of it (Jigjiga area) to Ethiopia for the first time.

The other parts were transferred in 1954 and 1956. Thus Ethiopia gained control over the Ogaden.

Since then, successive regimes have been accused of mercilessly suppressing local people.

At first, the new Ethiopian rulers forwarded a reasonable programme for addressing the burning issue of colonialism and its solution through recognising and granting the right of nations to self-determination through peaceful processes.

ONLF’s complained of Ethiopia’s interference in the day-to-day affairs of the Ogaden region, which they say contradicted the commitment to regional autonomy and devolution of power to the region.

Officials claim Ethiopia has frozen the regional budget, diverting international aid and discouraging international aid agencies from working in the region.

Initiatives and projects necessary for the region’s development have been stifled, they further claim.

They accuse the regime of Prime Minister Menes Zenawi of not being different from its predecessors.

Abdirahaman Mahdi, the ONLF Foreign Affairs General Secretary said the people’s struggle for equal rights would continue.

"We call on Ethiopia to desist from its current militaristic and aggressive attitude and accept a peaceful negotiated settlement of the current conflict. This is with the participation of third neutral parties from the international community," he said.

Burying the Darfur Genocide Myth

2011-08-13T04:09:00.000-07:00

Burying the Darfur Genocide Myth

by Thomas C. Mountain

August 13, 2011

I am one of the first western journalists to try and bring to the world’s attention the problems in west Sudan/Darfur in 2003. Having lived side by side here in Asmara, Eritrea, with representatives of not only the Darfur, but all the Sudanese resistance, since 2006, my investigation has found no evidence of genocide having been committed in Darfur.

Genocide has and is being committed by the Ethiopian regime of Meles Zenawi against the Somali people of the Ogaden, but there has been no genocide in Darfur.

To start with, my investigation has found that the victims of the Darfur conflict were the beneficiaries of the largest, best-run relief works in history. This is a fact, demonstrated repeatedly by the situation on the ground in Darfur, and every honest, knowledgeable aid worker in the Darfur relief works will tell you that Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir has played a critical role in the relief works success, and that without the leadership and support of Pres. Bashir, the Darfur relief works would not have been possible.

The charges of genocide laid against Pres. Bashir by, amongst others, the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are based on reports of the shakiest provenance, mainly UN “sources” of very questionable backgrounds.

Does it make any sense that Pres. Al Bashir was playing a critical role in saving hundreds of thousands of lives in Darfur all the while he was committing genocide against the Darfur people? The success of the relief works is a fact, while the charges against Pres. Bashir are almost impossible to verify.

The Darfur genocide myth has been promoted by western “human rights” NGO’s that have collected over $100 million under the rubric of “Enough” and “Preventing Genocide”. The claims of genocide are based on estimates of the number of deaths that were rapidly inflated as the dollars started rolling in. First it was 100,000, then 200,000, then 300,000 and finally, in a claim so ludicrous that even the British government media watchdog yanked it off the air, 400,000 people were supposed to have been victims of genocide in Darfur.

None of the Darfur reps I have heard here in Asmara have ever given any credibility to the western figures. In fact, most everyone here in the Horn of Africa, at least those not on the western payroll, all agree the real number of those lost in the violence in west Sudan is about 30,000, a tragic number, but surpassed by what has befallen those suffering in the Ogaden where a real genocide has been taking place.

In the Ogaden, Ethiopian death squads funded by western “aid” have spent the better part of the past decade spreading murder and mayhem across the countryside. With almost everyone from the International Committee of the Red Cross to Doctors Without Borders being expelled, there has been miniscule coverage of this genocide in the western media, let alone the extent of the western role in funding the Ethiopian regime. The Darfur genocide myth has for years been a very useful smokescreen in helping to hide the most terrible crime in the world today, the Ogaden Genocide.

As I mentioned earlier, I first wrote about what I believed was happening in Sudan and Ethiopia back in 2003. Sudan is estimated to have suffered some two million deaths during its decades-long civil war between the north and the south. After many years of hard work, peace has slowly, almost tortuously, been nurtured in Sudan, with the major ground work first laid during negotiations held here in Asmara.

In contrast to this, what is the program of action demanded by the “save Darfur” lot? A western-led military invasion and occupation of Sudan a la Iraq and Afghanistan. With half a million or more dead in Iraq and Afghanistan thanks to western military “intervention”, with NATO bombers slaughtering women and children in their sleep in Libya as I write, who in their right mind could think that sending western soldiers to Sudan will do anything other than destroy the peace so painfully built these past few years and cause even more suffering?

While peace has been slowing taking hold in Darfur, in the Ogaden peace is a long lost memory. War, famine, and disease are spreading across the Ogaden, and it is becoming a situation that is increasingly the norm in growing areas of Ethiopia. While the western hucksters raked in beau coup millions of dollars while peddling their “save Darfur” bunkum, Sudanese have seen real peace on the ground take place in Darfur.

In contrast, Ethiopians, suffering under a regime that is the largest recipient of western aid in Africa, only see a future of growing ethnic and religious conflict, and worse, active programs of genocide. The problems developing in Ethiopia can invariably be traced back to the west, mainly the USA. The west, in particular the USA, is hell bent on keeping Africa in a state of crisis, the better to exploit. And the “save Darfur” lobby is all for bringing more violence to Africa under the guise of “humanitarian intervention”, while little of the over $100 million they collected ever reached the Darfur people it was intended for.

The Darfur genocide myth is long overdue for burial and the world needs to put it to rest once and for all.

Thomas C. Mountain is an independent western journalist based in the Horn of Africa, and has been living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He was a member of the 1st US Peace Delegation to Libya in 1987. Read more articles by Thomas C. Mountain.

Free Ogaden 2011

2011-06-23T03:37:00.000-07:00

Letters To Leaders

Subject:
Free Ogadeen 2011

To:
President Barack Obama
Sen. Kent Conrad
Sen. John Hoeven
Rep. Rick Berg

April 16, 2011

President Barack Obama

Rep. Rick Berg

Sen. Kent Conrad

Sen. John Hoeven

The Honorable Barack Obama, Kent Conrad, John Hoeven, Rick Berg

Greetings

Please Free the Ogaden this year too.

We were thrilled to see that South Sudan was given a choice and was granted independence this year. We believe that the people of the Ogaden deserve this right too.

Ethiopia is the only country left illegally colonizing the Ogaden region. The people in the Ogaden have been waging an armed struggle with successive Ethiopian regimes over the last century to achieve self determination and peace.

The Ogaden is twice the size of England and Wales together with a population of about eight million. Most of the population is in crises of hunger and disease created by the Ethiopian Government to get the financial help from the international community to attack it's neighboring countries and their freedom fighters.

The region was annexed by Ethiopia in 1891. Then it was occupied by the British who returned to the Ethiopia in 1948 without consent of its people who are the rightful owners. From that day, the struggle started alongside the cruel oppression of the Ethiopian Government.

The Ethiopian Authority is currently committing genocide against the people in the Ogaden Region acceded to UN convention against Torture, Rape and Cruelty towards humans or degrading treatment or punishment, which is also against UN convention of 1949.So far, Ethiopia managed to keep the international community in the dark about its grave human rights violations in the Ogaden by misleading it and it intends to do so in the future.

The Ogaden Region presents one of the most consistent cases of human rights violations in the world. Not only the rights that are essential for the maintenance of human dignity, such as culture, economic, social and political rights are denied, but the very basic rights of life and liberty which the majority of mankind takes them for granted are infringed. The people in the Ogaden are constantly terrorized, abducted, detained, displaced, their properties are confiscated or destroyed and their land is mined by the forces of the Ethiopian government.

The main problem is that there is a lack of news in the Ogaden region. Journalists, camera crews and any sort of media are never allowed to cover anything in the area of Ogaden region. Except since the famine crises started in Ogaden region which is to their benefit because they are getting millions of aid from the international community to feed its oversized military and to ease its financial crises. In the meantime, the poor people in the Ogaden have to suffer.

The international donor's funds are apparently being misused by the Ethiopian government to feed its military and to harass the people in the Ogaden. This is a reverse of the good intentions of the western tax payers who mean to help the famine effected people in the Ogaden but not to kill. Therefore, we wish to condemn this evil action in the strongest terms possible and further use those responsible to refrain from such cruel actions without any conditions and instead use to provide the available resource to the daily needed basic requirements for the people of the Ogaden region.

Like South Sudan, the only solution to an everlasting peace is to give the people of the Ogaden a referendum on independence this year as well. Let the people vote peacefully and decide if they want to declare independence. We believe the people in the Ogaden deserve this chance too, please sign the petition to support the freedom of ogaden region.

Thank you for excellency: President Barack Obama,Rep. Rick Berg,Sen. Kent Conrad,Sen. John Hoeven

Nolasha Kajirta Naigeria & ta Soomaalida is barbar-dhig dabeetana waxa kusoo baxa ka jawaab?

2011-05-26T02:18:00.000-07:00

West Funds Full Blown Genocide in Ethiopia

2011-05-05T23:10:00.000-07:00

By Thomas C. Mountain

NO WAR OR FIGHTING ABOUT WHO WINS IS ALL ABOUT THE PEOPLE CHOSE. By: GEORGE FREDDY

As the UN famine warning center issues urgent reports that millions of Ethiopians are once again starving in the Somali populated Ogaden the International Committee of the Red Cross publishes a statement that the Ethiopian government has denied the Red Cross an operating permit to carry out relief work in the region. Blocking the Red Cross from relief work somewhere is almost unheard of yet when it comes to Ethiopia, headed by the G-20 “statesman” Meles Zenawi, this is business as usual.

For the past four years all aid agencies, including the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and UN relief agencies have been blocked by the Ethiopian military from feeding starving people in Ogadenia. Millions of starving people, maybe as many as 6 million, though no can can say for sure because...no one is allowed into the region.

Why is this? Why is there no outcry against this enormous crime against humanity, the blocking of food aid to millions of starving people?

The answer lies at the doorstep of those “humanitarian interventionists”, the western countries and their puppets in the U.N. who pump billions of dollars a year into propping up the Meles Zenawi regime in Ethiopia. Ethiopia has for several years now surpassed Egypt as the largest recipient of cash from the west in the entire continent of Africa. While the exact amount is hidden deep inside the opaque reports gathering dust in the offices of the international financial cartels, the IMF reported that in 2010 Ethiopia's import bill was $8.7 billion while it exported only $1.7 billion. $7 billion a year, in direct cash grants, loans that are inevitably forgiven (the bulk of so called African debt relief) or various methods involving financial chicanery, the bill has to be paid or the west knows all to well how quickly their East African henchman Meles Zenawi's followers will abandon him. If Meles Zenawi goes, who will be the western enforcer in East Africa, the one who does the dirty work so the west can show the world how clean its hands really are?

Drought, famine and an increasingly brutal counterinsurgency carried out by the Ethiopian military, the largest in Africa, the people of the Ogaden are forgotten by the world, thanks in no small part to the western media as well as the “human rights” corporations. In one moment of desperation I sent an e-mail about this to a reporter for the L.A. Times based in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa , only to receive a reply that they could not cover this matter due to “access and logistic difficulties”. At least they cant say they didn't know.

Yet in all this darkness there is light, for the people of Ogadenia have been increasingly effective in armed self defense, and have begun to go on the offensive against the Ethiopian military and their local paramilitary death squads. Still, it remains far beyond the means of the several thousand fighters in the Ogaden National Liberation Front to feed millions of their people, all the while fighting some very desperate battles against their western armed and funded enemies in the Ethiopian military.

The Horn of Africa has been one of, if not the most, war and starvation plagued regions in the world, and these ongoing calamities can all be traced back to the western overlords footing the bill.

The west, especially the Obama White House may pretend ignorance of this crime, but the fact remains that a senior Obama advisor, Gayle Smith, in her pre-Obama, opposition to George Bush day job at the so called Enough Project wrote about this back in 2007 and 2008.

So the powers that be know, all to well, that they are directly responsible for the forced starvation of millions, but don't expect any action from them. The mandate of the leaders of the western “democracies” is not to save lives, far from it, it is to protect their empire. So what does it matter if their capos in East Africa cause hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people to die of starvation?

International Law is really the Law of the Jungle, where only the strong survive, and the long suffering people of the Ethiopian Ogaden are the latest victims. The people of the the Ogaden have little choice but to fight for their lives, at least until the gangster, genocidal regime of Meles Zenawi is sent packing, with Meles fleeing to his palace in London and his ill gotten billions. Until then don't expect anything better than crocodile tears from the “humanitarian interventionists” in the west.

Thomas C. Mountain
Asmara, Eritrea
thomascmountain at yahoo dot com

Thomas C. Mountain is the only independent western journalist in the Horn of Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006

Ethiopia Denies ICRC Permission to Resume Ogaden Operation

2011-05-03T21:09:00.000-07:00

Ethiopia Denies ICRC Permission to Resume Ogaden Operation

Peter Heinlein | Addis Ababa April 29, 2011

Jakob Kellenberger, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), (File)

Ethiopia has denied the International Committee of the Red Cross permission to resume humanitarian operations in the restive Ogaden region. ICRC workers were expelled from the Ogaden nearly four years ago for allegedly aiding members of a separatist group, a charge they strongly deny.

ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger says talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi yielded no progress on the organization's return to the eastern Ogaden region.

"I had bilateral talks yesterday. And it will not be possible in the very near future for us to go back to the Ogaden region," Kellenberger said. "That's the message I got."

Ethiopia ordered ICRC staff out of the mostly ethnic Somali region in July, 2007, accusing humanitarian workers of siding with rebels of the outlawed Ogaden National Liberation Front. The ICRC rejected the charges.

Ethiopia limits access to the Ogaden by journalists and humanitarian groups. But a recent US State Department human rights report suggests food and medicine deliveries are restricted in the conflict zone, as pro-government forces wage a counterinsurgency operation against increasingly violent ONLF rebels.

The challenge to humanitarian groups is compounded by a severe drought. The UN World Food Program estimates nearly eight-and-a-half million people are in need of food aid over a wide swath of the Horn of Africa, including southern and southeastern Ethiopia, as well as parts of neighboring Somalia and Kenya.

Kellenberger says the ICRC focuses its Somalia operation mainly on the parched south and central region that is the stronghold of the al-Qaida-linked extremist group al-Shabab. He admits it is hard to monitor food and water deliveries to ensure the aid is not being used to benefit al-Shabab.

"Somalia is a very difficult context because to a large extent, it is what you call in humanitarian language a remote control operation," he said. "For security reasons it's very difficult to have expatriates on the ground on a permanent basis, so what they can do at the maximum is go in and out, so we do rely to a large extent on Somali ICRC staff, and we rely on the Somali Red Crescent."

Kellenberger's agenda in Addis Ababa included briefing the African Union Peace and Security Council on ICRC operations. He says six of the 12 largest ICRC missions are in AU countries, including Libya, particularly its embattled city Misrata.

"The ICRC is trying to work on both sides, on the side controlled by the TNC but also on the side controlled by the government in Tripoli. In recent times we've had a special focus on Misrata. It's still difficult for us to have an overall assessment," Kellenger explained. "Because we could visit part of the city but could not make an overall assessment."

Kellenberger says ICRC activities in Libya include evacuating migrant workers and people critically wounded in fighting, as well as visiting detainees being held by the rebel Transitional National Council. He said negotiations have not been completed with the Tripoli government to visit detainees they hold.

Ummad Walba Oo Dunida Guud-Keeda Ku Nool Waxay U Baahantahay Xornimmo!

2011-03-14T15:35:00.000-07:00

Sida aad ka aragto cajalkan muuqaal-ka ahi ummadani waxa ay u dhaqaaq-day oo ay warmaha u qaateen sidii ay ugu dagaalami lahaayeen xornimmadooda taasoo aanay ku qancayn wax ka hooseeya, waxayna u astays-teen calan si ay taa u gaadhaan, haddaba Shacabka ree Ogadenia miyuu ka tabar & taag la' yahay ummadan go'aan satay sidii ay ugu noolaan lahaayeen "xornimmo" mise waa ay garab & gaashaan waayeen ???

Hadii aan soo qaato hadalada mid kamida halgamayaashan oo ah Oday da' ah sida aad daawateen ba wuxuu sheegay in aanu ku qancayn wax ka hooseeya "xornimmo buuxda", wuxuu kaloo uu caddeeyay ama uu yidhi, inkasta oo aan da' ahay haddana waxaan u istaagay sidii aan u dagaalami lahaa wax baqdin ihina iguma jirto! intaa kuma uuna hakane wuxuu hoosta ka xarriiqay in aanay weligood ka laabanayn oo aanay joojinayn halganka ay ugu jiraan xorriyaddooda. "Papua Freedom" Ogadenia Freedom!!!

Letters To Leaders: Stop The Genocide in Ogaden Region

2010-11-22T00:49:00.000-08:00

All messages are published with permission of the sender. The general topic of this message is Foreign Affairs:

Subject:
Stop the Genocide in Ogaden region

To:
President Barack Obama
Rep. Earl Pomeroy
Sen. Kent Conrad
Sen. Byron Dorgan

November 20, 2010

The Honorable Barack Obama, Kent Conrad, Byron L. Dorgan, Earl Pomeroy
Dear: President Barack Obama, Senator Kent Conrad, Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Congress Earl Pomeroy
I appreciate your willingness to serve the public. As a concerned citizen, we are writing this letter to inform you of the human rights violations that are currently taking place in the desiccated Ogaden region of Ethiopia. We are asking you to take immediate action to protect these incapacitated individuals from the Ethiopian government and bring reconciliation to this region. The racial extermination of the Ethiopian military against the people of the Ogaden has been ongoing since September 23, 1948, when the Ogaden region was transferred to Ethiopia. The Ogaden region is sparsely inhabited with Somali nomads, who are deprived of both personal and political freedom.

It is critical to note that very few people have limited knowledge of this genocide. Genocide is defined as the killing of members in a group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, imposing measures intended to prevent birth, or forcibly transferring children of that group to another group. This is exactly what is taking place in Ogaden, according to the Genocide Convention signed and put into effect by the U.N December 9. 1948. Anyone committing genocide, whether constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals will be punished. The Ethiopian government have violated all these which is crime and us seven year old I was witness and no word could be describe but terrifying, frightening, scary plus whenever I remember I just cry because of what I saw at the age is still getting worse.

According to the Human Rights Watch Report titled Collective Punishment, 2008, "the Ethiopian government has severely restricted humanitarian agencies from operating in the conflict affected areas of the Somali region." In addition to these restrictions of international relief agencies, the mainstream media are prevented from reporting these undocumented tragedies in this region. Consequently, these restrictions have prevented the world from becoming acquainted with this atrocious genocide. In one report of the Human Rights Watch, it states "tens of thousands of ethnic Somali civilians living in eastern Ethiopia's Somali regional states are experiencing serious abuses and a looming humanitarian crisis." Nonetheless, while the Human Rights Watch and our State Department continue to chronicle substantial reports of this genocide, the world continues to be oblivious to this horrendous plight.

We acknowledge that there have been previous attempts by the US Senate to urge State Deportment and the White House to initiate a broad independent investigation by the conduct of the Ethiopian military forces in the Ogaden but so far no action has taken place. As our Leaders, we urge you to take part in this great effort to help bring this plight of Ogaden to the world's attention and imposing sanction on the Ethiopian regime. This is time you could save life of millions of lives yet the best thing human could do is saving life but you all get opportunity to save millions of Ogaden lives. Please assist the100000 people who is from this region via a letter to the White House about the need for a political resolution.

"In giving rights to others which belong to them, we give rights to ourselves." John F. Kennedy

fargo , ND

Human Rights Whitewash On Ethiopian Genocide

2010-11-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

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Human Rights Whitewash On Ethiopian Genocide

By Thomas C. Mountain

01 November, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Human Rights Watch has just released an over 100 page “human rights” report on Ethiopia that whitewashes the crimes against humanity and genocide being committed by the Ethiopian regime.

In the last ten years the Meles Zenawi lead government of Ethiopia has committed the following war crimes and crimes against humanity on both the Ethiopian people and their neighbors;

1) The 2000 invasion of Eritrea, with some 150,000 war dead and another 1.5 million refugees.

2) The 2006 invasion of Somalia, with tens of thousands killed and over a million refugees.

3) The genocidal program of counterinsurgency and blockade of food aid during a series of record breaking droughts in the ethnically Somali, Ethiopian Ogaden region. Even the truth challenged Enough Project used the term “scorched earth” to describe the rape, murder, mass murder, theft of cattle and grain and the burning of homes and crops that is carried out every day by Ethiopian troops in the Ogaden.

Almost none of this made its way into the HRW report.

There are many other examples of crimes committed by the Ethiopian regime not raised in the report, including the regimes counterinsurgencies in the Oromia and Tigray regions as well as the ethnic cleansing carried out in the western region of Gambella.

The HRW report on Ethiopia mentions the 99.6% election “victory” the Meles Zenawi regime declared this year, but doesn't expose the 500 plus protesters shot dead in the streets and over 50,000 thrown into concentration camps following the previous election in 2005.

Ethiopia itself receives, according to recent reports, some $6.7 billion in western aid and “forgiven” loans every year, yet remains the poorest country in Africa and one of the poorest, most aid dependent countries in the world.

Another very important fact not mentioned in the HRW report is that Ethiopia has the largest, best equipped army in Africa.

Why is HRW refusing to report these crimes?

Could it have something to do with the $100 million “matching grant” mega billionaire USA businessman George Soros recently “donated” to HRW? Ethiopia is a crucial supporter of USA foreign policy, America’s gendarme in East Africa, and has mostly been protected by leaders of NGO’s who are recipients of Soros largess.

The recent HRW report is just the latest example of this.

Human Rights Watch or Human Rights Whitewash? You be the judge.

Thomas C. Mountain is the only independent western journalist in the Horn of Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006.
thomascmountain at yahoo dot com

A Corrupt Militia

2010-10-21T07:21:00.000-07:00

A Corrupt Militia

October 20, 2010 - 11:20am | admin

Four times a year, the World Policy Journal publishes a magazine of intelligent and thought-provoking writing, investigating pressing issues in global affairs through the Institute’s broad, far-reaching perspective. Recent editions have covered crime and corruption, water and global health. In the next few months, the World Policy blog will issue a selection of articles from this quarter’s fall issue, "The Creative Canon."

by Jonathan Ewing

Local militia, created by the government had by 2007 also begun to play a greater role in the counter-insurgency. One of their most important tasks was to protect construction crews from attack and the roads from being sabotaged by the ONLF.

At a series of public meetings held in villages and towns throughout the region beginning in 2006, high ranking regional government officials and federal military officers ordered village elders and chiefs to begin organizing militias in their areas. At one such meeting, in the town of Kabridahar, some 250 miles south of the regional capital Jijiga, Col. Gebre Egziebher, said the government was committed to exploiting the oil and natural gas in the region—one of the main reasons for the exploration area, and for preventing the ONLF from attacking construction crews and vehicles along the route, or from trying to destroy portions of the road. These clan elders and chiefs were then ordered to return to their respective villages and begin organizing and training the militia for the task.

Egziebher repeated his orders at several villages during 2006. One former government administrator, Mohammed Abdirahman, who belonged to a prominent family in the Fik area of the Ogaden, was ordered to return home to organize and help finance a militia in his area. “This was the order of the day, it was the government’s latest plan—using the local militia to help its forces defend the roads,” said Abdirahman.

The militia at this time was unpaid, but from their barracks in larger towns and along roads, they were able to earn money from food aid stolen from the United Nations, according to senior U.S. and UN officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The roads were also very important for the movement of food aid through the region. They are expected to be even more important for the oil companies in the future.

As an administrator, Abdirahman remembers attending a meeting in Addis Ababa in 1993 when officials discussed various options for moving oil and gas out of the region by either road or pipeline. No decision was made during that meeting, and both options are still being discussed by the government, according to Tadesse at the Ministry of Mines and Energy.

But the issue remains vital for many potential corporate investors in the Ogaden. For the oil companies, it’s one thing to talk about exploration. But the situation becomes opaque when it comes to figuring out how to get oil out of East Africa and into the world market.

Hanspeter Heinrich, head of Safestainable, a Geneva-based firm that advises companies investing and working in areas of conflict, pointed out, “If you don’t have roads, and you don’t have a pipeline, you don’t have a transport network. You’re headed for trouble, because you will need to militarily defend a very long transport route. The big oil companies will probably not be very eager to invest in Ethiopia because getting the oil or gas to market in a safe way will be extremely costly.”

High Risk, Low Reward?

Heinrich founded his consulting firm after working in Ethiopia for the International Committee of the Red Cross for several years during the 1990s. From his office in Geneva, a world away from the Ogaden, he charts the security, legal and reputational risks that any company might face if it chooses to invest in an area of conflict such as Ethiopia. Over the past five years, he advised against investing in the region to all companies that have asked him.

“The risks are simply too high, and the potential rewards are too few,” he said. But for companies like Petronas, Lundin and Africa Oil Corp., Dubai based Ethiopian Exploration and Production and Black Marlin Energy, this is the political and security environment that they have chosen. With the exception of Petronas, all are small to mid-size companies, which traditionally have specialized in locating the oil and then selling that land for a healthy profit to large, internationally integrated companies.

Privately-run small and mid-size enterprises have traditionally worried less about reputational risks. But larger, publicly-traded companies are often more responsive to pressure from watchdog groups regarding issues related to corporate social responsibility and human rights. Smaller, publicly-traded western companies are even more vulnerable, so several have approached Safestainable to assess the risks of investing in Ethiopia. Lundin Petroleum was one of those companies Heinrich said he has advised. In Ethiopia, however, of all the publicly-traded companies—Lundin and Africa Oil Corp., Petronas and Black Marlin Energy—only Lundin has publicly discussed, in company papers, ways to mitigate some of the problems associated with operating in the Ogaden.

Strikingly, however, Lundin never specifically mentions the civil war or the difficulties of remaining neutral in a hostile environment. In its 2007 annual report, Lundin said that prior to obtaining the three oil exploration licenses, it carried out a review of the country from a cultural, economic, political and social perspective. It undertook a number of field visits and consulted with local as well as international experts in order to understand the country and its challenges. Community and security clauses in the production sharing agreement were drafted with particular attention to Lundin Petroleum’s Corporate Responsibility commitment and its support for the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, an international standard developed through multi-stakeholder participation from governments, the extractive industry and non-governmental organizations. Comprehensive field surveys were conducted to assess the target regions from social, environmental, security and infrastructure perspectives.

In the end, Heinrich advised Lundin against investing in the region. “My point is very clear,” he told the company’s executives. “You should not invest in the Ogaden because the human rights situation is terrible. Any company is facing an up-hill challenge when trying to manage its reputational risks. If you invest there you have to rely on the army, or you might have to rely on other armed forces such as militia. You might be pressured into supporting them logistically and you might end up, one day, facing very serious legal charges and answering questions about your role in the conflict.”

