Ethiopian Development and the Destruction of Lives Sunday, 18 August 2013
11:44 By Graham Peebles<
http://www.truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/48724>,
Redress Online<
http://www.redressonline.com/2013/08/ethiopian-development-and-the-destruction-of-lives/>|
Report
<
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18256-ethiopian-development-and-the-destruction-of-lives#>
*In order to develop the rich and fertile land of the Lower Omo Valley and
honor leasehold agreement with foreign companies, the Ethiopian government
is evicting indigenous people from their homes and driving them into
settlement camps.*
In many parts of the world development has become an invisible cloak under
which all manner of state sponsored atrocities and human rights violations
are being committed.
Married to growth, development has been largely reduced to economic
advancement, meaning maximizing Gross National Product figures month on
month, year on year, and turning over glowing returns to the insatiable
global monetary bodies – the World Bank and International Monetary Fund –
and profit to private investors.
A term overflowing with contradictions, development is often employed to
dignify corporate activities which are commonly no more than exploitation
and profiteering, as in the case of the worldwide appropriation of land,
usually to irresponsible, profit-driven foreign corporations and private
hedge funds and equity fund managers, who boast of returns of between 20
and 40 per cent on investments. A broader and more substantive definition
of development would include the fulfilment of innate potential, the
continuation of traditional lifestyles and the integrated development of
individuals.
*Lower Omo Valley*
Over 70 different tribal groups contribute to the rich cultural tapestry
that makes up Ethiopia. The beautiful Lower Omo Valley, in the southeast of
the country, is home to a group of eight ancient tribes, indigenous people
who have lived on the land for thousands of years, leading self-sufficient,
simple lives in harmony with the environment. They live east and west along
the 760-kilometre-long Omo River, which flows from Ethiopia into Kenya,
where it comes to rest in Lake Turkana.
In order to develop the rich and fertile land of the region, and honour
leasehold agreement with foreign companies, the government is evicting
indigenous people from their homes and driving them into settlement camps
where “the government promises us paradise, but we know that we are going
to hell”, says one of the aggrieved.
Their homes destroyed and their land stolen from them, local people tell of
horrendous government abuse. They say they are being subjected to a range
of atrocities: arbitrary killings, rape, false imprisonment and torture are
the tools of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)
in the region as they clear people off land that is rightfully theirs, and
either forcibly relocate them, drive them into the forests to perish or
simply kill them in cold blood.
Land rights are complex, and while the Ethiopian constitution (written by
the ruling regime but used at its convenience) states that all land
ultimately belongs to the state, indigenous people are protected by a range
of international treaties to which Ethiopia is a signatory and binding
articles within their own constitution. In addition, the government has
said that the only land appropriate to be leased is land described as
“marginal”, “unused” or “wasteland”. Land regarded by the government as
marginal is seen as central to the lives of indigenous people.
“Because the land is traditionally owned, under international law the
traditional owners have the right to it as property. Changes to its use or
seizure are illegal without the consultation and compensation of the lands’
traditional owners”, according
to<
http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/ethiopia0612webwcover.pdf>
* *Human Rights Watch. As well as protecting indigenous people, the
constitution also safeguards agro-pastoralists – the majority of affected
tribal groups. Driving local people off ancestral land which supplies their
food and medicine also breaches the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights. This states that “in no case may a people be deprived of
its own means of subsistence”. In addition, it breaches the Right to
Culture and Religion and the Right to Health.
*Gibe III Dam and associated land development*
Remote and culturally diverse, with prized United Nations Educational
Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage status, the Lower Omo
valley is home to over 200,000 indigenous tribal people, including the
Kwegu, Bodi, Mutsi, Suri and Nyangatom tribes. Their ancient ways of life
and the delicate ecosystem is being threatened by the construction of a
massive hydroelectric dam, known as Gibe III, on the Omo River and
associated plans for large scale irrigated agriculture. The massive Gilgel
Gibe III dam was started in 2006 and is now 62 per cent complete. Funding
for the 2-billion-dollar project has come from a range of sources,
including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. The Europeans looked
at the project and, concerned by the lack of impact assessment studies,
culturally appropriate project consultations (required under the
constitution), and under heated pressure from non-governmental
organizations, wisely decided not to get involved, as did the World Bank.
