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U.S. Anuak Refugees Fear 400 Dead in Ethiopian Massacre

By Doug McGill
The McGill Report

Rochester, MN -- There will be no last names given in this article. The reason is that if the last names are published, those people or their relatives could be shot and killed.

Let me explain. I am talking about the relatives of some 1,200 Minnesotans.

At 1 p.m. on the afternoon of Dec. 13, more than 200 uniformed soldiers of the Ethiopian army marched into the town of Gambella in remote western Ethiopia, near the border with Sudan.

The soldiers spread out through the town and knocked on the doors of the houses and huts made from corrugated steel and straw matting. Some of the soldiers had pieces of paper with addresses and names. If no one answered their knocks, the soldiers broke down the doors and grabbed all the men and boys inside the house, looking under beds for anyone hiding.

Once the frightened prisoners were in the street, the soldiers beat them with their guns and then told them to run. When they did, the prisoners were shot in their backs. Meanwhile, civilians in town from a different ethnic group than the victims appeared wielding spears and machetes.

"I am going crazy right now," said Romeago, a Minneapolis resident whose sister's home was burned down. "My sister and her kids ran for their lives into the bush. We have no idea if they are safe. We are just praying."

Eyewitness Report

Sometimes the spear-wielding civilians, watched by the passive Ethiopian government soldiers, ran the prisoners through with their spears or simply hacked them down like small trees. They crumpled and died in the street.

Eyewitnesses to the massacre, including one man named Omot who lives in Gambella, and with whom I spoke on the telephone Monday, say that more than 400 bodies have been recovered, many of them from a mass grave.

The United Nations, which runs three refugee camps in the region, has confirmed the massacre and said all of the dead are members of the Anuak tribe, an indigenous people of Western Ethiopia who have been the target of ethnic cleansing for more than a decade.

About 2,000 Anuak refugees came to the United States in the 1990s, with more than half of them settling in southern Minnesota. About 200 Anuak rallied on Saturday at the state Capitol, marching and making speeches to grab the attention of Minnesota citizens, legislators and the press. It was a freezing cold day, however, and I was the only reporter present.

"The problem is hunger," said Obang, a Minneapolis citizen whose brother is missing and feared dead. "There is nothing to eat. Even if you have money, you have no place to go to get food. You are afraid of being killed."

Ethnic Cleansing

The Anuak live in a verdant but remote area that has active gold pits and is also known to have oil deposits. Over the past two decades, more than 100,000 refugees from the Sudanese civil war, many of them members of the Nuer tribe, have been settled in the region. Tens of thousands of Ethiopians from poorer parts of the country have also been resettled to the Anuak land.

On Dec. 13, according to the testimony of Anuak survivors, the government and "highlander" Ethiopians collaborated in the massacre.

Omot, the man I interviewed by phone, lost a son in the attack.

"He was a driver and they shot him in his car," Omot said. "I survived by hiding in the bush. I saw a uniformed soldier kill one boy, a student."

Omot also saw a young man who had been shot in the leg and could not walk, and was crying out for help in the street. Omot couldn't help the boy for fear of being shot himself.

The thought of that boy haunts me.

Is he still alive, I wonder? Or was he shot like a crippled dog by the soldiers?

What would it be like to be shot and wounded and left abandoned to die slowly, on the side of a street in the middle of one's own town?

That question kept me awake last night. That and whether Minnesotans will rally to help the suffering relatives of their fellow citizens, the Minnesota Anuak.

If you want to be in touch with Anuak leaders in Minnesota who are organizing a relief effort, drop me an e-mail and I'll put you in touch: [email protected].

[Revelations]

May 16, 2004

Ethiopia's Genocide of the Anuak Broadens to Women, Children, and Small Villages

By Doug McGill
The McGill Report

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia -- A genocide in western Ethiopia that began last December with a massacre of some 400 Anuak tribe members has broadened into widespread attacks by Ethiopian military troops against more than a dozen Anuak villages in the western Ethiopian province of Gambella, according to Anuak refugees and humanitarian aid groups.

