August 6, 2008

An Ethiopian Politico Barnstorms Minnesota

MINNEAPOLIS, MN -- When Bulcha Demeksa, an opposition member of the Ethiopian Parliament, feels compelled to denounce the Ethiopian Prime Minister, he doesn’t bother to organize a political rally in Ethiopia
or search for journalists eager to publish his rhetorical thunderbolts.

That’s because opposition rallies are banned in Ethiopia, and the press is government-controlled down to the last pixel and drop of printer’s ink.

Plus, Ethiopia’s jails are filled these days with people brave or foolhardy enough to speak out publicly against the regime of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

By some estimates, as many as 30,000 political prisoners are presently being held in Ethiopian jails. Human Rights Watch and other watchdog groups over the past decade have documented thousands of cases of arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings and torture of political dissidents.

Suppressing Opinion

So instead of risking life and limb to speak at home, Demeksa travels to Minnesota. He did so last Thursday, speaking to a crowd of Ethiopian immigrants at a sometimes boisterous human rights conference at the University of Minnesota.

“We are ruled by a dictator who wants to cheat the U.S. and Europe by saying he is trying to democratize the country,” Demeska railed, pounding the air with his fists. “But he is not trying to democratize at all. He is suppressing the nation brutally, and he is suppressing difference of opinion. If you want to say something against him, somehow you will be silenced.”

Demeksa has visited Minnesota frequently over the years to build support and raise money for initiatives that he presses back home. Four years ago, following consultations in this state and elsewhere, he founded the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM), a political party representing 30 million members of the Oromo tribe, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group.

Educated People

Freedom of speech is only one reason Demeksa likes to make political stump speeches in Minnesota. Even more important is that perhaps his wealthiest, most media savvy, and most politically influential constituency lives right here.

Minnesota is home to around 20,000 immigrants from Ethiopia, more than live in any other state.

As a result, while he is straitjacketed and muzzled in Ethiopia, Demeksa’s political efforts here can inspire Ethiopian-born Americans to push U.S. officials to exert pressure on Ethiopia. He can get his central message -- that Ethiopia today is ruled by a de facto dictator and a brutal one -- into the international media. And sometimes he can raise more money in Minnesota than he could in Ethiopia.

“Our educated people are concentrated here,” Demeksa said. “If these people do not help us, who else will help us? First, by providing leadership, and secondly, with financial help. I come, and other politicians come, to allow people here to see problems developing in their country; to see if they accept our proposals; and to listen to their suggestions and proposals.”

Most Evicted

Yet things never go as smoothly in Minnesota as Demeksa would surely like. The same rancor and divisions that split Ethiopian politics are also present here in the state’s Ethiopian immigrant population.

Passions and grudges break in Minnesota along many fault lines. One of those is over whether opponents of the present Ethiopian regime should ever use more than words to fight the present regime. That topic was noisily debated at a political discussion Demeksa hosted with a group of young Oromo immigrants -- mostly college and graduate school age -- ahead of the conference’s academic lectures.

“The Oromo people are the most evicted, the most displaced, the most repressed and the most occupied people in Ethiopia!” one man in the audience exploded after Demeksa’s talk. “You are the advocate of an occupier! You are aiding this belligerent power! I ask you, are you defending the occupiers or standing with the Oromo people?”

Fever Pitch

Up on the dais, Demeksa blinked under the onslaught, paused for a moment and then pointedly answered his interrogator.

“Baloney!” he barked. “This is the same propaganda that has held us back and kept us down for so many years. You cannot say that I am a friend of the government. They think I am an enemy. They want to kill me.

“I don’t believe you can take power by force,” he added. “If you do, another force will take power from you, and it will go on endlessly like that.”

Whether conditions in Ethiopia are now so bad that only violent resistance will change them has been argued at fever pitch in Minnesota’s Ethiopian population in recent months.

Frustration has been fueled by one after another atrocity in Ethiopia, especially since 2005 when government troops killed more than 200 demonstrators at a rally protesting the national elections that year. Local elections earlier this year have also been widely dismissed as fraudulent by Demeksa and international monitors.

Fault Lines

Recent crackdowns by Ethiopian troops in the eastern Ogaden region and the western Gambella region of Ethiopia; total press censorship and control; and the widespread jailing and torture of political dissidents across all ethnic lines have all added urgency and credibility to the Oromo’s longstanding complaints against the regime’s brutally oppressive tactics.

By virtue of its enormous size – comprising roughly 40 percent of Ethiopia’s population – the Oromo have an especially strong claim to deserving a greater voice in Ethiopian politics and culture. Yet Demeksa’s OFDM party holds only about 2 percent of the seats in the Ethiopian parliament.

At the discussion with young Oromo immigrants, Demeksa’s insistence on non-violent resistance hardly mollified the crowd.

“Demeksa has good ideas but no way to get to his goal,” said Sena Jimjimo, an Oromo student who traveled to Minneapolis from Chicago to attend the conference. “He calls for peaceful demonstrations, but there are no such things in Ethiopia. It’s impossible. So my question to him is, ‘If I go to demonstrate, what guarantee do I have that I will come back alive?’”

Apartheid Parallel

I chatted with several of the young people during a break. None of them agreed with Demeksa’s insistence on using only non-violent means to establish democracy in the country of their birth.

Instead, they cited the American Revolutionary War and the sabotage and other violent tactics used by the African National Congress in its long struggle against South African apartheid, as possible models for Ethiopia.

“Martin Luther King needed Malcolm X to pave his way,” one Oromo woman said. “I agree with that. We have reached the point where we need change in Ethiopia by any means necessary.”

To reach Doug McGill: doug@mcgillreport.org

Permalink: www.mcgillreport.org/demeksa.htm
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report

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July 30, 2008

A Son of Minnesota Returns as a Worldly- Wise Monk

ROCHESTER, MN -- Jim Reynolds began his 40-minute talk to a group of Mayo Clinic physicians and health care workers last week by closing his eyes, putting his palms together and intoning an ancient chant in a dead language. 

"I am of the nature to age, I have not gone beyond aging; I am of the nature to sicken, I have not gone beyond sickness; I am of the nature to die, I have not gone beyond dying,” he chanted to the group of health care workers, first in the archaic Indian Pali language, and then in an English translation.

Jim Reynolds, you will have guessed by now, is a Buddhist monk. He is actually known now only by his Buddhist name, Ajahn Chandako, and he serves as the abbot of a monastery near Auckland, New Zealand.

His head is shaved, he never handles money, and he owns little more than his begging bowl, a pair of sandals, and the coffee-colored robes on his back.

