For years Jail Ogaden in Jijiga, in Ethiopia’s Somali Region, held thousands of prisoners, many of them government critics and opposition supporters arrested illegally and kept for years without charge. Torture, rape and deaths were common there. In July 2019, a year after the prison was shut, Human Rights Watch senior researcher Felix Horne walked through its empty rooms. “Walking through the front gate of the prison was one of those moments exemplifying the changes we’ve seen in Ethiopia – a year ago, this would have been impossible,” he said in an interview published by the group.
The closure followed political change at the top. After Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in April 2018, the Somali Region’s president, Abdi Mohamoud Omar, known as Abdi Illey, was arrested in August 2018. He had been ultimately responsible for the region’s security forces, including the Liyu police. His successor, Mustafa Omar, a long-time activist and former UN worker, closed Jail Ogaden as one of his first steps and released its political prisoners. Human Rights Watch had published a report on the jail in July 2018, based on interviews in ten countries with more than 70 victims, perpetrators and witnesses, 25 hours of video from a 2011 regional assessment of the guards, and satellite images.
Horne said the rooms were brighter than he expected. Former prisoners had told him they were ordered to hang coloured scraps of paper to make the cells look “happy” before visits by dignitaries, including Ethiopia’s Human Rights Commission, and many scraps were still hanging. Prisoners’ diaries and wardens’ logs lay on the ground, and goats grazed in the yard. Room 8, which survivors described as reserved for torture and solitary confinement, was small, dark and damp. In an area where former inmates said people had been buried, he saw many bones. Some were clearly from animals, but he said he wondered whether human remains were among them.
Some of those responsible were in custody. Horne interviewed Shamaahiye Sheikh Farah, a former head of the jail and a Liyu police colonel, in another Jijiga prison. He had been convicted of involvement in the deaths of several prisoners and sentenced to 18 years, and was appealing. Others were still at large. Horne said the media and civil society had not been present at the court hearings, so many victims did not know the trials were taking place, which he called a missed chance for healing.
The region still faced large problems. Hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the 2017–2018 clashes along the Somali–Oromia boundary did not want to go home because they felt unsafe, Horne said, even as federal authorities pressed some displaced people to return. More than a million people in the region were displaced by drought. Jijiga was still recovering from the violence of August 2018, when youths loyal to Abdi Illey attacked non-Somalis, burned churches and killed at least 15 civilians. The Ogaden National Liberation Front, removed from the federal terrorism list after an October 2018 peace agreement, was operating freely ahead of elections then planned for May 2020.
Sources: Human Rights Watch, Mereja (July 2019)