October 21, 2013 (Oromo Press) — You may ask people in Oromia, what is the language most widely spoken in Ethiopia’s prisons? Who are the ethnic groups singled out and subjected to extreme torture in Ethiopia’s notorious torture facilities? The answers to both questions are Afan Oromo (the Oromo language), and Oromo people respectively. People have pointed to this time and again to the point that torture and political imprisonments are almost becoming synonymous with one ethnicity in Ethiopia, the Oromo people.
Human Rights Watch just released a riveting account of torture in Maekelawi (comparable to Auschwitz of the Nazi era and Gitmo of the post-9/11 period). The conditions Oromo political prisoners, including school children, who have barely come of age, face in Maekelawi and Kaliti and other facilities of torture is similar to those faced by the Jewish community during the Holocaust. The comparison to Gitmo might be a little far-fetched since Oromo detainees are innocent and unarmed civilians who get thrown into torture prisons in most cases for no other valid reasons than their default belonging in a nationality group that is different, politicized and competing with the nationality group that controls the levers of power through totalitarian parties known as the Tigire Peoples Liberation Front/ The Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front.
I often get asked by Faranjii sympathizers with the Oromo conditions questions such as: did anybody try to sneak cameras into prisons and expose the tortures? Did anyone interview survivors of torture and human rights abuses and archive the information? When it comes to the Oromos doing the work by themselves, the answer is a resounding NO, but luckily, one could point to the work of Oromia Support Group and The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa for their specialty in putting specific ethno-national face to oft effaced torture in Oromia, Ethiopia.
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