Ajahn Chandako (the name Chandako means "one who aspires") is also a Minneapolis native and a Buddhist spiritual teacher with a growing international reputation. Last week, he returned to his home state to teach people how to meditate and to give a series of pithy, gently humorous talks in Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, Northfield and Rochester.

Graveyard Humor

"When I lived in monasteries in Thailand, the meditation halls sometimes had human skeletons hanging in them,” Ajahn told the group of 70 Mayo Clinic employees, flashing a mischievous ear-to-ear smile. “The skeletons hung there for everyone to reflect on, and they had little handwritten signs on them that read: ‘Once I was like you. And one day you will be like me.’”

A knowing chuckle rippled through the room. The health care workers  absorbed Ajahn's graveyard humor as pragmatic wisdom – a useful reminder, perhaps, of nature’s ultimate primacy over all the powers of medicine.

At the end of his Mayo talk, an eager hand shot up in the front row.

“Could you show us how to meditate?” a woman asked.

So, for a few minutes, in a conference room in the middle of a busy Mayo Clinic day, Ajahn taught people how to close their eyes and summon internal spaciousness and ease by using only focused attention and wholesome intention – the channeled inner zeal to become disease free.

Broad Compassion

From a Buddhist view, Ajahn told the Mayo audience, illness is a profound opportunity for spiritual transformation.

“In the old days, if you were a forest monk in Thailand, it was almost inevitable that you would get malaria,” he said. “So when you finally got it, you wouldn't see it as something abnormal, but rather as a normal human experience and an opportunity for spiritual practice.”

When skillfully and fearlessly embraced, Ajahn said, illness offers a rare chance to directly experience the most essential truths of nature. While unwelcome and painful, such an experience naturally imparts an intrinsic wisdom that can replace deep-seated arrogance with humility, anxiety with equanimity, and narrow self-regard with broad compassion.

Rock and Roll

The story of Ajahn Chandako’s emergence as a leading Buddhist teacher encompasses an epic journey from a bright teenager with a passion for drums, to a globe-trotting wanderer, to a disciplined meditator in jungle huts, to the worldly-wise New Zealand abbot and global spiritual teacher that he is today.

Born and raised in Minneapolis and Massachusetts, and a 1984 graduate of Carleton College in comparative religion, Ajahn Chandako says his boyhood was a happy one. He doesn’t recall a particular leaning towards Buddhism, except for one thing.

"If I saw a photograph of a Buddhist monk, something went off inside of me,” he said. “It struck me hard like a gong. It hit the depth of my heart.”

Throughout his high school college years, that strange inner call took a back seat to typical teenage distractions, especially rock and roll. He was a drummer in several bands – in “The Generic Band” the musicians wore plain white T-shirts that read “Drummer,” “Guitarist” and “Singer.”

Last Fling

Social injustice and environmental problems stirred a strong desire to act in response, Ajahn said, but he was dogged by a sense of unreadiness.

“Even if there is sincerity, there may not be the wisdom to know what is helpful and what is destructive,” he said. “Increasingly, I began to think that at least I can clean up this little corner of the environment” – here he pointed to himself. “I could clean up my own mind, and my own behavior."

His first taste of the monastic life came on long meditation retreats after college at the Hokyoji Zen Practice Community in southeast Minnesota, under the famous meditation teacher, Katagiri Roshi. Those were followed by even longer stints as a lay meditator at a monastery in Thailand, where he was first exposed to Buddhist monastic life that was fully integrated into a society where monks had a firm and high standing.

Harrowing Journey

Nearly ready to don the monk’s robes, Ajahn decided he wanted to travel widely through Tibet, which would be impossible once he ordained. This remarkable interlude is described in one of the most beautifully-written travel memoirs ever penned by an almost-monk, The Outer Path – Finding My Way in Tibet.

The story describes a harrowing foot-and-bicycle journey to Tibet in 1987, long before it was easy for Westerners to travel there. The book combines gorgeous descriptive prose with a young man’s struggle to meet the demands of an overwhelming inner drive to undertake ascetic discipline.

“Although I’m traveling lightly, I’m still carrying too much baggage,” he writes one evening by candlelight in a drafty cave carved into the cliffs overlooking Lake Manasarovar in remote western Tibet.

Bright Lights

"Often I feel in the awkward position of being half-monk, half-adventurer. I no longer take things like worldly achievement, social expectations, and money seriously, but I’m still living a secular life. I’m beginning to think like a monk, yet I continue to follow old habits.”

Staring at the brightly flickering candle by which he writes, Ajahn reflects on the pitfalls of his adventurous life, from his rock-and-roll days to his run-ins with Chinese police and nearly dying of hypothermia in Tibet.

“An insect appeared, circled the flame, and dove in to its death. It occurred to me that I am not much smarter. Attracted by bright lights, how many times have I jumped into the fire and been burned?”

Within a few months, Ajahn had returned to his Thailand monastery, shed all his excess baggage, shaved his head, and turned in his shirts and pants and shoes for a few plain squares of cloth and sandals.

Outward Ripples

"I could have gone off to the Amazon and become an ecoterrorist, blowing up bulldozers that were ruining the rainforest,” Ajahn said. “But I knew that would potentially harm other people, and it wouldn’t come from a peaceful mind. If one is practicing meditation correctly, it naturally leads to a reduction in anger and selfishness and greed. It very directly affects the people around us, our family and friends, the people we know best.

“Ripples start to go out in unseen ways. Immediately, the idea that meditation is somehow selfish just doesn't make sense. It has immediate and far-reaching benefits.”

To contact Doug McGill: doug@mcgillreport.org

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink www.mcgillreport.org/chandako.htm

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July 23, 2008

From Oromia to Minnesota, With Love and Coffee

ST. PAUL, MN -- Joe Riemann bestowed one simple name, and in return received overflowing blessings and a beautiful name for himself.

The name he received from members of a grateful immigrant community in the Twin Cities is “Jalata,” meaning “One who loves.”

As for the simple and single name that he bestowed, bear with me, this will sound implausible but it is absolutely true.

Riemann distributes Ethiopian coffee to food cooperatives in Minnesota, and he recently changed the label on vacuum-packed bags of the coffee beans he sells from “Organic Ethiopian” to “Organic Oromian.”

It was precisely this seemingly trivial packaging switch that unleashed a torrent of gratitude on Riemann personally and his colleagues at the St. Paul office of the fair trade food company Equal Exchange.

"Pervasive Violations"

The effusive thanks came from members of the Oromo immigrant community of Minnesota. The state is home to about 20,000 immigrants from Ethiopia, forming the largest Ethiopian diaspora in the world. The majority of these are from the Ethiopian state of Oromia. The Oromo are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, numbering about 30 million out of a total population something more than twice that number.

