[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 12]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 17258-17259]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




             IN ETHIOPIA, FEAR AND CRIES OF ARMY BRUTALITY

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. DONALD M. PAYNE

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, June 25, 2007

  Mr. PAYNE. Madam Speaker, I would like to submit for the Record an 
excellent article written by Mr. Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York 
Times June 18, 2007 entitled ``In Ethiopia, Fear and Cries of Army 
Brutality.'' It is about the forgotten people of the Ogaden and 
accurately describes in great detail the systematic abuses against 
civilians by the Ethiopian government security forces.

       In the Ogaden Desert, Ethiopia.--The rebels march 300 
     strong across the crunchy earth, young men with dreadlocks 
     and AK-47s slung over their shoulders.
       Often when they pass through a village, the entire village 
     lines up, one sunken cheekbone to the next, to squint at 
     them.
       ``May God bring you victory,'' one woman whispered.
       This is the Ogaden, a spindle-legged corner of Ethiopia 
     that the urbane officials in Addis Ababa, the capital, would 
     rather outsiders never see. It is the epicenter of a 
     separatist war pitting impoverished nomads against one of the 
     biggest armies in Africa.
       What goes on here seems to be starkly different from the 
     carefully constructed up-and-coming image that Ethiopia--a 
     country that the United States increasingly relies on to 
     fight militant Islam in the Horn of Africa--tries to project.
       In village after village, people said they had been 
     brutalized by government troops. They described a widespread 
     and longstanding reign of terror, with Ethiopian soldiers 
     gang-raping women, burning down huts and killing civilians at 
     will.
       It is the same military that the American government helps 
     train and equip--and provides with prized intelligence. The 
     two nations have been allies for years, but recently they 
     have grown especially close, teaming up last winter to oust 
     an Islamic movement that controlled much of Somalia and rid 
     the region of a potential terrorist threat.
       The Bush administration, particularly the military, 
     considers Ethiopia its best bet in the volatile Horn--which, 
     with Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, is fast becoming intensely 
     violent, virulently anti-American and an incubator for 
     terrorism.
       But an emerging concern for American officials is the way 
     that the Ethiopian military operates inside its own borders, 
     especially in war zones like the Ogaden.
       Anab, a 40-year-old camel herder who was too frightened, 
     like many others, to give her last name, said soldiers took 
     her to a police station, put her in a cell and twisted her 
     nipples with pliers. She said government security forces 
     routinely rounded up young women under the pretext that they 
     were rebel supporters so they could bring them to jail and 
     rape them.
       ``Me, I am old,'' she said, ``but they raped me, too.''
       Moualin, a rheumy-eyed elder, said Ethiopian troops stormed 
     his village, Sasabene, in January looking for rebels and 
     burned much of it down. ``They hit us in the face with the 
     hardest part of their guns,'' he said.
       The villagers said the abuses had intensified since April, 
     when the rebels attacked a Chinese-run oil field, killing 9 
     Chinese workers and more than 60 Ethiopian soldiers and 
     employees. The Ethiopian government has vowed to crush the 
     rebels but rejects all claims that it abuses civilians.
       ``Our soldiers are not allowed to do these kinds of 
     things,'' said Nur Abdi Mohammed, a government spokesman. 
     ``This is only propaganda and cannot be justified. If a 
     government soldier did this type of thing they would be 
     brought before the courts.''
       Even so, the State Department, the European Parliament and 
     many human rights groups, mostly outside Ethiopia, have cited 
     thousands of cases of torture, arbitrary detention and 
     extrajudicial killings--enough to raise questions in Congress 
     about American support of the Ethiopian government.
       ``This is a country that is abusing its own people and has 
     no respect for democracy,'' said Representative Donald M. 
     Payne, Democrat of New Jersey and chairman of the House 
     Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa and global health.
       ``We've not only looked the other way but we've pushed them 
     to intrude in other sovereign nations,'' he added, referring 
     to the satellite images and other strategic help the American 
     military gave Ethiopia in December, when thousands of 
     Ethiopian troops poured into Somalia and overthrew the 
     Islamist leadership.
       According to Georgette Gagnon, deputy director for the 
     Africa division of Human Rights Watch, Ethiopia is one of the 
     most repressive countries in Africa.
       ``What the Ethiopian security forces are doing,'' she said, 
     ``may amount to crimes against humanity.''
       Human Rights Watch issued a report in 2005 that documented 
     a rampage by government troops against members of the Anuak, 
     a minority tribe in western Ethiopia, in which soldiers 
     ransacked homes, beat villagers to death with iron bars and 
     in one case, according to a witness, tied up a prisoner and 
     ran over him with a military truck.
       After the report came out, the researcher who wrote it was 
     banned by the Ethiopian government from returning to the 
     country. Similarly, 3 New York Times journalists who visited 
     the Ogaden to cover this story were imprisoned for 5 days and 
     had all their equipment confiscated before being released 
     without charges.


