http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-ethiopia-protest-19805360-8013-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc-20160921-story.html
Ethiopian PM blames Olympic protest on U.S.-based dissenters
Siobhán O'Grady and Brian Stout, (c) 2016, Foreign Policy(c) 2016,
Foreign Policy
When Ethiopian marathoner Feyisa Lilesa held his arms in an "X" as he
crossed the finish line for a silver medal last month at the Rio
Olympics, he says he was culminating a political protest he'd planned
for months. But top Ethiopian officials say he was put up to the stunt
by U.S.-based opposition groups in order to protest the government's
crackdown on demonstrations and further fuel controversial
secessionist movements at home and in neighboring Eritrea.
Speaking to Foreign Policy in an exclusive interview from the living
room of his suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Tuesday, Ethiopian
Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn said he strongly believes that
groups of anti-government Ethiopians based in the United States
convinced the athlete to use the Summer Games as a protest venue. He
also figures they helped get him from a Rio hotel to Washington, D.C.
in time for a televised press conference last week.
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"It's me who sent him to Rio for the Olympics, and we expected him to
come back after winning the medal," Hailemariam said, specifically
naming members of the Oromo Liberation Front as having likely
contributed to Feyisa's protest. "This is not the capacity of the man
himself. It's something which has been orchestrated by someone else
from outside."
The OLF did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Feyisa could
not be reached for comment, but he told the Washington Post earlier
this month that Oromo sympathizers helped him with his U.S. visa
application.
Feyisa's move was meant to signal solidarity with protesters in
Ethiopia's Oromia Region, who have taken to the streets in recent
months to protest their marginalization from the country's central
government. International human rights groups, including Human Rights
Watch, have reported that security forces killed more than 400
peaceful protesters in the Oromia and Amhara regions since
demonstrations began last November.
Feyisa claims that he had planned his own protest in Rio for months.
Fearing retribution for his political demonstration, the silver-medal
winner left the Olympic Village after his race and hid in a Brazilian
hotel until early September, when he flew to the United States and
appeared at a press conference organized by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.),
chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa. There,
Smith announced his plan to introduce bipartisan legislation that
would recommend the Ethiopian government allow an independent
rapporteur into Ethiopia to assess the human rights situation in the
country.
Ethiopia wants nothing to do with that.
Hailemariam, who is in New York for the U.N. General Assembly this
week, told FP that he would never allow an outside investigation to
take place when Ethiopia has its own institutions available, because
to do so would be a "breach of sovereignty."
In an email to FP, Smith said that the rapporteur would not be imposed
upon Ethiopia without its consent, but that "in the absence of any
credible human rights reporting from the Ethiopian government on many
incidents regarding the denial of human rights," it would be standard
for the U.N. to "gain an impartial assessment" of the situation on the
ground.
But Smith's claim that Ethiopia has not proved itself credible in
human rights investigations rubbed both the prime minister and the
ambassador the wrong way.
"Ethiopia is a sovereign country and Ethiopia has the capability to
investigate its own case," the Ethiopian ambassador to Washington,
Girma Birru, told FP in a conversation at the Ethiopian Embassy in
Washington last week. "When the Ethiopian government is assumed to
have failed to do these things, it's an insult." He accepted that
protesters have legitimate grievances regarding land reform but denied
accusations of institutional discrimination by the government,
pointing to Oromia's share of seats in both chambers of parliament --
the largest of any region.
Critics of Ethiopia's human rights investigations say the government
deflates numbers in order to cover up abuses taking place at the hands
of their security services. Human Rights Watch's death statistics
roughly quadruple those of Ethiopian civil society groups such as
Human Rights Council Ethiopia, a nongovernmental organization that
monitors human rights in the country, and those published in an
official Ethiopia Human Rights Commission report presented to the
country's parliament.
The Ethiopian parliament endorsed the commission's findings, which
determined that agitators seized upon the peaceful protests and used
them as an opportunity to incite ethno-religious hatred. According to
the commission, 28 police officers were killed in November and
December alone. The commission also reported that excessive use of
force had been used on some occasions in the northern region of
Amhara, but not in Oromia. And Girma stressed that international
advocacy organizations failed to acknowledge that protesters also used
weapons.
Girma could not explain why security forces have fired upon crowds
with live ammunition instead of rubber bullets or other nonlethal
rounds commonly used in riot control. But he pointed out that the
protests in which the government found itself to have used excessive
force were illegal for failing to provide local authorities with
advance notice.
And both Girma and Hailemariam said that their government is committed
to revealing abuses that may have taken place on both sides. According
to the prime minister's count, some 70 percent of those wounded during
the protests this year have been law enforcement officials. But he
also said that there are measures in place to determine whether
excessive use of force may also have been used against civilians by
government security forces.
"There is no need for somebody from outside to come and investigate
this issue," Hailemariam said. "It's not because there is something to
be hidden but it's because we have a sovereignty that needs to be
kept."
The Oromo protests have put the Ethiopian government on shaky ground
with international partners who worry the intensity of the
government's crackdown could spark larger demonstrations, and threaten
to disrupt the relatively stable nation that finds itself sandwiched
between war-torn South Sudan on one side and the failing state of
Somalia on the other. More than 700,000 refugees now live in Ethiopia,
straining the fledgling democracy's already limited resources.
Last year, Ethiopia hosted talks intended to end the brutal civil war
in South Sudan. But the peace deal signed in Addis Ababa last August
has since all but fallen apart: Opposition leader Riek Machar took
eight months to return to Juba after the talks, then fled in July
after his forces and those loyal to his rival, President Salva Kiir,
opened fire on one another in the capital.
Hailemariam said Tuesday that Machar, who is now in Khartoum but lived
in Ethiopia for significant stretches of the civil war, will be
allowed to pass through Ethiopia in his travels but is not welcome to
stay again long-term.
"We do not need someone who is leading an armed struggle in Ethiopia," he said.
Copyright © 2016, Chicago Tribune
Received on Wed Sep 21 2016 - 20:22:38 EDT