The Oromo have immigrated to Minnesota over the past 15 years, fleeing what they say is brutal repression and ethnic cleansing of their group by the present Ethiopian regime – claims that are fully backed up by human rights groups. A Human Rights Watch Report in 2005 reported “pervasive human rights violations” and documented hundreds of cases of torture, arbitrary detention, surveillance, and harassment of Oromo citizens.

The systematic suppression of political influence and cultural expression — Oromo history is not taught in Ethiopian schools, for example — is what makes the appearance of the Oromo name on bags of coffee grown in Oromia so genuinely and deeply moving, Oromo Minnesotans say.

Sales Up

“It touches your heart, it’s so powerful,” said Lense Solomon, an Oromo native and the president of the Oromo Student Union. “The Oromo have been repressed for so long, their labor unrewarded, their history wiped out, that to have the Oromo name on their own coffee, that’s huge.”

“It’s like the difference between being called ‘you,’ and being called by your real name,” she added. “It makes you feel proud to be acknowledged.”

The change has been good for business too, according to Barth Anderson, a spokeman for the Wedge food cooperative in Minneapolis. Sales of the coffee have increased about 30 percent since the label change, he says, and some Oromo have brought their families and children into the store to pose in front of the “Oromia Organic” coffee bags on the shelves.

“It’s almost embarrassing how gushing they are in their gratitude,” Anderson said. “They tell me, ‘Thank you for being so brave, to acknowledge what we are going through and to stand with us.’”

Passionate Talk

Riemann says the idea to change the name began at a showing of the documentary film, “Black Gold,” about Oromia coffee farmers in Ethiopia, that he organized as “a bit of Equal Exchange outreach” to potential Ethiopian customers from the area, especially Oromo.

What started as a simple marketing event ended in a powerful experience for everyone who attended, Riemann said. When the movie flickered off and the lights went back on, the room exploded with passionate talk.

“It was emotional and heartwarming,” Riemann says. “Many people started sharing stories about their lives in Ethiopia. The movie had created a space for them remember and share. They talked about living in Ethiopia and the families they left behind. I was really touched. I didn’t expect that.”

Then one young man spoke up at the meeting.

“He called us out,” Riemann said. “He said, ‘the coffee you sell is from Oromia. They why is it called Ethiopian?’”

Nicaragua to Oromia

Riemann thought about that and discussed the possibility of a name change with a colleague, Scott Patterson. They weighed the obvious downside – losing the brand power of the “Ethiopia” label – against the potential gains.

“It was a way to do something positive,” Riemann said. “To not always be talking about tragedy, but to recognize the land where the coffee is grown.”

Equal Exchange started in 1986 by importing coffee from Nicaragua, just when the U.S. government was trying to topple the government, and the company's lawyers spent several years fighting legal battles to allow the imports.

So the “Oromia Organic” label was also in the best “bring-it-on” tradition of the company, and its Boston-based execs okayed the change.

To be sure, not every single response has been positive. Along with the bubbling thank you’s, Riemann and Anderson both received darkly-worded emails from Ethiopians who strongly protested the name change.

Harsh Words

Sometimes the language was so truculent as to give pause.

“Sometimes we’ve asked ourselves, ‘Hey, do we need to do something about this?’” Anderson said.

It is widely known that some of members of the Ethiopian diaspora retain close ties to the Ethiopian government. They report back on diaspora activities and are expected to promote the official Ethiopian government line in public discussions at meetings and in the media.

The harsh tone these correspondents take reflects the severity with which political dissent is received and answered in Ethiopia itself.

Yet Riemann insists the label change is separate from politics.

“This is about creating the chance for Oromos in the Twin Cities to tell their story about the farmers and the land where this coffee is coming from. The outpouring of love and friendship has been real positive.”

To contact Douglas McGill: doug@mcgillreport.org

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/oromiacoffee.htm

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July 16, 2008

From the Jungle, Global Insights on Words and War

ROCHESTER, MN -- In her very first interviews last week after being rescued in the jungles of Colombia, following six years of brutal captivity, Ingrid Betancourt remembered and reflected on a great many things.

But her most inspiring reflections, I think, were the startling words she uttered on two separate occasions last week about language itself – about words and their profound role in shaping human and political affairs.

“We’ve reached a point where we must change the radical extremist vocabulary of hate and very strong words that intimately wound human beings,” she said in a Monday interview with French radio, her voice clear and strong, her eyes alert and piercing.

So often in our private and public discourse, we rush to solve our problems with words. We may use them quickly, in defense or reaction, or we may spend time composing careful screeds of reason and reflection.

In either case, we rarely stop to think about the very medium we are using to douse the flames. What if we don't know as much about language as we thought? This question certainly goes to people who by the millions today are writing on blogs and web sites, and thus are profoundly shaping public discourse, as well as to professional writers, politicians, and full-time activists.

Public Peace

Is it possible that human beings remain collectively quite ignorant about how language actually works in the process of continuing individual and social hurts, and of easing suffering and harm?

What if, despite our best intentions, we often are actually using gasoline instead of water to extinguish our public and private conflagrations? 

Last Friday, in a second interview, Betancourt elaborated on this point. She described how the tonally sensitive and timely use of language is critical to achieve forgiveness first within oneself and between individuals, and how that step in turn creates a broad foundation for public peace.

Her points about language unfolded after the interviewer, Stephen Sackur, asked Betancourt about the very first moments in the rescue helicopter when she and her colleagues first learned they were free.

“At that moment, you could see the guys who had been responsible for your captivity, themselves bound,” Sackur said. “One of them was naked. Did you feel immense anger? Did you want to go and kick them?”

The Right Tone

“No, no,” Betancourt replied softly. “I was kneeling, telling my companions not to do that. At that moment, for some seconds, I prayed. I prayed to God. You know, I think it is very important to be free, totally free. And I think that anger or seeking revenge or bitterness is something like chains. The same chains they had us wearing all those years. It’s like those kinds of chains.”

She used gentle, careful language right there to break her chains.

“We are human beings, and human beings are beings of words,” Betancourt added. “The word is what makes us different. Words are our strongest weapons. We need to talk to make peace. It’s not easy. We know in our everyday life in a family, when there is a problem, that finding the right words, and saying them in the right moment, with the right tone, is so difficult. Well, that also happens for a nation.”

All around the world today, in many countries and spheres of life – scientific, journalistic, political, religious, spiritual – more and more people, including lay people, are considering language and its closely interrelated roles in daily life, the media, public affairs and democratic systems.