International and regional aid organizations, including Survival
International, believe “the Gibe III Dam will have catastrophic
consequences for the tribes of the Omo River, who already live close to the
margins of life in this dry and challenging area”. Gibe III will be the
largest dam of its kind in Africa (243 metres tall), causing potentially
some of the worst environmental and human carnage, by seriously impacting
the lives of tribal groups of the Lower Omo area, as well as the 300,000
people who live around Lake Turkana in Kenya, which receives the majority
of its water from the Omo River.
Water from the dam, which will double Ethiopia’s energy capacity, will be
stored in a giant reservoir that will feed the plantations (445,000
hectares have so far been earmarked by the government) via hundreds of
kilometres of pipelines. Up to 200 kilometres (125 miles) of such primary
irrigation canals have already been built, along with an “earthen dam” to
water the plantations which, the Oakland Institute tells us, “has stopped
the annual flood that all people along the river depend on for agriculture,
and in the process inundated cultivation sites of the Bodi and Kwegu people
upstream”. In addition, according to Survival International, the combined
effects of the projects “will result in the drying out of much of the
riverine zone and will eliminate the Riparian Forest. Indigenous people
such as the Kwegu who rely almost exclusively on fishing and hunting will
be destitute”. One could be forgiven for thinking that this government is
working to intentionally destroy the native peoples’ lives and shatter the
delicate ecology of the region.
The construction of the Gibe III dam and the interconnected development
project of leasing ancestral land for agriculture (including bio-fuels) are
being pursued by the government in a manner that is violating a range of
human rights and internationally binding legal agreements. Both schemes
have been widely condemned by human rights groups and concerned NGOs. Even
USAID, Ethiopia’s largest single donor, has berated the regime over its
mistreatment of indigenous people.
The EPRDF is pursuing a land sale policy that is causing enormous suffering
to the lives of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people throughout the
country. With the Lower Omo Valley projects there is a real risk “that the
livelihoods of 500,000 people may be endangered, tens of thousands will be
forcibly displaced, and that the region will witness increased interethnic
conflict as communities compete for scarce resources”, Human Rights Watch
says.
Over 375,000 hectares of fertile land in the Lower Omo valley, the Oakland
Institute reports, is being turned over for “industrial scale plantations
for sugar and other mono-crops“ – the controversial, albeit high-yield
agricultural practice of growing a single crop, year after year, on the
same land. Such methods damage the soil ecology, creating dependency on
pesticides and fertilizers (all good for the agro-chemical giants) and use
lots of water. Driven solely by profit, investors are interested only in
high-quality, well irrigated water with good water supplies: they care
little about the environmental impact on eco-systems and the devastation
being caused to indigenous people and rural livelihoods – nor, it would
seem, do the ruling EPRDF.
Human Rights Watch estimates that around 100,000 hectares is being made
available to private investors – corporations from Malaysia, India, Italy
and Korea which are planting bio-fuels and cash crops. In addition, there
is the state-owned sugarcane and cotton plantations run by the Ethiopian
Sugar Corporation, which has taken 150,000 hectares of tribal land for
itself and whose operations, the Oakland Institute says, “will [negatively]
impact the people of the Lower Omo most, especially the 170,000 along the
river”.
*Violent evictions, killing and rape*
Mass displacements are accompanying these projects. According to the
Oakland Institute, “260,000 local people from 17 ethnic groups in the Lower
Omo and around Lake Turkana [in Kenya]—whose waters will be taken for
plantation irrigation—are being evicted from their farmland and restricted
from using the natural resources they have been relying on for their
livelihoods”.
The military are the violent enforcers of much of the regime’s unlawful
policies up and down the country, including in the Omo valley.
