|
July 9, 2008 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 from Minnesota. 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. 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. “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. 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. 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 belong 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 as 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.” Like Ali Abdifatah, Lencho Bati also
has a brother who was “disappeared” by the Ethiopian military. 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. “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. 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
|