By Qeerransoo Biyyaa*
Aug 17 (gadaa) – “There is no time that I am safe,” says Ragatu Obora, a thirty-five-year-old female Oromo refugee in Kenya who had been subjected to various types of torture, loss of family members and rape in the Harawajat military camp in Ethiopia before she fled the country in search of a safe haven. Perhaps, what Ragatu did not realize was that there was also nowhere else she could be safer.
Using the politics and power of human rights theoretical lenses, this paper examines why and how the Ethiopian security forces pursue civilian Oromo refugees into several neighboring countries of the East African region (Kenya, Djibouti, Puntland and Somalia). How do these human rights violations by state security forces and hitmen compare to regional and international conventions, treaties and legal instruments for refugees? What are the politics surrounding the institutions involved in ostensibly protecting human (refugee) rights in the region? I argue that interstate system in East Africa has come to exploit certain loopholes/exceptions in the regional and international systems to allow states to flagrantly disregard or violate major conventions and treaties they are signatories to regarding protecting civilians refugees caught between the crossfire of rebels, opposition parties and governments. The question is not whether or not the regimes violate human rights because they obviously do. A better question is: how can one state get into another sovereign state in order to retrieve and refoul UNHCR-mandated and certified refugees without habeas corpus? And who should take the responsibility?
The analysis draws on primary information emailed to me from Kenya to publish as news articles, and reports from relevant human rights organizations. The paper is organized into two major sections and sub-themes. The first section provides the introduction, historical overview, definitions of key concepts, and legal framework. The second part analyzes the politics of human rights related to the forced expulsion of Oromo refugees from some East African countries.
Context of the Oromia-Ethiopia Conflict
Oromia is one of the nine member states of the present Ethiopia established under article 47 of the 1994 Ethiopian constitution. The Oromo people mainly inhabit Oromia region and constitute the most numerous ethno-national group in Ethiopia and occupy a huge land area (Shinn, 2009). The U.S. Department of State estimates that the Oromo constitute 40 percent of Ethiopia’s population. According to the 2007 Ethiopian census, the Oromo make up 37 percent of the Ethiopian population. The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which fights for the right to the self-determination of Oromia, claims that the Oromo constitute almost half of Ethiopia’s population (Shinn, 2009). Another study puts the population in Oromia at 60 percent of Ethiopia’s population (Holcomb and Ibssa, 1990:3). Census itself is the locus of contest, and Oromos hardly trust official government census; they think the state underreports the number of Oromos. Another important point that Holcomb and Ibssa make is that the Oromo issue “is centeral historically, geographically, structurally, numerically and theoretically to any consideration of the nature of the Ethiopian state and of the political economy of the region,” (1990:3). The strategic importance Oromia is linked to land, which constitutes 275,000 square miles, over half of the present land of the empire.
Since the formation of the “modern” Ethiopian state after Menelik’s ruthless conquest of Oromia in the late 1880s, the Oromo have never held political power commensurate with their numbers for the last 121 years, resulting in political marginalization, real and perceived grievances. The Oromo is a very diverse group with recognizable economic, religious and social differences between different zones of Oromia, but the Oromo are united by a common language – Afaan Oromoo – and other cultural practices. The Oromo practices Christianity, traditional Oromo faith Waqeffannaa and Islam. Because of the relative resource-richness of Oromia, the region has been a scene of political and military competition among many parties interested in controlling this strategic region.
The history of this conflict is a long and very complex one. This paper focuses on how the dynamics of armed conflict (1991-present), between the current ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and the OLF over the control of Oromia, led to transnational refugee crises in East Africa. Domestically, the goals of the parties to this conflict are categorically opposed, leading to over twenty years of armed conflict and civilian strife in Oromia. At its birth in 1975 , the primary goal of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the ethnic Tigrean core party within the EPRDF coalition of many satellite organizations, was achieving the right to self-determination for the Tigray region in the north, but it later modified its goal and sought the right to self-determination and Tigrean supremacy within a unitary Ethiopian state (Shinn, 2009).
The fundamental objective of the OLF has been to achieve the Oromo people’s right to self-determination (Shinn, 2009). Following the 1992 snap elections in Addis Ababa and Oromia that proved the popularity of OLF in the country, the TPLF rebel leaders realized that they would not have any chance of victory at the ballot box unless they broke the influence of OLF and started ruling by force. Soon after OLF was outlawed in 1992, the fighting between the two escalated. Just between 1992-1993, 20,000 to 45,000 Oromo mass arrests were reported (Amnesty International, 1995 in OSG, 2010:3). The OSG has now reported 4,279 extra-judicial killings and 987 disappearances of civilians in Ethiopia. The report states, “Hundreds of thousands have been placed in illegal detention, where torture and rape are commonplace,” (2010:1). The OSG report also establishes the most common patterns of human rights against Oromo refugees in East Africa when they were in Ethiopia. Prior to persecutions and rights violations, most Oromos are accused of supporting the OLF, being a member of the OLF and of providing material support (food, weapons, hiding rebels etc.) to the phantom OLF fighters. Being suspected of associating with OLF in anyway justifies extrajudicial killings and disappearances, torture and rape. As the analysis section will show, the refugees who are subjected to human rights abuses are also pursued into the neighboring nations in the name of weakening the OLF support-base.