Human Rights Watch says that “on the east bank of the Omo River, where
farms are being cleared, grazing lands have been lost, and livelihoods are
being destroyed. Furthermore, the *Guardian* newspaper reports, government
maps and local sources say this is just the beginning of a major
transformation of the Lower Omo area, where more than 2,000 soldiers are
said to have been drafted downstream of the dam and where most of the Omo
valley is now off limits to foreigners.
This resettlement of indigenous people to allow for the commercialization
of their land is taking place without the “free, prior and informed”
consent legally required for any development project, with no compensation
for loss of land and livelihood and without consultation, required within
the constitution.
Far from consulting with local people, military units regularly visit
villages, Human Rights Watch says, to “suppress dissent related to the
sugar plantation development [and associated resettlement plans]. According
to local people anything less than fully expressed support for sugar
development was met with beatings, harassment, or arrest.” According to the
*Guardian,* killings and repression are now common. The paper recounts the
story of a villager who says he “was shot with a bullet in my knee [when
walking on his land]. That day 11 people were killed and the soldiers threw
four bodies off Dima Village Bridge. They were eaten by hyenas”. Rape is
the military’s weapon of choice and is employed to frighten and intimidate.
The Oakland Institute relays the particularly distressing account of “the
gang rape of a young herd boy. They took a small boy that was herding
cattle. They had sex with him for a long time in the forest. He was
screaming. The boy couldn’t walk afterward. He had to be picked up and
carried.”
Frustrated, angry and seeing no alternative, members of the Suri tribe on
the west bank of the Omo river have taken up arms against the military. The
government has destroyed their land, clearing trees and grass to allow
Malaysian investors to establish plantations. Water has also been diverted
from the mainstay Koka River to these plantations, leaving the largely
pastoral Suri without water for their cattle, according to the Oakland
Institute. Government forces are maintaining a brutal campaign aimed at
the Suri people. Friends of Lake Turkana, a Kenyan NGO reported in May 2012
that,
government forces killed 54 unarmed Suri in the market place at Maji in
retaliation [for Suri actions against the military]. It is estimated that
between 57 and 65 people died in the massacre and from injuries sustained
on that day. Five more Suri have been killed since then… [and] Suri people
are being arrested randomly and sentenced to 18, 20, and 25 years in prison
for obscure crimes.
The government is not only destroying the lives of these tribal groups, but
is also creating food insecurity and dependence on humanitarian food
aid.Barred from cultivating their own fields and with the military
destroying crops and grain stores to cause hunger, people are then lured to
the resettlement sites with food aid from international agencies.
In 2011 then Ethiopian Prime-Minister Meles Zenawi asserted that the
industrial farms would “benefit the people of this area and hundreds of
thousands of other Ethiopians, by creating employment”. Hollow political
rhetoric. In fact, the government’s development plans for this region are
destroying lives and livelihoods for the pastoralist indigenous people,
whose only choice, the Oakland Institute says, “will be work on plantations
for a low wage”. Zenawi cited the example of sugarcane plantations
established in the Awash Valley, but failed to say that tribal groups in
the region lost their homes and their way of life and are now dependent on
food aid to feed their families – the same is now happening in the Lower
Omo Valley.
In addition to losing their land, their homes and livelihoods, with the
arrival of foreign workers, plus 2,000 soldiers in this previously quiet,
hidden corner of Ethiopia, the people of the Lower Omo Valley have become
exposed to a spate of health concerns. Prostitution is flourishing and due
to men’s arrogant refusal to wear condoms, HIV/Aids is now prevalent among
tribal members and “numerous cases of Hepatitis B, a disease transferred
through blood and sex”, has been reported in the area. Food insecurity,
violent evictions, including killings and rape, cultural carnage,
environmental destruction, prostitution and HIV/Aids: all these ills have
been brought to the beautiful Lower Omo Valley by the government, and all
in the name of development.
Received on Mon Aug 19 2013 - 15:21:04 EDT