U.S., U.K. Ignore Ethiopian Rights Abuses, Advocacy Group Says
July 18, 2013
by William Davison
The U.K. and
U.S. have ignored first-hand accounts of human rights violations in
southern Ethiopia where the government is forcibly relocating people for
commercial-scale sugar plantations, the Oakland Institute said.
The Western governments are “willful accomplices and supporters of a
development strategy that will have irreversible devastating impacts on
the environment and natural resources and will destroy the livelihoods
of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people,” the California-based
research and advocacy group said yesterday in a report.
The U.K.’s Department for International Development denied it was
funding resettlement programs, while the U.S. Agency for International
Development office in Ethiopia didn’t respond to questions e-mailed on
July 16. Ethiopia’s government described allegations in the institute’s
report as “pure rubbish.”
Increasing agricultural output and the transfer of land to private
investors for commercial farming are part of the government’s five-year
economic-development plan through mid-2015 to reach growth of as much as
15 percent a year. The Horn of African nation’s mixed economy relies on
state companies to run telecommunications, banking and power, and
private investment in farming and manufacturing.
Gross domestic product may expand 6.5 percent this year, faster than
average 5 percent for emerging- and developing-nation economies and 5.1
percent in sub-Saharan Africa, according to an International Monetary
Fund forecast.
An estimated 260,000 people from 17 groups in the Lower Omo and around
Lake Turkana may be affected by the resettlement and large-scale farming
projects, the institute said. A dam built for the sugar plantations has
ended the annual flood that 170,000 people living by the Omo River used
for cultivation.
Right Abuses
“Forced evictions, denial of access to subsistence land, beatings,
killings, rapes, imprisonment, intimidation, political coercion and the
denial of government assistance are all being used as tools of forced
resettlement,” the Oakland Institute said.
Officials from the U.S. and U.K. visited South Omo in January 2012. Will
Hurd, the author of Oakland Institute’s report titled “Ignoring Abuse
in Ethiopia,” translated interviews for the group, according to the
report.
The community recounted stories of mass arrests, intimidation by
security forces and the rape of women and a boy, according to an
official statement about the visit on the website of the U.K.
parliament. The accusations “could not be substantiated,” according to
the donors’ statement, which recommended a more detailed investigation.
“International donors have been accused of supporting programs connected
with the resettlement sites,” according to the Oakland Institute’s
report.
Double Blow
The U.K. government addresses any reports of human rights violations at
the “very highest level,” DFID said in an e-mailed response to questions
from London on July 16.
“To suggest that agencies like DFID should never work on the ground with
people whose governments have been accused of human rights abuses would
be to deal those people a double blow,” it said in the statement.
The Oakland Institute has an “agenda of dragging Ethiopia back to the
Stone Age,” Getachew Reda, a spokesman for Prime Minister Hailemariam
Desalegn, said.
“They keep quoting themselves again and again, they make references and
cross references to their own work,” he said by phone yesterday from the
capital. “Simply because you’ve said something 1,000-times over it
doesn’t make it true.”
Sugar plantations being developed in the Lower Omo Valley are part of
the state-owned Sugar Corp.’s plan to invest more than $4 billion in the
industry. The government intends to boost production almost 10-fold to
2.3 million tons by 2025.
Net official development assistance to Ethiopia totaled $3.8 billion in
2009, according to the website of the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development.
No comments:
Post a Comment