Better Metaphors

Mystics like Eckart Tolle; scientists like George Lakoff; popular writers like Deborah Tannen; and global economists like Amartya Sen are all highlighting how the ethical use of language in both private and public spheres, the two being blurred these days, is a key to human progress.

Tannen, in her book “The Argument Culture,” examines how the metaphors of “fighting,” “war” and “aggression,” so deeply buried in human consciousness, covertly direct much human behavior, much to our collective detriment. Learning and following more peaceful and collaborative metaphors to describe human interaction, self-representation and decision-making is critical to making peace as humans, Tannen says.

George Lakoff, Drew Westen and other neuroscientists and psychologists meanwhile have empirically described how language triggers discrete, measurable, predictable feelings and psychological moods. They thus are manipulated by propagandists – such as corporate advertisers and government leaders and political spinners – for distinctly anti-social ends.

A Last Question

Drawing closer to Betancourt’s recent comments on language, writers like Amartya Sen, Anthony Appiah and Amin Maalouf show how language works to establish and perpetuate divisive identity groups.

Such “descriptive misrepresentation” degrades people for political ends and “seriously miniaturizes” human beings, Sen says.

In a dreadful experiment in human suffering and language that distinctly was not of her choosing, Ingrid Betancourt reached similar conclusions.

At the end of the interview, the BBC host asked her one last question.

“When you think about yourself, Ingrid Betancourt, how have you changed over the last six and a half years? How are you different now from the woman you were, running for president, in 2002?”

“I’m a woman," Betancourt replied. "I’m a fragile woman. The difference is that now I know that I’m fragile. So I take care.”

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/betancourt.htm
To reach Douglas Mcgill: doug@mcgillreport.org

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July 9, 2008

As Ethiopia Boils, Minnesota's Ethiopians Feel the Heat

FRIDLEY, MN -- Ali Abdifatah is out of his mind right now, understandably so.

He is desperate to discover the fate of his brother, who was abducted by men with guns last Saturday evening. Since then, he hasn’t been seen or heard from and Ali has sat by his telephone and computer at his home here, calling and emailing, gathering small scraps of information.

But that’s a difficult task because his brother, Sultan Fowsi Mohamed Ali, is a clan elder in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, a half a world away. A renowned peacekeeper in the troubled Horn of Africa, whom Amnesty International has called a “prisoner of conscience,” Sultan Fowsi has been held in the giant Ogaden Jail in the town of Jijiga since last August.

Then, last Friday afternoon, according to Minnesota Ethiopians who have spoken to eyewitnesses in Ethiopia in cell phone conversations, Ethiopian troops barged into the jail and shot several prisoners on Friday afternoon. They then left, but on Saturday evening they returned, grabbed Sultan Fowsi and one other prisoner and vanished into the night.

Razor's Edge

As a result, this week in Minnesota hundreds of immigrants from the Ogaden region of Ethiopia are firing up Internet sites and spending hours on their cell phones every day, trying to learn the fate of a beloved leader.

“It’s shocking, it’s bad,” Ali said, thumbing through stacks of human rights reports written over the years, many of them praising his brother as one of the few figures capable of negotiating peace in the Horn of Africa.

Yet as bad as it is, Ali’s story is only one of hundreds of similar tales told these days by Minnesota’s nearly 20,000 Ethiopian immigrants, who come from all across the country and not just the Ogaden region.

What is happening in the Ogaden region is the most immediate, urgent, and largest-scale atrocity occurring in Ethiopia today.

But simmering conflicts that have been brewing for many years are flaring up today all across Ethiopia, and these are keeping Minnesota’s Ethiopian community, composed of many ethnic groups, on a razor’s edge.

U.S. Citizens

“What’s going on in Ethiopia is the government is trying to silence all opposition,” said Robsan Itana, director of the Oromo American Citizens Council, based in St. Paul, which represents immigrants of the Oromo ethnic group, the largest in Ethiopia. “They are killing people.”

When the present Ethiopian regime came to power in 1991 under the banner of “ethnic federalism,” there was widespread hope that Ethiopia’s nine major ethnic groups – and dozens of smaller ones – would for once begin to live in harmony with Ethiopia’s central government.

Instead, today, the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi finds itself fighting counter-insurgency campaigns against “liberation fronts” across the breadth of the country.

Fleeing these violent counter-insurgency campaigns, immigrants from virtually all of Ethiopia’s major ethnic groups came to live in Minnesota over the past decade. Many are now U.S. citizens.

But as they still have families and loved ones back in Ethiopia, when violence flares up over there, tempers and temperaments get riled here in Minnesota, and Ethiopian troubles soon become Minnesota’s.

Attacks-by-Proxy

Another example that is having repercussions in this state is a bloody clash that occurred in May between the Oromo and Gumuz ethnic groups in western Ethiopia, that left more than a hundred people killed.

On the surface, the inter-tribal nature of the Oromo-Gumuz conflict left little trace of Ethiopian government involvement.

Yet Oromo in Ethiopia and in the Minnesota diaspora have charged – as one or another party nearly always does in such cases – that the Ethiopian government instigated the conflict by various means, such as ceding land belonging to one party to another, as a way to foment violence and launch a brutal attack-by-proxy on a targeted ethnic group.

“It’s a nightmare what Oromos are subjected to in Ethiopia,” says Lencho Bati, a professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota, and a native Oromo. "It’s exactly what blacks in South Africa suffered under apartheid – lack of access to resources, education, power, cultural enrichment and the right to self-determination.”

Locked Out

Like Ali Abdifatah, Lencho Bati also has a brother who was “disappeared” by the Ethiopian military.

“My brother was abducted in 1992 by the then-new regime of Meles Zenawi,” Bati said. “He has been missing since then. My family is living this trauma that has left a big hole in our hearts. It’s a single story but it is also common among so many Oromos in Minnesota.”

Bati spends much of his free time researching conditions in Ethiopia and working on behalf of Oromo rights. He is a member of the Oromo Liberation Front, a political opposition group highly active in the Ethiopian diaspora.   

The Anuak of Ethiopia are another case in point. A black African tribe of only 100,000 living in Ethiopia’s western Gambela state, roughly 1,000 Anuak today live in Minnesota. They came here after fleeing ethnic cleansing attacks carried out both directly by the Ethiopian army, and in proxy conflicts instigated and then left unpoliced by Ethiopian troops, often pitting the de-armed Anuak against armed groups of the Nuer tribe.

Fertile Land

“Pushing the Anuak out of the region is part of the Ethiopian government policy,” said Apee Jobi, a Minnesota Anuak who lives in Brooklyn Park. “A government official once called the Anuak ‘scum.’ Gambela is a fertile land and if it was developed it could help feed all of Ethiopia. So the government likes the land, but it doesn’t like its people.”