As for Lundin, they considered the risk of possible litigation, which were considerable in Heinrich’s opinion, and matched those risks against the opportunities. In the end, they decided to minimize any potential damage by not involving their company name, so they sold their concessions in 2009 to a related company—Africa Oil Corp. One of Africa Oil’s major shareholders was Ellegrove Capital Ltd., a private corporation owned by the estate of the late Adolf H. Lundin, founder of the Lundin Group of Companies. Lundin Petroleum loaned Africa Oil money to then pay back Lundin Petroleum $20 million for the right to explore for oil prospects in the region. Using Africa Oil as a shield, Lundin has essentially retained its control and interest in the region but removed its name from the books.

“At the end of the day it becomes an issue of not having your brand name up-front. The companies realize that ‘OK, you have the concessions, but you shouldn’t have your name exposed to this kind of reputational risk. You maintain your interests, such as the concessions, and you give yourself time to find other, more durable solutions,” Heinrich says. But Lundin’s bid to conceal the link between the two companies is superficial at best. When a call is placed to Africa Oil’s head office in Vancouver, Canada, the receptionist answers the telephone with the standard greeting: “Lundin family of companies, how may I direct your call.”

It remains unclear if Lundin’s transition to a credit lender will protect it from potential legal or reputational damage. A growing number of cases bearing some similarity to the situation in the Ogaden have been tried in American courts under the Alien Tort Claims Act [ATCA], which grants district courts jurisdiction over civil actions against parties violating U.S. law, even if the conduct took place outside the United States. In Ethiopia’s case, “if a risk analysis was performed and it says that you stand a very high probability of being complicit in the human rights violations that are happening, then that company could be legally complicit,” Joshi from Global Witness says. Indeed, there have been a number of recent efforts to use ATCA to sue transnational corporations for violations of international law in countries outside the United States. If these suits are allowed to proceed, then ATCA could become a powerful tool to increase corporate accountability. Through ATCA, Lundin could be held accountable for complicity in the human rights violations in the Ogaden.

Last year, Royal Dutch Shell agreed to pay $15 million to settle several lawsuits alleging it collaborated in the execution of writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria. His son, Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr., accused the company of backing a campaign of repression conducted by Nigeria’s former military government in the oil-rich Niger Delta region in the 1990s. Saro-Wiwa Jr. and the relatives of other victims sued under the ATCA, which left Shell open to the suit.

State-owned companies like Malaysia’s Petronas have proven largely invulnerable to human rights pressures. Petronas’ company papers appear to make little or no mention of their operations in Ethiopia and the war that is quietly being waged there. Since it has few operations in the United States, it could prove immune to ATCA. “Typically, decision making at the larger companies, like Petronas, is dictated by the corporate character and any actual influence often comes from the political pressure of big government,” says Luke Patey, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies.

Next, mired in political and social tension, Ogaden is slowly improving--but only marginally.

Jonathan Ewing is a Stockholm-based investigative reporter who traveled to East Africa on a grant from the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, researching the relationship between the government of Ethiopia, the separatist rebels, the petroleum industry and the global interests they represent.

Picture via Flickr, by carsten_tb

Source From World Policy Journal

Ogaden: Coercion Towards Joining Security Forces

2010-10-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

Ogaden: Coercion Towards Joining Security Forces

Recent reports by refugees from the Ogaden region in Ethiopia have uncovered state pressure towards joining the pro-government police force - common means of coercion include false promises regarding monetary rewards and open threats to recruits and their families

Below is an article published by the Lethbridge Herald:

Ethiopian refugees in Kenya say they are being tricked into joining a government security force in a violent region of Ethiopia, and that their families face retaliation if they refuse.

Ethiopia's government says it is unaware of anyone coercing refugees to return or join the new police force it set up in the volatile eastern Ogaden region, which borders chaotic Somalia and is home to a long-simmering rebellion led by Ethiopians of Somali origin.

Putting a local face on Ethiopia's security forces, which Human Rights Watch accused of rape, torture and executions in a 2008 report, is essential to clinching a peace deal with a faction of the rebels. A rebel spokesman said the deal could be reached this month.

The refugees, though, say abuses are still happening, and that many of them are being tricked or coerced into joining the new police force.

"Whenever (the recruiters) meet a young man, they say if you don't go with us, your family (in Ethiopia) will be beaten," said 27-year-old Nur, a refugee who says he fled to neighbouring Kenya nearly two years ago after Ethiopian troops killed his brother and uncle.

Nur said about 10 of his friends have joined the new force. The recruits are lured by the promise of money and an escape from this dusty refugee camp in eastern Kenya, and are frightened by threats to their families.

Nur and 16 other Ethiopian refugees interviewed by The Associated Press late last month asked that their full names not be used to protect them from reprisals. All but one said they had either been recruited, approached by recruiters, or had seen family members join.

The refugees said that recruiters promise money and either a job or the opportunity to go and see how peaceful the region is before returning with their families.

Such offers can be enticing. Even a little cash is a fortune in the Dadaab camps because the Kenyan government prohibits refugees from leaving or seeking work.

The recruits travel in groups of up to 25 by vehicle to the border and then to the Ethiopian town of Suf. There they are given uniforms, guns and training, said the deserters, who said they got some of their information from men who had stayed.

Ethiopia is a military powerhouse in East Africa and a U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida-linked insurgents in neighbouring Somalia. Last year [2009] it received $865 million in U.S. aid, plus an unpublished amount for counter-terrorism assistance.

It also has a history of forcing its citizens to join pro-government forces, said Leslie Lefkow, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. She said she has heard dozens of stories of forced recruitment. Family members could be beaten, detained or forced to pay money if they couldn't furnish a recruit, she said.

That's what Abdisalam, 38, said happened after he rescued his younger brother and two friends from the recruiters.

"They threatened to kill me," Abdisalam said quietly, as he sat hidden from the baking sun and prying eyes in the mud-walled sitting room of a local youth leader.

Less than a week after he persuaded his brother to return to the overcrowded Dadaab camp, their sister in Ethiopia was jailed. Family members were told it was in retaliation for her brother's "anti-government" activities.

"They said I am a rebel and working against the government," he said. "I told them I'm only saving my brother. Now my sister is in jail. The war that we fled has followed us and we are not safe anywhere."

Ethiopia government spokesman Shimeles Kemal confirmed that the government was talking to one rebel faction and regional authorities had founded a new police force in the Ogaden aimed at "mopping up" the rest of the rebels. But he said he was unaware of any recruitment by government agents in refugee camps.

"That's not possible," he said. "It's not in line with the principles of the regional government ... I have no knowledge of such incidents."

The rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front, founded in 1984, accuses the ethnically Tigray-dominated government of starving Ethiopia's ethnically Somali region of resources and killing its residents. The conflict is also complicated by clan loyalties.

"They are going to claim they have an agreement with the ONLF (rebels) soon," said Abdirahman Mahdi, a London-based rebel spokesman. "Their strategy before was to recruit militias and fight us. This is a new strategy because there is a lot of pressure from the international community for a settlement but people are still very angry."

Mahdi said his faction of the ONLF would not negotiate unless another country was willing to act as a credible guarantor.

In Dadaab, many refugees say they no longer believe peace is possible. Among them was a woman who arrived to speak to AP veiled from head to foot. She was too fearful even to give her first name.

Through a translator, the woman said that five months ago Ethiopian forces came to her home in the Ogaden. They killed the men, she said, and gang-raped the women before throwing them into a fire. After the translator stepped outside, she disrobed in the fading light, pressing a journalist's hand against the bands of puckered burn tissue across her torso.

"I can't forget what happened," she said later. "How can I trust the government speaking of peace?"

Oil Company Petronas Laying Off Employees in Ethiopia

2010-09-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Oil Company Petronas Laying Off Employees in Ethiopia

September 12, 2010 -- The Malaysian petroleum company, Petronas, which is prospecting for oil resources in the Ogaden basin, in south-eastern Ethiopia, is to lay off its employees working in the company’s Ethiopian office, according to the Reporter.

The employees said that they were informed of the management’s decision to lay off most of the employees two months ago. There are about 40 Ethiopians working full time for the company.

Petronas drilled two wells in the Ogaden basin. The first one is in the Genale block that turned out dry. The second one is near the Hilala gas field in block 15. The testing result of the well is not yet known.

According to The Reporter, the Malaysian professionals who left for Malaysia did not return to Ethiopia. Petronas is also sending its vehicles and machineries that it had imported duty free back to Malaysia.

Petronas has been exploring the Ogaden basin since 2006. The company acquired an exploration area covering 93,000 sq.km. The company collected numerous seismic data in the Ogaden. “They did a remarkable job,” says an industry analyst. “They drilled two wells, though the result of the second one is yet to be determined,” the analyst said.

Source: Reporter

Pirates of Puntland; A tale of Somali Pirates, Ethiopia and the USA

2010-09-01T03:03:00.000-07:00

Special Reports

Last Updated: Sep 1st, 2010 - 00:32:48

Pirates of Puntland; A tale of Somali Pirates, Ethiopia and the USA
By Thomas C. Mountain
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Sep 1, 2010, 00:26

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Pirates, warlords, Marxist guerilla turned G-20 statesman and the USA . . . the real story of the Somali pirates in the Horn of Africa is a tale that needs telling.

This story starts in a place calling itself Puntland, after The Land of Punt, a once great and glorious civilization in Africa’s Horn, today a forgotten legend found only in the most ancient texts. Formerly part of Somalia, Puntland can be found at the very tip of the Horn of Africa. From its shores desperadoes in small, open boats motor hundreds of miles into the Indian Ocean in search of unwary ships to hijack and hold for ransom.

Many reasons are given for what drives these pirates but the question not being asked is how they have managed to get away with extorting over a quarter of a billion dollars from the international community.

The fact remains that despite the assembled flotillas from much of the world’s navies, with unmanned drones flying overhead and satellites in space watching their every move, the Somali pirates of Puntland have been almost unimpeded in collecting their loot and returning to their lairs. No Delta Force commando raids, no cruise missiles, not even a smart bomb, little if any attempt has been made to bring these pirates to justice. The answer to this mystery lies at the very core of US foreign policy, which is based on using local gendarmes to do its dirty work, and of course, being able to distance itself from these crimes when they are exposed.

The warlords in Puntland are allied with the Ethiopian regime, lead by Meles Zenawi, a Marxist guerilla turned G-20 statesman. With both regimes built on a house of cards the USA and its Western allies are afraid to place any stress on the lot in fear of it all falling down. With the Ethiopian regime gone, who is going to enforce Western interests in East Africa?

The law of the jungle rules life in the Horn of Africa and in Puntland in particular. In this struggle for survival, clan connections, and loyalty, are all important. In Puntland the clans are ruled by a council of warlords, whose brigandry and opportunism has earned them the support of the murderous clique of former Marxist guerillas who today rule Ethiopia. Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi and his former comrades in arms in the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front, one-time followers of Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Communist Party’s version of world revolution, are today enforcing Pax Americana in East Africa.

From his seat of power in Addis Ababa, where in past days another Western cop on the beat, Emperor Haile Sellasie, kept his imperial court, Meles Zenawi recently summoned his minions in Puntland. Upon the Puntland leadership’s arrival in Addis Ababa, press conferences were held where gestures of fealty were duly made and close ties proclaimed, but behind the scenes, fractious meetings marked by not so veiled threats marked the days. It would seem that not enough of the loot collected by the pirates of Puntland was making its way back to the regime in Addis Ababa.

Meles Zenawi, who soon after this meeting would be on the world stage at the G-20 meeting in Toronto, needs Puntland for its Indian Ocean coastline and as a bulwark against an outbreak of Somali nationalism in Somaliland in the north and the Islamic resistance in the south. He also needs Puntland as a safe haven for the Ethiopian military, still licking its wounds after its mauling by the Islamic resistance and its withdrawal from southern Somalia.

The USA needs Meles to continue enforcing its interests in the Horn of Africa and in times past has seen their enforcers of Pax Americana collapse when domestic matters explode. Ethiopia is fighting home grown insurgencies in its southeast in the Ogaden, in the north in Tigray, in the west in Gambella and in the south west in Oromia. The defeat in Somalia at the hands of a small, poorly trained and armed rag tag bands of Islamic fighters in the southern and Mogadishu regions of Somalia has further demoralized the Ethiopian military which has never recovered from the loss of tens of thousands of its best troops a decade ago in the invasion of Eritrea.

Invasions and counterinsurgency take a large military. A large military requires a lot of money, and with a domestic economy crippled by famine, civil war and a decades-long kleptocracy, Ethiopia is one of the most aid-dependent countries in the world.

Ethiopia has about 80 million people and with its abundance of water, rich agricultural land, minerals and now even oil, should be a rich country, at the very least able to feed its own people. In real life, Ethiopia’s number one hard currency earner is cut flowers, about $400 million a year. With coffee, at $250 million a year, coming in second, Ethiopia has less than $1 billion a year in foreign currency to bankroll its imports. As a result, Ethiopia remains the largest recipient of Western aid in sub-Saharan Africa, with some years receiving almost 90 percent of such. Ethiopia also is the recipient of about $2 billion a year in loans, and with such a small export base, it shouldn’t be surprising that most of these loans go unpaid. “Debt Forgiveness for Africa” is how it ends up being described.

What is almost unknown in the west is that Ethiopia also has the largest, best equipped army in Africa, though finding information in the Western media about Ethiopia’s military has been all but impossible for over a decade now.

Ethiopia invaded its former colony Eritrea in 2000 and by its own admission lost 123,000 of its own soldiers killed in action. Ethiopia invaded Somalia at the end of 2006, something no Ethiopian leader in history had ever done, and quickly found itself attacked from all sides by the Islamic resistance. By the time Ethiopia officially “withdrew” some two years later, estimates of Ethiopian soldiers killed in action range from 20-30,000.

Today, the Ethiopian army is conducting search and destroy operations throughout the ethnically Somali Ogaden region and, at the same time, during a series of the worst droughts in history, blocking all food aid to 90 percent of the province. Even the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders have been expelled. What is being committed can only be described as genocide and Ethiopia doesn’t want any witnesses blowing the whistle on it.

If Ethiopia can carry out genocide against its own population for years now with the unwavering support of its Western funding agencies, it is little wonder that the pirates of Puntland have nothing to fear from all the naval flotillas in the world. The empire of the USA may be crumbling but it still calls the shots when it comes to its gendarmes on the beat in East Africa, and little is being allowed to threaten an already shaky Ethiopian regime.

The tale of the pirates of Puntland may be hard to believe, but then truth is so often stranger than fiction. And with fiction passing as fact in the Western media when it comes to the Horn of Africa, it behooves one and all to stop and take a second look at what is really going on in these parts.

Thomas C. Mountain was, in a former life, an educator, activist and alternative medicine practitioner in the USA. Email thomascmountain at yahoo.com.

Silent Cry OYN On Fox 9 News

2010-03-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

Ethiopian Government can run, but can’t hide

2010-03-08T21:52:00.000-08:00

By Anyuak Media
Posted to the web on March 9, 2010

The Ethiopian authorities are back on international human rights and genocide watch radar. They are trying to run away from the genocide of Anyuak but they can’t hide from it.

This week Genocide Watch President, Dr Gregory Stanton wrote an open letter to alert the UN Human Rights Commissioner about the continuation of human right abuse by Ethiopian government.

In the letter Genocide Watch, an international organization campaigning to end Genocide internationally, accused the Ethiopian government of its complicity in acts of genocide committed by Ethiopian soldiers in Gambella and Ogaden regions.

Genocide Watch President, Dr Gregory Stanton, expressed his concerns to lack of actions by Ethiopian authorities to bring to justice those responsible to crime against humanity and genocide in Gambella and Ogaden regions. Full detain of the letter ===>>>

FACTBOX-Who are Ethiopia's ONLF rebels?

2009-12-13T00:35:00.000-08:00

11 Dec 2009 13:35:05 GMT
Source: Reuters
Dec 11 (Reuters) - Ethiopia's Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) launched attacks on government positions last month and are warning international oil companies not to explore for their region's potential deposits. [ID:nGEE5B91IW]

Here are some key facts about the ONLF:

* The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) is the most active of the country's rebel groups. It was formed in 1984 amid a resurgence of separatist sentiment in the Ogaden region, which is near Ethiopia's border with Somalia.

* In April 2007 the rebels attacked an oilfield run by Sinopec, Asia's biggest refiner and China's second largest oil and gas producer. Sinopec then pulled out of the Ogaden. Most of Ethiopia's oil and gas exploration activities have centred on the vast desert province. The rebels want firms to stay away.

* Ethiopia's Somali region, of which the Ogaden is a part, is mainly populated by Muslim Somali-speakers. The area has its own identity, doing most of its trade with Somaliland, Somalia and the Middle East, rather than the rest of Ethiopia.

* The ONLF dominated the Somalia region's government from 1991 until 1994. But the regional parliament passed a resolution in 1994 to hold a referendum on independence for the Ogaden and was then dissolved by the government.

* The group says its goal remains a referendum on independence for the region.

* The rebels have employed a strategy of hit-and-run attacks, often using grenades and landmines before melting back into the region's largely nomadic population.

* The Ethiopian government says the ONLF is trained and funded by Horn of Africa rival Eritrea in an effort to destabilize Ethiopia. Regional analysts agree.

* The Ethiopian government is itself partly made up of former rebel groups. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi came to power in 1991 when rebels led by him and others overthrew a communist regime. He has said his government will not commit war crimes in the Ogaden as they know what it is to be rebels.

* The separatist cause has been fuelled by widespread resentment at the region's low level of development. Until Chinese engineers arrived in 2006, the entire region had just over 30 km (20 miles) of tarmac road. (Reporting by Barry Malone, editing by Paul Taylor)

Conflict endures in Ethiopia’s ethnic Somali Region

2009-11-11T20:09:00.000-08:00

November 11, 2009

Conflict endures in Ethiopia’s ethnic Somali Regio

The violent, separatist conflict in southeastern Ethiopia known as the Somali region or Ogaden has been referred by some as the next Darfur. The conflict has claimed thousands of lives over the last 15 years.

Ethiopia sealed off the region to media so there is little accurate information about the conflict, including claims of human rights abuses.

The region is rich in natural gas and is home to about 5 million people, mainly ethnic and Muslim Somali nomadic tribes. The U.S. has said little about the conflict, as Ethiopia is its main regional ally in the increasingly unstable Horn of Africa region.

Read More >>> http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/11/11/conflict-endures-in-ethiopias-ethnic-somali-region/8249/

Time For A Shift In Priorities

2009-10-30T04:30:00.000-07:00

by Nicole Lee
NNPA Columnist
Originally Posted 10/28/2009

--Over the years, we have provided millions of dollars in military aid to Ethiopia and Kenya, yet have been slow criticize those covernments when they have allied themselves, at least in word if not in deed, with our military. We see the same in Ethiopia over the issue of the Ogaden region, where thousands have died in each year from hunger and neglect.

Read More >>> http://www.seattlemedium.com/news/article/Article.asp?NewsID=99839&sID=34&Search=YES

Somali-Americans subjected to first Obama “terror” prosecution

2009-07-16T12:01:00.000-07:00

By Bill Van Auken
16 July 2009

It cited even more horrific crimes in the Ogaden, part of the Somali region of Ethiopia, reporting “many killings by the Ethiopian forces; the burning of villages; widespread sexual violence; the arbitrary detention and torture of thousands in military custody; denial of access to wells; confiscation of livestock and hostage-taking to compel families to turn in family members suspected of [resistance].”

During the same period, the US military carried out missile attacks on Somalia that left large numbers of civilians dead.

It was these crimes, in which the Ethiopian military was acting as Washington’s proxy, that prompted at least some Somali-American youth to go back to their homeland, apparently to defend those under attack. Read More >>> http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/soma-j16.shtml

IMAGES AND INTERVIEWS OF REFUGEES FROM OGADENA

2009-07-13T09:14:00.000-07:00

IMAGES AND INTERVIEWS OF REFUGEES FROM OGADENÂ

by Britta Radike with Tobe Levin

A desiccated, little-known region in southeastern Ethiopia: this is Ogaden. Bordering on Somalia, it is populated mainly by Somali nomads. Ethiopian King Menelik II first captured the region in 1891, although the colonial powers of England, France, and Italy were equally avid to secure and expand possession in the Horn of Africa. Great Britain and the â€œChiefsâ€ in Ogaden signed a treaty in 1896 that guaranteed Ogadenâ€™s sovereignty, but it became apparent rather quickly that England had no intention of honoring the agreement. In 1954, Britain simply decreed that Ogaden and its people would henceforth be a part of Ethiopia.
Enter Italy: following World War I, Italy decided to increase its efforts in the colonies and furthered this aim by capitalizing upon an incident in 1934 in Welwel, Ogaden, a city occupied by Italy but claimed by Ethiopia. Italy took the unrest as an excuse to declare war on Ethiopia (1935â€“1936).
During the 1950s and 1960s, Ethiopia appeared to the outside world to be a cradle of stability in an otherwise rapidly changing Africa. However, domestic tensions were brewing. The disproportionately high percentage of Amharic speakers within the administration led to uprisings and violent confrontations. As Somaliland gained independence from Italy and England, Ogaden continued to be ruled by a foreign power. Consequently, the people of Ogaden renewed their fight to free themselves from occupation.
1963 witnessed the launch of the Ogaden Liberation Front, which demanded retraction of taxation that caused nomads to lose their land and possessions. Independence would have assured a trouble-free border crossing into Somalia, allowing the herders needed access to traditional pastures and water. This desire for regional autonomy led, in August 1963, to the first Ogaden Rebellion, which ended, in December 1964, unsuccessfully: Ethiopian troops won back territorial control of Ogaden. During this war, sporadic fighting also broke out between Somalia and Ethiopia, thus reinforcing the public perception of the events as arising from a border conflict between the two countries. What followed in Ogaden was the formation of the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), trained and financed by Somalia. The WSLF aimed to secure Somali self-determination by force of arms.

