Skip to main content

Rights group: Ethiopia forcibly resettled 70,000

By LUC VAN KEMENADE, Associated Press – Tue Jan 17, 9:59 am ET
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – Ethiopia has forcibly moved tens of thousands of semi-nomadic people in the country's west to barren villages and threatened, assaulted and arrested those who resisted, an international rights group said in a report Tuesday.
The Human Rights Watch report said that Ethiopia last year resettled about 70,000 people in its western Gambella region after the first of a three-year "villagization" program.
The rights group said it suspects people have been moved to lease out farmland to investors, and not just to lift them out of poverty. It said that security forces "repeatedly threatened, assaulted, and arrested villagers" who resisted relocation. The watchdog also reported rape, killing of cattle and burning of houses among rights violations.
Instead of the promised improved life with "access to basic socio-economic infrastructures," locals found new villages that lacked food, farmland, schools and health clinics, the New York-based watchdog said.
Human Rights Watch said its report is based on 100 interviews in 2011 with residents in Gambella and in a refugee camp in Kenya. The report also relied on visits to 16 affected villages.
The organization called upon the Ethiopian government to suspend its program until all promised facilities have been provided for.
Ethiopia's minister of federal affairs, Shiferaw Teklemariam, denounced the allegations in a letter to Human Rights Watch as "downright fabrications" of a "politically motivated" organization. He wrote that Human Rights Watch "willfully ignores the fact that more than 50,000 people are utilizing services from the newly built" villages.
He said the Gambella resettlement is a success and that "villagers for the first time in their history started to produce excess product — maize, sorghum, rice, potatoes, beans, vegetables, fruits, etc. — beyond and above their family consumption."
Shiferaw said resettlement is voluntary. He denied any presence of military troops and claimed that interference of security forces was unnecessary because participants showed a "keen interest."
Ethiopia plans to relocate a total of 45,000 households in Gambella by 2013. According to the Oakland Institute, a U.S.-based policy think tank, Ethiopia's government has earmarked 42 percent of Gambella's land for investment.
The Gambella resettlement plan is part of a larger scheme that aims to relocate a total of 1.5 million people in four regions. Ethiopia has earmarked a total of 3.5 million hectares for leasing nationwide and according to the country's ministry of agriculture website it rented out more than 350,000 hectares to 24 investors in the last two years.
Jan Egeland, Europe director of Human Rights Watch, said that resettlement takes place "in the exact same areas of Ethiopia that the government is leasing to foreign investors for large-scale commercial agricultural operations".
"This raises suspicions about the underlying motives of the program," he said in a statement.
Human Rights Watch cited an official from the U.S. government's aid arm — USAID — as saying the U.S. organization had concerns about underlying motives of the resettlement scheme but wasn't successful in getting the government to respond to allegations of a link between relocation and investment. Ethiopia is one of the top recipients of U.S. aid.
Egeland said that it "seems that donor money is being used, at least indirectly, to fund the villagization program." He said donors should take the responsibility "to ensure that their assistance does not facilitate forced displacement and associated violations".
USAID did an assessment of the Gambella resettlement program in March 2011 and, while the report has not been made public, concluded that relocation was voluntary, Human Rights Watch said.
U.S. Ambassador Donald E. Booth and USAID deputy country director Jason Fraser traveled to Gambella last week but were not immediately available for comment.
Gambella, in west-central Ethiopia, is a traditionally marginalized area of the country that suffers internal conflicts over resources like water and land between indigenous peoples like the pastoral Nuer and agrarian Anuak. It also is affected by its border with South Sudan, as refugees pour across into Gambella when violence erupts in that newly independent nation.
Gambella also saw a large influx of Ethiopians who the former dictatorship forced to relocate after a devastating famine in the 1980s.
Human Rights Watch has accused Ethiopia's military of murder, rape and torture of scores of ethnic Anuak in Gambella in December 2003. The government conducted an investigation but largely absolved the military.
Ethiopia's Walta Information Center has reported that most of the 4.45 million acres (1.8 million hectares) that Ethiopia's government leased to foreign companies last year are in Gambella, and that most of the leased Gambella land has gone to Indian companies.
A World Bank report last year on leasing agricultural land to foreign companies noted that some of Ethiopia's leases last up to 100 years and favor rich foreigners over poor Ethiopians, with large investors receiving land and water free of charge along with tax benefits, while local peasants have to pay land taxes and other fees.
___
Associated Press reporter Michelle Faul in Johannesburg contributed to this report.
Follow Yahoo! News on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Video: Israeli soldiers fire tear gas at 6-year-old children on their way to school

Video: Israeli soldiers fire tear gas at 6-year-old children on their way to school The new school year started four days ago in the occupied West Bank, and Israeli soldiers have fired tear gas and hurled stun grenades at Palestinian elementary school students on at least two occasions already. In the Nablus -area village of Burin , which is surrounded by illegal Jewish-only Israeli settlements , Israeli forces stormed an elementary school Wednesday, firing tear gas and stun grenades at students after a settler’s vehicle traveling nearby the school was allegedly hit with a rock thrown by a Palestinian youth. Many children were treated at the scene for tear-gas inhalation, reported Ma’an News Agency . One day earlier, Israeli forces in Hebron fired up to 15 tear gas canisters and five stun grenades at small children as they made their way to school Tuesday morning. Video of the attack — recorded and posted to YouTube by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)...

Border Children: ‘They Don’t Speak English, But They Understand Hate’

July 17, 2014 " ICH " - " Truthdig " - -  Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas put a prominent, public face on the immigration crisis this week when he was detained by the U.S. Border Patrol in McAllen, Texas. After a number of hours and a national outcry, he was released. He first revealed his status as an undocumented immigrant three years ago in a New York Times Magazine article, and has since made changing U.S. immigration policy his primary work. Vargas was in Texas to support the thousands of undocumented immigrant children currently detained there by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Border Children: ‘They Don’t Speak English, But They Understand Hate’

Gilad Atzmon : Now’s The Time To Strip Israel of its WMDs

Gilad Atzmon : Now’s The Time To Strip Israel of its WMDs Now’s The Time To Strip Israel of its WMDs By Gilad Atzmon September 26, 2013 " Information Clearing House - The Israelis are not very impressed with Hassan Rouhani, the new Iranian president. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Israel’s delegation to boycott his appearance at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday and later denounced Rouhani’s address there as “a cynical speech that was full of hypocrisy.” But Israel seems to be alone this time.  Both the United States and other Western nations appeared to warmly welcome the new Iranian president at the UN.   But did Rouhani present any radical change? Did he deliver new promises? Not at all. Like his predecessor, he made it clear that Iran is not going to give up on its right to proceed and develop nuclear energy. Like Ahmadinejad, Rouhani contended that  "...