                      Ethiopia's Tiananmen Square

       In many ways, Ethiopia has a lot going for it these days: 
     New buildings, new roads, low crime and a booming trade in 
     cut flowers and coffee. It is the second most populous 
     country in sub-Saharan Africa, behind Nigeria, with 77 
     million people.
       Its leaders, many whom were once rebels themselves, from a 
     neglected patch of northern Ethiopia, are widely known as 
     some of the savviest officials on the continent. They had 
     promised to let some air into a very stultified political 
     system during the national elections of 2005, which were 
     billed as a milestone on the road to democracy.
       Instead, they turned into Ethiopia's version of Tiananmen 
     Square. With the opposition poised to win a record number of 
     seats in Parliament, the government cracked down brutally, 
     opening fire on demonstrators, rounding up tens of thousands 
     of opposition supporters and students and leveling charges of 
     treason and even attempted to kill top opposition leaders, 
     including the man elected mayor of Addis Ababa.
       Many opposition members are now in jail or in exile. The 
     rest seem demoralized.
       ``There are no real steps toward democracy,'' said Merera 
     Gudina, vice president of the United Ethiopian Democratic 
     Forces, a leading opposition party. ``No real steps toward 
     opening up space, no real steps toward ending repression.''
       Ethiopian officials have routinely dismissed such 
     complaints, accusing political protesters of stoking civil 
     unrest and poking their finger into a well-known sore spot. 
     Ethiopia has always had an authoritarian streak. This is a 
     country, after all, where until the 1970s rulers claimed to 
     be direct descendants of King Solomon. It is big, poor, 
     famine-stricken, about half-Christian and half-Muslim, 
     surrounded by hostile enemies and full of heavily armed 
     separatist factions. As one high-ranking Ethiopian official 
     put it, ``This country has never been easy to rule.''
       That has certainly been true for the Ogaden desert, a huge, 
     dagger-shaped chunk of territory between the highlands of 
     Ethiopia and the border of Somalia. The people here are 
     mostly ethnic Somalis, and they have been chafing against 
     Ethiopian rule since 1897, when the British ceded their 
     claims to the area.
       The colonial officials did not think the Ogaden was worth 
     much. They saw thorny hills and thirsty people. Even today, 
     it is still like that. What passes for a town is a

[[Page 17259]]

     huddle of bubble-shaped huts, the movable homes of camel-
     thwacking nomads who somehow survive out here. For roads, 
     picture Tonka truck tracks running through a sandbox. The 
     primary elements in this world are skin and bone and sun and 
     rock. And guns. Loads of them.
       Camel herders carry rifles to protect their animals. Young 
     women carry pistols to protect their bodies. And then there 
     is the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the machine-gun-
     toting rebels fighting for control of this desiccated 
     wasteland.