Photo Â© 2006 by Britta Radike

In 1977, Somalia waged the Ogaden War in order to wrest and annex from Ethiopia the area occupied by Somalis. Following early Somali victories, however, the Ethiopian army, aided by the Soviet Union and Cuba, won, acceding to power in 1978. Military and civilian opposition was brutally suppressed, and hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled.
After Somaliaâ€™s defeat, the struggle between Ogaden Somalis and Ethiopian government troops turned into guerilla warfare, culminating in the destruction of the WSLF fighters before they were able to achieve even their minimum goals. Perhaps due to the resulting vacuum, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) was founded on August 15, 1984, offering independent leadership the opportunity to answer the call for self-determination, despite the fact that the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia persecuted anyone suspected of belonging to a liberation movement. This policy affected members of both the ONLF and the WSLF, but especially the political arm of the ONLF.
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Although regional elections in January 1992 saw the ONLF emerge as the strongest contender, the party remained unable to push through a constitutional referendum for Ogadenâ€™s independence. The Ethiopian government feared the partyâ€™s influence in the region and dealt brutally with members and sympathizers of the ONLF. Hundreds were arrested and tortured; many were shot. As a result, new leadership formed in Ogaden. Coming together from another wing of the ONLF, they would make do without the referendum. The â€œoldâ€ ONLF membership, led by Sheik Ibrahim Abdallah, continued the fight underground.
Amnesty International Germany reported:
Given these events, individuals were detained who had nothing to do with politics. For instance, in November 1996, members of a Somali aid and development NGO were arrested. Aid projects are of great importance in this very poor country continually threatened with drought. But it looks very much as though the central government wants to hinder efforts by their own people because success might increase the aid groupâ€™s influence.
Many of these arrests took place with the collusion of a dysfunctional Ethiopian justice system. After the end of the Mengistu regime, all trained judges were dismissed, and the frequent retirement of judges continues to this day, ensuring a dearth of legal personnel and a large number of delayed cases, with suspects forced to remain in prison awaiting charges.
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Mohamed, 46, from Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar in Ogaden (interviewed in the Ifo refugee camp in Kenya on January 4, 2006)
Britta Radike (BR): Mohamed, youâ€™re from Ogaden. Can you give us a general rundown of the political background? Why are so many people attempting to flee?Mohamed: When I was born, in 1960, my family was already on the run. We havenâ€™t stopped. Nor have we ever been happy. Just the opposite. Our lives are colonized by anxiety and fear. That part of your body that cradles joyâ€”we donâ€™t have it anymore. Weâ€™ve grown numb. Iâ€™m old and death is waiting for me. People in Ogaden wouldnâ€™t be fleeing if only our basic rights were assuredâ€”the right to water, health, education, and commerceâ€”although commerce is less important. We arenâ€™t on the run because of hunger, or in search of a better life in a nation thatâ€™s not our own. In fact, we have a beautiful country and the best weather. No. Weâ€™re refugees because in Ogaden we have no peace.
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The Ethiopian army is wrongfully here. Ethiopia says the land is theirs, but Iâ€™ve never seen a single Ethiopian civilian in the areaâ€”only soldiers. As a boy, I herded sheep. I lived through the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie and, after that, Mengistuâ€™s communists, followed later by the EPRDF [Ethiopian Peopleâ€™s Revolutionary Democratic Front] or Tigray regime. None could be called â€œhumane.â€ The people have a slogan for the present government: â€œKuwii hore kan kii kalaa ka siidaran [Each regime is worse than the one before].â€
Today, the armyâ€”responsible for the crimes against usâ€”is commanded by the EPRDF. It recruited from among former rebels. In the middle of the night, they suddenly surround innocent families of nomads and arrest them. Pretty girls are separated from the rest and taken away. If a man happens to be standing nearby, heâ€™ll be asked if sheâ€™s his wife. If he says â€œyes,â€ heâ€™ll be shackled on the spot and the woman raped right in front of him. They have no pity and no shame. It doesnâ€™t even matter if sheâ€™s pregnant. Theyâ€™ll rape her anyway.
You canâ€™t let your goats and sheep run free, either. They confiscate your herds and kill as many animals as they happen to need at the time. They take camels, too, corral them and sell them later. To protest all of this, we have an organization, the Ogaden National Liberation Front [ONLF]. They couldnâ€™t just stand there and let these crimes continue unopposed. But, no surprise, the regime uses the ONLF as an excuse for exacting revenge on civilians.
For instance, take what happens when girls or boys are guarding their animals. Government agents ask them to reveal the whereabouts of the bandits or gangs fighting against them. If youngsters say they donâ€™t know, the soldiers call them liars and arrest them. They seize any strong man, take him away, and heâ€™s never seen again. Many of the girls are raped and then detained so that they can be raped again. Or theyâ€™re lined up and raped, one after the other, right then and there by a pack of militiamen. And, once the girls are totally wiped out, their rapists laugh at them. They take batteries and try to see how many can fit in there. Thatâ€™s something I witnessed, and it makes me sick every time I think about it. One time they accused a girl of giving water to the rebels. They leaned her up against a tree, tied her hands behind her back and, after ripping open her mouth, poured a teapot of boiling water down her throat. Her intestines came out the back. There are no words for suffering like that.
People wouldnâ€™t be fleeing their homes just because they canâ€™t get an education or because they lack health care. You can live with that. Killing people has simply become a habit with these soldiers. When they murder, rape, or rob, theyâ€™re not punished according to law. Instead, theyâ€™re rewarded or promoted. And because GI pay in Ogaden is very low, militiamen are instructed to take whatever they want. Each soldier gets to keep one-third of what he plunders, with the other two-thirds filling the military coffers. The only judge in Ogaden is a gun. The only lawyer is a gun. The prosecutor is a gun. And if you try to say anything about it, the gun gets you.
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Thereâ€™s a Somali saying for this: â€œNaftu orod bay kugu Aamintaa [To rescue itself, the soul flees].â€ Still, the masses canâ€™t flee, because they donâ€™t know where to go. Now, the world isnâ€™t totally ignorant of what goes on in it. Journalists file reports. I know because I sometimes listen to the radio. But, here, an entire family of nomads can be exterminated, and thereâ€™s not a peep. The globe is abuzz with talk about the war on terrorism. And itâ€™s good to fight terrorism. But you have to ask: if the government murders, robs, and rapes, isnâ€™t that terrorism? Our terrorists are the Ethiopian government, because they deprive us of the means to make a life. Who are the terrorists? The Ethiopian regime. They destroy what we need to live.
What we donâ€™t know is why the world is doing nothing about it.
BR: Youâ€™re telling me that international media are not reporting on atrocities in Ogaden?Mohamed: No free press is allowed to enter Ogaden and file reports. Besides which, anyone talking to a journalist would be killed, so nobody talks. Theyâ€™ve even forbidden us to listen to the radio. A few men heard about an ONLF member on the BBC. [The telephone interview took place toward the end of 2005, in Shilabo, according to the BBC Somali service.] The militia came and simply opened fire. When such things are going on, how can we give information to journalists?
BR: But even if journalists are prevented from filing stories, other human rights organizations can still react. What about Amnesty International and the International Red Cross?Mohamed: The Red Cross is there. And prisoners tell them how many have been arrested by the EPRDF. With this information, they go to the military, who then send someone to look at the prison. But these Red Cross visits are window dressing, prepared in advance with pre-selected inmates who testify that all those incarcerated have been released. Meanwhile, the rest of the prison population is hidden away in containers where theyâ€™re kept until the Red Cross leaves. And the Red Cross distributes papers to those they are allowed to see. But when these men are freed or escape, they throw the papers away for fear that the militia might find them. Immediately, theyâ€™d be locked up again. Itâ€™s a really sad businessâ€”impossible to describe in simple language or to give the full picture in interviews like this one. Still, the three main reasons why people are fleeing from Ogaden are the lack of security and freedom; the plunder of their possessions and land; and the inability to work in their own country, to farm or to run businesses. Weâ€™ve given up on getting any services in terms of education and health.
BR: Ogaden is composed of nine regions. How many hospitals do you think there are?Mohamed: Thatâ€™s a good question, but you may as well ask it on the moon. Iâ€™ll try to clarify this with an example. Under Haile Selassie, a hospital was built, and before that, when the Italians had conquered Ethiopia, they built a hospital in Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar. The Italians also built fountains, a high school and an airport, but all these belong to the military now. The hospitals youâ€™re thinking of, we gave up hope years ago of ever seeing them.
BR: Do you have schools in Ogaden?Mohamed: The situation on the ground is very different from the official picture of it. The government announces that itâ€™s going to build a school for us, but it doesnâ€™t. In the major city Jijiga, thereâ€™s one high school for the entire Ogaden region. We have a couple of primary schools, but they were set up by the previous regime. Diaspora Somalis who left in 1977 during the first Ogaden war would have been able to build schools, and could even have taught in them. But theyâ€™re afraid of the bullets. When this regime took power, it tried to show its good side by constructing a college in Shaygoosh. Presently, birds are building nests on the construction site; there are no students and no teachers. In fact, the school was never up and running. The regime simply doesnâ€™t want people to get an education, to receive proper medical care or clean drinking water. Passable streets are simply not built.
BR: Please share with us some of your personal story.Mohamed: My nickname is â€œAkjar,â€ which means that a part of my leg was hit by an Ethiopian bullet and has been amputated. My right and left hips were also hit. That happened while I was working my land. Even though Iâ€™m not a soldier and didnâ€™t lift a hand to anyone, they shot me. On January 21, 1992, the ONLF and government troops clashed. On January 22, soldiers came and â€œinformedâ€ me that I had helped the ONLF the day before. I should raise my hands. In one hand, I still had my hoe. From that point, I canâ€™t remember. The next thing I knew, I was being transported on a donkey wagon.
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I fled first to Djibouti. That was during Hassan Guled Abtidoonâ€™s presidency, who ordered that everyone without a Djibouti passport be deported. So they arrested the refugees and sent them back. But the Ogadenis couldnâ€™t go back; theyâ€™d be accused of belonging to the rebels. And it doesnâ€™t matter whether youâ€™re men or women, or even little kids, two or three years old. But how can you accuse small children of membership in an oppositional party? Where else in the world do they throw three-year-olds in jail for belonging to the â€œoppositionâ€?
So people started to escape into northwest Somalia. But there, too, the warlords sided with the Ethiopian government, and in eastern Somalia it wasnâ€™t much better. There they didnâ€™t hand anyone over to the authorities, but they did deprive them of any means to survive. So the Ogadenis looked for another way out and fled to Kenya. Thatâ€™s how I joined a group going to Kenya. Djibouti failed; Somalia failed. In Galkayo and Baidobo, they killed a lot of us, so the only place left was northeastern Kenya. But in order to get into Kenya, we had to be Somali, not Ethiopian. So we passed as Somalis in order to receive papers from the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees]. Many of us have kept these new identities because weâ€™re still afraid of being sent back. Many people have also changed their names. We were only looking for a safe place to stay.
And even though weâ€™re in Kenya now, we live in constant fear of the EPRDF. They can track us down even here. Ethiopia can easily pay a Somali to sniff out where we are and kill us. We registered an official complaint about this in February 2000 with the UNHCR. It was the first time in our lives that we could actually register a protest anywhere and air our grievances. The person in charge of the UNHCR camps answered us: Ethiopia has a stable regime. To that, we responded that weâ€™re aware of Ethiopiaâ€™s regime, but it isnâ€™t our regime. Itâ€™s a beast, a hyena that devours people.
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Abdullahi, 47, from Jijiga in Ogaden (interviewed in Asmara, Eritrea, on December 24, 2005)
BR: Can you tell us about your life?Abdullahi: Growing up in Jijiga, I first attended the Koran School and then went on to primary, junior high, and high school before leaving for the university in Addis Ababa. But I really couldnâ€™t afford to study, so I left after one year and became a chat [a drug with powerful amphetamine-like effects, illegal in many countries] merchant.
BR: In which cities did you buy and sell chat?Abdullahi: Shipments came from the Oromo area and were transported through Jijiga on their way to northern Somalia.
BR: And despite being â€œonlyâ€ a businessman, you were arrested in northern Somalia?Abdullahi: Yes, it was 1996 when they arrested us in Hargeysa and charged us with cooperating with the ONLF. They brought three of us to a police station in the northern part of the city and then separated us. One guy was taken elsewhere in town, one brought to the city center, and I was kept in the Dolodo station, where they really did a job on me.
BR: What did they do to you?Abdullahi: For example, if anyone delivered clothes, the things were confiscated right away. If relatives provided food, it would be given to all the inmates, so fights broke out over it. There were two large rooms, and in the one closest to the door, the prisoners urinated at night. Thatâ€™s precisely where they made me sleep.
BR: Who forced you to sleep there, other prisoners or the police?Abdullahi: The police.
BR: What happened to your captured friends?Abdullahi: We were kept for three months in these local jails. Then, one day, early in the morning, police came and took us away in their cars to a town on the Ethiopian border, Togwajaale. There, Tigray men coming from the Ethiopian side met us, and we were handed over to them. Our captors switched cars. The replacements then brought us to Jijiga, where we stayed for one night before transfer to HÄrar. HÄrar is the center of power in Ogadenâ€”from there the whole state is controlled. They kept us there for awhile before taking us, once again early in the morning, to a large institutional prison.
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BR: What was the real reason they arrested you businessmen and extradited you to Ethiopia?Abdullahi: There are various categories of people they imprison. Some they just arrest, rob, and eliminateâ€”the victims simply vanish. I only learned this once I was in the police station.
BR: What is northern Somaliaâ€™s interest in turning ethnic Somalis over to the Ethiopian government? What is that supposed to bring to them?Abdullahi: They want Ethiopian satisfaction with Somali politics. What this does is send the messages your enemy is our enemy, and your friend is our friend. There are many reasons. The Ogadenis want to do business with northern Somalia, but northern Somalia is anxious to please Ethiopia. I know there must be a good number of reasons, but exactly why they turned us over, I canâ€™t say. They didnâ€™t tell us.
BR: What happened to you after you were brought to HÄrar?Abdullahi: They locked us in an underground room. Most of those imprisoned came from Ogaden, but there were a few Oromos as well. And a good number of women. I was there for nine months. Thereâ€™s no court and no trial. Youâ€™re simply there and you wait. The waiting really got to me, but on top of it, they treated us without humanity. If you got sick, you went untreated. There was no medicine. And what they allowed us to do was wash our clothes at midnight, naked. That was an indirect punishment, since they know very well that in HÄrar it gets cold at night, and they gave us only cold water. It was unbearable. In the daytime we werenâ€™t allowed out at all.
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BR: Were the Oromos also political prisoners?Abdullahi: Most of them were merely poor civilians who were imprisoned anyway. They are accused of the same things we are: of having worked with the Oromo rebels or of having supported them.
BR: In those nine months, how many people died in that prison?Abdullahi: Thatâ€™s not so easy to answer, because people were kept in different cells. And you couldnâ€™t know what was going on in the other rooms. Only a few areas were open, and contact between prisoners kept separately was impossible. You hear some people saying that, again, in the middle of the night, some were taken away and forced to dig graves. We assume they were then used for those they killed. If anyone died a natural death or was murdered, thatâ€™s where they would be buried.
BR: When did you leave HÄrar?Abdullahi: From HÄrar, we were brought to Dire Dawa, where a man from the International Red Cross met us. After he showed up, our captors took us to the police station and then to court. So there we were in the courthouse but with no charges and no conviction. After that, they brought us to another prison, where we stayed for four years. The court had told us that each group of prisoners would be placed in a prison from the region they came from. So, as an Ogadeni, I was supposed to be incarcerated in Ogaden. But that didnâ€™t happen. When the four years were up, they brought me to an underground prison near the OAU [Organization for African Unity] in Addis, and three months later back to Dire Dawa. Only after five and a half years had passed did they have me stand trial, where I was acquitted and released.
BR: Did you receive any kind of compensation for all those lost years?Abdullahi: Thereâ€™s no compensation and also no complaint. If you attempted to pursue justice, youâ€™d simply end up in an even more difficult situation. You are simply glad to be free again and try to get out of there as quickly as possible. When I was released, I stayed only one night in that town. The next evening I was already in Jijiga. At that point, I decided I would fight for the right thing. If you can be arrested for no reason whatsoever, you may as well fight for your rights.
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BR: How did you begin to fight for your rights?Abdullahi: I joined the ONLF. Iâ€™m a man with plenty of experience, and I remember that day in 1977 when more than 100 people were massacred in Jijiga. Among those killed was my grandfather, who owned a small shop. They slaughtered everyone in broad daylight. Today itâ€™s a perfectly normal event, to be robbed and killed. The world has something to say about human rights. Here thereâ€™s none of that.
BR: Are academics targeted as well as businessmen?Abdullahi: Yes, a good number of intellectuals have disappeared. We donâ€™t know whether they remain alive or not. Itâ€™s almost impossible for any academic to work in Ogaden or simply to be noticed there. Many returning scholars, some of whom were first hired by the government in Jijiga, have been fired.
BR: What do you think of the so-called new regime for the Ogaden region under Abdullahi Hassan (nicknamed Lugbuur [big leg]), whom Ethiopia put in place at the end of 2005?Abdullahi: The administration does nothing but carry out Ethiopian dictates and represents the interests of the present centralized regime. Lugbuur himself has his hands tied. He is powerless, and they have no interest in letting him get anything done. The president before him could do nothing, and now itâ€™s no different. He canâ€™t decide for himself. Thereâ€™s a Tigray behind every decision.
BR: In the past, then-president of the Ogaden administration Khadar Moalin was arrested. Do you think that could happen to the present president?Abdullahi: Yes, it could happen, though if heâ€™s lucky, theyâ€™ll merely let him go. Itâ€™s the Tigray above him who determines his fate.
BR: Would you say that your life as a freedom fighter, compared to your earlier days, has radically changed?Abdullahi: A lot has changed for me. If in your country all rights are being violated, then resistance seems to me the correct way to go. Neither under the earlier administration nor the present one do Ogadenis have any rights. If we try to fight, then maybe the next generation will gain something from it. I would really like to see this country become something one day.
BR: What effect has your membership in the resistance had on your family?Abdullahi: If someone joins the rebels, their families will be directly or indirectly persecuted. And this oppression and persecution are worse in smaller towns than in larger ones. A person in Jijiga has less to fear than someone in Degeh Bur. But someone in a place smaller than Degeh Bur is at even greater risk. And nomads with their animals and camels are in the most danger. Larger towns make the authorities somewhat more reticent, since foreigners or human rights organizations may be present. But, in the end, the people whose families have joined the rebels suffer the most under Ethiopian occupation.
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Amino, 25, from Degeh Bur, Ogaden (interviewed in the Ifo refugee camp in Kenya on January 4, 2006)
BR: Amino, you are from Degeh Bur and have been living for one year in the Ifo refugee camp in Kenya. Can you tell us what drove you to flee?Amino: I left Ogaden about eight years ago. In the meantime, Iâ€™ve stayed in either Hargeysa, Djibouti, or Mogadishu. Itâ€™s been back and forth. Until 1999, I was able to live in Degeh Bur, in my own house, in my homeland. But one day, right in the middle of town, a battle took place in Degeh Bur between Zenawi troups and rebels. The government lost a couple of men, while the one man wounded took refuge in my house. It was about noon while the main meal was being prepared. The man had been shot and then burst into our house. Soldiers surrounded the place. We were eight children and our mother. Now only my mother is left in the Degeh Bur house. All the children have fled. I was arrested and thrown in jail. For a month and ten days I was there, tortured and raped. After that, I fled to Hargeysa and stayed for three years. After that, I escaped to Djibouti.
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BR: What happened in Hargeysa to make you leave this last time? Wasnâ€™t there a refugee camp there, too?Amino: Itâ€™s true that many refugees went to Hargeysa, and at that time it was a bit more tranquil. The natives didnâ€™t bother us, but there was no camp. Later, the situation changed, so I had to leave. Today, Ogadenis on the run donâ€™t have a chance there because Somaliland and Ethiopia now work together. If they find anybody from Ogaden, theyâ€™ll turn that person over to the Ethiopians. I saw how four men were arrested in town and extradited. In September 2003, they issued a decree requiring all foreigners without papers to leave the country. Because I feared another imprisonment, I left.
BR: Does Djibouti house many refugees from Ogaden?Amino: Yes, many. But many have also departed.
BR: They went from Djibouti to Mogadishu?Amino: Yes, and I also stayed in Mogadishu for a year. But, even there, they targeted us Ogadenis, singling us out for persecution. Of course, everyone suffered from the civil war that broke out when the city collapsed. Thatâ€™s when I fled through Dobley to the border with Kenya and entered the camp.
BR: So they accepted you here in Ifo?Amino: The UNHCR first grilled me intensively; then they put me on a waiting list. But I still donâ€™t have a real refugee I.D. In fact, they first rejected me because the authorities claimed there was no persecution in Ethiopia, that there were no large crowds fleeing from there. You see, other than through Somalia, thereâ€™s no direct route from Ogaden. After their initial rejection, I submitted another application.
BR: Are you here with your family?Amino: Yes, I have six children and a husband here.
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BR: What is camp life like?Amino: Not so good. It used to be better. There used to be more flour and other foodâ€”now we have nearly nothing: a mere half cup of oil and millet from time to time. You canâ€™t live on that. When those families who are officially registered get their rations, they share their portions with us.
BR: What are your hopes for the future?Amino: Somalis here with us are taken better care of, and the world community is also concerned about doing more for them. They are helping to stabilize the regime, and making the media reports on Somalia. But you never hear about delegations traveling into Ogaden to report on the situation there. So, for that reason, I have no hope for our future. Once peace returns to Somalia, Somali refugees can go home, but not me. I have nowhere to go. Iâ€™m just waiting for Allah to show us a way out. Other than that, I have no hope.
BR: Many Ogadeni refugees have expressed pessimism about getting help from international organizations. Do you feel the same?Amino: Yes, and itâ€™s very sad that for the rest of the world weâ€™re nothing but a dark speck on the map. Still, when you really need help, you donâ€™t give up so easily, though I have no great hope. And itâ€™s not good to have none.
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Arab Bihi, 43, from GodÄ“, Ogaden (interviewed in the Ifo refugee camp in Kenya on January 4, 2006)
BR: What drove you to leave your homeland and become a refugee asking the UNHCR for asylum?
Arab Bihi (AB): I arrived here in December 2006. It isnâ€™t the first time Iâ€™ve applied to enter a refugee camp. During the 1977 war, I was in a camp in Somalia in the Hiraan Region near Beledweyne. I stayed there for fourteen years; thatâ€™s where I went to school. In 1988, the UNHCR started a program for refugees who wanted to return to Ogaden, so part of the camp was disbanded. Back in Ogaden, I became a teacher. But I encountered difficulties and dangers as a result of my teaching pro bono in a school there and working together with the Ogaden Welfare Society [OWS]. The OWS had done a lot of good in terms of infrastructure and attending to water, education, and healthâ€”precisely what it was accused of by the government, which wanted no development in Ogaden. The regime said that the organization was politicalâ€”part of the oppositionâ€”and disbanded it. Then they persecuted me and other members of the group. When they arrested me the first time, I was locked up for six months in a military jail near the airport in GodÄ“. Whenever the International Red Cross wanted to visit, they would hide us from sight. They tortured us. I lost one of my testicles. A fellow prisoner died because he had asthma; the cell was below ground, and there wasnâ€™t enough air. I also developed rashes all over. But, finally, offering enough in bribes, my family was able to buy my freedom. Then I started dealing in pharmaceuticals, only to have the government take the business away from me later on. They accused me of supporting the ONLF, the rebels. Problems like these, and many more, were what forced me to abandon my home. So I became a refugee again.
BR: Do you think others in Ogaden are struggling with the same issues?AB: Yes, and this is especially so for the educated, because anyone who might play an important role in society will be singled out.
BR: Have you ever spotted journalists or human rights organizations in Ogaden?AB: No, apart from the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] thereâ€™s no other organization really active in the region. And even their offices are attacked and their employees harassed. I remember very well in August 2004 when two students were killed: their bodies were left on the football field, and burial was forbidden. A Swiss ICRC employee, Florenzo, tried to intervene. She went to the responsible Brigade Commander, Halus, to protest, but Halus is a murderer with too many victims already on his conscience.
BR: So it was a white woman who complained?AB: Yes, she was Swiss, from the human rights division of the International Red Cross, and they had another human rights person, Hans Peter, also Swiss. They said it was inhumane to leave bodies lying for three days out in the open. It was against the Geneva Convention and, since Ethiopia is a signatory, it has to follow its rules. But Brigade Commander Halus got mad, and the next day he ordered an attack on the Red Cross headquarters.
BR: What kind of attack?AB: Soldiers took documents and opened archives, saying the Red Cross should mind its own business. Some time later, the soldiers left. But problems like theseâ€”and worseâ€”occur all over the region. Even the humanitarian organizations that are elsewhere respected are here harassed. Imagine, then, what happens to ordinary citizens!
BR: What happened when you asked to stay in the refugee camp?AB: We were five children and two grown-ups. When I first arrived, I presented myself to the UNHCR and was put on a waiting list. I still donâ€™t have a ration card for food. In order to be officially recognized as a refugee, I still have to go through an interview with the appropriate agency. They took photos and filled out a couple of forms. Only when I have all that behind me will I be eligible for a ration card.
BR: What do you hope for here?AB: I have a great deal of refugee experience. I spent fourteen years in a Somali refugee campâ€”the major portion of my lifeâ€”and here Iâ€™ve landed in another one. I am bereft: no country, no work, and no hope. Nobody hears about Ogaden. People are simply killed, robbed, mistreated and nobody hears anything about it. The lack of reporting tells the Ogadenis that theyâ€™re of less value because nobody cares what happens to them. And the feeling overcomes them that they donâ€™t belong among citizens of the world. When 500 Ogadenis are murdered, thereâ€™s complete silence. The world community is wholly ignorant of events in our region.
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Ifraah, 25, from Aware in Ogaden (interviewed in Djibouti on December 5, 2005)
BR: You come from Aware in Ogaden. What happened there that made you flee to Djibouti?Ifraah: I arrived here on November 25, 2005, but had to escape from Aware in mid-October. In Ogaden in general there is trouble. One night, at about 9:00 pm, a group of military came to our home. They entered fully armed, forced us out, and separated the men from the women. They gunned down some of the men; then they brought the women to the city and put us in prison. I saw soldiers raping women. Right now Iâ€™m wearing this white cloth as a sign of mourning because my husband was one of the men they killed. Thatâ€™s how it happened.
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BR: After they killed your husband, how long did you spend in prison?Ifraah: People took pity on me because of the white clothâ€”they saw that I was in mourning. So a man came and posted bail for me. When they let me go and the man was taking me back home, I fled to Hargeysa and stayed there for a couple of days. The trip was very difficult because I didnâ€™t have any money. I had to constantly beg people for help. Then I got a ride to Djibouti. Now Iâ€™ve been here for twenty-five days, sharing this space with three other girls.
BR: When you were arrested, was it the first time or had you been imprisoned before?Ifraah: Yes, often. To be released, you have to pay the Ethiopian military from 1,000 to 2,000 birr. And the price keeps going up. If they suspect that the family has money, they raise the price. Poor people often stay in prison much longer because they canâ€™t raise the ransom. It happened to me twice. The first time I wasnâ€™t yet married. I spent a couple of months in prison and had to pay 500 birr; the second time, I had to pay 1,000. My mother wanted me to get away. The decision to leave was very difficult for me. How could I go to a country where I donâ€™t know anybody?
BR: What happened to the man who paid to get you out?Ifraah: I havenâ€™t asked, but I think heâ€™s now in jail in my place. I hope his relatives can get the money together to get him out.
BR: In the town council you find mainly Ogadenis. Couldnâ€™t they help you?Ifraah: The administration has no power. They are in danger themselves. They are forced to do what the Ethiopian government wants. They are the local government, but they canâ€™t really govern. They do what the military commander says. They are also afraid of the soldiers. Sometimes, when a lot of us girls were imprisoned, weâ€™d send letters to the local council to complain about being raped at night. But we never got any response.
BR: Can you estimate how many girls were in prison?Ifraah: It differed. Some weeks there were ten; then everything would quiet down. If an incident occurred or there were tensions, the numbers could be as high as twenty-five or more. Aware is only a village.
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BR: Why did they jail the girls?Ifraah: The soldiers said that they supported the ONLF. Whenever the military and the ONLF fight and the army suffers casualties, soldiers storm villages to take revenge.
BR: Are there armed women who fight in the ONLF?Ifraah: Some women have been shot by the Ethiopian army, but whether they were armed and fighting for the ONLF, I donâ€™t know. Some women are shot on the spot, but they preferred to arrest and rape us.
BR: Why have there been so many arrests?Ifraah: Itâ€™s no secret that Ogaden is a troubled region. For no reason, people are being persecuted and thrown in jail. Rebels and government troops are fighting each other, and whenever the soldiers suffer losses, they take revenge on the civilian population. But arrests also benefit the military; itâ€™s a flourishing trade. Innocent people are captured and have to come up with a lot of money to free themselves. Some are murdered; others are taken, for instance, to HÄrar and thrown into jail. The pretexts are well known: you support the rebels, so they arrest you, and a few months later they want money to let you out. There are women thrown into prison five times, and each time they have to pay to get out. But economic factors are not the only ones. Thereâ€™s also torture and rape.
BR: Is it possible that the soldiers consider the ransom their salary?Ifraah: Thatâ€™s what we think. Some prisoners are repeatedly freed for 1,000 birr. But thatâ€™s only those who can afford it. Others have to stay in jail because their families simply canâ€™t raise the money to liberate them.
BR: Can you tell us something about daily life in jail? How do they treat the prisoners? What did they give you to eat?Ifraah: In prison they donâ€™t give you anything to eat. You get your food from relatives. If you donâ€™t have anyone nearby, your relatives send money to people who live there so they can buy you food. If that doesnâ€™t work, other inmates give you what they can. Whatâ€™s worse is the torture and rape. At night you hear the girls screaming when soldiers take them from their cells.
BR: In what condition are the women when the soldiers bring them back?Ifraah: Well, they return very demoralized, broken in spirit, and everyoneâ€™s quiet. Before, when they came to get the women and opened the gate, we would all rush forward for a breath of fresh air. But once we learned what happens, weâ€™d hide as far to the rear as possible. When the soldiers entered, they always had their guns already cocked and they also had nightsticksâ€”theyâ€™d select one woman and all of us would scream. And whoever refused was beaten with the night stick or the butt of a gun. The torture took different forms. Some were beaten all over their bodies, some less extensively. If you were lucky enough to get out of there, the only option was to leave the country.
BR: So thatâ€™s what you went through?Ifraah: Yes. First, they beat you, and then you simply let them rape you. Thereâ€™s nothing you can do. You are completely powerless and without hope of it ever ending. Sometimes they take two or three women. You can complain to relatives when they bring food, but they canâ€™t do anything about it, either. The humiliation and scandal are out in the open, but no human rights organization has come along to let the world know whatâ€™s going on. Itâ€™s as though the country were roped off from the rest of the world and nobody cares what happens here.
BR: Do you feel at least a little more secure here in Djibouti?Ifraah: Yes, here thereâ€™s more security. Here nobody is after me. I donâ€™t have any real plans to flee elsewhere, but Iâ€™m hoping God will help me make everything turn out all right.
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Ayaan, 24, from Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar in Ogaden (interviewed in Djibouti on December 5, 2005)
BR: Can you describe for us how people live in Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar?Ayaan: Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar is one of the larger towns in Ogaden with a good-sized population, but I donâ€™t know exactly how large. In any case, that really doesnâ€™t matter, because itâ€™s occupied territory. For instance, if you live in Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar, you canâ€™t buy good clothes, because if you wore them, the soldiers would suspect youâ€™re with the rebels. You canâ€™t simply explain to them where the things came from. They wonâ€™t believe you. We have no right to manage our own affairs. So when relatives abroad send money, and you buy something for yourself, you have a problem. Youâ€™ve raised suspicion. Or when nomads sell their camels for moneyâ€”that causes problems. Then the real trouble starts. If you donâ€™t know Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar, it all sounds like fiction. This couldnâ€™t possibly be true! Itâ€™s only if you live there or come from there that you know the horror stories are real.
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BR: How was it for you on a daily basis?Ayaan: Like a stray cat, I was living from hand to mouth. Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar is my home, but I couldnâ€™t stay and move around freely. Whenever I visited, I had to hide. Nobody but my mother was allowed to know that I had entered the village, and only she could see my face. Trusting even my own brothers and sisters was out of the question. I was arrested six times.
BR: Why and how were you arrested?Ayaan: The first time was in Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar. There I owned a small kiosk. One day I was washing my clothes together with another woman at a little pond. Suddenly, an officer with two soldiers approached. I was just folding my laundry when, without my noticing, the officer sat down behind me. Suddenly, he grabbed my leg. Startled, I jumped back and turned to face him. He said, â€œSister. Youâ€™re beautiful. Donâ€™t get upset!â€ My companion helped me gather the clothes and run away. The soldier followed and grabbed me by the collar. He said, â€œHereâ€™s fifteen birr. Letâ€™s go into the bushes!â€ I threw his money down and ran to my kiosk. Seven of my relatives were there. In the presence of all of them, the soldier returned and offered me forty birr, saying, â€œCome on, miss, weâ€™ll go into the back room!â€ I fled to a neighboring shop. The soldier became aggressive, kicking my nephew and demanding a cigarette. When I saw that, I returned to urge my nephew to defend himself. Then the soldier kicked me, I fell, and for two hours he struck me with the butt of his rifle. My relatives looked on, doing nothing, because if anyone had tried, they would have been shot. Bleeding profusely from the mouth and nose, I threw up and was left lying there half dead. The soldierâ€™s commanding officer had been in another village at the time. Our council of elders had someone drive over from Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar to lodge a complaint.
The commander then came to us with the offending soldier in tow. We thought he was bringing us medicine. Towering over me, he asked, â€œIs this the woman you beat?â€ The commander then slapped the soldier on the cheek with his open hand, saying, â€œYouâ€™re in the military. You should either have shot her or let her alone, but not beaten her.â€ Observers walked away, and nothing in the situation changed. I remained only half conscious until the next day, when the soldier returned, wanting to punish me for the trouble heâ€™d had with his commander. One of my cousins, Shaqaaq, was a collaborator who worked for the Ethiopian soldiers. He spoke to the soldier and asked that he wait to punish me until Iâ€™d recovered. When darkness fell, my cousin returned and said that he was a man, so it was okay; they could shoot him for all he cared, but I had better disappear. So, under cover of darkness, I ran away and hid until dawn. On my right side I was seriously hurt, and whenever I coughed, I spit blood. Thatâ€™s how I arrived in Dig, where my fatherâ€™s family lives. The family has a small kiosk where they hid me because they didnâ€™t want to take me home with them. I remained there for a month. No one informed the Ethiopian army that I was there, but they found out anyway, arrested me again, and jailed me for a month and a half.
BR: How did they treat you in prison?Ayaan: Every day they made me sit out in the sun with no shade. They also took away my veil and gave it back only in the evening. In the sun, everything before my eyes paled. I could no longer distinguish one color from another.
BR: Can you tell us anything about daily life in prison? Did you have enough to eat and drink?Ayaan: In Dig, where I had to sit in the sun, they gave me tea and two rolls in the morning that had to last for the entire day. Sometimes if our relatives brought food, the guards ate it themselves. Especially if no officer was around, the soldiers devoured our portions. In the Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar prison, we went at times for twenty-four hours without anything to eat, and even when they gave us food, I couldnâ€™t swallow it. Sometimes I drank water, even though it was unhygienic. Once youâ€™ve seen people pour the water theyâ€™ve bathed in back into the tank, you lose your desire for it. To shower and wash, thatâ€™s okay, but for drinking? Disgusting. There was a real meal only once a day, either in the morning or at noon. In the evening, more often than not, nothing. Even if an officer was there, he had the food brought by relatives carefully inspected. Spaghetti, rice, and bread were picked apart.
After that, I wound up imprisoned in Degeh Bur, but not with the other women, who were housed in a makeshift trailer or in military headquarters. I was in the self-designated police station and permitted to sit in the sun. In Aware, instead of containers for jail cells, they had overheated corrugated iron-roofed huts. But Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar was the most painful. I was there for three nights when the guard told me to take off my clothes. I said â€œno,â€ and â€œif you want to, go ahead and shoot me, but Iâ€™m not getting undressed.â€ He slapped my face and insisted, â€œGet undressed!â€ I said, â€œno.â€ So he threatened me, putting the barrel of his pistol against my temple. He then pushed me toward a dark area not far away, demanding to hear what I knew about the ONLF. I answered, â€œI donâ€™t know anything about them and donâ€™t know what youâ€™re talking about.â€ He thought I was a native of the place and had the right to live freely. â€œBut you have to tell me if youâ€™re with the ONLF or Al Itihad.â€ I said, â€œAll I can see is the Ethiopian militaryâ€”I havenâ€™t seen anyone from ONLF or Al Itihad.â€ From 9:00 pm to 1:00 am, he interrogated me.
BR: When did you get to Djibouti?Ayaan: On the twelfth day of Ramadan [October 15, 2005]. I donâ€™t know anyone here and have no relatives. I came only because of problems. If you fear for your life, you donâ€™t think of anything but running away. I didnâ€™t intend to come here. I simply ran.
My whole life I have seen and experienced awful things. You see dead bodies daily, or you witness someone being shot and killed, or someone getting a bullet in his head, his brains splattered on the ground. One morning a brawny soldier whipped a thirteen-year-old boy with an electric cable. With every hit, tattered skin flew, so powerful were the thrusts. The boy ran to me seeking shelter, but I couldnâ€™t help him. His tormenter would have whipped me, too. But the boy clung to me, and you couldnâ€™t tell his blood from mine. Later he fell to the ground, unconscious.
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My sister in prison is also now pregnant from rape. They shot my brother because he was well dressed and possessed a couple of camels. He wanted to bring camels to Hawle village for water. They caught him by accident and wanted to know if he was from Al Itihad. Then they simply shot him. They didnâ€™t bury his corpseâ€”it lay for eleven days in the village until the hyenas had eaten him. In the end, we could only gather up his bones and bury them. Iâ€™ve experienced so much horror, what else can I say?
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Maryama, 25, from Hamarro near Fik, Ogaden (interviewed in Djibouti on December 5, 2005)
BR: Youâ€™re from Hamarro. How many people live there?Maryama: I donâ€™t know exactly, but itâ€™s a small village where everybody knows everybody.
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BR: Can you tell me a little about daily life there?Maryama: Hamarro is controlled by the Ethiopian military. Any visitor is immediately recognized as an outsider. Our lives donâ€™t seem to be worth much.
BR: Does the Ethiopian military live among you, or are you separated?Maryama: We are separated. They are the occupiers and not native to the place.
BR: How do the villagers in Hamarro live?Maryama: We donâ€™t have many options. Actually, there are primarily two: you can drive a truck, or sell in a little kiosk. In either case, you donâ€™t have much freedom. If you have a little shop, you are often robbed, and if you drive a truck, they sometimes take your goods as well. There arenâ€™t many businesses here.
BR: When did you get to Djibouti?Maryama: Iâ€™ve been here for two months now.
BR: What brought you here?Maryama: They accused me of belonging to the ONLF. They surrounded our hut and arrested me.
BR: What made them think that you worked with the ONLF?Maryama: When I entered the village, they spotted me. They know almost everybody there. I was the only outsider. So they thought I must be working with the ONLF.
BR: The village where you were arrested wasnâ€™t your own village, Hamarro?Maryama: Yes, it was my village. But I wasnâ€™t there very often.
BR: Where were you?Maryama: In the countryside, where my grandmother lives. I was taking care of the animals.
BR: How long did you stay with your grandmother?Maryama: She took me with her when I was seven so I could look after her animals for her. I hadnâ€™t been in the village very long at all before they arrested me.
BR: How long were you in prison?Maryama: I spent about twenty days there.
BR: Can you tell me a little bit about prison life? How did the soldiers treat you?Maryama: At night, they would take a couple of us outside the camp, beat and torture us. At about 9:00 pm, they came and brought us to a nearby hill. They raped me and placed a rope around other peopleâ€™s necks before throwing them into a latrine to make them talk. If they loosen the rope, you sink. They tortured us for a long time. If you refused to talk, they might bring you back, drag out another woman, and repeat what theyâ€™d just done, over and over. The latrine was the soldiersâ€™ toilet. It had no real liquid because they donâ€™t use much water. Over the hole were wooden boards to stand on. They didnâ€™t want to kill us; they wanted to torture us to make us talk.
BR: How many prisoners were there?Maryama: I couldnâ€™t give you an exact figure, but Iâ€™d say there were about sixty women, nearly all of them young. Some were released; some were recaptured. I canâ€™t say anything about the men because they kept us locked up separately.
BR: Did you receive enough to eat and drink?Maryama: They gave us one Ethiopian injerra [a round, fermented-flour â€œpancakeâ€ cooked in the shape of a large plate] per day. But the one injerra was always very spicy and we had to share it with ten people. We werenâ€™t given anything to drink.
BR: Ten people for one injerra?Maryama: Yes, they gave us three meals a day, but at each we got one injerra that we had to share. For ten people, one injerra without water.
BR: Did your relatives bring you anything to eat?Maryama: No, they werenâ€™t allowed to. If they had brought food, the Ethiopian army would have thought they were also sympathizers, feeding us because they felt guilty.
BR: How did you survive such treatment? Did anyone die?Maryama: Yes, some died, and the torture killed others, who disappeared. After the soldiers came to get them, they would simply fail to reappear.
BR: When someone in the cell died, did the soldiers take the body away or let it rot there?Maryama: They would carry the bodies out but then throw them somewhere. Where, we donâ€™t know.
BR: Do you know how many died during that time?Maryama: There were people who came before me, and others who came after. Therefore, I canâ€™t say exactly. During the time I was there, however, four women died.
BR: Couldnâ€™t your family help you? Did they ransom you, or did the soldiers simply let you go after twenty days?Maryama: My family couldnâ€™t help me. If they had tried, they would have been arrested as well. Later they did pay the ransom. They also gave houses.
BR: What kind of houses?Maryama: Because the village hadnâ€™t been my permanent home, I needed a sponsor there. When the soldiers take the ransom, they also want someone with houses or possessions as a sponsor.
BR: How much ransom was paid?Maryama: I had to give them 1,500 birr. To be able to pay, we had to sell some of our animals.
BR: And after you were released, you went away?Maryama: Yes, I fled.
BR: What happened to the relative who sponsored you?Maryama: I heard that they arrested him, and theyâ€™ll let him go only when I return.
BR: How long has he been in prison?Maryama: Iâ€™ve been here for two months. I heard that heâ€™s been in jail for one.
BR: How did you get here? Who helped you?Maryama: I walked from Hamarro to Fik and then continued on foot until I had almost reached Babile, when a car picked me up. From Babile, I traveled further through Jijiga and Boorama, heading toward Lowjacado. From there, I went again on foot to Djibouti.
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Sahra, 23, from Garbo in Ogaden (interviewed in Djibouti on December 5, 2005)
BR: Youâ€™re from Garbo. Whatâ€™s the city like, and how many people live there?Sahra: I donâ€™t know exactly how many, but Garbo has a large population. Most people live in straw huts, but there are a few businesses and larger houses made of stone.
BR: When you were living there, what kind of work did you do?Sahra: I sold tea in a little shop. I had to earn money to support my siblings because our father is dead.
BR: When and why did you come to Djibouti?Sahra: I came two years ago to escape the oppression my people suffer and because Iâ€™d been repeatedly arrested.
BR: Can you tell us in detail about your arrests? Why were you detained?Sahra: When I was at work, they came and accused me of having something to do with the ONLF, the group fighting in the countryside. Not once in my life had I known where the ONLF was headquartered. But they arrested me anyway and put me in jail for a long time. On my release, I moved around from place to place, but without fail, every time I returned: they threw me back in prison. And this isnâ€™t only my story. There are others, too, with the same experience. Once I was locked up for nine months, then for thirteen months, and then for four months.
BR: What was the rationale behind repeated arrests?Sahra: Thatâ€™s just how it is in Ogaden these days. Every day, violations of rights. Soldiers are paid to commit them. There was no court that convicted me; theyâ€™re accusing me of something I didnâ€™t do.
BR: Where did this idea come from, that people are being arrested for money?Sahra: Whenever youâ€™re arrested, you have to pay to get out. And then after youâ€™re out, they pick you up again. But many prisonersâ€™ families are simply too poor to buy their release, so they stay behind bars.
BR: And nobody defends themselves against this?Sahra: No. Weâ€™re all in fear for our lives and are trying simply to get out. Any little thing can serve as an excuse to accuse you of associating with the ONLF. So nobody defends themselves.
BR: Are people sympathetic with the ONLF?Sahra: No, weâ€™re not.
BR: Can you tell us what it was like in jail? How many people were there?Sahra: Iâ€™m not sure how many, but it was pretty crowded. Like today, twenty new ones might arrive. Tomorrow, more. The next day youâ€™ll have another group. In any case, there were a lot. The first ones I remember who died were a boy and girl, and two women had babies. The second time I was in jail, two women died. And there are other women who are said to have died while being raped. During my third jail term another woman died. There were days when they passed food on to us, but others when we didnâ€™t get anything.
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BR: Were the women who gave birth in prison already pregnant when they were arrested?Sahra: Some were pregnant on arrival. But others, young girls, were impregnated by the soldiers. Little girls, thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds, in prison and suddenly pregnant. Sometimes they let pregnant women go. As for the girls, they wanted doctors to perform abortions, but religious leaders in the village were against it, since our faith forbids abortion. During this period, five girls and another five married women got pregnant.
BR: Who helped these women when they went into labor?Sahra: We had some older, experienced women with us in jail. One, Dahaba Sherif, helped the women in their cells. We all did.
BR: How many females in prison were minors?Sahra: Well, once we had eight children with us, another time three little girls, the youngest about ten. All the other men and women were adults.
BR: Were you raped?Sahra: Yes, I was. They donâ€™t differentiate between a girl and a married woman. There were a lot of women in prison, and every night they would take a few out. It differed. The men would come toward evening and take a girl out behind the barracks. There were ten of them, so you never knew whoâ€™s going to be first and who last. In one evening, they might even do it to you twice. First they beat us, and then they raped us.
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BR: What helped you to survive your months in prison?Sahra: What helped me? Nothing. I simply sat there with the others and shared the horror of our days. I simply had to make it. Itâ€™s always been my hope that the Ogadenis who escaped and live abroad would tell the world about our problems so that, finally, help will come.
BR: How did you go from Garbo to Djibouti?Sahra: First I went to Kâ€™ebrÄ« Dahar, where my aunt lives, but I couldnâ€™t find her. A friend then paid a car to take me to Hargeysa, where I bumped into a woman I had known in prison. She gave me the money to go as far as Lowyacadde on the border with Djibouti. From there, I walked.
BR: How do you manage in Djibouti?Sahra: Here we have problems, too. You clean somebodyâ€™s home but they might not pay you for the whole month youâ€™ve worked. So you get hired by someone else, and the same thing happens. The only ones you know will help are the other Somalis here.
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Ogaden, much more than simply a very dry region in southeast Ethiopia, has been in turmoil for decades. Darfur is on everyoneâ€™s mind, and rightly so, but right across the border, underreported genocide has been taking place in Ogaden. You have just read interviews with refugees from that devastated region who spoke Somali to an interpreter who recorded their depositions in simple German. Translating this text into English gave rise to difficult choices, and the speakersâ€™ verbal personalities were to some extent lost, resulting in a generic reportage that may come across as emotionally understated. However, the original Somali clearly witnesses mortification, anger, and pain, especially in rendering womenâ€™s exceptional burdens.
Womenâ€™s testimony here represents the experience of a particularly vulnerable group on whom atrocities have been heaped: 99 percent of Somali women have undergone infibulations (generally performed on girls of between four and seven years of age), the amputation of the labia minora, generally without anesthesia, followed by stitching of the vagina to a minuscule opening that stretches only moderately with repeated conjugal relations. One must know this in order to understand why, denied a midwifeâ€™s attendance, parturient women and their infants die, as cutting is essential to let the baby out. Rape of an already tortured organ adds another excruciating dimension to the intolerable situation.Â
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Africa Update

