|
June 4, 2008 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. 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. The Anuak of Minnesota who
attended the Saturday meeting were dressed as if for church, and sat
respectfully as if in pews. 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!” 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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.” 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. 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 Ethiopian government
to kill his own people. When you look into his eyes, you see there is
nothing there. He also is a victim.”
|
traumatized survivors of an accused mass killer greet the very person who
had planned their doom?