                        Rebels Live Off the Land

       Lion. Radio. Fearless. Peacock. Most of the men have 
     nicknames that conceal their real identities. Peacock, who 
     spoke some English, served as a guide. He shared the bitter 
     little plums the soldiers pick from thorn bushes--``Ogaden 
     chocolate,'' he called them. He showed the way to gently skim 
     water from the top of a mud puddle to minimize the amount of 
     dirt that ends up in your stomach--even in the rainy season 
     this is all there is to drink.
       He pointed out the anthills, the coming storm clouds, the 
     especially ruthless thorn trees and even a graveyard that 
     stood incongruously in the middle of the desert. The graves--
     crude pyramids of stones--were from the war in 1977-78, when 
     Somalia tried, disastrously, to pry the Ogaden out of 
     Ethiopia's hands and lost thousands of men. ``It's up to us 
     now,'' Peacock said.
       Peacock was typical of the rebels. He was driven by anger. 
     He said Ethiopian soldiers hanged his mother, raped his 
     sister and beat his father. ``I know, it's hard to believe,'' 
     he said. ``But it's true.''
       He had the hunch of a broken man and a voice that seemed 
     far too tired for his 28 years. ``It's not that I like living 
     in the bush,'' he said. ``But I have nowhere else to go.''
       The armed resistance began in 1994, after the Ogaden 
     National Liberation Front, then a political organization, 
     broached the idea of splitting off from Ethiopia. The central 
     government responded by imprisoning Ogadeni leaders, and 
     according to academics and human rights groups, assassinating 
     others. The Ogaden is part of the Somali National Regional 
     State, one of nine ethnic-based states within Ethiopia's 
     unusual ethnic-based federal system. On paper, all states 
     have the right to secede, if they follow the proper 
     procedures. But it seemed that the government feared that if 
     the Somalis broke away, so too would the Oromos, the Afar and 
     many other ethnic groups pining for a country of their own.
       The Ethiopian government calls the Ogaden rebels terrorists 
     and says they are armed and trained by Eritrea, Ethiopia's 
     neighbor and bitter enemy. One of the reasons Ethiopia 
     decided to invade Somalia was to prevent the rebels from 
     using it as a base.
       The government blames them for a string of recent bombings 
     and assassinations and says they often single out rival clan 
     members. Ethiopian officials have been pressuring the State 
     Department to add the Ogaden National Liberation Front to its 
     list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. Until 
     recently, American officials refused, saying the rebels had 
     not threatened civilians or American interests.
       ``But after the oil field attack in April,'' said one 
     American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, 
     ``we are reassessing that.''
       American policy toward Ethiopia seems to be in flux. 
     Administration officials are trying to increase the amount of 
     nonhumanitarian aid to Ethiopia to $481 million next year, 
     from $284 million this year. But key Democrats in Congress, 
     including Mr. Payne, are questioning this, saying that 
     because of Ethiopia's human rights record, it is time to stop 
     writing the country a blank check.
       In April, European Commission officials began investigating 
     Ethiopia for war crimes in connection to hundreds of Somali 
     civilians killed by Ethiopian troops during heavy fighting in 
     Mogadishu, Somalia's capital.


                      Women Are Suffering the Most

       In the Ogaden, it is not clear how many people are dying. 
     The vast area is essentially a no-go zone for most human 
     rights workers and journalists and where the Ethiopian 
     military, by its own admission, is waging an intense 
     counterinsurgency campaign.
       The violence has been particularly acute against women, 
     villagers said, and many have recently fled.
       Asma, 19, who now lives in neighboring Somaliland, said she 
     was stuck in an underground cell for more than six months 
     last year, raped and tortured. ``They beat me on the feet and 
     breasts,'' she said. She was freed only after her father paid 
     the soldiers ransom, she said, though she did not know how 
     much.
       Ambaro, 25, now living in Addis Ababa, said she was gang-
     raped by 5 Ethiopian soldiers in January near the town of 
     Fik. She said troops came to her village every night to pluck 
     another young woman.
       ``I'm in pain now, all over my body,'' she said. ``I'm 
     worried that I'll become crazy because of what happened.''
       Many Ogaden villagers said that when they tried to bring up 
     abuses with clan chiefs or local authorities, they were told 
     it was better to keep quiet.
       The rebels said that was precisely why they attacked the 
     Chinese oil field: To get publicity for their cause and the 
     plight of their region (and to discourage foreign companies 
     from exploiting local resources). According to them, they 
     strike freely in the Ogaden all the time, ambushing military 
     convoys and raiding police stations.
       Mr. Mohammed, the government spokesman, denied that, saying 
     the rebels ``will not confront Ethiopian military forces 
     because they are not well trained.''
       Expert or not, they are determined. They march for hours 
     powered by a few handfuls of rice. They travel extremely 
     light, carrying only their guns, two clips of bullets, a 
     grenade and a tarp. They brag about how many Ethiopians they 
     have killed, and every piece of their camouflage, they say, 
     is pulled off dead soldiers. They joke about slaughtering 
     Ethiopian troops the same way they slaughter goats.
       Their morale seems high, especially for men who sleep in 
     the dirt every night. Their throats are constantly dry, but 
     they like to sing.
       ``A camel is delivering a baby today and the milk of the 
     camel is coming,'' goes one campfire song. ``Who is the owner 
     of this land?''

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