Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 18:41:48 +0200
Ogaden To Dadaab In Search Of Peace – OpEd
By <http://www.eurasiareview.com/author/graham-peebles/> Graham Peebles
April 1, 2014
Meeting the victims
It was dark when I arrived at Wilson Airport, Nairobi for the 7am United
Nations charter flight to Dadaab. I was in Kenya to meet refugees from the
Ogaden region of Ethiopia and record their stories. Accounts of false
imprisonment, murder, rape, torture at the hands of the ERPRDF government:
stories, which would prove deeply distressing.
An inhospitable land, the Ogaden region is home to around five million
Ethnic-Somalis, and has been the battleground for several armed conflicts
between Somalia and Ethiopia since the 19th century. There is natural gas
and oil under Ogaden soil: is the Ogaden yet another oil-infused
battleground?
A hidden war, the people’s suffering irrelevant in the eyes of Ethiopia’s
donor benefactors, who see their ally as stable and ignore wide-ranging
human rights abuses.
Mainly pastoralists, the people of the region live simple lives tending
their cattle and moving along ancestral pathways. Most have never been to
school, cannot read or write and live hard but honest lives in tune with the
land. They want simply to be left alone, and allowed to live peaceful
dignified lives.
Shocking stories
A fleet of white UN 4x4s met the incoming Nairobi flight and drove us along
the pitted dusty road through Dadaab town to the main United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) compound. With a population approaching
500,000 in the five sites Dadaab Refugee Camp collectively forms the largest
temporary settlement (22 years temporary) in the world.
A small open room in the middle of one of the courtyards suffices as a
workspace. Noor, a tall man in his forties, was eager to talk about his
experiences. Strong and proud, he had worked for the local government in
Fiiq province, Ogaden. All regional government activities, he said, are
supervised by the military, “they control everything.” Arrested without
charge in 2010, he had been imprisoned for two years in barracks, where he
“was repeatedly beaten. After two years I was released and confined under
house arrest, but managed to escape.” Noor had witnessed the killing “of a
14-year-old girl, by the Ethiopian military. She had set up a small business
– a kiosk. The military suspected she received financial support from the
ONLF [The Ogaden National Liberation Front, which has been fighting for
self-determination since 1984].”
Noor, frustrated by the lack of international interest, estimates that less
than 25% of aid reaches those it is intended for; the military steal the
rest, some is used to feed soldiers and the Liyuu Police – their
paramilitary brothers-in-arms – some they sell to starving villagers. Donor
countries are unable to monitor aid deliveries: the Ethiopian government has
restricted access to the region for aid groups and the media since 2007.
Having told his story, he shook my hand and sat quietly with the others in
the stifling heat. One woman, Muus Mohammed, beautiful and bitterly angry,
looked at me through doubtful eyes, unsure whether to trust me. She had
witnessed the killing of her father and brother by the military, and had
been imprisoned herself for three years, when she was repeatedly raped and
beaten.
Carrying out orders
The inculcation of fear lies at the heart of the Ethiopian government’s
methodology in the region and indeed throughout the country: “the first
mission for the military and the Liyuu is to make the people of the Ogaden
region afraid of us,” said Dahir, a former divisional commander of the Liyuu
force; In keeping with acts of (state) terrorism, he dutifully carried out
his orders “to rape and kill, to loot, to burn their homes, and capture
their animals – we used to slaughter some of the animals we captured, eat
some and some we sold back to their owners.” He ordered and committed
hundreds of killings and some 1,200 rapes, or 1,500 – he couldn’t say
precisely. Should this man be granted asylum in London, to end up running a
café in Shepherd’s Bush, or in Sweden studying engineering in Stockholm?
This moral question confronted me as the former soldier recounted serial
brutality that turned my stomach, rendering me silent.
In the safety of the UNHCR compound, a huge enclosure reminiscent of a
French campsite, I met 18-year old Hoden. Dressed in a long black headscarf,
she avoided eye contact, looked fragile, and shy and would only speak to me
if we were alone. We sat in a small air-conditioned portakabin at the back
of the main compound and she slowly, tentatively began to answer my
intrusive questions.
She cried as she told me her story. Brought up in Fiqq town, her family
moved to Gode after her mother was arrested. It was in Gode that she too was
imprisoned for six months, caned, tortured, raped every night by gangs of
soldiers. She was a frightened 17-year-old child then, today she is a lonely
mother shrouded in shame, with a one-year-old baby girl – result of a rape.
Hoden is stigmatized within her community for ‘having a child from an
Ethiopian soldier’. At the end of our time together she said her ‘future has
been ruined.’ She lowered her head and wept.
Omar was a slight, gentle man with a glazed frightened stare, a look I would
come to recognise many times during the week. He came to Dadaab in September
2012 from Gode, in the district of Godi, which he said, is one of the most
badly affected areas of the Ogaden conflict.
His wife, son and brother had been killed: pregnant with their second child,
Omar’s wife became sick and “decided to travel to the countryside to drink
goat’s milk hoping to recover.” When her condition deteriorated Omar went to
her. “I stayed on in the countryside and sent my wife and son back [to Godi]
with my brother.” They were stopped by the military “and asked where they
had come from, what they were doing in the countryside and where they got
the car from.” They were accused of being affiliated with the ONLF and
executed at the roadside.
Accusations of ONLF membership/support are the common excuse for killings,
torture, false imprisonment and rape, accusations brandishing the innocent
as the enemy. All three bodies were left at the roadside.