The Ethiopian military has conducted four major attacks on the Anuak tribe since the Meles regime took power in Ethiopia in 1991, Jobi said. The largest one took place on December 13, 2003 when uniformed Ethiopian troops killed some 425 Anuak men in a massacre that Human Rights Watch called “crimes against humanity” that targeted the Anuak tribe specifically.    

Employed at a local bank, Jobi devotes virtually every weekend to Anuak causes, organizes meetings, helps raise money for Anuak refugees, and edits a web site, Gambela Today,  which runs news stories almost daily.

Stark Contrast

In stark contrast to the picture painted by Minnesota’s Ethiopians, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, in interview after interview, portrays Ethiopia as a country that has its problems but is inevitably marching towards peace and democracy.

“A peaceful, strong, viable opposition is part of any vibrant democracy,” he told the Washington Post in 2006. “We wish to have a vibrant democracy and therefore we wish to have a vibrant, strong, peaceful opposition.” 

But of the dozen Ethiopian immigrants interviewed for this article, only those quoted in the story above were willing to give their names for publication.  

The others said that the Ethiopian government pays spies in Minnesota to report the names of people here who criticize the government, and that family members who still live in Ethiopia would be punished.

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report 
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/minnethiopians.htm

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July 2, 2008

With Spies and Cellphones, Ethiopian Terror Touches Minnesota

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – The four men sitting at a downtown coffee shop here recently told me a story that sounded too far-fetched to be true. 

Could a humanitarian crisis following the pattern of Darfur, Sudan actually be unfolding while capturing hardly a second of the world’s collective attention, or Minnesota's?  

Even worse, could it actually be true, as these four Minnesotans insist, that this unimaginable massacre is substantially being sustained by U.S. tax dollars and moral support? 

Is it possible that entire African villages are being wiped out Darfur-style by marauding helicopter gunships belonging to a close American ally, and that new refugee camps are being formed virtually overnight, as we speak, thanks to Uncle Sam? 

Superpower Struggles

This sounded like the vilest strain of anti-American propaganda. But after a few hours speaking with these gentlemen, and doing a few more hours of research and checking, their story seems all too definitely, tragically, true.
 
The four men are in an ideal position to know. They are members of Minnesota’s community of immigrants from Ogaden, Ethiopia – a Montana-sized patch of desert that has been the scene of global superpower struggles for many decades.  

Every day for the past several months, these four men, along with hundreds of other Ogaden immigrants in Minnesota, have spent hours every week on their cellphones talking to loved ones who give them seemingly endless eyewitness accounts of crimes and horrors in a war zone.

“We hear about mothers being forced to betray their own sons to the Ethiopian Army, of fathers being handed guns and ordered to kill their own sons on the spot or to be killed themselves,” one of the men said.  

Minnesota Spies

“Every Ogadeni in Minnesota has friends or family who have been jailed, tortured, or killed. It seems there is no end to it. We could tell you stories all day for a whole week and still have more stories to tell you.” 

The men asked that their names not be published, because they said Ethiopian government spies live in Minnesota who would help the Ethiopian authorities hunt down their family members in Ogaden to jail them, torture them or worse as a punishment for talking with the press.
 
Having the second-largest population of refugees per capital of any U.S. state (after Florida), and likely the nation's top state in diversity of refugees, Minnesota has once again become an early-warning system for crimes against humanity being perpetrated in a faraway country – this time in eastern Ethiopia.
 
Minnesota’s Ethiopian immigrant community is estimated between 13,000 and 20,000, the lower number being the latest U.S. Census figure, and the higher a number given by local Ethiopian immigrant groups.  

Ethnic Somalis

About a fourth of the state’s Ethiopian immigrants are from Ogaden, whose natives, in contrast to Ethiopia’s Amharic-speaking Christians, are Somali-speaking Muslims. And therein lies the problem.
 
For decades, ordinary Ogadeni herders and farmers have lived on a literal battlefield over which Ethiopia and Somalia, acting as proxies for global powers, have waged an epic-length conflict.

A conventional war was fought in 1977-78. More often, counter-insurgency attacks by the Ethiopian government against supposed Ogaden separatists -- or now, "terrorists" -- have targeted civilians and entire villages, creating vast refugee flows.

The Ogaden landscape today is littered with the hulks of tanks and rusting weapons used in battles since 1948. That was the year that Britain, then the region’s dominant global power, ceded Ogaden to Ethiopia, even though nearly all of its five million inhabitants are ethnically and culturally Somali.
  
During the Cold War period, the region’s global powers were the Soviet Union and the United States.  

Minnesota's Challenge

Today, the great global struggle being waged locally is the “War on Terror.”
 
Official U.S. foreign policy holds that the Horn of Africa is one of the world’s top breeding grounds for radical Islamist terrorists.

An Islamist governnment in Sudan, plus a powerful Islamist faction in Somalia with the likely support of nearby Eritrea, have led to the U.S. embrace of Ethiopia as a close ally in the War on Terror – it being “the only democratic nation in the Horn of Africa.” 

But Minnesota’s large Ethiopian population challenges that formulation. 

If Ethiopia is a democracy how come thousands of its citizens are fleeing as refugees and asylees to our state, insisting Ethiopia is a tyranny? 

A report published last month by Human Rights Watch lends credence to horrific stories told by the four Ogadeni men at the Minneapolis coffee shop.  

87 Villages

The report’s title, “Collective Punishment,” refers to the practice of wiping out villages based on rumors that insurgents live there. The report’s subtitle is “War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in the Ogaden.”
  
Despite Ethiopia’s attempts to block information about human rights crimes from escaping the Ogaden, Human Rights Watch said it had received reports of  “at least 87 burnings and forced displacements of villages, many of which involved extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape across numerous areas of the Somali Region,” meaning the Ogaden.
   
Since the late 1970s, when Ethiopia and Somalia waged a conventional war over the Ogaden, between two and three million refugees have poured out of region into neighboring Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti – and then onwards to a global diaspora including Minnesota.

In the most recent violence, tens of thousands of Ogadenis have already been displaced, and an Ethiopian economic and aid blockade threatens to escalate the humanitarian catastrophe by orders of magnitude as a result of drought and famine, Human Rights Watch said.
 
“The situation is critical,” the report says. 

Moral Hazard

As for the question of funding, the U.S. is the largest single source of foreign military aid to Ethiopia. Moreover, total U.S. military aid to the country increased seventeen-fold after 9/11, when Ethiopia became a close ally of the U.S. in the “war on terror.” 