2009-07-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

Areas of Conflict:

Ethiopia:

The rebel army Ogaden National Liberation Army (ONLA,) the military arm of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF,) continues to attack government soldiers, claiming that war crimes are being committed by government troops.

The ONLF is a separatist rebel group fighting to make the region of Ogaden in eastern Ethiopia an independent state. Because Ogaden is populated by many ethnic Somalis, the ONLF claims that Ethiopia is an occupying government.

Ethiopia has been accused of human rights abuses for the past several months. Restrictions on humanitarian assistance to the Somali Region (known as the Ogaden) continue with little international criticism. The government continues to engage in sporadic armed conflict against the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) and both forces perpetrate human rights abuses against civilians.

The government still refuses to allow unhindered independent access for human rights monitoring.

According to Human Rights watch, reports, dating back to 2007, of beatings, rape and other forms of torture, forcible conscription and extrajudicial executions in the Somali Region are being investigated by a government-contracted body but not by an independent international body.

Denan Project Founder Tells Rotarians

2009-07-08T21:03:00.000-07:00

By: Tammy McVey-Camilleri 07/08/2009

Dick Young (center) of the Denan Project, welcomed by Woodbury-Southbury-Middlebury Rotary Club President Rudy Mazurosky (left), publisher of Voices, and Rotary Treasurer Ron Webb, told Rotarians that when the Denan elders knew he was returning to the U.S., they asked that he express to all those who help the words “mahit senit” as often as he can. Mahit senit in the local language means thank you. (McVey-Camilleri photo)
...Read More>> http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20341865&BRD=1380&PAG=461&dept_id=157533&rfi=6

Ethiopian rebels, government claim gains in restive region

2009-07-07T19:58:00.000-07:00

ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — Ethnic Somali rebels in Ethiopia's Ogaden region claimed Monday they killed 90 government troops in recent clashes, but the government denied any losses, claiming victory instead.

In a statement, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) said it had "conducted a coordinated military operation" in Kebridehar, Degahabur and Jijiga, in response "to increased harassment and war crimes being committed by the Ethiopian Army".

The ONLF "conducted coordinated military operations ... killing 90 soldiers and wounding more than 100 others", the group said, before adding that six Ural military vehicles were destroyed and dozens of assault rifles captured.

The group did not disclose when the incidents took place, but said "engagements are still going" on in one locality of the vast region.

Government spokesman Bereket Simon admitted "incidents", but said it was the rebels who sustained heavy losses.

"They are trying to hide their losses. Once again the militia managed to get them and inflict heavy damage on the ONLF," he told AFP.

Bereket said the group sustained around 80 deaths during the fighting.

Ethiopia's military launched an offensive against the ONLF after they attacked a Chinese-run oil venture in the Ogaden in 2007, killing 77 people, including nine Chinese nationals.

Addis Ababa recently announced that the rebellion was on "its last knees" as a result of "successful" campaigns against them.

"It was the first time they were trying to regroup since the campaign in the region," Bereket said.

The ONLF is fighting for the independence of ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia's oil-rich Ogaden region. They say the local people have been marginalised by Addis Ababa.

'Why I took up arms against Ethiopia'

2009-07-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

Ahmed, 35, is a member of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), one of a number of separatist groups fighting for independence of the Somali-speaking Ogaden region in the east of Ethiopia.

Read More > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8112541.stm

Ethiopian rebels threaten foreign oil companies

2009-06-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

By Barry Malone
Reuters
Wednesday, June 3, 2009; 2:02 PM

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - An Ethiopian rebel group on Wednesday warned international oil companies against exploring in a region of the Horn of Africa nation where the rebels attacked a Chinese-run field in 2007 killing 74 people.

The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) -- whose hundreds of fighters seek autonomy for the ethnically Somali Ogaden region -- said oil firms had cleared some 1,600 square kilometers, displacing locals and destroying vegetation.

"Certain multinational oil corporations are intent on exploiting Ogaden fossil fuel resources in alliance with the current Ethiopian regime that is committing genocide and war crimes in Ogaden," it said in an emailed statement.

"Besides destroying the livelihood of the rural population in the affected areas, these companies are filling the coffers of this regime and financing its criminal activities in occupied Ogaden."

The group has in the past directly threatened Petronas, the Malaysian state-owned company, which is one of more than a dozen international explorers hunting for oil and gas in Ethiopia.

Cash-strapped Ethiopia is keen to attract foreign investors and denies the rebelsare still a threat.

Ethiopian forces launched an assault against the rebels -- who have been fighting for more than twenty years -- after the 2007 attack on an exploration field owned by a subsidiary of Sinopec, China's biggest refiner and petrochemicals producer.

Addis Ababa now says the ONLF has been defeated.

The rebel statement said any firm working in the region would be considered complicit in crimes by Ethiopia's military.

"In order to accommodate these immoral and gluttonous rushes for oil in Ogaden, Ethiopia killed, raped and illegally detained thousands of Ogaden civilian and imposed economic and aid blockade at a time of when there was a full-blown drought in the Ogaden," it said.

"ONLF has persistently warned these unscrupulous multinational companies and their governments ... the ONLF has been left no alternative but to take all measures necessary to protect the inalienable rights of the Ogaden people."

Ethiopian officials deny rights abuses in the Ogaden region, saying the rebels are the ones perpetrating crimes there on locals.

(Editing by Matthew Jones)

NHS Students' Battle of Bands Benefits Denan Project

2009-05-20T17:04:00.000-07:00

Voices - Woodbury,CT,USA
05/20/2009

Since 2004, teachers, students and administrators in NHS have pitched in to help Denan, raising money with concerts, penny drives and auctions.

The project's logo, which the people of Denan see as a powerful symbol, was designed at NHS by student Rachel Tobin in art class.

All the money donated to the Denan Project benefits the people of the Denan area. The project's free hospital is the only one in the entire Ogaden, a region of some 350,000 square kilometers with a population of more than 4.5 million.

Read More >>> http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20317302&BRD=1380&PAG=461&dept_id=157525&rfi=6

New Tree Found In Ogaden

2009-04-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

Posted on: Friday, 24 April 2009, 06:40 CDT

Botanists discovered a pink-flowered tree in Ethiopia that has been overlooked by generations of researchers.

The acacia fumosa tree is located in a war zone so it was not "found" for scientific purposes until 2006-7.

"I have spent a lifetime looking at plants and describing species -- it knocked me sideways when I heard about this tree," said David Mabberley of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England.

"The total numbers must be in the millions," he said of the 20-foot tall tree that covers hillsides in an inaccessible area of 3,100 sq miles near the border with Somalia.

The article about the acacia fumosa tree is in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Mabberley noted the flowering tree had probably been overlooked by generations of botanists, because it grows in the same region where the Ogaden National Liberation Front is fighting for autonomy.

From rainforests to mountains to the ocean depths, researchers say the discovery was encouraging that other overlooked large species might still be found.

"It's an upbeat story for a change," Mabberley said.

Swedish botanist Mats Thulin found the tree and previously described it in a Nordic journal.

Some believe the tree may have commercial uses, for instance in gum used for foodstuffs or glues. It’s currently used for firewood only.

Mabberley said around 10,000 new species of plants or creatures are described worldwide every year, but most of them are small.

"I suspect there are still large species out there to be discovered," said Craig Hilton-Taylor, head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of endangered species.

He said the most likely places to find overlooked species were in countries that have suffered conflicts like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cambodia or Colombia.

---

Image Caption: A tree now named Acacia fumosa covers thousands of square kilometers of the limestone hills in Ethiopia's Ogaden region. Yet botanists had never named the tree until 2008. The new species bears pink flowers in the dry season, unlike most acacias, which produce yellow or cream blooms in the wet season.Credit: Thulin

---

On the Net:

Royal Botanic Gardens
Science

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

Statement On Call For UN Human Rights Investigation of Ethiopian Regime

2009-04-17T22:25:00.000-07:00

17 April 2009

The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) strongly supports the call by Genocide Watch for the initiation of an investigation of the human rights situation in Ethiopia based on the proprio motu powers of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The ONLF has maintained for some time that the Ethiopian regime of Melez Zenawi is engaged in war crimes tantamount to Genocide in Ogaden. The United Nations own humanitarian assessment team which visited Ogaden in September 2007 concluded that an independent investigation was warranted but this recommendation was never acted upon and the details of their findings with regards to human rights was never fully released.

The United Nations cannot continue to sit by idly as countless innocent civilians in Ogaden are killed senselessly by the armed forces of Ethiopia in a deliberate policy aimed at ethnically cleansing the Somalis of Ogaden from their own land. Should the UN High Commissioner choose to initiate a human rights investigation, the ONLF affirms that we will cooperate fully with this effort.

The fact that the current Ethiopian regime has increased its military budget and is seeking to expand domestic arms production capacity as reported this week is indicative of the misguided priorities of this regime even when faced with the stark reality of poverty, recurring famines and lack of access to education and health services for the broad masses.

Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF)

See >>> Genocide Watch Open Letter to UN
http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/Ethiopia090323UNHCHR.pdf

O.N.L.F PRESS RELEASE

2009-04-11T04:46:00.000-07:00

O.N.L.F Press Release
8 April 2009

Claims by the Ethiopian regimes Communication Minister, Bereket Simon, that the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) is "now in a state of crisis and very weak" can only be described as wishful thinking which is far from reality and bordering on fantasy.

The fact of the matter is that the ONLF's operational capacity is now higher than at any point since the start of the organizations armed struggle. It is precisely because the Ethiopian regime seeks to conceal from the international community the widespread support the people of Ogaden have for the ONLF and the exponential growth of the ONLF's military might that members of the international media are denied unfettered access to Ogaden.

The ONLF has defeated every major military campaign launched by the Ethiopian regime in Ogaden over the last two years and is on the offensive in all operational theaters in the Ogaden. Defections of the regimes troops are on the rise and, in some areas, Ethiopian troops are selling their weapons to ONLF military commanders.

The most recent claim by the regimes communication minister is clearly designed to instill a false sense of confidence in oil exploration companies which the regime is trying to lure back to Ogaden.

The communication ministers claim that "The situation in Ogaden now is improving by the day" is a gross misrepresentation of the true state of affairs in Ogaden and demonstrates the regimes continuing efforts to conceal the suffering it has inflicted on the people of Ogaden. It is also a response to growing international concern over the deliberate and systematic campaign of collective punishment, war crimes and genocide against the civilian population of Ogaden.