When Omar returned to the city he “found the dead body of my son by the
roadside, he was being eaten by stray dogs.” Omar was arrested and
imprisoned for “one year and two months,” when he was routinely tortured.
“There is a river nearby the prison, late at night we were taken to the
river, a rope tied around our necks and held under the water. They pulled me
out and beat me with wooden sticks and their rifles. Sometimes they would
vary the method and put a sack over my head, tie it around my throat with
rope, submerge me in the river, then beat me – it happened to most of the
prisoners.” One night around midnight, “the rope broke and I fell into the
water. The soldiers thought I had drowned [as many do] and left me, but
fortunately I know how to swim and I swam to the opposite bank and escaped.”
We had been talking for over an hour, despair and anger filled the room.
Drawn back to the horrors of his family’s tragedy Omar sat staring into his
pain, his soul entrapped.
>From Victim to Murderer
A sullen 25-year-old former member of the Liyuu Police, Abdi joined the
Liyuu, rather than be imprisoned, in August 2010 and became one of 500 in a
regiment stationed in Fiiq. He looked guilty and repeatedly justified his
actions – saying he had no choice, unable perhaps to face the reality of
what he had done.
During their three-month training he and his fellow recruits were told “to
enjoy our freedom, and to rape the young women. I raped between 10 and 20
women and remember killing 11 civilians.” Soldiers “who raped a lot of
women, who robbed a lot and did lots of killing were rewarded and praised.
They were given
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around 5000 ETB ($250) as a present.”
Abdi was in the force for two years, three months. Two appalling incidents
caused him to leave. “One day we saw a group of pastoralist families with
their animals. We approached the families and took three women aged 20 to 30
years and nine girls aged 15-20 years old… We were 300 soldiers. We raped
all the women and killed about 80 people.” A group of seven furious village
elders “came to ask why we raped their women, one of the men was the father
of a girl we raped. The old man was very angry and took a stone and hit the
leader of our force on the head, and made him bleed. The leader selected two
soldiers and ordered them to kill all seven elders and all the girls and
women.” This took place in March 2011 and “started to make me feel sorry for
the people.” Despite this rush of compassion, Abdi stayed with the force
another year, until a final atrocious straw broke his military resolve. It
was around 20th December 2012 in the rural area around Galalshe, where “we
killed 96 innocent people. Of the 96, 25 were tied together in a clear
field, two soldiers were selected and they shot them all dead. We also burnt
their homes to the ground. That day I saw a woman who was dead and lying on
her was her baby, who was suckling from her breast. That is the day I
decided to leave the Liyuu police.”
I had never sat with a man who had killed and raped; I thanked him for his
honesty. He was only a child himself, his life before him a past to somehow
atone for.
Aid convoys travel to the camps in convoys of 15-30 vehicles with armed
Kenyan police throughout: carjacking and hijacking of staff and visitors is
an Al-Shabab threat taken seriously.
In Dagahaley camp (c. 100,000 people), an array of shacks 20-minutes’ drive
from UNHCR’s Dadaab compound, children and women collected outside the gates
of the UN field office. Fifty or so men, women and children were ushered
unceremoniously into a holding area, where they sat with the same dignity I
had seen on my first day. I photographed them against the white wall of the
UNHCR offices. Ahmed, my translator, wrote a succinct word or two next to
their name: Ardo, female 30, falsely imprisoned, gang raped, tortured;
Fadumo, female 40, falsely imprisoned, gang raped, tortured; Raho, female
31, falsely imprisoned, gang raped, tortured, her family killed by the
Ethiopian military; Cibaado, female, 60, blinded in prison and burned;
Khadar Hared Adam, male 17, tortured, using a crocodile to attack his legs.
“Why don’t they stop the violence?”
Many who arrive in Dadaab journey to the Kenyan border on foot, walking in
intense heat over harsh landscapes for months: 40 year old Fadumu Siyad
arrived in Dadaab in August 2012 after two months: “we used to walk all day
and all night. At first we cooked food we carried with us, but after a month
the food was finished, then we looked for pastoralists who helped us by
giving us food and milk. I was walking with my three young children,” a
girl, 14 and two boys, 10 and 7 years.
In the Hagadera camp I met Ardo, a pastoralist; she had never known a
permanent home, used a power shower or a dishwasher, she bathed in wells
‘sometimes’ and lived a simple life. “I had very long hair, down to my
waist, they used to tie my hair around my throat to strangle me and then,
whilst the hair was tied like this, they would rape me.” ‘They’ are
Ethiopian soldiers, carrying out the orders of the EPRDF government.
May I ask something now, said Ardo: “Why are the British and Americans
supporting the government? Why don’t they stop the violence? Why do they say
nothing?”
On my last day a defected former officer from the Liyuu Police agreed to
talk to me. Forcibly recruited when he was 30, he was in the force for five
years before the horror of what he was doing became too much for his humane
sensibilities. Trained to rape and kill, and how to “break a virgin,”, a
brutal process involving 15 – -18 -year -old girls who have been falsely
imprisoned. He told of violent abuses constituting war crimes and crimes
against humanity that shocked and appalled.
How to speak to a man who has just told you he and his “men” dismembered
teenage girls, buried others alive, hanged boys, murdered village elders and
incessantly raped. He seemed to be in a permanent state of shock, staring
out from a dark place onto a world of his own making.
The Ethiopian government denies any abuse is taking place in the Ogaden
region.
It was pouring with rain as we landed in Nairobi: I walked to my hotel, ate,
began writing and wondered at our fractured world and man’s continual
inhumanity to man.
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