“This government is at least better than previous ones,”
remarked a 74-year-old Eritrean man to me last month in the Ethiopian capital
of Addis Ababa, his longtime residence. Clad in a tattered grey suit and
speaking to me in Italian, the man was peddling a book of useful Amharic
phrases he had compiled for the foreign visitor, proceeds of which would go
toward the purchase of a second-hand comforter for his bed.
As it turned out, his assessment of the relative superiority
of the current Ethiopian administration was for good reason: two of his
children had been killed by a previous ruling outfit, the Derg military junta
that took power in 1974 and began eliminating suspected opponents in droves.
Although that particularly bloody epoch came to an end in
1991, many a resident of Ethiopia might nowadays still have cause to complain
about homicidal activity by the state. In the Oromia region surrounding Addis
Ababa, for example, there are claims that more than 200 people have been killed
by Ethiopian security forces since November 2015, when protests broke out in
response to the government’s so-called “Master Plan” to expand the boundaries
of the capital by a factor of 20.
As a Newsweek article explains, the Oromo inhabitants of the
region viewed the plan as “an attempted land grab that could result in the
forced eviction of Oromo farmers and the loss of valuable arable land in a
country regularly plagued by drought.”
This was no doubt a valid concern given the government’s
established tradition of wantonly displacing Ethiopians in the interest of
“development”—that handy euphemism for removing human obstacles to the whims of
international and domestic investment capital.
Comprising some 35 percent of the population, the Oromo are
Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group and have regularly decried discrimination by
the ruling coalition party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic
Front (EPRDF), which is dominated by ethnic Tigrayan interests. Politically
motivated detention, incarceration, and other abuses have long characterized
the landscape in Oromia, and the current protests have seen children as youngas eight arrested.
Apparently, torture has also been a difficult habit for
security forces to break.
And while the government has opted to shelve the Master Plan for now, protests in Oromia have continued. When I recently visited the town of Woliso, one of many protest sites in the region, residents pointed out that cancelling the plan wouldn’t bring back the dead people. READ MORE AT TeleSUR ENGLISH.
And while the government has opted to shelve the Master Plan for now, protests in Oromia have continued. When I recently visited the town of Woliso, one of many protest sites in the region, residents pointed out that cancelling the plan wouldn’t bring back the dead people. READ MORE AT TeleSUR ENGLISH.