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ETHIOPIA: Western Allies Ignoring Gov’t Abuses, Report Says

Katie Vandever

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 12 2008 (IPS) - Since a battle last year against rebels in eastern Ethiopia’s Somali Region, Ethiopia’s government and armed forces have been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity by subjecting ethnic Somali nomads to executions, torture and rape, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released Thursday.

The pattern of abuses by Ethiopian government forces is not new. Eyewitness accounts of atrocities, including the destruction and burning of villages, forced relocations of civilians, summary executions, and violent acts of rape and torture, date back more than a decade.

Yet according to the new 130-page report, “Collective Punishment: War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in the Ogaden Area of Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State”, these abuses have intensified over the last year.

In April 2007, the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) killed more than 70 Chinese and Ethiopian civilians, after an attack on a Chinese-run oil installation in the Ogaden area of the Somali Region. In response, Ethiopian forces launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in five zones of the Somali Region that has included deliberate and repeated attacks on civilian populations in an attempt to wipe out the roots of the rebellion, HRW says.

“The Ethiopian army’s answer to the rebels has been to viciously attack civilians in the Ogaden,” said Georgette Gagnon, HRW’s Africa director. “These widespread and systematic atrocities amount to crimes against humanity.”

Villagers and nomads have been ordered by the Ethiopian government to relocate from small villages and pastoralist settlements to designated larger towns throughout the conflict-affected zones. Thousands of civilians have fled to neighbouring countries.

Civilians who refuse evacuation from their villages have been killed, while settlements have been burned and water sources and wells destroyed, HRW says. Others have been detained in military barracks where they are subjected to regular beatings, torture and rape.

In the report, a 31-year-old shopkeeper gave this account of the treatment of detainees by Ethiopian soldiers. “They started beating me with the backs of their AK-47 guns. They hit me once with the gun in my face, and then started beating me. They also hit me with the gun barrel in my teeth, and broke one of my teeth. Then they started beating me with a fan belt on my back and my feet. It lasted for more than one hour. Then they tied both my legs and lifted me upside down to the ceiling with a rope, and kept beating me more, saying I had to confess. For two months, we underwent this same ordeal, being taken from our rooms at night and being beaten and tortured.”

HRW has documented reports of 87 villages and nomadic settlements that were forcefully evacuated and partially or totally burned during government military operations between June 2006 and August 2007. Over 150 individuals have been executed, usually in demonstration killings, with Ethiopian soldiers targeting suspected ONLF members or supporters.

HRW believes that these documented cases represent a small fraction of the actual abuses.

Since mid-2007, the government has taken a series of actions aimed at cutting off economic support to the ONLF, including imposing a trade blockade on the war-torn region, manipulating food distribution by restricting access to water and food, and obstructing humanitarian aid donated to the country.

The Ethiopian government denies all allegations of abuses against civilians, but has responded by restricting access to the region to journalists, human rights groups, and aid organisations.

“The government’s attacks on civilians, its trade blockade, and restrictions on aid amount to the illegal collective punishment of tens of thousands of people,” said Gagnon. “Unless humanitarian agencies get immediate access to independently assess the needs and monitor food distribution, more lives will be lost.”

Despite the mounting evidence of abuses, HRW says, major western governments have failed to speak out on the matter.

“The international community by and large has been shamefully quiet about these abuses,” Chris Albin-Lackey, a senior researcher with HRW’s Africa Division, told IPS.

He believes that international donors are well aware of the scope of the problem but have refused to publicly criticise the Ethiopian government’s conduct, or even to raise the issue forcefully behind closed doors.

This is largely because Western governments, such as the United States, Britain and European Union, rely on the Ethiopian government as a key African ally in the “war on terror”. It is one of the largest recipients of overseas development assistance in this unstable region, receiving nearly 2.0 billion dollars in aid each year.

Because donor governments and companies are fearful that a robust stance on human rights will rupture diplomatic relations, the violations occurring in Ethiopia have been actively ignored, HRW says. The U.S. government, a strong Ethiopian ally in counter-terrorism efforts, has refrained from even expressing mild concern.

HRW urges governments to start taking action to end the war crimes committed by the Ethiopian government. “If there is one key recommendation to our reporting, it’s that the pattern of failing to respond to these abuses has to end now and a serious investigation into these abuses should be held accountable not to be carried out by the Ethiopian government itself,” Albin-Lackey said.