According to the Center for Public Integrity, the U.S. provided $16.8 million in military aid to Ethiopia in the three years following 9/11, compared to $928,000 in the three years before 9/11. That is a small percentage of Ethiopia’s annual $300 million defense budget, but critics say that unofficially, U.S. support of Ethiopia and its military is far higher.
 
Overall U.S. assistance to Ethiopia totaled $474 million in 2007 alone, according to the U.S. Department of State. Including other major sources of foreign aid, especially the UK and the European Union, Ethiopia receives almost $2 billion in aid annually.  

“Americans are also a victim in the Ogaden,” one of the men in the coffee shop said. “Do they know their tax dollars are supporting a tyranny like this? If they knew, wouldn’t they want it to stop?” 

CORRECTION: In this story's original version I bluntly characterized the government of Eritrea as Islamist, which was incorrect and misleading. The Eritrean government is composed of members of the country’s sole legal political party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, which formally follows no ideology. Yet in 2007, the U.S. and the U.N. both accused Eritrea of providing weapons and support for prominent Islamist factions in neighboring Somalia, as part of Eritrea's long-running conflict with its neighbor, Ethiopia. Strong evidence has been offered to back this claim. Nevertheless, as I said, the PFDJ is not formally aligned. And it remains even more emphatically true that average Eritreans, who have their own problems with their government, grievously suffer for having the “Islamist” label tagged onto their entire nation by a U.S. government following its own “War on Terror” propaganda campaign. I'm sorry that my original wording sounded like that tag. 

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink

http://www.mcgillreport.org/ogaden.htm

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June 25, 2008

Ethiopian Official Defects
to U.S., Decries Anuak Genocide

ROCHESTER, MN -- An Ethiopian government official seeking to distance himself from what he says is a continuing attempt by Ethiopia to eradicate an African tribe, has defected to the United States.  

Obang Oman, who only three weeks ago visited Minneapolis
as part of an official Ethiopian delegation, was scheduled to return to Ethiopia on Sunday,
June 8.

Instead, the night before, he fled his Washington, D.C. hotel, spent the entire evening in a 24-hour restaurant, and flew out early the next morning for Denver, Colorado. He has not announced his defection until today.  

“I know what is waiting for me if I return,” Oman said. “They would try to arrest me or kill me. I fear for myself, my wife and my children. So what is the better thing to do? I decided to keep my remaining life.” 

Anuak Genocide

Oman’s defection is the latest twist in the long-running saga of the Anuak tribe of Ethiopia, more than a thousand of whom live as refugees in Minnesota. According to Human Rights Watch and other international groups, the Anuak tribe has been the target of crimes against humanity and a campaign of genocide conducted by the Ethiopian government.

Minnesota has the largest Anuak refugee population in the world.  

Ironically, Oman came to the U.S. last month as part of an Ethiopian government delegation whose official purpose was to persuade Minnesota’s Anuak population that conditions are now safe enough for the Anuak to return to Ethiopia to invest, to start businesses and to raise their families. 

As the Deputy Director for Agricultural Research in Gambella, the western state of Ethiopia where most Anuak live, Oman sat on a dais with five other high-level Ethiopian officials at a May 31 meeting in Minneapolis. With the other officials, he promised more than a hundred Minnesota Anuak refugees in the audience that conditions in Ethiopia are now safe and secure.   

Remarks Recanted

Today, Oman recants those remarks. He says that the governor of Gambella, Omot Olom, who is named as a key planner of the genocide in several human rights reports, had personally threatened his life in the past and would likely have jailed him or worse if he had not lied at the Minneapolis meeting.   

“He expected me to lie,” he said, referring to Governor Olom, who was the highest-ranking member of the visiting delegation. “I don’t like to lie, but if I had refused he would have taken action.”

Oman said that his wife was evicted from their government housing in Ethiopia two days after his defection, and that he fears for her life and those of his three children.  

Feisel Abrahim, an Ethiopian government spokesman based in Washington, D.C. who was part of the visiting delegation to Minneapolis, denied that Oman’s wife had been kicked out of her apartment, that she or Oman’s  children are in any danger, or that the Ethiopian government has any grievance whatsoever against Oman. 

“This individual is looking for a better life rather than serving his people,” Abrahim said. “There is no way the government is after him. Most people when they come to the United States try to present themselves as political, that they will be tortured or imprisoned. But in actual terms it’s not true.” 

Routine Torture

Michele McKenzie, an immigration lawyer for the Minneapolis-based The Advocates for Human Rights, says that Ethiopian refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. have been one of the biggest portions of their clientele since at least 1991, when the present Ethiopian regime took power.  

“It’s because of political repression,” McKenzie said. “It informs a level of fear that I would say is unique in the clients we deal with. The government routinely uses torture as a means of curtailing dissidents, and they don’t soft-pedal their tactics. It’s working for the Ethiopian government to target people ethnically and it seems they are picking off the groups one by one.” 

Oman, the official who defected, is an Anuak and is not named as being involved in the Anuak genocide in any human rights report. He also was not employed by the government on December 13, 2003, the day on which some 425 Anuak men in Gambella were reportedly killed by uniformed Ethiopian soldiers, in one of the worst massacres ever suffered by the Anuak.  

Last Warning

Oman says his relationship with Olom, the Gambella governor, turned sour in March, 2006 after he questioned the apparently arbitrary killing of two young Anuak men in Gambella by Ethiopian soldiers. The regional military commander complained about him to Olom, Oman says, which prompted Governor Olom to personally threaten his life.  

“They discussed it and he gave me a last warning,” Oman says. “He said ‘If you do that again you will be killed or arrested.’” Following that incident, Oman says he was demoted several times. He says he was ordered to join the visiting delegation primarily because the government needed to have an Anuak testify to the Minnesota Anuak that conditions are safe to return.  

Several Minnesota Anuak, reached by telephone, said that Oman’s defection testified to the actual truth of conditions in Gambella today, as opposed to the optimistic line offered by the official delegation at the May meeting.  

Causing Chaos

“His defection automatically contradicts that message,” said Apee Jobi, an Anuak who lives in Brooklyn Park. “It says that that Gambella is not really stable and that things are still really bad.” 

Habtamu Dugo, an Ethiopian journalist seeking asylum in the U.S. after suffering several jailings and torture for publishing articles critical of the Ethiopian regime, says that many Ethiopian government officials have defected to the U.S. in recent years. 

“While they are in the regime, they do what they don’t believe in, and that haunts them,” Dugo said. “They get tired of seeing crimes committed against their own people, whom they say they represent. The time finally comes when they realize they are causing a lot of chaos. They feel guilty and they don’t want to be a part of the system, so they defect.” 