While the ONLF has left no stone unturned in a search for a just and peaceful settlement to the Ogaden conflict and still stands ready to enter into direct talks with the Ethiopian regime in the presence of a neutral third party mediator of international standing, the regime continues to choose a futile military solution in a bid to suppress the legitimate desire of the people of Ogaden to self-determination, development and democracy.

The fact of the matter is that there is no "round table" in Ethiopia, as the Minister claims, to discuss peace. The Ethiopian regime is, by all measures, a dictatorship with no respect for human or civil rights, it is a regime engaged in a deliberate and systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Somalis in the Ogaden.

The ONLF will continue to engage this regime wherever and whenever it enters Ogaden, we will also further strengthen our cooperation and coordination with other oppressed nations and members of the political opposition who respect our peoples legitimate rights to self-determination.

Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF)

Baird eyes Ethiopia trip to urge detainee's release

2009-04-03T14:22:00.000-07:00

By Louisa Taylor, Ottawa Citizen April 2, 2009

_______________________
Transport, Infrastructure and Communities

Minister John Baird is hoping to fly to Addis

Ababa this month to press for the release of

Bashir Makhtal, a Canadian citizen who has

been in an Ethiopian jail for more than t

wo years.

Photograph by: Chris Wattie, Reuters

__________________________________

OTTAWA — Senior cabinet minister John Baird is hoping to fly to Addis Ababa this month to press for the release of Bashir Makhtal, a Canadian citizen who has been in an Ethiopian jail for more than two years.

Earlier this week Baird made the formal request to the Ethiopian government for a meeting with a senior official. In an interview Thursday, he would not confirm which official, but it is believed to be Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

Baird would like to travel during the parliamentary recess, which is April 14 to 19.

"I made a commitment that if I thought it would be helpful to Bashir's case, I would travel to Ethiopia, and Canadian officials are in discussions with Ethiopian officials about it as we speak," said Baird, the minister of transport, infrastructure and communities.

The Ethiopian government alleges that Makhtal, an ethnic Somali, is a member of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, a group it considers a terrorist organization (Canada does not). Makhtal was arrested in Kenya in late 2006 and a month later was illegally flown to Ethiopia, where he was kept incommunicado and in solitary confinement for almost two years.

He was not allowed to see an embassy official for 16 months, and met his lawyer for the first time at the beginning of 2009.

A former Toronto computer programmer, Makhtal was operating a trading business in the Horn of Africa at the time of his arrest. He has denied all allegations against him.

"I've been pushing for due process and fairness and that's a message I'll take with me to Addis," said Baird Friday. "I look forward to making Bashir's case directly to senior officials."

"Knowing that senior government officials are willing to make interventions on Bashir's behalf sends a very strong signal to Ethiopia that the Canadian government is committed to this case," said Lorne Waldman, Makhtal's Canadian lawyer. "Now it's extremely important that they follow through. Bashir's life hangs in the balance."

To keep up the pressure on both the Ethiopian and Canadian governments, Waldman filed a lawsuit this week on Makhtal's behalf, asking the federal court to order the suspension of Canada's official government aid to Ethiopia on the grounds that it contravenes the Official Development Assistance Accountability Act. The act, which came into force last year, requires international aid programs to meet several criteria, including that it be consistent with international human rights standards.

Canada gave approximately $83 million to Ethiopia in 2006-2007, including $500,000 towards improving governance and the justice system.

War Without End Proceeds

2009-03-21T19:03:00.000-07:00

March 19, 2009: Asylum seekers are a continuing problem for Ethiopia. Refugees fleeing the war in Somalia have been increasing. The UN reported that 10,000 have collected in the border town of Dolo Ado (Somalia-Ethiopia border). One official described them as asylum seekers – which puts them in a slightly different category than a refugee. The implication is they are fleeing not simply war and its evils, but also fear violent political retribution.

March 15, 2009: Eritrea accused “some parties” in Ethiopia of helping Somali pirates. The Eritrean statement claimed that Ethiopia provides some of the pirates with “logistical support.” This is more of the Eritrea versus Ethiopia charge and counter charge, and one guaranteed to attract attention. Here’s why: Somali pirates do operate out of anarchic regions in northern Somalia. Ethiopia certainly maintains an intelligence presence in northern Somalia and has contacts with the “statelets” of Puntland and Somaliland. Eritrea would love to tar Ethiopia as being part of the pirate problem.

March 11, 2009: Eritrea condemned the International Criminal Court warrant for the arrest of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. Eritrea has decided to support Sudan’s government to the hilt. There are several reasons. One is that Eritrea completely distrusts the UN. Eritrea accuses the UN of favoring Ethiopia in its border dispute. Sudan sees the UN as an instrument of “European imperialism” (that’s the pitch at the moment). This suits Eritrea just fine. Sudan and Ethiopia don’t get along very well, either. It’s all about stirring up trouble for Ethiopia.

March 9, 2009: The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) claimed another victory over Ethiopian security forces. The ONLF said its fighters were attacked by Ethiopian military forces that remain “stationed near the border” (ie Somalia-Ethiopia border). The fight allegedly took place near the town of Mustahil (also spelled Mustaxiil). The ONLF repelled the attack and killed approximately 30 Ethiopian soldiers, then took control of Mustahil. The Ethiopian government completely denied the report. ONLF also claims to have destroyed several trucks. Ethiopian military sources frequently report that their units exchange gunfire with Somali rebels. Ethiopia claims that the ONLF is backed by Eritrea. Since March 1, several Ethiopian and Ogaden rebel websites had reported that Ethiopian local militia forces (this usually means tribally-based security forces) have been fighting with ONLF rebels in the Ogaden.

February 22, 2009: Eritrea completely rejected any new attempts to mediate the border dispute with Ethiopia. New diplomatic efforts have been launched as part of the UN’s attempt to mediate Eritrea’s dispute with Djibouti. The government of Libya made a new approach to Eritrea as well, and that was rejected. Eritrea’s official position is blunt: Ethiopia continues to occupy Eritrea territory. The 2002 border demarcation decision gave Eritrea the town of Badme. Ethiopia disputed the decision?but the decision was supposed to be binding (ie, the two countries had agreed to accept in advance the decision no matter how it went). Ethiopia reneged on that agreement.

February 20, 2009: 45 people were killed in fighting in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region. Ethiopian security forces fought with members of the Ogaden Naitonal Liberation Front (ONLF) near the towns of Fik and Degehebur. The ONLF claimed it killed 145 Ethiopia troops and local militia forces.

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ONA - Gudoomiyaha JWXO wuxuu uga digayaa dadweynaha Ogadenya shirqoolka cadawga

2009-03-18T15:04:00.000-07:00

Ku : Dhamaan Ugaasyada/Cuqaasha Somalida Ogaadeenya Rugtooda

Ku : Dhamaan waxgaradka Somalida Ogadenya Rugtooda

Ogg : Dhamaan xubnaha CWXO iyo kaadirka JWXO Rugtooda.

Uj : Fashilinta Shirqoolada cadawga

Waxaa jirta siyaasad guun ah oo gumaysi meeluu joogaba uu adeegsado oo ah – qaybi oo xukun -. Sabatoo ah wuxuu ogyahay gumaysiga inuusan ka guulaysan karin umad u midowday iska dulqaadista heeryada gumaysigiisa.

Siyaaba kala duwan ayuu adeegsadaa gumaysiga si marka ay xeelad ka fashilantaba uu mid kale ula soo boxo, suu u helo marwalba bulsho kala qaybsan oo cadaawad iyo colaad joogta ay ka dhexeyso.

Shirqoolada uu horey u soo tijaabiyay gumaysiga wayaanaha oo intaba ay fashilyeen bulshadeena gumaysi diidka ah iyo CWXO oo isku duuban waxaa ka mid ahaa; 1- Ciqaab joogta ah oo shacab aan waxba galabsan si wadar ah loo mariyo, si loo cabsi galiyo reeraha ka agdhow aaga lagu ciqaabayo shacabka.

Falalkan oo wali sidii u socda ayaa waxaa fulinaya ciidanka wayaanaha iyo qaar gacan-ku-dhiigleyaal ah oo u astaamaysan jabhadda.

2- Waxaa ka mid ahaa, in beelaha qaar si gooni ah loo ciqaabo, si loo ogolaysiiyo inay gumaysiga kula gorgortamaan badbaadin-tooda taasoo ah inay ka ilaalinayaan naftood-hurayaasha tuulooyinka ay dagaan iyo aagaga ka ag-dhow.

3- Waxaa ka mid ahaa in odayaal bulshada magac ku lahaa iyo qaar sheeganayay aqoon diineed la shiriyay oy soo saareen bayaano la leeyahay waxay kaga soo horjeedaan jabahdda.

4- Waxaa ka mid ahaa, in xubno daba-qoodhi ah la joojiyo wadooyinka oy dhibaan safarada iyagoo iska dhigaya CWXO, Ama intay iska dhigaan qaar ka soo goostay xeryahoodii oo ku soo birey CWXO, muddo ka dibna dib ku noqda oo iska dhiga ciidankii jabhadda oo isa soo dhiibay oo taleefishinka cadawga laga soo saaro sawiradooda iyagoo ka warbixinaya.

Falal kala duwan oo kuwaa la mid ah ayuu soo tijaabiyey cadawga iyo kuwa u adeega oo intaba la fashilyay.

Walalayaal; markuu ku fashilmay cadawga dagaaladii ugu dambeeyay oo dhamaan ciidankuu soo hawl-galiyay iyo wixii agtiisa ku hadhay ee daba-qoodhiga ahaa laga dhigay qaar la laayay iyo qaar is-dhiibay, iyo intii soo hadhay oo dib ugu soo carartey xeryihii ay ka soo duuleen, ayuu hadda bilaabay shirqool uu doonayo inuu ku abuuro iska-horimaad qabiil iyo dagaal sokeeye oon dhamaad lahayn.

Qorshahan oon waxba dhaamin kuwii ka horeeyay ayaa waxaa loo dhigay in loo fuliyo siyaabaha soo socda;

A) Koox daba-qoodhi ah ayaa loo dirayaa reera meel yaala oo intay galaan rag iyo caruurba ka laynaya.

B) Marka ay laayaan ayaa waxaa dusha laga saarayaa reeraha agtooda ah ee la doonayo in la’iska horgeeyo.

C) Waxaa dhacda in odayaashii isku daya inay arinta wax ka qabtaan la wada xidh-xidho iyagoo lagu eedeynayo inay jabhadda la shaqeeyaan.

D) Waxaa dhacda in dadka la laayay qaar la bah ah lagu wargaliyo inay diidaan waanwaan kasta oo ka soo horjeeda in dagaal lagu qaado beesha la calaamadiyay.

Jabhadda Wadaniga Xoreynta Ogadenya markay si dhab ah u ogaatay shirqoolkan iyo ujeedada uu ka leeyahay gumaysiga ee ah inuu bulshadeena ku mashquuliyo dagaal sokeeye oo ka jeediya xabadda ku socota ciidankiisa, wuxuu ugu baaqayaa dhamaan dadweynaha Somaliyeedee Ogadenya;

1- Inay iska jiraan shirqoolkan oy ka warhayaan dhaq-dhaqaaqa gacan-ku-dhiiglayaasha loo soo adeegsaday fulinta shirqoolkan.

2- Inay ogaadaan shirqoolkan in lagu fashilin karo oo kali ah dulqaad iyo feejignaan iyo ilaalinta wada-dhalashada iyo islaaminamada ka dhexeysa shacabka Somlaiyeed ee Ogadenya.

3- In wixii dhib ah ama khilaafaad ah ee soo kala dhex gala bulshada lala socodsiiyo CWXO. Iyaga ayaa daba gali doona raadadka dhaliyay dhibaatada oo xal lagu diirsadana ka gaari doona haduu Alla idmo.

4- Waxay Jabhadda Wadaniga Xoreynta Ogadeenya digniin culus oo kama dambays ah siinaysaa kuwa fulinaya shirqoolkan lagu dhibaataynayo shacabka.

Waxaan Ilaahay uga baryayaa umadeena inuu ka ilaaliyo shirqoolada cadawga dhibaatada gumaysigana uu ka dulqaado.

Midnimo. Mintid. Isku-tashi. Allahu Akbar.

Adm. M. Cumar Cusmaan / Gudoomiyaha JWXO

Ethiopia ONLF rebels 'seize town'

2009-03-10T01:54:00.000-07:00

Monday, 9 March 2009

Rebels in Ethiopia fighting for the independence of the Somali-speaking Ogaden region say they have captured a town in the east of the country.

The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) said it had seized Mustahil and was also fighting for the towns of Wardheer and Khalavo.

It said at least 80 Ethiopian soldiers had been killed.

An Ethiopian government spokesman told the BBC the reports were absolutely false and the ONLF was on the run.

On Saturday, the Ogaden rebels said they had killed more than 20 Ethiopian troops in recent fighting, a report also denied by the authorities in Addis Ababa.

The ONLF, founded in 1984, says the Somali-speaking population in Ethiopia's oil-rich Ogaden region has been marginalised by Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia's military launched an offensive against the ONLF after its fighters attacked a Chinese-run oil venture in Ogaden in 2007, killing dozens of people, including nine Chinese nationals.

O.N.L.F Military Communique'

2009-03-10T01:21:00.000-07:00

7 March 2009

Heavy fighting between Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) forces and those of the Ethiopian regime is currently taking place in the vicinity of Degah Bur in northern Ogaden. ONLF fighters from the 'Dufaan Unit' are engaging with Ethiopian troops, who at one point, occupied parts of Southern Somalia but have now been redeployed to Ogaden.

24 Ethiopian troops have been killed in this latest round of fighting since the 4th of March with dozens wounded. Ethiopian forces killed six ethnic Somali pastoralists in the area. Two of the six civilians died by hanging at the hands of the Ethiopian regimes troops.

ONLF forces have now captured the staging ground and an arms depot belonging to the Ethiopian unit operating near Degah Bur. Thousands of rounds of amunition and several dozen rifles have been captured.

ONLF military operations in the Degah Bur area will continue until the Ethiopian unit redeployed from Somalia is completely eliminated.

Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF)

Military Command Centre (MCC)

Ogaden Group Accuses Addis Ababa of Atrocities

2009-03-08T06:19:00.000-07:00

By Peter Clottey
Washington, D.C
25 February 2009

The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) is accusing the Ethiopian government of committing genocide against the people of the Ogaden region. The group said it would not relent in its effort to expose what it described as the nefarious activities of the Meles Zenawi government in the region. This comes after Ethiopia recently barred international journalists from the area, saying that the area is not safe. But the liberation group sharply disagreed and promised to tell the world about the need for an independent investigation into what the group said are the ongoing atrocities allegedly being committed by the Addis Ababa government. Abdirahman Sheikh Mahdi is a leading member of the liberation group. He was here in our VOA Washington studio after meeting US congressmen. Sheikh Mahdi tells reporter Peter Clottey that there should be a holistic approach towards resolving the insecurity situation in the Ogaden region.

"As you know, there is a big problem in the Horn of Africa and one of the problem areas is what is happening in the Ogaden region. So, our mission is to bring international attention to the calamities that are happening in Ogaden. There is a big fight between the Ethiopian government and the Ogaden Liberation Front. The Ethiopian government is abusing the people in Ogaden and there is an economic blockade, there is a massacre and there is actually an active genocide going on there. So, we came to the United States to highlight that issue and to meet relevant actors in international politics," Sheikh Mahdi noted.

He said international organizations have expressed their concerns about the difficult situation in the Ogaden region despite claims by Addis Ababa to the contrary.

"Both the United Nations and the International Human rights organization and the NGO's (Non-Governmental Organizations) in the area have already ascertained that there has been serious human rights violations in Ogaden. And the response of the Ethiopian government was to shut the doors and ban all NGO's journalists from going there. So, what we are saying is if Ethiopia is telling the truth, why doesn't it allow independent international journalists to go there and verify what we are saying? That is the reason why we believe the Ethiopian government is lying about what is going on in Ogaden," he said.

Sheikh Mahdi said there is a long history involving the surrounding countries who have fought over the Ogaden area for a long time.

"First of all the people in Ogaden are Somalis and the place is almost as large as Somalia. The population there is about six million and the population about Somalia is about eight million and the area is almost the size of Somalia. So, it is a whole territory it is not just a small region and because of history and because of the circumstances that have happened in the Horn of Africa during the 19 century Ogaden became separated from the bigger Somali nation," Sheikh Mahdi pointed out.

He called for international help towards finding a lasting solution to the ongoing problems in Ogaden.

"So, the issue of Ogaden if it is to resolved, we believe it cannot be divorced from the greater Horn of Africa problem because Somalia and Ethiopia have been at loggerheads because of Ogaden. So, the whole Horn of Africa needs a comprehensive solution. You cannot solve the problem there by piece meal. So, we believe that the international community should give as much attention to the problem in the Ogaden the same given to Somalia or may to Darfur or to other parts of the region," he said.

Sheikh Mahdi said there was need to give residents of the Ogaden region the right to determine what their future should be.

"The Ogaden National Liberation Front does not dictate what the people of Ogaden want. The people of Ogaden want self-determination and they have the right to choose whatever they want. They can choose to be state and they can choose to be part of any other nation in the area. But what we are saying is that let the people of Ogaden be given the right to decide what they want. Nobody can force them to choose what they don't want and what they don't want is very clear. The way Ethiopia is treating them and the way the Ethiopian government is dealing with them that is what they don't want," Sheikh Mahdi noted.

He called on Ethiopia to allow for international mediation to resolve the problems in the Ogaden.

"First of all we are telling the Addis Ababa government that bloodshed, African bloodshed has no value. So, far you have been believing in the rule of the gun, but what we propose to you is to stop that and accept internationally mediated negotiated peace process that have no conditions and which is run by credible international mediators," he said.

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Ethiopian Rebels Clash With Government Forces; at Least 45 Dead

2009-02-20T20:54:00.000-08:00

By Jason McLure

Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- At least 45 people died in clashes between Ethiopia’s army and the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front in the east of the country, government and rebel spokesmen said.

The ONLF said its ethnic Somali fighters killed 140 Ethiopian soldiers and allied militia members in battles over the past five days near the towns of Fik and Degehebur, according to an e-mailed statement from the group. In addition, 29 ONLF members died in the fighting, it said.

“The area around Degehebur is now completely in the hands of the ONLF, as is the area around the city of Fik,” it said.

Ethnic Somali rebels from the ONLF are seeking autonomy for Ethiopia’s Somali region, an arid tract of land twice the size of England, which is also known as the Ogaden. In June, New York-based Human Rights Watch accused the Ethiopian government of burning villages, executing civilians and raping women in an effort to quell the ONLF’s insurgency. Ethiopia denied the allegations.

Ethiopia’s government disputed the ONLF’s version of the latest fighting.

“This is completely wrong,” Ermias Legesse, Ethiopia’s state minister for communications, said in a phone interview today from Addis Ababa, the capital. “The regional peoples fought with the ONLF and they killed more than 45 ONLF soldiers.”

Legesse said three or four innocent people died in the fighting. He said he couldn’t respond to an ONLF claim that Ethiopian attack helicopters have been active in the region.

Opposition

Ethiopia claimed the Ogaden region in the late 19th century through a series of agreements with Italy and the U.K., which colonized much of modern-day Somalia. Ethnic Somalis from the Ogaden clan have opposed Ethiopian rule, and fighting in the region surged after the ONLF killed 73 Chinese and Ethiopian workers at an oil exploration site in the region in April 2007.

Ethiopia accuses neighboring Eritrea of backing the ONLF and has in turn backed Somali militias from rival clans to fight the rebel group.

Ethiopia has banned journalists from traveling independently in the region and rejected a United Nations call for an independent assessment of human rights atrocities.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via Johannesburg at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 20, 2009 04:08 EST

A row over human rights

2009-02-05T19:41:00.000-08:00

Ethiopia

Feb 5th 2009 ADDIS ABABA

From The Economist print edition

The government says Human Rights Watch has got it wrong. Really?

INDEPENDENT voices in Ethiopia are finding it ever harder to be heard. Suffocated by an irascible government, the country’s newspapers are now the least informative in east Africa. Journalists deemed critical of the prime minister, Meles Zenawi, are pilloried. And they are not alone.

Foreign aid people and diplomats say a law pushed through parliament last month will curtail the activities of local human-rights workers. The new law means that independent local outfits that get more than 10% of their income from abroad will be classified as foreign. Once designated as such, they will not be allowed to engage in anything to do with democracy, justice or human rights. Real foreigners are already banned from doing so. As few home-grown charities and non-governmental organisations can stand on their own feet in a country as poor as Ethiopia, the government will be able to control domestic dissent more tightly.
document.write('');

The task of raising human-rights issues now increasingly falls to foreigners. A particularly bitter tussle is under way over allegations of atrocities by Ethiopian soldiers in the country’s south-eastern Ogaden region. This area abuts the border with turbulent Somalia and is populated mainly by ethnic Somalis traditionally hostile to the government in Addis Ababa, the capital.

Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, accuses Ethiopia of war crimes and crimes against humanity there. It says that Ethiopian troops burned down villages and killed, raped and tortured civilians in a counter-insurgency campaign 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 allegations as hearsay and its methods as slapdash.

The government report found “no trace” of serious human-rights violations. People reported to have been killed or tortured were said to have been found alive and well. Villages marked down as torched were said to be unscathed. The sole admitted instance of torture was said to have resulted in a court-martial. According to the Ethiopian report, Human Rights Watch was one-sided, since it failed to document the guerrillas’ thuggery. Perhaps unwittingly, said the Ethiopians, it had made itself a propaganda tool of the separatists.

The Ethiopian investigation did not, however, examine all of Human Rights Watch’s accusations. Some executions listed by the group go unchallenged or are blamed unconvincingly on the guerrillas. The report skims over the Ogaden’s humanitarian emergency, which Médecins Sans Frontières, a French-based charity, lists as one of the world’s ten worst. The Ethiopian report flatly denies that the government blockaded separatist strongholds during a famine, thus starving civilians. The Ethiopians also lambast Human Rights Watch for not visiting the Ogaden, knowing that it was they who blocked the visit. They claim that the Ogaden has been open to anyone, yet most independent journalists have been banned from travelling there freely. Several aid organisations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, have been kicked out. Aid workers there speak only anonymously, for fear of expulsion.

The government has a general election to win next year. A wave of arrests of political dissenters, including a prominent opposition leader, Birtukan Mideksa, suggests the government wants to keep all its opponents in check.

A simple way for it to win confirmation of its claim that Human Rights Watch’s accusations are false would be to let independent journalists, both foreign and Ethiopian, visit the Ogaden and see for themselves.

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President Barack Obama Took The Oath Of Office As The 44th President Of The United States And Delivered An Inaugural Address...

2009-01-21T16:12:00.000-08:00

Petronas Urged by Ethiopian Rebels to Avoid Ogaden (Update1)

2009-01-14T13:24:00.000-08:00

By Jason Mclure

Jan. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Petroliam Nasional Bhd. was urged by rebels in Ethiopia’s Ogaden Basin not to resume oil exploration in the eastern region.

“Petronas and similar companies should consider the damage to their reputation if they effectively enter into a regime engaged in war crimes,” the Ogaden National Liberation Front said in a statement e-mailed to reporters today in the capital, Addis Ababa. “We urge Petronas to exercise corporate responsibility and steer clear” of the Ogaden region.

The warning comes after a Jan. 3 article in The Reporter, an Addis Ababa-based newspaper, which said Petronas had hired a United Arab Emirates-based company to resume exploration in the region.

Ethnic Somali rebels from the ONLF are seeking independence for Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, an arid area twice the size of England largely inhabited by nomads. In April 2007, the group attacked a Petronas exploration site operated by China’s Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Bureau, killing nine Chinese workers and 65 Ethiopians.

The attack triggered a counterinsurgency campaign by the Ethiopian army in the second half of 2007. The area is still under the control of Ethiopia’s military, which has barred foreign reporters from traveling independently in the region.

Tania Landsberg, group communications manager at Petronas’s African unit Engen couldn’t immediately comment when Bloomberg News reached her on her mobile phone. Petronas owns 80 percent of Engen.

No viable oil reserves have yet been discovered in eastern Ethiopia. Ethiopia and Somalia fought wars in 1963-1964 and 1977 over the region.

Wahde Belay, a spokesman for Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, didn’t answer calls to his mobile phone. Calls to Alemayehu Tegenu, Ethiopia’s minister for mines and energy, didn’t connect.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via Johannesburg at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: January 6, 2009 10:59 EST

Ethiopian Separatists Accuse Government of Killing 48 Civilians

2009-01-02T07:21:00.000-08:00

By Jason McLure

Jan. 1 (Bloomberg) -- An Ethiopian separatist group accused government soldiers of killing 48 civilians in a village in the country’s eastern Somali region last month.

The villagers were shot in an attack on Dec. 17 at Mooyaha, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) northwest of Degehebur near Ethiopia’s border with Somalia, the Ogaden National Liberation Front said in an e-mailed statement today in the capital, Addis Ababa. The group included a list of names of those killed.

“The area was closed off for several days in order to remove the bodies and eliminate the evidence of a massacre,” the ONLF said. “These people were unarmed.” State officials weren’t available to comment on the allegation.

Ethnic Somali rebels from the ONLF are seeking autonomy for Ethiopia’s Somali region, an arid tract of land twice the size of England, which is also known as the Ogaden. In June, New York-based Human Rights Watch accused the Ethiopian government of burning villages, executing civilians and raping women in an effort to quell the ONLF’s insurgency. Ethiopia denied the allegations.

Wahde Belay, a spokesman for Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, didn’t answer his mobile phone when called several times today for comment on the ONLF’s latest allegations. Korale Illiasu, an Ethiopian Defense Ministry official, said he couldn’t comment because he’d been transferred from his job as spokesman with the ministry and didn’t know who had replaced him.
In 2007, the United Nations twice requested access to the Somali region to conduct an assessment of human rights abuses. Ethiopia refused the requests.

Somalia Withdrawal

Thousands of Ethiopian forces in neighboring Somalia are expected to withdraw to Ethiopia’s Somali region this week, two years after invading Somalia to help remove Islamists from power and halt support for the ONLF from militias in Somalia. At least 800,000 people have been forced from their homes in the ensuing fighting between Ethiopian forces and Somali militias.

Ethiopia has controlled the Ogaden since the late 19th century. Ethiopia and Somalia fought wars from 1963-1964 and 1977-1978 over the region. Ethiopia also occupied border areas in Somalia in 1995 in an effort to destroy an Islamist militia that carried out attacks in the Ogaden. Somalia hasn’t had a functioning central government since 1991.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via the Johannesburg bureau at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: January 1, 2009 04:45 EST

ONLF Statement on Massacre In Mooyaha Village, Ogaden

2008-12-21T18:26:00.000-08:00

20 December 2008

The Ethiopian regimes army has carried out a wanton massacre in the village of Mooyaha near the town of Ararso 50 Km north west of Dagahbur, Ogaden on the 17th of December 2008.