Scorched-earth raids carried out from January through April have destroyed a dozen Anuak villages in Gambella, refugees said. The raids have driven more than 10,000 Anuak into refugee camps in neighboring Sudan and Kenya, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

While the December 13 massacre in Gambella town, the capital of Gambella province, was directed only at educated male Anuak, the new phase of the genocide has seen women and children killed, hundreds of Anuak homes and fields burned, and gang rapes of dozens of girls and women, according to Anuak refugees.

Fleeing earlier episodes of ethnic cleansing, more than 2,000 Anuak refugees have immigrated to Minnesota since the early 1990s. The present crisis, however, is by far the bloodiest phase of the continuing genocide of the Anuak in Ethiopia.

More than two dozen Anuak survivors interviewed in mid-April in south Sudan said that on Dec. 13, several hundred uniformed Ethiopian soldiers led the slaughter of more than 425 male leaders of the Anuak tribe in the town of Gambella. The troops used a list of names to identify educated Anuak men whom they dragged from their homes and shot with AK-47 assault rifles in the streets.

Ethiopian troops also incited hundreds of ethnic Ethiopian "highlanders" living in Gambella to go to their homes to fetch machetes, knives and spears, and to join them in the slaughter, eyewitnesses said. Survivors said the Ethiopian troops burned hundreds of Anuak "tukuls," traditional mud and straw homes, and gang-raped hundreds of Anuak girls.

The Ethiopian military broadened its attacks after Dec. 13 by dispatching troop trucks and, in one case, allegedly a helicopter gunship, against Anuak villages throughout Gambella state. The total casualties from these attacks is said to be more than 1,000.

Eyewitness Accounts

The eyewitness Anuak accounts have been corroborated by independent investigations made by humanitarian groups including Genocide Watch in Washington, DC., and the World Organization Against Torture, based in Geneva, Switzerland. Amnesty International and the governments of the U.S., the European Union, Canada have all called on the Ethiopian government to immediately investigate the reports.

"The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Defense Front and highland Ethiopian civilians [have] initiated a campaign of massacres, repression, and mass rape deliberately targeting the indigenous Anuak minority," Genocide Watch wrote in its February 2004 report, following a research team visit to Pochalla. "A severe escalation of violence [has] the potential to provoke a full-scale international military confrontation if not immediately checked."

The Genocide Watch team documented numerous instances of attacks on Anuak as the Highlander attackers sang or chanted slogans like "Let’s kill them all!" and "Now is the day for killing Anuak!" Hand grenades thrown into huts was frequently reported, as was looting and, on February 1, the exhumation of a mass grave in the Jabjab region of Gambella by 11 Ethiopian soldiers, apparently to remove evidence of the massacre.

In Addis Ababa on April 22, Barnabas Gebre-Ab, the Ethiopian Federal Minister with statutory responsibility for Gambella state, insisted that all reports of an Anuak genocide were "fabrications."

Gebre-Ab admitted the region had suffered "tragic" bouts of violence in recent months but said the killers were not the Ethiopian military but, rather, armed revolutionary cells of the Anuak people themselves.

"Social Scums"

"These are Anuak," Gebre-Ab said. "It’s an Anuak group which claims to have formed a liberation front in Gambella, okay? So these are the ones who are killing. They kill engineers. They kill health workers. Teachers. If they are Highlanders, they kill them. Deliberately. And we are hunting them. We have to hunt them down.

"If you want to challenge the political order through violence, we won’t let you go. So we are doing our job. Because we are giving them a mortal blow, they are fabricating about this rape, and this and that, it’s all fabrication."

According to Gebre-Ab, it was a mob of "vagabonds" and "social scums" including many Highlanders who precipitated the widespread killing of Anuak on December 13. "It’s related to animosity. It’s hatred, you know,” he said. “Why couldn’t they control themselves? Why did they go into this emotional outburst and start to kill? Because they are social scums.”