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/defection.htm

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June 11, 2008

In Darfur, Minnesota,
Another Kind of Siege

DARFUR, Minnesota – Every once in a while, someone in this tiny speck of a prairie town catches sight of a “Save Darfur!” poster in a magazine or a newspaper, or on the flickering TV at the Darfur Lounge on main street.

What follows is a shake of the head and a stoical smile.  

Folks here are well aware of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, the blood-drenched patch of northern Africa that -- by pure historical accident -- is this Minnesota town’s namesake.    

But the citizens of Darfur, Minnesota have had their own bitter survival struggle in recent years. The clash of modern life versus traditional agricultural life here hasn’t been as tragically bloody as the siege in Sudan, but it still has profoundly diminished this place that 137 Minnesotans call home.  

Railway Town

And today, powerful new global economic forces -- the rising price of gasoline, farm fertilizers, food commodities and globalization itself -- are beginning to batter and further isolate Minnesota's Darfur. It’s an ironic counterpoint to the supposedly increasingly interconnected, digitally “networked” world.  

“We used to have two of everything here,” said Katherine Penner, a Darfur native who has worked at the local post office for 20 years. “Two grocery stores, two gas stations, two of everything. But now,’’ she says, her voice trailing off wistfully. 

Like hundreds of Minnesota’s agricultural communities, Darfur began as a surging railway town that boasted a cathedral-like grain elevator at its commercial and spiritual heart. The town grew by mid-century to include its own stockyard, a lumber yard, a hatchery, a hardware store, downtown coffee shops, a barber shop, a beauty shop, a brass band and a public school.

Two Name-Tales

Today, the town's wide empty main street is flanked by shuttered old buildings. The elegant old public school, once the pride of Darfur, sits empty with blank windows at the center of town. The four viable businesses -- the bar, the bank, the coop and the elevator -- huddle against the vastness of the prairie. 

Folks in town tell two stories about the origin of the town’s name, which is pronounced "DAR-fer" as opposed to Sudan's "dar-FOOR." 

Bruce Englin, the co-manager of the Darfur elevator, says the story goes that a Norwegian immigrant railroad worker asked another worker, back in 1899 when the town was first surveyed, “Why did you put that stake dar fur?”  

Katherine Heppner recalls a different version. She says her father told her as a child that trappers in the area used to seek dark-pelted local otters whose “dark fur,” once rendered in immigrant brogue, became dar fur. 

The city’s official history, buried in dusty files at the Watonwan County Historical Society in nearby Madelia, describes the dynamic Darfur-of-long-ago days in this scene of the Darfur General Store in 1900: “Sausage came in very long, dry sticks; cheese came in large round cakes which was sold to customers in pie-shaped wedges; candy came in pails; dry goods consisted of yard goods, lace, buttons, hats, shoes, and long black stocking; there were lanterns, pails, washtubs and washboards all suspended from the ceiling.” 

$4 Gas, $6.30 Corn

It’s all gone now, and it all left long ago. The rise of mega-farms, the globalization of agricultural markets and the flight of young people to the big cities – the classic Midwest American story -- left Darfur struggling.  

Now, newer global forces threaten to dissolve what little cohesion the town of Darfur has managed to retain.

At the Darfur bank, vice-president Michael Stoesz hands out a flyer showing that although food commodity prices have risen this year, most other “input costs” for farmers are rising much quicker – propane by 54%, farm diesel fuel by 68%, fertilizer by 99%, and potash a whopping 125%.  

“Corn at $6.30 a bushel sounds great on the outside,” Stoesz says. “But with all these other prices going up, in reality it’s not so great.”   

A framed satellite photograph on Stoesz’ wall shows Darfur in a single snapshot – 58 homes filling city blocks laid out in a perfect triangle, with the grain elevator at the middle of the base and the town’s cemetery at the triangle's peak. 

Sudan News

Over at the Cenex agriculture coop, the talk is about what happens if the price of corn and beans goes down but the price of fertilizer, chemicals and fuels stay where they are or spike higher. That could spell Darfur's final doom.  

Sofie Evers, who has run the one-room Darfur library for two afternoons a week for the past 29 years, says she has many friends in Darfur who already are suffering from close-to-$4-a-gallon gasoline.  

“We have no grocery story here, so we have to drive to get food,” she says.  

That trend is increasing Darfur’s sense of isolation from the rest of Minnesota and the world, Evers said.  

Every once in a while, news of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan makes its way to Darfur, Minnesota in an odd and fleeting way.  

Sermon Theme

Rick Nelson, a bartender at the Darfur Lounge, sometimes clips article headlines out of the newspaper – “U.N. to Send 26,000 Troops to Darfur,” “Bush Determined to End Bloodshed in Darfur” – and posts them on the bar’s bulletin board, next to the notices about farm auctions and bake sales. 

Lisa Schumann, the Darfur city clerk, remembers how a bunch of college kids wearing “Save Darfur” t-shirts showed up once out of nowhere to have their pictures taken next to the green-and-white "Darfur, Pop. 137" road sign on County Road 30 just outside of town.

Lots of folks in Darfur remember how Pastor Bob Olson of the Lutheran church here, before he passed away, started making sermons about the Darfur genocide, and passing the plate from time to time.  

Mostly, people here say that not much unites the two Darfurs except for the name. But sometimes on reflection they change their mind.  

“We’re polar opposites,” Mike Stoesz started to say. “We are just a small little town in the middle of nowhere, with very few of all the modern things like computers, compared to …” And then he paused for a moment. 

“Come to think of it,” Stoesz amended himself, "maybe we aren't that different after all."

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/darfurmn.htm

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June 4, 2008

By Douglas McGill

MINNEAPOLIS , MN -- The burning question in the days before the tense meeting held here last Saturday was: How would the traumatized survivors of an accused mass killer greet the very person who had planned their doom?
 
Omot Obang Olom has been named by human rights groups as a key architect of a genocide against the African Anuak tribe of western Ethiopia.
 
Last Saturday, that same man met face-to-face with more than a hundred Anuak survivors of the genocide who now live in Minnesota, which is home to the largest Anuak diaspora population in the world.  

The Minnesota Anuak and Olom confronted each other in an otherwise plain conference room at a Minneapolis Sheraton. The Anuak sat in rows before a dais where Olom perched watchfully if impassively for a full six hours, flanked by two stony-faced Ethiopian officials on his either side.

Reluctant Speakers

The dais was draped with the red, green and yellow flag of Ethiopia, with bunches of white cut flowers and brightly painted Anuak gourd bowls.
 
Olom today is the governor of the Ethiopian state of Gambella, the ancestral homeland of the Anuak tribe and ground zero of the genocide. The declared purpose of his visit was to assure the Anuak of Minnesota, who fled here to escape likely death in Ethiopia, that their homeland is now peaceful enough that they may return to raise their families, to do business, and to invest. 