The Ethiopian troops rounded up the villagers and started gunning them down indiscriminately. Forty eight (48) civilians mostly comprised of children women and elderly men died on the spot and at least fifty (50) are gravely wounded. The worrying factor in this callous act is that there were no ONLF forces in the area to justify an attack on the village making this a deliberate and planned execution style massacre. On the same day, the Ethiopian regimes army also killed six civilians in Galalshe town near Fik.

The Ethiopian troops have now sealed off the area and are preventing surrounding communities from coming to aid their compatriots with the wounded and to bury the dead. They are working hard to eliminate the evidence of this massacre.

The ONLF believes this is the beginning of a new round of genocide in the Ogaden where there has been an increase civilian attacks by the Ethiopian regime including attacks using assault helicopters against civilian targets.

The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) calls upon the United Nations to send an urgent mission to the village and investigate this massacre while providing necessary aid to the remaining survivors.

Furthermore, the ONLF calls upon the Security Council to hold the Ethiopian regime of Meles Zenawi accountable for its crimes against Humanity and Genocide in Ogaden. The ONLF is once again informing the world that Genocide continues in Ogaden and further delays in a direct international intervention will result in the continued loss of innocent civilian lives.

Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF)

EPRDF Failed Ethiopia But Accused The International Community Of Double Standards

2008-11-22T17:32:00.000-08:00

“In fact, despite the number of terrorist atrocities world-wide, and despite the resolutions of the General Assembly, some in the international community still appear to fail to understand the realities of terrorism. We would repeat: they are quite simple. Terrorism (to paraphrase the OAU/AU’s Convention on Prevention and Combating of Terrorism) is any violation of a state’s criminal laws which may endanger the life, physical integrity or freedom of, or cause serious injury, or death to, any person, any number of group of persons or damage public or private property, resources, or heritage of the state, in order to intimidate, frighten or coerce any government body or the general public, disrupt any public service or create general insurrection in a State”.

The above paragraph is an excerpt from an article titled “Terrorism, double standards and the international community” written by the Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. aiga
Surely if we stick to the above definition, Ethiopian government qualifies perfectly to be a terrorist state. However, despite its proven track record of grave human right violations, EPRDF-led Ethiopian government remains a close ally of the world’s super powers, particularly the US, exposing the inconsistency and the double standard of the latter. This relationship exemplifies how terrible many leaders in the developed world have abandoned the fundamental values of the countries they represent and betrayed their electorates.

This is the government that, in 2005 with no hope left of winning the election, shot dead more than 200 civilians in Addis Ababa, simply for protesting against the announced result of an election they believed to be rigged. This took place just less than two years after the Gambella massacre in which many hundreds of unarmed populations perished at the hands of the government. Imagine if this has happened in Zimbabwe or Sudan! How EPRDF treats its political rivals? Tamrat Layne has been in jail for more than a decade now, accused of corruption. What happened to Siye Abraha and Bitew Belay after TPLF split in 2001. They were too charged with corruption and power abuse. While I’m not defending them, few might doubt (if any) that the charges were politically motivated and the state power was horrendously abused, not least in the case of Siye. Again compare this how the international community would have criticised and condemned had this been in Zimbabwe.

Thousands have disappeared in the Oromo and Somali regions while Amharas were beaten into submission earlier in the process. War mongers lie, innocent people die. Can we count the number of innocent civilians killed cold-bloodedly by the state security forces? Yet EPRDF/TPLF enjoys an unqualified support of the western countries laying bare the very double standard Ethiopian government is accusing them of.

In the article, the ministry mentioned the assassination attempt of Dr. Abdulmajid Hussien who was a minister at the time. For argument sake, let’s say that Alitihad, ONL or ONLF was behind it – though hard to believe given the location of the incident and the timing. Whoever committed, the action was a crime and must be treated as such. But discuss with every Ethiopian Somalis and you hear loads of Abdulmajids killed by the government forces inhumanely in front of the public. They hardly miss to mention Mirad Layli (Gode woreda), Muhumed Omar Tube, Dek Mohamud Arab (Kabridahar woreda), Abdullahi Taflow, Abshir Abdi (Members of the local council), Muktar Adan, and many other civil servants executed publicly, not because of what they committed (they were not even suspects), but to terrorize the people.

Don’t we know what is going on in Somalia and Ogaden now? In Somalia, it has been reported that more than ten thousand died and about two-third of Mogadishu population have been displaced. Ethiopian forces involved in the conflict are accused of indiscriminate shelling (of civilian populated areas), use of banned weapons, gang rape and heavy looting. The situation is much worse in the Ogaden. Collective punishment, extrajudicial killings, torture, forced displacement, mass arrest without due process and rape are common in the region. As widely reported and at last shown digitally by Human Rights Watch villages were destroyed. To hit where it hurts most, at the peak of the 1 in 100 years drought, woredas have been blockaded to starve and pastoralists denied access to drinking water. To realise the effectiveness of these inhumane treatments and ensure that no one was spared (from the punishment), another unprecedented measure was introduced. Compensation (blood money) of USD 15000 was imposed to be paid by the local people for any one – military or local militias – killed by ONLF. It is not secret that the food aid is used as an effective political weapon. Imagine how many stories would have been made if Sudan would have expelled one aid organisation from Dafur. EPRDF have ordered many such organisations to leave the country with no consequence from the international community.

It is definitely impossible to list the atrocities committed by the security forces, but I emphasized Ogaden because of the depth and magnitude of the problem. I’m empathizing, and in no way undermining or denying, the physical and emotional pain millions of Ethiopian individuals in other parts of the country feel.

Where in the constitution are these collective punishments approved? If the attempt of Dr. Abdulmajid’s life is sufficient for one organisation to be a terrorist, where in the ladder of the list will EPRDF qualify?

Indeed EPRDF and particularly the TPLF seem to have forgotten their recent history. Their cynical mendacity and actions have wiped away the social reality that brought them to power. They have mistakenly clung to the belief that they could maintain the power, they so desperately want to keep, by terrorising the people. Little wonder such approach has not delivered a peace to its predecessors. The only way to end the starvation and civil wars with which Ethiopia is associated with is to end the denial of the rights that fuels them and to ensure that all people’s rights are equally protected.

The early anticipation, that EPRDF would be a harbinger of peace, justice, equality, democracy and economic salvation has been proven wrong. They have shown no sign of wanting to do this and it is increasingly becoming clear that it is finished now. As a ruling entity, it is in office but practically not in power. The system is paralysed, deeply disorganised and perhaps permanently damaged. Individual members do as they wish; pursuing their interests. Since EPRDF came to power, it failed to remain true to its promises. It has exploited our ethnic difference to divide us further and bring misery and endless conflicts. Yet unfortunately, many countries treat them as partners, especially in the fight against terrorism. Many Ethiopians found it difficult to fathom out how raping and strangling innocent girls and women in the remote Ogaden region could contribute positively to the war on terror. How can punishing, torturing, starving and killing the poverty-stricken pastoralists in the desert Ogaden weaken terror organisations?

John Holmes (UN Humanitarian Coordinator), after visiting the region admitted (with channel 4 interview) that there were issues he couldn’t say publicly and failed to criticise, even mildly, the government for its misdeeds. Similarly, many aid workers and diplomats feared to speak out. Now let’s hope that the unfair criticism of the article (of the Ministry) against Ambassador David Shinn and Prof. Ken Menkhaus will not silence them.

For Ethiopians, solutions seem far into the future but the questions are how much long can this continue and how long will it be before we rise and face the challenges? In conclusion, in their hour of need our brothers and sisters in Ogaden need our help, let’s stand by them.

Tadesse Mesfin
Geneva
Switzerland
Tadesse2001@live.co.uk

ONLF STATEMENT ON AMERICAN ELECTIONS

2008-11-10T21:28:00.000-08:00

5 November 2008

On behalf of the people of Ogaden, the Central Committee and Executive Council of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) wishes to express our profound congratulations to the people of the United States of America on the occasion of the election of President-Elect Barack Obama.

An Obama administration should have the political capital necessary to usher in a new era of global cooperation in confronting challenges to freedom, democracy and prosperity. An Obama administration will also be able to legitimately lead in holding friend and foe alike accountable for assaults on the aspirations of free peoples to choose their own destiny. Such leadership from the United States is sorely needed in Africa in general and the Horn of Africa in particular.

Today, the Horn of Africa finds itself engulfed in conflicts that could have been largely avoided had even handed diplomacy been the norm and not the exception. Poverty and famine continue to deepen and genocide in Ogaden continues unabated. The message to the people of the Horn has clearly been that freedom, human rights, justice, and even humanitarian concerns, take a back-seat to security interests. This approach has yielded no sustainable fruits.

It is therefore time to embrace a new politics where the freedom and self-determination of all peoples in the Horn is recognized as a foundation for sustainable peace,democracy and renewed prosperity.

As the Obama administration re-examines U.S. policy towards the Horn of Africa in general and the current Ethiopian regime in particular, the ONLF stands ready to be a partner in the pursuit of a just, comprehensive and lasting political solution to the Ogaden conflict and the realization of a peaceful, democratic, prosperous and stable Horn of Africa.

The aspirations of free peoples perseveres through seemingly insurmountable challenges precisely because the desire to live in freedom fuels the human spirit. It is why the people of Ogaden struggle despite the countless atrocities committed against them by successive Ethiopian regimes. It is why they yearn for freedom loving peoples to stand with them in that legitimate struggle.

It is, as President Elect Obama says, that 'audacity of hope', thepeople of Ogaden retain coupled with the clear understanding that while freedom is not and has never been free, it is and has always been, worth the sacrifice. For that sacrifice will lead to a day when an election, such as the one in the United States, can be held and every candidate can prove that in a free society, anything is possible.

Mohamed Omer Osman
Chairman
Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF)

Bleak scenes as Ethiopia puts war before famine

2008-10-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

On the front line of an invisible Ethiopian famine, government forces stand between the dying tribes scattered across a closed hinterland and outside aid.

By Damien McElroy
Last Updated: 9:14PM BST 17 Oct 2008

The restrictive Ethiopian security regime hiding the worsening crisis in the country's southern Somali region has infuriated important donors. Western officials privately warn that a damaging stand-off with the country is unfolding.

International relief agencies should be celebrating notable breakthroughs in the rush to stop a fresh wave of mass starvation in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa this week conceded that 6.4 million people were on the brink of death and agreed to open up the worst hit parts of the country to shipments of outside assistance.

But hard-won access to the bleak garrison town of Kebri Dehar in the Somali region, also known as the Ogaden, has unveiled the harsh realities of a regime determined to crush a rebel army.

The government strives to proclaim it has the upper-hand against the vicious insurgency waged by the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The desert raiders have waged a war of ethnic separation from Christian-dominated highlands since peace talks broken down in 2005.

In efforts to bolster its claims to have crushed the group, the government has staged Potemkin scenes in Kebri Dehar. Half-filled hospitals are marshalled by clean but uncrowded schools with plasma screen televisions. Meanwhile the streets appeared to have been emptied.

"The groups have been eradicated and the food is now moving freely," declared local administrator, Bashir Ahmed Abdi.

Nothing rings true in the boast. Two aid workers were kidnapped near Kebri Dehar just this month and are thought to have been spirited over the border to Somalia. British officials in the town reported it was flooded with Kalashnikov-carrying soldiers as recently as Wednesday. Skirmishes between the army and rebel fighters take place with regularity in the surrounding bush.

Five brigades of the Ethiopian army are based in Kebri Dehar's garrisons. Those caught in the middle of the war are too afraid to speak out against the government line.

School teacher Abdi Wahadi tried vainly to hide his embarrassment that his class size had been reduced to just six pupils, claiming that 70 were expected to enrol by the end of the week, even though the year started in September.

At the hospital the reluctance to acknowledge the impact of the war was clear in the maternity ward. One lone woman sat with a baby. An aid worker shamefacedly explained that two other women with far more malnourished children had disappeared.

"The others must be taken out," she said. "I'm not sure where they could have gone because the children are severely malnourished. I hope they are within the city limits."

A UN official went further. "The people's movements are severely restricted by the government," the official said. "If they are starving they get past the roadblocks to get into town; if they have any goats left they don't go to the watering hole because the army targets these; if they are ill they can't get into the hospitals to be treated."

In the town's market, there are hardly any goods. A diplomat in Addis Ababa said the overstretched Ethiopian army, which maintains an expeditionary force in neighbouring Somalia, has indiscriminately blocked movements in the region.

A government ban on truck has stopped food distribution efforts, according to World Food Programme officials. But it has also cut off supplies of consumer goods and durables that used to be imported from Somalia. "It's difficult to come here," said nomad Mohammad Farah, "when we get here we have nothing to sell and nothing to buy."

Oxfam reported this week that two million people are on the brink of starvation in Ethiopia's Somali region and that the long-term prospects of recovery were blighted by the loss of 60 per cent of cattle and 50 per cent of goats.

Frustrations over the Ethiopian government's refusal to throw open the doors to foreign assistance threaten a schism between Addis Ababa and its Western allies. "The events in Somali demonstrate too clearly the flaws in Ethiopia's willingness to engage with us as government and its actions on the ground," said a European diplomat. "A lot of governments are awkward on both fronts but by mixing its messages Ethiopia has got away with too much, for too long."

AN OGADEN WAR-DANCE

2008-10-01T20:37:00.000-07:00

Through Jubaland to the Lorian Swamp An Adventurous Journey of Exploration & Sport in the Unknown African Forests & Deserts of Jubaland to the Unexplored Lorian Swamp By Ignatius Nicolas Dracopoli

Ogaden, ONLF, and the UN – US Task to Prevent Famine: Eliminate the Abyssinian Culture of Death

2008-09-18T15:38:00.001-07:00

Nomads blame Ethiopian military as famine threatens 18/09/08

2008-09-18T15:38:00.000-07:00

HEADLINE: Hunger meets chaos in the Horn of Africa;

2008-05-22T03:54:00.000-07:00

Somalia in crisis as aid efforts fail

BYLINE: Jeffrey Gettleman - The New York Times Media Group

DATELINE: DAGAARI, Somalia

BODY:

The global food crisis has arrived at Safia Ali's hut.

She can no longer afford rice, wheat or powdered milk. A drought has devastated her family's herd of goats, turning the family's sole livelihood into a pile of bleached bones and papery skin.Safia, a 25-year-old mother of five, has not eaten in a week.

Her year-old son - an adorable but listless boy who does not respond to a pinch - is also starving. Somalia - and much of the volatile Horn of Africa - was about the last place on earth that needed a food crisis.

Even before commodity prices started shooting up around the globe, civil war, displacement and imperiled aid operations had pushed many people here to the brink of famine.

But with food costs spiraling out of reach and the livestock dropping dead in the sand, villagers across this sun-blasted landscape say hundreds of people are dying of hunger and thirst.This is what happens, economists say, when the global food crisis meets local chaos.

There has been a collision of troubles throughout the region: skimpy rainfall, disastrous harvests, soaring food prices, dying livestock, escalating violence, rampant inflation and shrinking food aid.Across the border in Ethiopia, in the war-racked Ogaden region, the situation sounds just as dire.

In Darfur, Sudan, the United Nations has had to cut food rations because of a rise in banditry that endangers aid deliveries.Kenya is looking vulnerable, too.

A recent headline in one of Kenya's leading newspapers blared, ''25,000 villagers risk starving,'' referring to a combination of drought, higher fertilizer and fuel costs and post-election violence that displaced thousands of farmers.

''These places aren't on the brink,'' said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist and top UN adviser, who recently visited neighboring Kenya.

''They've gone over the cliff.''Many Somalis are trying to stave off starvation with a thin gruel made from mashed thorn-tree branches called jerrin.

Some village elders said their children were chewing on their own lips and tongues because they had no food.

The United Nations has declared a wide swath of central Somalia a humanitarian emergency, the final stage before a full-blown famine.

But Christian Balslev-Olesen, the head of Unicef operations in Somalia, said the situation was likely to become a famine in the coming weeks.

Famine is defined by several criteria, including malnutrition, mortality, food and water scarcity and destruction of livelihood.

Some of those factors, like an acute malnutrition rate of 24 percent in some areas of Somalia, have already soared past emergency thresholds and are closing in on famine range.Balslev-Olesen said Unicef recently received reports of people dying from hunger and thirst.

It is hard to know exactly how many, he said, though local elders have put the number in the mid-hundreds.'

'We have all the indicators in place for a catastrophe,'' Balslev-Olesen said. ''We cannot call it that yet. But I'm very much concerned it's just a matter of weeks until we have to.

''Many people already consider Somalia a catastrophe. It has some of the highest malnutrition rates anywhere in the world - in a good year.The collapse of the central government in 1991 plunged Somalia into a spiral of clan-driven bloodshed that it has yet to pull out of.

The era began with a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people.The consensus now is that all the same elements of the early 1990s - high-intensity conflict, widespread displacement and drought - are lining up again, and at a time of the biggest spike in global food prices in more than 30 years.

The UN says 2.6 million Somalis need assistance and the number could soon swell to 3.5 million, nearly half the estimated population.

If there is excellent rain or a sudden outbreak of peace, the crisis may ease. But weather projections and even the rosiest political forecasts do not predict that.

Whether Somalia slips into a famine may depend on aid, and right now, that does not look so good.Eleven aid workers have been killed this year, and UN officials say Somalia is as complicated - and dangerous - as ever.

Beyond the warlord and clan fighting, there is a budding conflict with Western aid workers. The Bush administration has said that terrorists with Al Qaeda are hiding in Somalia, sheltered by local Islamists, and has gone after them with U.S. airstrikes. But a recent U.S. attack on an Islamist leader in Dusa Marreb, a town in the center of the drought zone, has prompted revenge threats against Western aid workers.

The United Nations and private aid organizations say it is now too dangerous to expand their lifesaving work in Dusa Marreb.'

'We're in a different contextual environment right now,'' said Chris Smoot, the program director for World Vision aid projects in Somalia.

He said there were anti-Western ''rogue elements that can shut you down, in any shape or form, at any time.''Aid is also a serious problem in the contested Ogaden region of Ethiopia, across the border from here.

A recent report written by a U.S. aid official said the drought there was ''clearly worsening'' and that the response by the Ethiopian government, one of the closest U.S. allies in Africa, was ''absolutely abysmal.''This may be no accident.

The Ethiopian government is struggling with an insurgency in the Ogaden, and the report said that ''food is clearly being used as a weapon,'' with the government starving out rebel areas, while a mysterious warehouse of U.S.-donated food was discovered across the road from an Ethiopian army base.

''The USG,'' meaning the U.S. government, ''cannot in good conscience allow the food operation to continue in its current manifestation,'' the report said.

''This situation would be absolutely shameful in any other country.''The report was not made public, though a copy was provided to The New York Times.

When asked about it, a senior U.S. aid official characterized the report as ''just a snapshot and one person's observations and impressions.''But the senior aid official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said:

''We're not saying there's not a crisis in the Ogaden. We're not saying the Ethiopian response has been satisfactory. But some progress has been made. And we need more.

''Ethiopian officials declined to comment and have long denied human rights abuses in the Ogaden.

May 19, 2008

GEOGRAPHY QUIZ, May 18

2008-05-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

The Ogaden is a dry, sparsely populated region that was fought over by Ethiopia and what bordering country in the 1970s?

African violence unreported

2008-04-28T19:01:00.000-07:00

Updated: 4/28/2008 6:22:02 PM

Does it bother anybody that the type of killing we saw in the movies "Hotel Rwanda" and "Sometimes in April" is happening right now in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia?

The land is occupied by ethnic Somalis who rightfully belong there. Also, there have been between 1 million and 2 million people displaced inside Somalia. They fled their homes in fear of the Ethiopian-backed transitional government, which has committed unspeakable atrocities against these people. Food supplies to the refugees have been cut off to purposely starve them. The Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations have been forced out at times because they might report the abuses.

Washington sends lots of money to the Ethiopian government because of its efforts to get three people who may or may not be in the neighborhood who committed terrorist acts in 1998. Does anyone else find this all a little hypocritical? Does this make you feel safe? Write to your senators, and tell them to stop sending money to Ethiopia. Hold these people accountable for the crimes they committed with our tax dollars!

Tell your favorite news outlet to report the story! Check out ogaden.com, hiiraan.com or BBC News, because you won't hear about it on Fox News or the nightly news on ABC, CBS or NBC.

DONNA DOUGLAS

Print/Email this article PRINT EMAIL

Statement On Puntland's Abduction & Extraordinary Rendition of ONLF Officials

2008-04-27T17:56:00.000-07:00

24 April 2008

The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) strongly condemns the forced abduction,detention and extraordinary rendition of two ONLF Central Committee members by the Puntland regional administration in Somalia on 22nd of April 2008. This act constitutes a clear violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and other Forms of Cruel, Inhumane, orDegrading Treatment as the two officials have a clear and well founded fear of persecution including torture in Ethiopia.

The two ONLF political prisoners were removed by force from their hotel in Garowe in central Somalia by security forces of the Puntland administration. After intense interrogation, they were then driven in the personal vehicle of the Puntland Minister of Finance Mohamed Ali Yusuf "Ga Gaab" to Ethiopian security forces waiting for them on the Ogaden side of the border with Somalia.

One of the ONLF officials was in Puntland to protest the deliberate killing of a citizen of Ogaden by Puntland security forces in a jail in the northern city of Bosaaso and to assist his family members. He was in regular contact with Puntland officials who never objected to his presence.

The other ONLF official was in Puntland visiting his spouse and children. Both were unarmed political figures and posed no threat to the security of Puntland.

The ONLF considers this act to constitute a clear hostile intent on the part of the Puntland regional administration toward the people of Ogaden.The consequences of this action shall be the sole responsibility of the Puntland regional administration.

Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF)

Rebels criticise Ethiopia for breaking ties with Qatar

2008-04-22T05:30:00.000-07:00

22 hours ago

ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — An Ethiopian rebel group on Tuesday criticised the government for breaking diplomatic ties with Qatar, saying the reasons it did so were "far from reality".

Addis Ababa severed relations with Qatar on Monday citing the Gulf State's "strong ties" with its arch-foe Eritrea and support to armed opposition groups within the country.

It also accused Qatar of becoming a "major source of instability" in the Horn of Africa region.

"If there has been a destabilising factor in the Horn of Africa, it has been the regime currently in

power in Ethiopia," the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) said in a statement.

"The Ethiopian regime's severing of diplomatic relations with Qatar is based on accusations which are far from reality and designed to divert attention from yet another unfolding African genocide in Ogaden."

The ONLF, operating in Ethiopia's southern Ogaden region, is fighting for the independence of ethnic Somalis in the region, who they say have been marginalised by Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia also charged that Qatar was using its media to undermine it, after the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera news network aired a series of reports earlier this month on the Ogaden region, where a news blackout has been imposed.

"Qatar follows Norway as the latest victim of the Ethiopian regime's paranoia in its dealings with the members of the international community," the ONLF added.

It said Ethiopia "can no longer conceal the systematic and deliberate persecution of an entire people solely because of their ethnic heritage and desire for self-determination".

"The regime can also no longer conceal the fact that it is not in effective control of Ogaden."

Ethiopia expelled Norwegian diplomats last year, explaining it was dissatisfied with the way the Scandinavian country was conducting its diplomacy in the region.

A day in the life of an Ogaden refugee 18 Apr 2008

2008-04-18T16:56:00.000-07:00

Residents struggle as Ogaden conflict simmers - 17 Apr 08

2008-04-17T03:13:00.000-07:00

Female fighters in Ogaden region - 16 Apr 08

2008-04-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

Unrest simmers in Ethiopia's Ogaden

2008-04-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

Al-Jazeera Ogaden

2008-04-14T03:48:00.001-07:00

Dhaqanka Dhurwaaga iyo Colaadda Kadhaxaysa Libaaxa

2008-04-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

Power Politics Trumps Democracy in U.S.-backed Ethiopia

2008-04-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

By Alex Stonehill and Sarah Stuteville

From the April 11, 2008 issue Posted in International Email this article

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—Dawn in the Merkato breaks over a tangle of streets jammed with shouting hawkers and towering pyramids of ripe produce from Ethiopia’s fertile countryside. Today it is a popular destination for sunburnt foreign tourists, expensive cameras poised to capture lively scenes from one of Africa’s largest open-air markets.

Few of them, unloading from tour buses today, know that less then three years ago these bustling streets were stained with the blood of murdered citizens who had flooded into the center of Ethiopia’s capital city to protest the contested re-election of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. “People were pissed off,” says Eskinder Nega, who was a columnist and publisher for several Ethiopian newspapers during the 2005 protests. “It was the first time we really had hope, and when the elections were stolen, people were angry. … It wasn’t planned — people just started pouring into the streets,” Nega said. The government reaction was swift. According to Amnesty International, 187 civilians were killed during those demonstrations and thousands of others arrested. Protesters, mostly young people and students, fell in the streets of the Merkato with bullets through their hearts and foreheads, a detail that led many to believe they were purposefully killed by specially trained military snipers, not regular riot police. Ethiopian publications and journalists that covered these events, especially those that focused on mounting human rights abuses, didn’t escape the wrath of the government either. At least 14 journalists, editors and publishers were arrested and all private newspapers that criticized government actions during or after the elections were shut down. When they first saw their photos on the news, Nega and his wife, Serkalem Fasil, went underground. They were in hiding for almost a month until the authorities finally caught up with them in the fall of 2005. For Fasil, who was one month pregnant at the time, it was her first trip to jail for journalism deemed seditious by the Ethiopian government. It would be Nega’s seventh.

THE TORTURE CHAMBER

The police were angry when they first captured the couple, explains Nega, sitting in an airy cafe in Addis Ababa nine months after their acquittal and release. Both of them were roughed up during their capture. When Fasil’s pregnancy became known she was no longer beaten, but Nega was not so lucky. “I was in an isolation cell at that time. They came for me in the middle of the night,” Nega recalls, calmly explaining how one night he was blindfolded and dragged by his armpits into another room he can only refer to as the “torture chamber.” “They flip you over onto your back with your feet in the air, and then hit you on the bottom of your feet, and everywhere with an electrical cord. I couldn’t move for weeks afterward.” Nega’s story echoes accounts of intimidation, arrests and beatings recounted by journalists in many parts of the world. Alarmingly, these accounts of iron-fisted censorship emerge not only from the notoriously repressive regimes that often make the news such as North Korea, Burma or Iran. Just as often they come from the political darlings of the United States’ foreign policy; places like Pakistan, Egypt and more recently Ethiopia. The “War on Terror” has allowed U.S. leaders to re-introduce a Cold War-style paradigm, in which countries slip simply into the categories of democratic and undemocratic. But most of the world eludes these dogmatic categorizations — with many countries caught in a web of geopolitical forces and troubled histories manipulated by authoritarian leaders who are tolerated, if not supported by the “democratic world.” These countries linger in the great swath of gray ignored by the black and white rhetoric of the “War on Terror”; leaders here are often seen as strategic to the Western world in ways that allow for a blurring of democratic expectations. A kind of collective squinting obscures some of the brutal realities that threaten to muddy the path on the way to larger strategic goals.