"In all societies there are backward elements," Gebre-Ab said. "They are illiterate. They are backward. They are liable to commit crimes."

On December 18, five days after the December 13 massacre, Gebre-Ab released a statement blaming the killings on the Oromo Liberation Front and the Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Front, two resistance forces fighting the Meles regime that are based in areas far remote from Gambella state. A few days later, the Ethiopian defense ministry announced on national radio that inter-tribal conflicts between the Anuak and the Nuer tribes.

Okello Akuai, the governor of Gambella state last December 13, strongly disputes Gebre-Ab’s account of the massacre. An Anuak himself, Okello fled for his life on January 8 and today lives in exile in Europe.

"Stop the Killings"

"Gebre-Ab gave the order to the local military,” Okello said in a telephone interview. “I know that because I was at the military camp when it happened. I was sitting next to the military commander in the region, Tsegaye Beyene, when he got the call from Gebre-Ab on December 13."

"From there they started killing people in the town,” Okello said. On the second day of the killing, Okello said he pleaded with Tsegaye to stop the killing. “I quarreled with him, I told him to stop the killings,” Okello said. "He said to me, 'All Anuak are the same, they are butchers.’"

On the early morning of December 13, before the killings began in Gambella, an unidentified group attacked a vehicle carrying eight Highlander government officials, killing them all. According to Okello and other Anuak eyewitnesses, the Ethiopian army displayed their corpses in downtown Gambella and incited local Highlanders to their murderous fury by saying that Anuak had killed the eight, and that the murders needed to be avenged by killing all grown Anuak men living in Gambella.

On December 14, the second day of the massacre, Okello said he called Gebre-Ab in Addis Ababa to report on the killings and to plead that they stop. Gebre-Ab’s telephone line to his military commander was not working at the time, so Gebre-Ab told Okello to relay a message to Tsegaye.

"I told Gebre-Ab that the military was killing people,” Okello said. “And Gebre-Ab told me, ‘Tell Tsegaye to increase the military force.’"

Okello also said Gambella municipal employees had earlier reported to him that a list of educated Anuak men marked for execution had been drawn up. Okello said before he fled Gambella on January 8, eyewitness reports to the massacre by Anuak women who had lost husbands and brothers were destroyed en masse.

King Adongo

In an interview last week with the Reuters news agency, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, called reports of the Anuak genocide a “fiction.” He said the Ethiopian military had intervened to stop killing by armed Anuak insurgents and that “without the intervention of the army, the killings would have continued.” No more than 200 people have died, he said.

The statement to Reuters was Meles’ first public mention of the violence in Gambella since it started on December 13. Neither Meles nor Gebre-Ab explained why a radical Anuak militia -- even if it conducted armed attacks on the Ethiopian military -- would also kill large numbers of Anuak farmers and herders, loot Anuak homes, and rape Anuak women.

The Anuak King, Adongo Agada Akway, whose permanent home is in the village of Otallo, southern Sudan, is presently living in Nairobi where he is meeting with foreign diplomats, journalists, United Nations officials, and other humanitarian workers to try to bring international pressure on the Ethiopian government to stop the genocide of the Anuak people.

"What is happening in the Anuak Kingdom is exactly what happened in Rwanda, and what happened in Darfur, western Sudan,” King Adongo said. “Innocent people are killed in all these cases. They don’t know why they are being killed. And in every case it is designed by the regimes in those countries. The Ethiopian government is the one that gave the orders."

The King estimates that the ethnic cleansing of his tribe by the Ethiopian government has decreased the tribe's population by 10 percent since 1991, when the present government took power. There are about 150,000 Anuak living both in a small portion of eastern Sudan and, primarily, the Gambella state of Ethiopia.

The Breadbasket of Ethiopia

Historically, the lighter-skinned Ethiopian tribes have shunned the darker-skinned African tribes, and sometimes raided the tribes to acquire slaves.
The Anuak are one such dark-skinned African people indigenous to regions of the lower Nile, others including the Nuer, Dinka, and Shilluk. All these tribes are racially distinct from the olive-skinned Ethiopian tribes such as the Tigray, the Oromo, and the Amhara.

