Taxpayers’ Money Funds State-Terrorism of the Ethiopia Regime

By Denebo Dekeba Wario*

The UK saw the brightest summer in years and everyone seemed to have been quite busy going on holiday and having fun.  For the Oromo in the UK and elsewhere in the world, however, August 2013 turned out to be less shining as it was a season when the torment back home had exacerbated.

Even though the nation had already been suffering a great deal of socio-economic, political and cultural injustices, August 2013 was a moment of mourning the death of more than twenty seven innocent people, including children, who were slaughtered by the Ethiopian government army in  broad daylight at Kofale, in south-central Oromia. It was also the period when the ‘UN Convention 1951 Relating to the Status of Refugees’ was proved to have practically failed to protect the Oromo seeking sanctuary in other countries. This was revealed by the kidnappings and subsequent killings of Oromo refugees by the Ethiopian security forces.

Despite such gruesome violations of human rights, some of the Western governments kept on providing the dictatorial regime, to the detriment of the oppressed, with technical and financial support. These simmering bitter groaning have drawn thousands of Oromo men and women to the streets throughout Europe and North America since August 2013.

One of those mass demonstrations occurred in the UK. Disgruntled by the recent massacre of innocent people and continuous violations of human rights, the Oromo gathered by the Houses of Parliament in London on 13^th September 2013 and voiced peremptorily:

UK Taxpayers’ Money Is Funding Genocide in Oromia!
Ethiopian Government Is Terrorizing the Oromo!
The Oromo Are Counting On the British People!
Stop Assisting Despots in Ethiopia!

(More Photos)

The Oromo, the largest nation in East Africa, has gone through one ordeal of suppression after another since the last quarter of the 19^th-century. Supported, unfortunately, by the Anglo-French and Italian colonizers, the Abyssinian emperors had committed horrendous atrocities against the Oromo nation since 1882. For instance, more than 13,000 innocent people were killed overnight at a district called Annole in the Arsi province in 1886 during the conquest of Menelik II; more atrocities were attended by the use of biological weapons and claimed the lives of nearly half of the nation’s population. In those days, there were no global human rights organisations; the United Nations was not born; and the Universal Declarations of Human Rights was many years away from being conceived. Ever since, nonetheless, the world has gone through a great deal of structural and institutional changes in terms of human rights protection. Some dictators seem to have received a mounting persuasion and, sometimes, coercion from the “democratic” governments in the West with the intention to promote human rights. Unluckily, life for the Oromo under the Ethiopia regime, however, has remained the same, dare I say it, even worse!

Following the footsteps of its predecessors, the current Ethiopian government has gone to extreme lengths in human rights violations. A hundred and twenty-seven years after the Annole Holocaust, a tragic event befell upon blameless Oromo children, older men and women when they were massacred by the Ethiopian troops in Kofale, in the same province of Arsi on 3rd August 2013. Six decades after the promulgation and enforcement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, more than five thousand Oromo men and women have been tortured to death, and more than 20,000 are languishing in prisons and concentration camps only because of their opinions. More than half a century after the UN Convention 1951 Relating to the Status of Refugees, Oromo refugees in the neighboring countries have been abducted and murdered by the Ethiopian undercover security. One of such pernicious examples is the murder of engineer Tesfahun Chemda (1).

Murdering innocent civilians should, I strongly believe, be considered despicable acts of terrorism, and supporting such killers, definitely equates funding state-terrorism. Even though the people butchered by the Ethiopian security forces were innocent civilians as those killed during the terrorist attack of the West Gate Shopping Mall in Nairobi-Kenya, the ordeal of the former remains hidden from the world. The Ethiopian government’s ruthlessness did not trigger anger in the White House nor at Downing Street. I am not entirely sure if the UK government, which provides the Ethiopian government with financial aid of &500,000,000 each year (2), condemned the Kofale massacre of August 2013 as “sickening and despicable and appalling brutality.” Neither did the U.S. lambasted the massacre as a horrifying act of human rights violation.

Well, you might wonder why such dreadful violations of human rights seemed to have remained concealed from the world. There are combinations of different reasons in my opinion. First of all, the sufferings of the Oromo are not mesmerizing enough to make news in the BBC and the CNN these days because the Ethiopian authorities are so subtle that they use conventional weapons, not chemical ones, to kill the Oromo.

The victims are just shot dead, not suffocated by nerve gas or saran gas as in the case of Syria – that has dominated the global media. Second, the Oromo do not do suicide bombings in response to the government’s violations of basic rights. Make no mistake; it is not because we are submissive to the injustice, but because we have strong sentimental respect and value for human lives, especially of innocent civilians, that are seeped deep into our national psyche.

It is very unfortunate that we happen to be living in the world where politeness and respect for human dignity fail to pay off. Thus, the atrocities and genocide committed by the dictatorial regime do not easily bewitch the attention of global media giants. As a matter of fact, it has been more than a decade since all free electronic and print media were banned. Hundreds of national journalists, who dared to expose the situation, have worked their ways to jail and threatened to flee the country. Foreign media are not allowed to operate in the country, and attempts to report undercover might result in severe ramifications. No one knows this fact better than Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson, the Swedish journalists who were jailed in Ethiopia for more than 400 days in an Ethiopian prison from between 2011 and 2012.

It is such a pity to see the Western democratic countries funding the Ethiopian government. Many of us are a bit annoyed that countries like the U.K. and the U.S.A. are so wedded to providing the Ethiopian dictatorial regime – turning a deaf ear and blind eye to the genocide and other gross violations of human rights. Isn’t this a shocking state of affairs and a horrendous way to spend the U.K. and the U.S.A. taxpayers’ money? Please do not get me wrong, I am not against the generosity of these blessed nations; however, the aid should not be given to and/or used as an instrument of oppression. The Western governments bestowing the money ought to, at least, make sure that the donation is spent against measurable benchmarks of human rights and the will of the subject. This should be augmented by some form of retributive measures, without whom, the growing disaffection with the west might mature to another, perhaps, more costly phase that could exacerbate the worsening instability in the Horn of Africa.