A microphone stood in the center aisle of the audience for anyone brave enough to address Olom publicly. An Anuak moderator however began the session by declaring that if anyone was too afraid to speak – many Anuak had said they feared for the lives of families members still in  Ethiopia -- they could write down their questions instead on a piece of paper.  

In Jesus' Name

The Anuak of Minnesota who attended the Saturday meeting were dressed as if for church, and sat respectfully as if in pews.  

The Anuak men were immaculately groomed, wearing handsome suits and patent leather shoes, sometimes with subtle silver ear studs and stylish eyeglasses. The women likewise were tastefully turned out in flowing long colorful dresses, bright gold- and silver-bangled jewelry and sweeping headscarves covering long braided hair. 

The meeting began with a vigorous prayer from Omot Aganya, a Minnesota Anuak pastor.
 
“We must be sure that there are absolutely no hard words, no fighting today!” Aganya thundered, jabbing the air with his fist. “We thank God for this opportunity to meet together and to talk. We REBUKE ALL EVIL SPIRITS that might enter this room. We CAST THEM AWAY so this meeting will have a positive outcome, IN JESUS’ NAME!” 

Intense Stares

Olom, the reputed killer, was a baby-faced man only in his mid-30s. He wore a powder blue suit and wire-rim glasses, and spoke in the flat tones of a technocrat, not the impassioned tones of an ideologue.  

“It’s been too long since we have talked,” he told the crowd in his opening statement. “We need to all be in conversation today because Gambella needs you. You all need to become a part of a new democratic Gambella. We are peaceful today and there are chances for development. If the Anuak of America don’t become a part of that, we won’t make any progress.” 

When he was finished, about half the audience applauded weakly.
 
Then, during the Q&A, the positive-to-negative comment ratio veered sharply negative. All but a handful of the audience questions were sharply critical of Olom.  

Sorrow and Fury

The most poignant comments came from Anuak women who fixed Olom with intense glares and lashed him with words mixing sorrow and fury.
 
One woman began by sternly uttering a single word, “Okichi.” It was Olom’s childhood nickname which was known to everyone, and when she said the word a ripple of nervous laughter spread throughout the room.  

Another woman leaned into the microphone and said to Olom: “Thank you for being here, for not running away from us. We want to tell you what we have in our hearts. We will say good things and bad things. But the first thing is, you should have started your speech with an apology. We want to hear your apology. Yet you still have not yet apologized. Will you now apologize?” 

The apology the Anuak woman sought was for the gruesome events of December 13, 2003 and for the years that have followed – the period of time that a major 2005 Human Rights Watch report says that Olom was involved in “crimes against humanity” against the Anuak.  

"Exceptionally Hard-Line"

On December 13, according to those reports and to a journalistic account, more than 100 soldiers entered the Anuak town of Gambella, where they led a rampage that ended in the deaths of 425 Anuak men, the destruction of hundreds of  Anuak homes, and the rape of Anuak women and girls.
 
Two reports by the human rights group Genocide Watch cite witnesses saying that Olom, who was Gambella's security chief during the massacre, gave lists of educated Anuak men to the Ethiopian army to be targeted for execution. 

In the years following 2003, Olom “has taken an exceptionally hard-line approach to stamping out the threat to regional security,” the 2005 Human Rights Watch report said. “Unarmed young men have been frequently shot at and in many cases killed while traveling between villages. Many [Army] patrols seem to view any Anuak civilian who runs away from them a legitimate target.” 

The Living Dead

In the six-hour Saturday meeting, Olom never apologized. To the contrary, he flatly denied having passed a death list of Anuak names to the Ethiopian army, and he blamed the massacre of December 13 on his predecessor as governor of Gambella, whom he called weak and cowardly. 

“It is wrong that people point to me as the bad guy,” Olom said, even though he was Gambella’s security chief during the 2003 massacre. “I was only trying to calm the situation.”
 
During the Saturday meeting, members of Olom’s delegation said that lists of the Anuak dead that are published on the Internet are inflated and inaccurate.  

“I have seen people on that list walking around in Gambella,” the official said. Some names on the list also were double-counted, he said.  

Blaming Victims

In many cases it was Anuak troublemakers who caused the killing on December 13, one Ethiopian official told the crowd. Olom said that dozens of Anuak men in prison today in Ethiopia are still suspects in the killings. 
My translator, an Anuak named Magn Nyang, offered a bitter comment after translating those words.  

"Is he saying that we killed ourselves on December 13?” Magn asked. 

“He is blaming the victim,” Magn said. “Omot Olom is not answering the most important question, which is who has been found guilty of the crimes? We want that question answered and we want those who are guilty to be arrested.” 

Legal Hearings

Many Anuak refused to attend yesterday’s meeting on ethical grounds. Some of them contacted the U.S. State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, to try to deny Olom a visa or even to have him arrested.  
One of the boycotters was Obang Metho, a prominent Anuak activist and writer who lives in Saskatchewan and travels frequently to Minnesota.
 
Last Wednesday, Metho, the director of the Anuak Justice Council, published an article explaining why he would boycott Saturday’s meeting: “It should take place under some other venue -- a legal hearing in a court, a truth-and-reconciliation hearing, or at least an Anuak traditional approach where there is accountability for what one has done and the truth is held in high regard,” Metho wrote.
 
The traditional Anuak approach mentioned by Metho is a prominent feature of Anuak culture called “gurtong,” in which aggrieved parties meet, the facts of a case are painstakingly determined, accountability is established, and a mutual settlement is reached.

Blunt Spears

Literally translated “to blunt a spear,” gurtong has been studied by anthropologists and proposed by some human rights groups as a model peacemaking process. 

Another boycotter of Saturday’s meeting was Obang Kono Cham, an Anuak from Rochester who sends money regularly to a brother who has lived in a refugee camp in Kenya since he fled the massacre of December 13, 2003. 

“I’m still suffering because of my brother, and every Anuak does the same thing because of Omot Olom and his crimes,” Cham said. “I didn’t want to go to the meeting and see him deny all of that in front of me.”
 
Yet, Cham added, “Olom also has suffered from the violence. He’s been forced by the Ethiopan government to kill his own people. When you look into his eyes, you see there is nothing there. He also is a victim.”

Douglas McGill can be reached at doug@mcgillreport.org

See an earlier story, A Genocide Planner to Meet His Minnesota Survivors

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http:www.mcgillreport.org/olomvisit.htm

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May 29, 2008

A Genocide Planner to Meet
His Minnesota Survivors