The Anuak’s ancestral homeland of Gambella is not only geographically remote from the capital of Addis Ababa – it is also agriculturally fertile, relatively sparsely poplulated, and blessed with gold and oil reserves. This has made their land much coveted by the central government for economic development and population resettlement.

"Gambella is potentially a very rich area,” said Gebre-Ab. “It could be the breadbasket of Ethiopia.”
Throughout the 20th century, the Anuak Kingdom has been studied by many Western anthropologists who have lived among the Anuak for long periods, including the famous British social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard.

The Anuak have been admired in particular by anthropologists for their system of dispute resolution, in which all major arguments throughout the Kingdom are resolved by open discussion between all the disputants in front of the King and his cabinet which holds session every day in Otallo, Sudan.

King Adongo is now struggling to apply his culture’s ancient system to one of the greatest crises the Anuak Kingdom has faced in its history.

"Before taking up arms we want to find a democratic way,” he said. "A way of reconciliation. We don’t want to aggress anybody. We want to have peace talks with somebody who aggresses us. We want to have a meeting with the Ethiopian government with the intervention of the world community. There is no alternative unless people sit down."

Copyright @ 2004 The McGill Report

[Revelations]

[Revelations]

5.17.2004

An Interview with Ethiopia's Minister of Genocide

By Doug McGill
The McGill Report

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA -- I finally went man-to-man with Ethiopia’s Minister of Genocide.

He greeted me with a serious nod in his Addis Ababa office and offered me an orange Fanta. He was eager to tell the world his side of the story, he said. He was fed up with the reports coming from the United Nations and from humanitarian groups about widespread ethnic cleansing of the Anuak people of western Ethiopia. He wanted to set the record straight.

After the interview he drove me to my hotel, then invited me for a beer at a local restaurant where we spoke for another hour. His two bodyguards, grim-faced young men carrying AK-47 assault rifles, stood watch nearby as we chatted into the Ethiopian night.
I couldn’t stop him from talking.

“If I died tomorrow, I would die with a clear conscience,” he said. “I have made mistakes. I am not a perfect man. But I know that I have always done my best in life.”

Some Anuak relief groups have named Barnabas Gebre-Ab, Ethiopia’s Minister of Federal Affairs for the State of Gambella, in western Ethiopia, as the highest-ranking of three officials responsible for the targeted killing of more than 1,200 Anuak in the past three months in Gambella.

Last December 13, more than 400 Anuak were killed in a single day in the town of Gambella, the capital of the state of Gambella. Eyewitnesses say the Ethiopian army has since conducted scorched-earth raids against many Anuak villages killing men, women, and children.

Justified Atrocities

Some 2,000 Anuak immigrants live in southern Minnesota where they’ve come over the past decade fleeing earlier episodes of ethnic cleansing. The newest violence in Gambella means that more Anuak refugees will ultimately emigrate from Africa to live in Minnesota.

No group has definitively linked Gebre-Ab to the killings. Yet he is the Ethiopian government official with direct responsibility for day-to-day government and military operations in Gambella state where the killings have occurred. He is the civilian chief of the Ethiopian military force that is posted in Gambella. And at least one source, the former governor of Gambella, says he heard Gebre-Ab give an order to the top Ethiopian military commander to use violent force against the Anuak.

In a column I wrote the day before I met Gebre-Ab, I predicted that he would be more Adolph Eichmann than Adolph Hitler. I expected to meet a bland functionary who saw himself as “just carrying out orders,” as opposed to a zealot who justified atrocities by appealing to a greater cause.

Boy, was I wrong. Gebre-Ab is a zealot but not a fascist one. He is a Communist one.
“ In our revolutionary days we read one model after another – Mao Tse-tung, Sun Yat-sen, Castro, and especially Lenin,” he told me over beers.