DEMOCRATIC DREAMS DASHED

“I want a democratic country for Ethiopia, I want to contribute to that. I am a child of the First Amendment,” says Nega, who spent his formative years in Washington, D.C., after his parents fled the communist Derg regime that ruled Ethiopia during the 1970s and 1980s. When the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), led by current Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, drove out the Derg in 1991, Nega returned armed with democratic values he says he picked up in the United States, and began a career in journalism. But the end of communisim, it turned out, did not automatically signal the beginning of democracy. “[Before the 2005 elections] we had press freedom not because the ruling party wanted it, but because we paid the sacrifice” says Nega, referencing his previous stints in prison as well as those served by scores of fellow Ethiopian journalists. Those who dared to ask for more from their government, using the press to push for reforms, representation and accountability, or even tried to amuse readers by poking fun of their leaders in political cartoons, would often receive a late-night visit from the police. Over the course of seven years Faisal and Nega owned three different Amharic-language papers all of which were criticized for having an “anti-government bias” and later even inciting violence. Nega rebuffs these claims, saying their papers were independent, having no association with specific opposition parties, and that they attacked the government primarily for its human rights record, which he insists is a nonpartisan issue. But any illusions Nega might have still held that his country was on a rocky but progressive march toward democracy were shattered after the 2005 elections. With political alliances and development aid from Western countries on the rise, the Ethiopian government was under pressure to produce internationally-endorsed election results. Ninety percent of registered voters in the country showed up eagerly at the polls in May 2005 — but how they actually voted is still a matter of contention. When early returns indicated a surprising amount of support for the opposition, the vote counting was disrupted and eventually the ruling party declared itself the victor. Angry voters responded in two waves of protests that shook Addis Ababa over the course of the next six months. As the blood of protesters was spilled in the streets of Addis, and many of their colleagues were swept up in mass arrests, Nega and Fasil knew this wasn’t just another routine round of political intimidation. They hid, watching their photographs flash on the government TV station as charges of genocide and high treason were leveled against them. In fear for their lives, they tried to flee to Kenya, but their location was given away before the proper travel plans could be made. As horrified as Nega was with the actions of his own government, his disillusionment was only deepened by the reinforcement the EPRDF received from the leaders of a country he’d admired for so long. While the European Union decried widespread irregularities in the 2005 elections and condemned violence and arrests, The Carter Center (officially representing the United States) expressed concerns over alleged irregularities but supported the National Election Board’s declared results. As Nega and Fasil sat in prison over the next 17 months, Ethiopia’s relationship with the United States was only strengthened. Today, a year after their release, the ties that bind the two governments are as strong as ever.

PROXY WAR IN SOMALIA

The rise of the “War on Terror” has turned a nation of 77 million people defined in the West by poverty and famine into a powerful military force strategically situated in the tumultuous Horn of Africa. While Ethiopia received only $928,00 in military aid from the United States from 1999 to 2001, it received $16.8 million in assistance from 2002 to 2004, according to the Center for Public Integrity. When Islamist judges in neighboring Somalia emerged from a decade of warlord driven chaos as a unified force in the summer of 2006, the United States and Ethiopia found themselves with a common enemy. For the United Sates, still smarting from its military misadventure in Somalia in 1993, the idea of an Islamist government in the Horn of Africa, and a possible safe haven for terrorists, was unacceptable. For Ethiopia, looking to solidify its regional hegemony, and already battling an insurgency by its own Somali population in the Ogaden region, the reunification of Somalia under the banner of Islam was equally unpalatable. Even with alleged support from Egypt, Eritrea and foreign Islamist fighters, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) government was easily driven out of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, within a matter of weeks by thousands of Ethiopian troops trained and supported by the U.S. military to an extent that neither government has disclosed to date. But in the year since, Ethiopia’s military dominance has proven susceptible to guerilla tactics in the same way American forces have in Iraq, and a continuing series of suicide bombings and insurgent attacks have led Mogadishu to be dubbed “Baghdad by the sea.” Meanwhile, Ethiopian troops have also had their hands full on the other side of the border in the Somali region of their own country. Last April rebels from the Ogaden National Liberation Front attacked Chinese oil workers who were doing exploratory drilling in the region. In the ensuing military crackdown, Ethiopian forces have been accused of war crimes, including killing and raping civilians and burning villages thought to sympathize with the rebels. But on the streets of Addis, it’s hard to imagine you’re in a country in the midst of two wars (and possibly on the verge of a third with neighboring Eritrea). Since the crackdown in 2005, the independent press has all but disappeared. The private newspapers that are left are careful to vet news of Ethiopia’s engagements in Somalia or Ogaden. Expatriate websites are blocked on the government controlled Internet server, so they can’t be accessed from inside the country without use of proxy servers.

A COUNTRY GRIPPED BY FEAR

But if Prime Minister Zenawi has been able to hide the realities of Ethiopia’s military entanglements, there is no mistaking that his is a country gripped by fear. In Addis Ababa, politics are spoken of in whispers, and many Ethiopians say they’d prefer to abstain from the topic entirely, at least for now. Most attempts to engage Ethiopians in political conversations are rebuffed. The few willing to talk, such as a taxi driver who had been arrested during the 2005 protests or a young businessman trying to make enough money to start a family, did so only on repeated promises of complete anonymity. Even once anonymity was guaranteed, their trepidation was palpable. In one case a young man reached for this reporter’s camera with shaking hands asking for reassurance that his picture had not been taken. One of the elements most confounding to reporting on, or even just talking about, political issues in Ethiopia is determining how far the government’s reach really is into the private lives of citizens who disagree with its actions. It’s unlikely that the government actually has the capacity to check up on random dissenting opinions, but, regardless, the effect is the same. Images of students shot dead in the streets and mass arrests have stifled political opposition in the population. As one frustrated citizen admitted, “I don’t care for politics, politics is for only a few people in Ethiopia; 98 or 99 percent don’t have any say, so why should I extend my hand to politics?” For Nega’s part, he says he still believes the United States could become a positive force in democratizing Ethiopia, and his unwavering faith in the democratic process strengthens his conclusion that he will see the pendulum swing back from the Bush administration’s hard-line “War on Terror” policies. Still, he comes across as calmly disappointed with the political maneuvering that resulted in the double betrayal of being imprisoned by the country of his birth and overlooked by the country that nurtured his belief in democracy. “The U.S. policy is a calculated complicity with tyranny because of the ‘War on Terror,’” he says. “Nothing matters except for the war. The democratic cause here is expendable.” A spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa claims that the U.S. government is advocating press freedoms in Ethiopia through “ongoing human rights discussions with senior leaders.” In the meantime Nega remains hopeful and sees signs that suggest the tide may be turning in America’s policy toward Ethiopia. A resolution calling for limited sanctions on Ethiopian officials involved in the 2005 killings has passed through the House, and is now under debate in the Senate. Nega and Fasil’s tenacity stand in stark contrast to the disillusionment that hangs in the cool air of Addis Ababa. Following their eventual release from prison, they filed for a license to start two new papers, which was rejected by the government. Other Ethiopian newspapers won’t risk publishing their work. Fasil’s baby was born in jail in the summer of 2006, and their blacklisting has forced them to support the family on savings, as they refuse to be forced into exile. To hear Nega tell it, speaking loudly in a café on Addis’ busy Bole Road, the struggle may be difficult, but the goal is inevitable: The people of Ethiopia will eventually win their freedom. “Democracy is the destiny of all humans,” he smiles “That’s why I’m still here.” Funding for this article provided by the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting, (pulitzercenter.org). Photo by Alex Stonehill

Ethiopia and the United States

2008-04-03T17:22:00.000-07:00

A loveless liaison
Apr 3rd 2008 ADDIS ABABA
From The Economist print edition

America and Ethiopia need each other, but their needs are not equal

THE alliance between the United States and Ethiopia was born of pragmatism. In another time, they might have been enemies. Ethiopians do not like American soldiers tramping on their soil. Americans dislike Ethiopia's bad human-rights record. Local elections due this month are a case in point. Ethiopia's opposition, emasculated by the long imprisonment of its leaders (most of whom were pardoned last year) and weakened by its own divisions, will almost certainly be crushed in an unfair contest. “It's going to be a stitch-up,” says a Western diplomat. “Control is what this government is all about.”

America jealously guards information about its more discreet military activities in Ethiopia, while advertising its soldiers' do-gooding: digging wells, vaccinating animals and so on. Officially, it contributes only a sliver of Ethiopia's $300m defence budget. Unofficially, it may have helped pay for the rising costs of Ethiopia's army, one of Africa's largest. Some say America has a secret base in eastern Ethiopia to move CIA, special forces and “friendlies” into next-door Somalia; America says not.

Leftist hardliners in Ethiopia's government think that its prime minister, Meles Zenawi, is doing the Bush administration's bidding. That is not how the Americans portray it. Regardless of Mr Zenawi, who must answer to his party's central committee and is anyway due to step down in 2010, the Pentagon wants to make Ethiopia a bulwark in a region where Somalia is a dangerously failed state, Sudan and Eritrea are pariahs and Kenya has troubles of its own. Ethiopia has other selling points. The African Union is based there. Its ancient Christian history stirs American evangelicals. Its poverty and population (at 80m, Africa's third-largest) attract development-minded foreigners.

But Ethiopia is too poor to be rated an A-list client state. Even American hawks admit that selling guns to one of the planet's hungriest countries, the “cradle of humanity” to boot, would look bad. America says the little it gives Ethiopia's forces is “non-lethal”: boots, night-vision goggles, medical kits and so forth. It would like to do more to train Ethiopian troops for peacekeeping work. A measure of America's realism is the way it has allowed Ethiopia to buy arms from North Korea.

So differences remain. Many in Ethiopia's 1.2m-strong diaspora in the United States have lobbied their congressional representatives to condemn Mr Zenawi's government as tyrannical. A bill passed by the House of Representatives last year called for curbs on aid to Ethiopia, but is unlikely to be passed by the Senate. Yet it points to a division between those in Washington (mainly Republicans) wanting to reward Ethiopia for fighting terrorism in Somalia and those (mainly Democrats) wishing to punish it for its human-rights abuses at home.

Ethiopia, for its part, had hoped for stronger support from America over its border dispute with Eritrea. It wants the administration to list two Ethiopian separatist groups, the Ogaden National Liberation Front and the Oromo Liberation Front, as terrorists. America is reluctant. The process is complex; it has taken a long time to complete listing the Shabab, a Somali jihadist group. The Ogaden and Oromo fronts will go on fund-raising among their supporters in America, just as the Irish Republican Army once did.

Aid from European Union countries will probably keep flowing, however patent Ethiopia's human-rights violations. China will invest more. But Ethiopia's luck may run out. After several years of good harvests, a famine may set in this year. With 8m of its people likely to depend on food aid, much of it paid for by the Americans, Ethiopia still needs America a lot more than

America needs it.

At Nonnewaug Battle of the Bands Aids Denan Project

2008-03-26T02:44:00.000-07:00

03/26/2008

BETHLEHEM-WOODBURY - Students at Nonnewaug High School offered their third annual Battle of the Bands concert Friday, March 14, to benefit the Denan Project, a local group that built and maintains a free hospital in poverty-stricken

eastern Ethiopia.

Three student bands and the band of Steve Bunovsky, a history teacher at NHS, entertained an audience of nearly 200 students and some parents.

Members of the Denan group were present to express their appreciation and to show the award-winning video detailing the plight of the people of the Denan area.

The event raised more than $1,000 that will immediately go to help alleviate the escalating suffering and starvation brought on by a recent severe drought and its resulting crop failure.

Started four years ago in Woodbury, the Denan Project raised money to build and staff a small, free clinic to bring help to people in Denan suffering from drought, malnourishment and disease.
Almost since the beginning, teachers, students and administrators in NHS have pitched in to help, raising money with concerts, penny drives and auctions. The project's logo was designed at NHS by student Rachel Tobin in art class.

Through fundraising in Connecticut, New York City, Colorado and Florida, members of the Denan Project were eventually able to turn the clinic into a 29-room hospital with a staff of 30 people.

The only free hospital in Ogaden, a region of some 350,000 square kilometers with a population of more than 4 million, it has so far treated some 40,000 people for illnesses and injuries, saving many lives.

Donor funds have allowed the Denan Project to buy an ambulance and a pickup truck to bring the most gravely ill people to a bigger hospital 75 kilometers away, to ferry supplies and equipment to the Denan hospital and to pick up patients in outlying areas and bring them in for treatment.

Donations also help the project allay the worst of the malnourishment for mothers and babies by giving them a lifesaving supplemental meal especially formulated for African tastes and fortified with milk, minerals and vitamins.

To address the ravages of the ongoing drought, the group is completing a pipeline to bring precious, potable water from a source 12 kilometers away to the people of Denan for the first time in their history.

One of the 13 watering stations along the line was donated by Nonnewaug High School and features a plaque dedicated to NHS.

Other watering stations were donated by the Tribury, Watertown and Naugatuck Rotary Clubs.

The Denan Project raised money to buy a large water-tanker truck and fund the building of reservoirs to hold the water the tanker delivers periodically to the outlying villages that cannot be served by the pipeline.

Denan farmers were trained to use new methods of raising drought-resistant crops and donated funds bought a tractor that will soon help them prepare the soil and plant the seeds supplied by the project.

The Denan Project is also working with local residents to build cottage industries that will help them become self-sustaining: giving them a solar oven to bake 400 loaves of bread a day to feed the patients in the hospital and to sell to the community; and teaching them how to make cheese using goats' milk, also to feed to patients and to sell.

With help from the Ethiopian government, the Denan Project was able to widely distribute antimalarial sleeping nets. The group is also working with colleagues in the regional nonprofit Ogaden Welfare and Development Association and with the elders of Denan to bring an end to the terrible, age-old practice of female genital mutilation.

OWDA carefully monitors the situation in Denan and sends monthly reports. Denan Project volunteers also visit several times a year.

The political situation in Ethiopia and the countries around it is not good. Yet, despite conflicts between the government and some area groups, the Denan hospital and its people, the pipeline and all the project's ongoing operations have not been harmed.

The project hopes to expand the hospital and its treatment capabilities, supply more food and water and bring better education to the children.

Dick Young, president of the Denan Project, is in Ethiopia right now, bringing newly raised funds to help stem the crippling effects of the recent severe drought and crop failure.

According to Mr. Young, a documentary film-maker whose video launched the Denan Project and helped the project raise funds, the elders of Denan say they have seen other humanitarian groups but the Denan group is the only one that has asked the local people what they need.

"Though we are an all-volunteer group, we are determined and we believe in the power of these people," Mr. Young said. "The elders of Denan have told us, 'We have been living in the dark and you have brought us into the light.'

"One community reaching out to help another - we believe it's a model for improving the world."

Those seeking additional information may visit http://www.thedenanproject.com/.

©Voices 2008

Ethiopian girl survives troop massacre

2008-03-23T01:15:00.000-07:00

SURVIVOR: Ridwan Hassan Sahid says Ethiopian troops rounded up
people in her village, accusing them of being rebels.
All were killed but Sahid, who survived among a heap of corpses.
Abukar Albadri / For The Times

Posted on Sat, Mar. 22, 2008 10:15 PM

By EDMUND SANDERS
Los Angeles Times

NAIROBI, Kenya The teenager awoke under a pile of corpses to a pricking sensation on her face. Ants were biting her eyelids and the inside of her mouth.

The pain, however, brought relief to the 17-year-old. “I thought, I’m alive,’ ” Ridwan Hassan Sahid remembers. She felt blood oozing from rope burns around her neck and the weight of a body against her back. But fearing that the Ethiopian soldiers who had left her for dead in a roadside ditch would return, she quickly brushed away the ants, shut her eyes and slipped back into unconsciousness.

The assault and miraculous escape is one of the most chilling stories to emerge from an unfolding tragedy in eastern Ethiopia that largely has escaped the attention of a world transfixed by the humanitarian crisis in neighboring Sudan’s Darfur region.

Ever since exiting colonialists arbitrarily stuck a triangle-shaped wedge of land with 4 million ethnic Somalis inside Ethiopia’s border, violence and suffering has plagued the region. Now, many of them have been caught up in a war between the Ethiopian government and a separatist group known as the Ogaden National Liberation Front.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed and tens of thousands were displaced in the past year alone, although exact figures are unknown because the area is remote and Ethiopian officials restrict access to humanitarian groups and journalists.

Survivors such as Sahid offer the only glimpse into the unfolding tragedy. Now living in a secret location, the petite young woman shared her story recently.

Now 18, Sahid at times seems to be an average teenager, picking absent-mindedly at her henna-stained fingernails and blushing when strangers express interest in her. But behind her soft brown eyes is a weariness that belies her age, and a necklace of scar tissue rings her throat where the rope cut into her skin.

She recounts her ordeal without emotion. Only occasionally does her veneer crack long enough for a tear to roll down her check, which she self-consciously laughs off and wipes away.

“I wonder sometimes,” she says, “what kind of life I can have now.”

She grew up in the village of Qorile with eight siblings. The family, like most everyone else in the area, were semi-nomadic cattle and sheep herders.

Ever since she can remember, Ethiopian authorities were seen as the enemy.

“We feel as if we are living under occupation,” she says. “We grew up afraid of them.”

The Ogaden conflict dates to the 1940s, when after World War II European nations lost or began to relinquish their colonies in the Horn of Africa. After some years under British administration, Ogaden and surrounding areas were placed under Ethiopian control, but the decision was never accepted by the ethnic Somalis living there, spurring two wars between Ethiopia and Somalia and spawning a string of rebel movements seeking autonomy or unification with Somalia.

Ethiopian officials accuse the Ogaden rebels of using terrorist tactics. In April 2007, the rebels killed more than 70 people at a Chinese-run exploration facility in the region.

The attack prompted what aid groups and witnesses call a heavy-handed response by the Ethiopian government. Troops are accused of burning down villages believed to be sheltering rebels, forcibly recruiting young men into government militias, raping women and imposing a commercial blockade that sent local food prices and malnutrition rates soaring.

“They used mass indiscriminate measures to collectively punish the entire population,” Human Rights Watch researcher Leslie Lefkow said.

See...... Next page >

ONLF, the African Fighters for Ogaden´s Liberation and Democracy

2008-03-17T15:28:00.000-07:00

Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
March 17, 2008

A while back, in an article entitled ´Ogaden – the African Kosovo ready for Independence´, we revealed the existing parallels between the newly proclaimed Balkan state and Ogaden, a vast African territory of ca. 280000 km2, inhabited by approx. 4.5 million Somalis, that was illegally transferred by the departing British colonials to the Amhara Abyssinian tribal pseudo-king Haile Selassie between 1948 and 1955.

Ogaden has lived over the past two years under conditions similar to those befallen on the Kosovars in the terrible winter 1998 – 99; parts of the mercilessly tyrannized land have been carpet-bombed by the military aircraft of Africa´s bloodiest tyrant, the uncivil Tigray thug Meles Zenawi, who boasts to be the preferred interlocutor of the - detrimental to US interests - Ass. Secretary Jendayi Frazer.

The longer Jendayi Frazer stays in her position the better for China´s interests in Africa; this situation, at the time of the Lhasa insurgence, must take a short end.

In the same way the Kosova Liberation Front (KLA) represented the most valiant and honorable representation of the desire of the Albanian Kosovars for Freedom, Justice, Liberation and Self-Determination, the Ogaden National Liberation Front struggles for Freedom, Democracy, Respect of the Human Rights, and Independence for the long tyrannized, deprived, and massacred Ogadenis.

"Fraudulent, and Corrupt US Administrators Slandering ONLF"

Contrarily to what an impartial observer could possibly accept, prepaid agents working in the US administration attempt to diffuse the rumor that the ONLF is a terrorist organization, eventually assassinating people in Ogaden. This is a typical black propaganda that has been attested in various parts of the world; in the same way the KLA was falsely accused of terrorist acts (that in fact were a mere self-defense against the criminal Serbian state terror machine), the Tibetan monks have been disreputably accused of terrorism by the Chinese tyrants.

It is truly odd how the dictatorial regime at Addis Ababa expels one international NGO after the other on the ground of cooperation with the ONLF (which automatically means that the Ogadeni Front is a trustworthy interlocutor for Human Rights activists of global caliber), and these fraudulent and corrupt US administrators store money on Swiss bank accounts by defaming the Righteous and Honorable Struggle of a Nation for Liberation.

If we examine the origin of the money these corrupt US administrators and supposedly academics make, we realize that we attest one of the most squalid cases of politically immoral behaviour; the money is paid by Abyssinian ambassadors and consuls, who are all Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians hired by the racist state machine in order to ceaselessly promote their filthy tribal interests at the detriment of the outright majority of the subjugated nations of Abyssinia, the Ogadenis, the Oromos, the Afars, the Sidamas, the Kambatas, the Shekachos, the Kaffas, the Agaws, the Anuak, the Wolayitas and others.

In fact, the racist Amhara and Tigray Abyssinian elites not only attempt to perpetuate the anti-Kushitic, anti-African tyranny that they imposed on all the aforementioned, subjugated nations, but they also immorally, illegally and inhumanly occupy positions of representatives of those whose extermination they have undertaken in an all-committed and most determined way. And they disreputably call themselves ´Ethiopians´ to demonstrate cultural ´authenticity´, whereas for more than a century they undertook an anti-Ethiopian, anti-Kushitic, anti-African Cultural Genocide.

Contrarily to what eventual falsifications and black propaganda may diffuse, the ONLF cadres, spread in Ogaden and the Diaspora, incessantly work for the utmost benefit of all the oppressed Ogadenis, for their freedom, for their liberation, and for their prosperity in a democratic, tolerant and open society.

To better illuminate the ONLF cadres´ approach to their National History, Identity and Perspectives, and to highlight the parallels existing between the Struggle of Kosovars and the Pledge of the Ogadenis, we publish here integrally a Press Release issued yesterday by the ONLF Foreign Relations Bureau. As the text encapsulates the History of Ogaden, and reveals the tyrannical methods used by the Abyssinian elites, the urgency for Ogaden´s secession and independence becomes plainly understood.

"ONLF Foreign Relations Bureau - Press Release"

Among the most far-reaching consequences of colonialism in Africa has been the partition of the continent into political units whose borders were determined on the basis of European interests. To restrain the historical precision, many downplay the political encounter, which we believe is central to comprehending not only the Ogaden conflict but the conflicts that have taken place elsewhere in the Horn of Africa,mainly the recently devastating genocide in Somalia.

Although we are not attempting to deal with it here, the roots of the Ogaden conflict can be traced by contrasting between two distinctive epochs; first the state of the colonized Ogaden people in pre-colonial epoch and second the successive Ethiopian regimes denial of the Ogaden Somalis' rights for self-determination in the postcolonial era, which set the stage for an inevitable conflict in the Horn of Africa.

In 1896, an agreement was signed between Great Britain and the Ogaden Somali chiefs which was basically constituted Great Britain´s control over Ogaden, and aimed to preservation of Ogaden sovereignty. But Great Britain had no intention of living up to the agreement. In 1897, Great Britain signed an agreement with the Abyssinian Empire, currently known as Ethiopia, in which it recognized the Abyssinian claims on Harar, which it had occupied a few years earlier.

This act was entirely a breach of the 1896 agreement between Great Britain and Ogaden Somali chiefs. Since that time the Ogaden history has been quite turbulent one and Ogaden people's struggle for self-determination has not destined or stopped.

For more than 100 years, the Ogaden territory and its inhabitants have been under severe isolation from the rest of the world. It has been a no-man´s land where Abyssinian successive regimes practice their military power and slaughter innocent civilians. All successive Ethiopian governments´ military campaigns to quell the struggle to self-determination for the Somali people in Ogaden had caused enormous human suffering including the current government´s military campaign, which is going on vigorously as this writing. Since the current Ethiopian government came to power in 1991, hundreds of Somalis in Ogaden, including women, children, elderly people, politicians and religious scholars, have been killed, disappeared, tortured or remain under incommunicado detention without charges or trial.

The people of Ogaden have endured over many decades of devastating armed conflict and since early 1994 when the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) called for referendum on self-determination for the Ogaden region, the region has been a virtually closed military zone. While the international community agonises over Darfur, another humanitarian and human rights disaster is brewing in Ogaden. The atrocities happening in Ogaden will forever hold a devastating place in history. Grave human rights abuses are fuelling the worsening humanitarian crises in Ogaden.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch said "The situation in Ethiopia´s Ogaden region, where millions are suffering, is a forgotten tragedy". Yet until recently, the serious human rights violations and ongoing humanitarian crisis in Ogaden received little attention or action from the international community.

While the mainstream media has been largely focussed on Darfur crisis, one of the bloodiest conflicts in the Horn of Africa, Ogaden is also living its own silent crisis, which has been for the most part ignored by the international community. During the past several months, atrocities in Ogaden, including mass killings, rape, torture, and displacement, have remained largely silent and below the radar of the international community. Only occasionally does Ogaden conflict make the front pages as with the recent coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Ogaden. Yet, the Ogaden conflict has been raging for years with virtually no mention in the international media particularly the western press.

The recent UN report also verifies the use of indiscriminate force by Ethiopian regime forces stating that "The indiscriminate use of force by government troops the conflict in Ogaden has resulted in widespread civilian casualties and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of persons". The report further states "In addition to casualties attributable to indiscriminate use of force by the Ethiopian regime armed forces, individual government servicemen or units committed many abuses". This practice is in clear contravention of the protected status afforded to civilians under international humanitarian law.

Despite, the continuing deterioration of the situation in Ogaden region, which widely regarded as one of the world's worst humanitarian crisis, there remains no real international will to reach an equitable agreement to act. This demonstrates the imperative of international mobilization to save what is left of the people of Ogaden.

Unless the United States alters its foreign policy on Horn of Africa and unless Jendayi Frazer acknowledges and admits she is wrong her firm support for the Ethiopian regime genocidal policy in Ogaden particular, hundreds of thousands innocent civilian more will suffer unabated at the hands of Ethiopian forces and the misinformed United States policy of indifference policies based on the myth of global war on terror.

Now is the time to raise and increase pressure on the international community to take an action the crisis in Ogaden. If there's not something done very quickly to break that kind of cycle of impunity whereby Ethiopian military and leaders in Addis Ababa feel they can commit abuses of this sort and get away with it, then the crisis in Ogaden is only going to deepen.

While nothing can be done for the unfortunate lives that have already been lost, hope still remains for those who have persevered through the hardships. What many fail to understand is that the longer these crimes are allowed in Ogaden, the more anguish will be created.

