Ethiopia's Darfur

hukri Abdullahi Mohammed is still haunted by the horror scenes of soldiers raiding her village in the remote Ogaden region in eastern Ethiopia on glooming June morning.
Perşembe, 18 Ekim 2007 11:16
Shukri Abdullahi Mohammed is still haunted by the horror scenes of soldiers raiding her village in the remote Ogaden region in eastern Ethiopia on glooming June morning.

"I will not forget it," the mother of seven told The Independent on Wednesday, October 17, from a ramshackle refugee camp in Somalia's port town of Bosasso.

People in Kamuda, a village of 200 families in Ogaden, froze in horror on that June morning when 180 soldiers raised the village and kidnapped seven girls, aged between 15 and 18.

The horrified villagers later found three of the girls, bloodied and beaten, hanging from a tree. The other four were never found.

Every night, soldiers would knock on doors looking for women to rape.

"I did not want to wait until it happened to my family," said Mohammed, who fled the village days after a 12-year-old boy was kidnapped and gang-raped by soldiers.

The story of Kamuda is just one more example of the kind of atrocities committed by Ethiopian troops against the people of Ogaden.

The military is waging a scorched-earth campaign in Ogaden on the grounds of fighting the National Liberation Front (ONLF), a group fighting since 1897 for more self rule for the underdeveloped, Muslim region.

Some estimates put the number of people displaced by the military campaign at 200,000.

Human rights investigators are gathering evidence of widespread use of rape, with women reporting gang-rapes by up to a dozen soldiers.

A former Ethiopian soldier who defected from the army recalls how he had been ordered to burn villages and kill all inhabitants.

"Men, women, children – we killed them all," he told the British daily.

"We were told we were fighting guerrillas – the ONLF," he said. "But we were killing farmers – they were not ONLF."

Hidden Darfur

About 100 Ethiopians flee their home in Ogaden every day and seek shelter in refugee shacks fashioned from brushwood and cardboard on the edge of Bosasso.

Refugees tell how the military burn homes, rape women and kill civilians in a systematic campaign.

They accuse the government of starving Ogaden people by preventing food convoys from reaching villages and destroying crops and livestock.

The Independentsaid that while aid agencies have been able to establish camps in Sudan's troubled Darfur, they have been blocked from setting up operations in Ogaden.

Activists from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other medical and humanitarian aid organizations have been thrown out from the region.

Journalists trying to enter Ogaden have been banned.

Worse still, while the situation in Darfur has been labeled by the US as "genocide" and by the UN as "crimes against humanity," international condemnation of the military's draconian operations in Ogaden has not been heard.

A UN team was allowed into the Ogaden last month to investigate the abuse by Ethiopian troops, but the report was not made public.

Blind Washington

Ogaden is also overlooked by US, which has always supported Addis Ababa, its strategic African partner in the so-called war on terror.

Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer, America's top official on African affairs, has visited Ogaden last month.

She came out saying that reports of military abuses were merely allegations.

"We urge any and every government to respect human rights and to try to avoid civilian casualties but that's difficult in dealing with an insurgency," Frazer said.

Ethiopia has long been a strong ally of Washington in the strategic Horn of Africa.

For years the US has been pouring weapons, military advisers and millions of dollars in military aid into Ethiopia.

The American military has trained Ethiopian troops at bases in the eastern region.

Washington fully supported Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia last year to oust the ruling Supreme Islamic Courts of Somalia (SICS).

The Bush administration defended the offensive as part of the global war on international terrorism.

IOL