Strong Ideology

Like many top Ethiopian government figures, Gebre-Ab fought as a revolutionary for more than a decade to topple the cruel Communist regime known as the Dergue. Gebre-Ab was a medic in the revolutionary militia, hiding out for years until the Dergue was finally overthrown in 1991.

After the revolution, Gebre-Ab earned a doctorate degree in England before returning to Ethiopia to accept a government post. His articulate English has a light British accent, plus vocabulary words taken straight from Das Kapital. He spoke frequently of Ethiopia’s “lumpens,” or criminal class, borrowing the Marxist term made famous in the phrase “lumpen proletariat.”

During my trip to Ethiopia, I asked people many times “Why would the government of this country want to wipe out the Anuak tribe?” There are several possible answers. One is that Gambella state, the Anuak’s ancestral homeland, is geographically remote but is agriculturally fertile and contains gold and oil reserves. This makes it attractive for economic development and population resettlement programs by the central government.

The Anuak have consistently pushed for a greater degree of self-rule than Ethiopia wishes to grant, fueling tensions. In addition, the black-skinned Anuak people have historically been persecuted by the lighter-skinned Ethiopians, who in the past have even raided Gambella to abduct slaves.

International Court

To these reasons I would add a third, which is that strong ideologies, in particular utopian ones like Communism, often breed atrocities.

The vision of an ideal society shines so brightly that any amount of brutality is justified as a means to that glorious end. Such a zealot might thus justify wiping out an entire Anuak village including women and children, just to kill one or two Anuak resistance fighters the village was harboring.

The tragedy of My Lai, and now proof that American soldiers have brutalized Iraqi prisoners in the torture dungeons of Saddam, shows that Americans have no monopoly on virtue in this area.

As we finished our beers, Gebre-Ab described how he had hungrily read through all the great works of Communist revolutionaries for inspiration. It struck me that he and his fellow revolutionaries are now discovering that revolution doesn’t work as a principle of governance.

It’s been thirteen years since the Dergue was overthrown. Today, rather than fostering democracy, the Ethiopian government is adopting the Dergue’s own former methods to keep power and maintain domestic rule.

Its future therefore belongs not as a member of the international family of open, tolerant, liberal democracies, but in an international court of law.

Copyright @ 2004 The McGill Report

[Revelations]

5/16/2004

"They Killed You Like a Dog" -- An Anuak Survivor's Story

NAIROBI, KENYA -- Emmanuel Okwier Oletho, a teenage agriculture student in Gambella who has a sister in Minnesota, was at home at around noon on December 13. His father, Okwier Oletho, the pastor at the Assembly of God Chuch, was one of Gambella’s most prominent figures. Here is Emmanuel’s eyewitness account of that day:

“A lot of Highlanders came, followed by Ethiopian government soldiers. My Pop opened the window and he said ‘I’m a pastor, why are you looking for me?’ They said ‘We are searching for you. You are the one we are looking for.’ He said ‘Okay, let me finish my prayer.’ At that time the house was starting to burn because they threw two bombs into the house. The furniture was burning.

“When he finished he ran out the window. They pursued after him and killed him with an axe. There were three soldiers in uniform. One guy who had come to visit my Dad, they shot him in the back. When he fell down they poured gas on him and they burned him. The guy was absolutely roasted.

“Two members of the choir were praying and the soldiers said, ‘We are going to blow up the church.’ Then when the choir members were running out of the church, the soldiers shot them in the back.

“My cousin, they shot him in the face. He was a little guy. He was really angry when he realized that his father was killed. So he came out the house really angry, and when he came out they shot him the face.

“The military used guns, the Highlanders uses machetes, spears, and axes. The Highlanders were our neighbors. We used to even share coffee together. I can’t explain it. It really hurts for me even to say it. They cut you just like a tree. A person you used to live with, they killed you like a dog. It’s unbelievable.

“It’s something that just seems unreal. I still can’t believe it. It’s like a dream when I think about it.”

Copyright @ 2004 The McGill Report

[Weyane.is.dead]

The real genocide was committed by TPLF. Good job oballa

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[Revelations]