Fortunately, there are those who do realize this fact, and are trying their best to change the course of Ogaden´s future. Although this chapter of history has had an appalling start, the end has not yet been written. This ending can be one filled with the suffering that Ogaden has endured since the conflict first began, or it can be one filled with hope and rectitude. It all simply depends on the choices, decisions, and actions of those who hold the power that writes the world history.

We, Ogaden Diaspora appeal to UN, United States, EU and the international community at large to immediately intervene and rescue Somali people in Ogaden and stop the Ethiopian forces campaign against innocent civilians. At the same time to exert pressure on Ethiopian regime to stop immediately the current genocidal policy it is implementing in Ogaden and find a political solution to the current conflict in Ogaden.

Note Picture: the reality of Ogaden in its real colours

See more here: http://thisisdenan.blogspot.com/

One million Ethiopians face water shortage

2008-03-05T12:39:00.000-08:00

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
______________________________________________________

05 March 2008 03:44

More than one million people in eastern Ethiopia's drought-hit Somali region face critical water shortages, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

"A joint multi-sectoral Drought Emergency Response Plan ... has been released by the regional government. The plan indicates that more than one million people are currently facing critical water shortage," the UN humanitarian agency said in a statement.

"The response plan, which focuses on life-saving interventions in health and nutrition, water and sanitation, and livestock and agriculture, aims to mitigate the impacts of drought due to poor consecutive seasonal performance in 2007 coupled with the current dry season," the statement added.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the regional authorities were seeking over $3-million to address emergency requirements for a period of six months.

The mineral-rich region, also known as the Ogaden, has also been wracked by a separatist rebellion, against which government troops have launched a fierce crackdown. -- AFP

Congressional Record Statement of Senator Russ Feingold On the Political Crisis in Ethiopia

2008-03-04T21:23:00.000-08:00

March 3, 2008

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the political situation in Ethiopia. The US-Ethiopian partnership is an incredibly important one – perhaps one of the more significant on the continent given not only our longstanding history but also the increasingly strategic nature of our cooperation in recent years. Ethiopia sits on the Horn of Africa – perhaps one of the roughest neighborhoods in the world, with Somalia a failed state and likely safe haven for terrorists, Eritrea an inaccessible authoritarian regime that exacerbates conflicts throughout the region, Sudan a genocidal regime, and now Kenya descending into crisis. By contrast, Ethiopia seems relatively stable with its growing economy and robust poverty reduction programs.

Indeed, one look at the deteriorating situation on the Horn of Africa and it is clear just how essential our relationship with Ethiopia really is. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration’s approach to strengthening and building bilateral ties with Ethiopia has been short-sighted and narrow. As in other parts of the world, the Administration’s counter-terrorism agenda dominates the relationship, while poor governance and human rights concerns get a pass.

Mr. President, genuine democratic progress in Ethiopia is essential if we are to have a healthy and positive bilateral relationship. We can not allow a myopic focus on one element of security to obscure our understanding of what is really occurring in Ethiopia. Rather than place our support in one man, we must invest in Ethiopia’s institutions and its people to create a stable, sustainable political system. As we are seeing right now in Kenya, political repression breeds deep-seated resentment, which can have destructive and far-reaching consequences. The United States and the international community can not support one policy objective at the expense of all others. To do so not only hurts the credibility of America and the viability of our democratic message, but it severely jeopardizes our national security.

Mr. President, I am seriously concerned about the direction Ethiopia is headed – because according to many credible accounts, the political crisis that has been quietly growing and deepening over the past few years may be coming to a head. For years, faced with calls for political or economic reforms, the Ethiopian government has displayed a troubling tendency to react with alarmingly oppressive and disproportionate tactics.

For example, Mr. President, in 2003, we received reports of massacres of civilians in the Gambella region of Ethiopia, which touched off a wave of violence and destruction that has yet to truly loosen its grip on the region. At that time, hundreds of lives were lost, tens of thousands were displaced, and many homes, schools, and businesses throughout the area were destroyed. Credible observers agree that Ethiopian security forces were heavily involved in some of the most serious abuses and more than 5 years later no one has been held accountable and there have been no reparations.

The national elections held in May 2005 were a severe step back for Ethiopia’s democratic progress. In advance of the elections, the Ethiopian Government expelled representatives of the three democracy-promotion organizations supported by USAID to assist the Ethiopian election commission, facilitate dialogue among political parties and election authorities, train pollwatchers, and assist civil society in the creation of a code of conduct. This expulsion was the first time in 20 years that a government has rejected such assistance, and the organizations have still not returned to Ethiopia because they do not feel an environment exists where they can truly undertake their objectives.

Despite massive controversy surrounding the polls, it is notable that opposition parties still won an unprecedented number of parliamentary seats. Their pursuit of transparency and democracy was again thwarted, however, when they tried to register their concerns about the election process. In one incident, peaceful demonstrations by opposition members and their supporters in Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa were met with disproportionate and lethal force that killed more than 30 people and injured over 100. In another incident, the Ethiopian government arrested thousands of peacefully protesting citizens who took to the streets in support of the opposition.

The systemic nature of this crackdown was revealed in credible reports coming from the Oromia and Amhara regions that federal police were unacceptably threatening, beating and detaining opposition supporters. Indeed, international human rights groups documented that regional authorities were exaggerating their concerns about armed insurgency and “terrorism” to try to justify the torture, imprisonment and sustained harassment of critics and even ordinary citizens.

This tendency to portray political dissent as extremist uprisings has been repeated more recently with regards to what is being characterized by some as a brutal counterinsurgency operation led by Ethiopia’s military in the Ogaden, a long-neglected region that borders Somalia. Certainly I recognize the serious security concerns in this region, made worse by the porous borders of the failed state just a stone’s throw away.

But it is precisely because Ethiopia is our partner in the fight against al Qaeda, its affiliates and allies, Mr. President, that I am so concerned about what I understand to be a massive military crackdown that does not differentiate between rebel groups and civilians. While I am sure there are few clean hands when it comes to fighting in the Ogaden region, the reports I have received about the Ethiopian government’s illicit military tactics and human rights violations are of great concern.

I have been hearing similar reports of egregious human rights abuses being committed in Somalia, about which I am gravely concerned. When I visited Ethiopia just over a year, I urged the Prime Minister not to send his troops into Somalia because I thought it might make instability there worse, not better. Tragically, more than a year later, it seems my worst fears have been realized as tens of thousands of people have fled their homes, humanitarian access is at an all time low, and there are numerous reports of increasing brutality towards civilians caught in the crossfire. In the interest of its own domestic security, Ethiopia is contributing to increased regional instability.

Mr. President, what troubles me most is that the reports of Ethiopia’s military coming out of the Ogaden and Mogadishu join a long list of increasingly repressive actions taken by the Ethiopian government. The Bush Administration must not turn a blind eye to the aggressive – and recurring – tactics being utilized by one of our key allies to stifle dissent.

I certainly welcome the role the Bush Administration has played in helping to secure the release of many -- although not all -- of the individuals thrown in jail in the aftermath of the 2005 elections. I welcome the Embassy’s engagement with opposition members and their efforts to encourage Ethiopian officials to create more political space for alternative views, independent media, and civil society. These are all important steps Mr. President, but they do not go far enough.

The Administration’s efforts at backroom diplomacy, Mr. President, are not working. I understand and respect the value of quiet diplomacy, but sometimes we reach the point where such a strategy is rendered ineffective – when private rhetorical commitments are repeatedly broken by unacceptable public actions. For example, recent reports that the Ethiopian government is jamming our Voice of America radio broadcasts should be condemned in no uncertain terms, not shrugged off.

The Bush administration must live up to its own rhetoric in promoting democracy and human rights by making it clear that we do not – and will not -- tolerant the Ethiopian government’s abuses and illegal behavior. It must demonstrate that there are consequences for the repressive and often brutal tactics employed by the Ethiopian government, which are moving Ethiopia farther away from – not closer to – the goal of becoming a legitimate democracy and are increasingly a source of regional instability.

Mr. President, I’m afraid that the failure of this Administration to acknowledge the internal crisis in Ethiopia is emblematic of its narrow-minded agenda, which will have repercussions for years to come if not addressed immediately. Worse yet, without a balanced US policy that addresses both short- and long-term challenges to stability in Ethiopia, we run the risk of contributing to the groundswell of proxy wars rippling across the Horn – whether in Somalia, eastern Sudan, or even the Ogaden region. And those wars, in turn, by contributing to greater insecurity on the Horn and providing opportunities for forces that oppose U.S. interests, pose a direct threat to our own national security as well.

I yield the floor.

# # #

FAO Desert Locust Bulletin No. 353 - 03 Mar 2008

2008-03-04T12:35:00.000-08:00

General Situation during February 2008
Forecast until mid-April 2008

The Desert Locust situation continued to be serious in parts of the Central Region during February. Several swarms formed in central Oman and moved through eastern Yemen, Saudi Arabia, UAE to southern Iran. Hatching and hopper band formation are likely to occur in southern Iran. Immature swarms persisted in rugged areas of southern Ethiopia where little control could be carried out.

These swarms are expected to move to the Ogaden region and perhaps to northern Somalia and breed. Locusts declined in the winter breeding areas on the Red Sea coast, especially in Sudan, and no signifi cant developments are expected. The situation remained calm in the Western Region.

Western Region. The situation continued to remain calm during February. Small-scale breeding continued for the fourth consecutive month in northwest Mauritania but locust numbers remained low and insignifi cant. Locusts increased slightly in central and southern Algeria where scattered adults were present in several areas.

Low numbers of adults are likely to be present in parts of northern Mali and Niger but surveys could not be conducted in these areas due to insecurity. Scattered adults are expected to persist in these countries and small-scale breeding could occur if further rains fall. No signifi cant developments are likely during the forecast period.

Central Region. As vegetation dried out, several small immature swarms formed in central and southern Oman by mid February. Most of the swarms moved through UAE to southern Iran while a few swarms fi rst moved to eastern Yemen and then crossed the Empty Quarter in eastern Saudi Arabia to the Persian Gulf.

The swarms were highly mobile so only limited control operations could be carried out. Immature swarms persisted in southern Ethiopia, but survey and control operations were hampered by the remote mountainous areas.

Therefore, the current situation is not very clear. Nevertheless, the swarms are likely to remain in the Harar Highlands and eventually move to the Ogaden region and breed when the long rains begin in March or April.

There is a low to moderate risk that a few swarms could move to northern Somalia. Locusts declined on the Red Sea coast of Sudan where ground control operations were carried out against late instar hopper bands and adults in the Tokar Delta. A few adults were present in southern Egypt.

Eastern Region. Small-scale breeding occurred on the southeastern coast of Iran during February. On the 20th, a small swarm from the northeastern Arabian Peninsula arrived on the southern coast, dispersed and laid eggs.

As only part of the swarm was treated, hatching and small hopper band formation will occur in March. Scattered adults are likely to be present in western Pakistan. Locust numbers are expected to increase in the spring breeding areas of Baluchistan in Iran and Pakistan from breeding that occurs during the forecast period.

MAP - Africa and the Middle East: Desert Locust Summary 353 (Feb 2008) Full_Report (pdf* format - 115 Kbytes)
(*) Get Adobe Acrobat Viewer (free)

Tortured Abroad? Forgotten At Home?

2008-02-29T09:01:00.000-08:00

Feb 29, 2008 04:30 AM
Alex Neve
Chris MacLeod
Lorne Waldman

Bashir Makhtal has been imprisoned in Ethiopia for a year, but his exact whereabouts and fate are unknown. He was arrested at the Kenya-Somalia border and then, while awaiting legal proceedings in Kenya was suddenly and secretly flown to Somalia and then on to Ethiopia where he has disappeared into prison. He has had no legal representation. It appears that he has been brought before a military court, but his family has been given no news of why that was or what the result has been. Prisoners held in secretive detention are particularly vulnerable to torture and abuse, be it in Ethiopia or anywhere. His crime? No one knows. He has been an outspoken supporter of his ethnic group, the beleaguered Ogaden people of Ethiopia. Like the Uighurs in China, the Ogaden people have suffered decades of relentless persecution in Ethiopia.

Read More.... http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/308095

Young adults lobby for change: The Ogaden Youth Network

2008-02-27T05:55:00.000-08:00

By Lisa Peterson-de la Cueva , TC Daily Planet
February 26, 2008

Hodan Dualeh has never set foot in the Ogaden, but her passion for the land and people could not be stronger. Dualeh is president of the Ogaden Youth Network (OYN), a youth group from the Ogaden region of Ethiopia.

“Our aim is to change U.S. foreign policy specifically as concerns the Ogaden,” Dualeh said, using the gestures of a politician to help get her point across. “That is really the main objective, whether it’s though
lobbying or through education,” The Ogaden is a large desert in eastern Ethiopia. Most of its residents are ethnically Somali and speak Somali. The Ethiopian government has a record of perpetrating human rights abuses in the region, mainly through the military. This treatment has caused local groups to develop their own rebel militia. The conflict between militia groups and the military continues to ravage the region.

According to the Minnesota state demographer’s office, it is difficult to tell exactly how large Minnesota’s Ogaden community is, because it is not identified as a separate category. Most Ogadanians count themselves as Somali instead of Ethiopian, which further complicates the figures. Members of the OYN estimate the number to be more than 15,000.

For more information on the current situation in the Ogaden see this article and video in the New York Times.

Dualeh never actually lived in the Ogaden. Her mother was born there but fled to Somalia, where Dualeh was born in 1981. They moved to Kenya in 1991 and then came to Minnesota in 1996, where Dualeh attended the School for Environmental Studies in Eagan. She went on to major in biology at the University of Minnesota and is pursuing coursework in epidemiology. There are about 30 core members of OYN like Dualeh. Most were educated in American high schools and are now in college, have graduated, or are working to save money for postsecondary education.

These young adults founded the OYN in June 2005. In 2006, they raised funds for drought relief in the Ogaden region, and organized a national Ogaden youth conference at St. Thomas University, where 600 people gathered. The second annual conference will be held this August in San Diego.

Besides preparing the upcoming conference, the OYN is lobbying in Minnesota and in Washington. The OYN educates elected officials about the Ogaden and lobbies for a change in American foreign policy, which has been backing the Ethiopian military.

Last October the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 2003, the Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act of 2007. The bill, sponsored by Representative Donald Paine (D-NJ), emphasizes human rights and humanitarian efforts in the Ogaden region.
The U.S. Senate has not voted on the bill, which is why the OYN is eager to influence Senator Norm Coleman, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

“We have gone to Senator Coleman’s office and met with his representatives, but never with him,” Dualeh says. “And he has yet to take any aggressive action regarding Ogadania.” Otherwise the OYN says that many elected officials have been very supportive, including Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Keith Ellison.

The OYN also invites guest speakers to educate its own members on the Ogaden. Last Saturday, members gathered in a dimly lit room in the Sabathani Community Center in South Minneapolis. Kadra Abdi, Secretary of the OYN, started off the monthly meeting by introducing Hassan Mohamed Ciise to speak about his recent trip to the Ogaden. Twenty-five young adults listened to his account, told in Somali but sprinkled with an occasional phrase in English, such as “without justice, there cannot be peace.” Speakers like Ciise help OYN members stay current on a region that many have not visited in years, if ever.

Not all of the OYN’s activities focus on the Ogaden. OYN members are preparing voter education and participation activities for the upcoming election. They will determine which candidate to endorse, something they have done before. In 2006 Representative Mark Kennedy supported the Ogaden, who in turn endorsed his candidacy and encouraged members of the Ogaden community to vote and volunteer for him.

Dualeh and the other members of the Ogaden Youth Network have their work cut out for them. It seems, though, that Dualeh at least has strong support within her family. Her mother, Hawey Mahad, is also active in the recently formed Ogaden women’s group, an adult version of the OYN. Mahad attends most of the OYN meetings, more as an observer and silent participant than an active member. Kadra Abdi says of Dualeh’s mother, “She helps us a lot; if we need finances, she goes and raises money from the community, and she gives us a lot of advice.”

As Dualeh and Abdi recount their goals and activities in the OYN, Dualeh’s mother sits in the background with her arms crossed. Occasionally she reminds her daughter in Somali “to talk about the human rights abuses.” It is not likely something Dualeh or other members of the OYN will overlook.

Lisa Peterson-de la Cueva (peterson.delacueva@gmail.com) is an educator and has taught in various contexts, including junior high social studies and adult basic education. She is transitioning from a career in teaching to freelance writing and is interning at TC Daily Planet.

In Ethiopia, does staying silent save lives?

2008-02-25T21:31:00.000-08:00

In the middle:
Villagers, like these
in Degahabur, are
caught between
separatist rebels
and Ethiopian
government forces.
anita powell/ap

Government warns aid workers if they talk to press about atrocities in Somali region, they will lose access.

By Nicholas Benequista Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
from the February 26, 2008 edition

Page 1 of 2 ...

Jijiga, Ethiopia - Spotting a plume of dust from an approaching vehicle, residents of Gudis village ran to tell their neighbors to hide. Then someone saw the flag on the white Land Cruiser; international aid workers were coming. "We thought you were the military," said one man to an aid worker who later recounted the story.

The residents of Gudis, a village of pastoralists in Ethiopia's Somali region, had not seen an aid worker in the six months since the Ethiopian military sent thousands of troops to the area to put down a renewed surge by a separatist rebel group, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). Now the village was eager to share its secrets.

At dusk, accompanied by just one villager, the group drove a few miles beyond the cluster of thatched roofs to four, freshly dug mass graves.
"They begged us to stay," said the aid worker, requesting anonymity.

Indeed, aid workers want to stay, but their presence in places like Gudis comes at a price. As the military campaign winds down in the vast portion of the Somali region known as the Ogaden, international humanitarian groups have been gradually allowed to return, though only in exchange for their silence.

"We have two options: either we come out with a nasty press release tomorrow on protection of human rights, and we will have to leave behind a substantial population still facing atrocities, or we just do our work," the aid worker said.

Those who do talk – and they are few – whisper stories of public executions, arbitrary detentions, rapes, beatings, and torture of civilians by government forces intent on crushing a guerrilla insurgency that draws on sympathetic villagers for support. Others describe equally heinous acts committed by rebel forces against those civilians – often from rival clans – who refuse to help the insurgents, whom the government labels as terrorists.

With journalists prohibited from entering the area under military occupation, most of these allegations are hard to verify, and conflicting versions of the same story are common. For instance, Gudis residents told the aid workers that the 47 young men buried in the mass graves were innocent civilians killed by government forces. An elder from the Abdili subclan that inhabits Gudis said the 47 had been coerced to join a government militia and were slaughtered in a confrontation with the ONLF.

The government denies any wrongdoing by federal troops, including the allegation that soldiers have forced civilians to form militias.

"I can assure you that the government is not in the business of killing people and putting them in mass graves," says government spokesman Bereket Simon. "That is why we fought against the military regime." Mr. Bereket, like Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and many high-ranking members of Ethiopia's government, was himself once an insurgent in the movement that overthrew a socialist military dictatorship in 1991. The former revolutionaries claim to know from experience how brutal military tactics can backfire by galvanizing support for rebels.

Page 1 2 Next Page

Ethiopa's war on its own

2008-02-25T03:04:00.000-08:00

The government is accused of a reign of terror similar to what is happening in Darfur.

By Ronan Farrow

February 25, 2008

DADAAB, KENYA -- The bullet tore through Ibrahim Hamad's torso and lodged in his hip. The 26-year-old teacher was at home with his elderly father when government forces swept through his town in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, burning huts and killing civilians. "The young girls were the first to die. The soldiers shot them and gathered the bodies and burned them," he said. The troops demanded that surviving men join their ranks, threatening those who refused with torture, imprisonment and death.

"When they came to my home, I told them, 'I am just a schoolteacher, I will not leave my family,' " said Hamad. In a bleak whisper, he recounted the ordeal that followed. "They strangled my father with a wire and hung his body in a tree. Then they shot me and left me for dead."

Hamad now struggles to survive in this remote refugee camp in northern Kenya, joining thousands who have fled a reign of terror by the Ethiopian army. Little noticed by the world, Ethiopia is waging war against its own people in the Ogaden desert. Long-simmering tensions erupted last April when separatist rebels attacked a Chinese-run oil field. The Ethiopian government responded by ejecting humanitarian agencies and launching a scorched-earth campaign in the region.

The targeting of the predominantly ethnic-Somali Ogaden population has led to accusations of ethnic cleansing. In October, Human Rights Watch: warned that events in Ogaden were following a "frighteningly familiar pattern" to those in Somalia's Darfur region, noting "ethnic overtones" to attacks and accusing Ethiopia of "displac[ing] large populations" and "deliberately attack[ing] civilians." Government forces have been implicated in escalating looting, burnings and atrocities. Recently, soldiers have begun a brutal campaign of forced conscription, often torturing or killing those who refuse to join.

The Ethiopian government has suppressed most news from the region, sealing Ogaden's borders and denying access to the media. Last May, three New York Times reporters researching the crisis were held for five days and had their equipment confiscated. Ethiopian officials have been quick to dismiss mounting reports of bloodshed as propaganda. But in this camp, refugees fleeing Ogaden tell stories of rape, torture and mass murder perpetrated against civilian villages by Ethiopia's military.

However, it is the U.S. government, not Ethiopia's, that elicits the most anger from Hamad and the other Ogadenis seeking shelter in Dadaab. The bullet that shattered Hamad's hip, and the gun that fired it, were likely supplied by the United States. The soldier who pulled the trigger was almost certainly compensated with U.S. military aid.

The U.S. has historically provided Ethiopian forces with arms, funding and training. In recent years, the bond has deepened, with Ethiopia's military serving as a proxy for American interests in a region increasingly viewed as a crucial front in the war on terrorism. Since 9/11, military aid to Ethiopia has soared, growing at least 2 1/2 times by 2006. A close intelligence-sharing relationship between the governments has burgeoned.

In the face of mounting evidence of atrocities, some U.S. officials are questioning the no-strings-attached backing of Ethiopia's army. "This is a country that is abusing its own people," said Rep. Donald M. Payne (D-N.J.), chairman of the House subcommittee on Africa and Global Health, accusing the Bush administration of "look[ing] the other way" as Ethiopia's abuses worsen. Last fall, the House passed the Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act, sponsored by Payne, to limit military aid to Ethiopia. It awaits action by the Senate. "The United States cannot afford to allow cooperation on the war on terror," Payne said, "to prevent us from taking a principled stance on democracy and human rights issues."

Ironically, unbridled support of Ethiopia's army in the interest of combating terrorism may serve as a powerful catalyst for anti-U.S. sentiment. "We hate the U.S.A. more than the Ethiopians," one Ogadeni told me. "It is guns and money from the U.S.A. that are killing our people."

If Washington wants to fight the rising tide of terrorism in the Horn of Africa, it cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the abuses of its closest ally in the region. The U.S. wields unique influence over Ethiopia; how it uses that influence will determine Ogaden's future. Legislators should continue to press the Bush administration to help stop the bloodshed. Current levels of U.S. aid should be made contingent on Ethiopia halting its attacks on civilians. That might sacrifice some goodwill with Ethiopian officials -- but it could save the people of the Ogaden.

Ronan Farrow, a student at Yale Law School, has worked on human rights issues for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and recently accompanied a congressional delegation to the Horn of Africa.

The human face behind Cold War's proxy conflicts

2008-02-23T04:15:00.000-08:00

February 22, 2008 Edition 1

Havana: The young Cuban pilot, with the wary look of a hunted animal, sat on a patch of sand in the shade of a thorn bush guarded by a troop of dusty Somali soldiers in the middle of the Ogaden desert.

The Cuban's MiG fighter had been shot down somewhere over the wasteland of the Horn of Africa and he was being displayed as a trophy to Western reporters.

It was 1978 and this was just one of the Cold War's proxy conflicts that Fidel Castro, who retired on Tuesday after decades of fomenting revolution around the world, engaged in during the 1960s and 1970s.

Castro, who for some years backed Somali president Siad Barre, had switched allegiance the previous year to Somalia's northern neighbour, Ethiopia, where Mengistu Haile Mariam presided over a bloody revolutionary purge.

Cuban forces had been sent as military advisers or as fighters to all corners of Africa.
Cuba tipped the balance of the civil war in Angola by deploying tens of thousands of troops and beating South African forces.

Cubans joined conflicts in Algeria, Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea-Bissau, Morocco and Mozambique as part of Castro's internationalist mission.

The Ogaden War, over virtually empty land crossed only by nomads in search of pasture for their goats and camels, was perhaps the most farcical.

To outsiders, it had much of the absurdity of the fictional war between the "rebels" and "patriots" portrayed in British novelist Evelyn Waugh's classic spoof of African warfare, Scoop.

The Soviet Union and the United States essentially swapped sides in 1977, so they found themselves facing weapons they had originally provided to the other side.
The Cuban pilot was in the middle.

As the knot of sunburned Western reporters ate the gristly meat and drank lukewarm camel's milk served in their honour, he ignored a few questions about where and how he had been shot down and what his mission had been.

He looked into the distance and occasionally stroked his chin as some reporters tried to get him to speak about the war.

Then one reporter, suspecting he might even be a fake, asked him if he could authenticate himself by naming three Cuban basketball players.

His eyes lit up, and a smile played over his face.

He named seven players before he stopped, nodded at the questioner and said: "That's my
game!"
Shortly after that the interview was over, and he was walked away by his armed captors into the desert to an uncertain future. -

Reuters

Halganka Ogaadeeniya & Xilliyadii Adkaa Ee Lasoomaray.

2008-02-21T05:51:00.000-08:00

Somali Ogaden: Halkaan ka akhri Xilliyadii adkaa ee soo maray dadka iyo dalka Ogaadeeniya iyo halgankooda si aan u ifinno waxyaalaha ay "ONLF" ka suura galisay caalamka iyo dadka Soomaaliyeed-ba, waxaana lama huraan ah in aan dib u'milicsanno ...

Report: Western nations accept elections, but neglect human rights

2008-01-31T17:42:00.000-08:00

Posted : Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:48:04 GMT

New York - Western democracies increasingly have accepted elections conducted in countries that have no respect for human rights for the sake of political expediency, Human Rights Watch said Thursday. States that claim the mantle of democracy, include Kenya and Pakistan, while others like Bahrain, Jordan, Nigeria, Russia and Thailand have taken on the belief that elections are equal to democracy, the New York-based rights group said in an annual report.

It said Washington, Brussels and European capitals "play along" with the notion that a country can have democracy simply by holding elections.

"It's now easy for autocrats to get away with mounting a sham democracy," said Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director. "That's because too many Western governments insist on elections and leave it at that."

"They don't press governments on the key human rights issues that make democracy function - a free press, peaceful assembly, and a functioning civil society that can really challenge power," Roth said.

The report said grave human rights abuses have fueled humanitarian crises in Somalia and the Ogaden region in Eastern Ethiopia, where millions of people are suffering.