Nothing better puts the human rights abuses against the Oromo in Ethiopia in perspective than a statement “The prison speaks Afan Oromo … about 99 percent of Qalitti prisoners are Oromo” made by Siye Abraha, the former number-two TPLF man and Defense Minister in the early 1990s, who ordered killings and mass arrests against Oromo himself. His confession comes as a result of his own prison experience with Oromo inmates upon being jailed from 2001-2007 for dissent from his fellow Tigrean Prime Minster, Meles Zenawi, on the conduct of the Ethio-Eritrean war of 1998 to 2000. Abraha’s statement at the 2008 Virginia meeting is viewed by many Ethiopians as a defining moment in his career because he has been the first ever prominent Tigrean leader in the last 20 years to break ranks and declare the regime’s bleak human rights records.
Since my focus is on the transnational aspect of human rights abuses, I will not dwell on domestic human rights abuses against Oromos. That requires a separate analysis.
Even from the transnational aspect, I will be focusing on the forced expulsion of Oromo refugees mandated by the UNHCR because nobody studied that so far. The UNHCR refugees and asylum-seekers trend in East Africa shows that Somali (516,000), Ethiopian (55,000) and Sudanese (33,500) refugees top the list of Kenya’s refugee population (UNHCR, 2011). The trend shows that Kenya is one of our planet’s ten countries hosting the largest refugees and the sole largest host on the African continent. These refugees need international protection whether they are UNHCR-mandated or not.
Definitions of Key Concepts
Oromo refugees have fled their homes for the well-established classic reasons of why people in other regions of war leave their home country – the search for a safe haven. The reasons for forced migration include: “persecution, human rights violations, and natural and man-made disasters,” (Martin and Schoenholtz, 2006:406). Voluntary escape from life-threatening conditions is a form of migration. They underscore however that “in a growing number of cases, people are driven from their homes by governments and insurgent groups intent on depopulating or shifting the ethnic, religious, or other composition of an area” (2006:406). In the case of the armed conflict between the EPRDF/TPLF and the OLF, the more militarily stronger party, which is the ruling party, has been trying to decimate the OLF movement, and where possible, to shift the ethnic composition of Oromia by subjecting civilians to internal displacement and turning them into refugees.
How are refugees defined under the international law? Under the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees and Stateless Persons and the 1966 protocol, refugees have a special status in international Law. In the 1951 convention, the term “refugee” is defined narrowly in direct reference to the contexts of post World War I and II Europe refugee crises. A refugee is a person who:
“as result of events occurring before January 1951 and owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it ( Article 1 (A2).
The 1966 OAU convention, which only entered into force five years later in 1974, copies the above definition word for word, but expands on it to reflect the African historical context of disturbances created by the struggle between the colonial powers and liberation movements, external aggression, occupation and civil war. The essence of the OAU and the UN definitions is that a “refugee” is a person outside his/her own country who has a well-founded fear of being persecuted on upon returning. I will use this definition for the purpose of my paper. If there is such a person with a special legal status, there must exist international and regional organizations mandated to protect him/her. Since I am dealing with issues of refoulement in the latter part of this paper, the provisions in Articles 32 and 33 of the UN Refugee Convention of 1951 will serve me as nuanced analytical and framing devices. The sub-articles dealing with expulsion are as follows:
(1) The contracting States shall not expel a refugee lawfully in their territory save on grounds of national security or public order;
(2) The expulsion of such refugees shall be only in pursuance of a decision reached in accordance with due process of law …
(3) The contracting States shall allow such refugee a reasonable period within which to seek legal admission into another country.
Sub-articles of Article 33 that prohibit refoulement are quoted below:
(1) No Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race religion nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion;
(2) The benefit of the present provision may not however be claimed by a refugee whom there are reasonable grounds for regarding as a danger to the security of the country in which he is, or who have been convicted by final judgment of a particularly serious crime, constitutes a danger to the community of that country.
I compare states’ decision-making processes with the consequences of those decisions on refugee rights and status. The concepts in these international refugee conventions are primarily built on and inspired by the normative framework provided in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948. These conventions in some ways concretize the more abstract provisions in the UDHR.
The Politics of Refugee Refoulement and the Tyranny of Exceptions
This section analyzes the politics surrounding the expulsion of Oromo refugees from East African countries. I argue that the interstate system and the international institutions in the region have failed to comply with the treaties and conventions they acceded to. Instead, nations like Ethiopia and Kenya exploit what Winifred Tate (2007) refers to as “criminalization narrative” by accusing refugees of membership in outlawed armed opposition, unarmed opposition and certain population groups. As reviewed in the context section, the confrontation between the OLF and the Ethiopian government on the home front feeds directly into the justifications for pursuing Oromo refugees into neighboring countries and refouling or even killing them in collaboration with the host states without due process. The states disregard other provisions in the international and regional conventions, and choose and pick exceptions in these laws that allow them to incriminate refugees as “subversive or terrorists.” I call this process “the tyranny of exceptions,” and I will show in the remaining part of the essay the dangers of combining politics and exceptions in international law; the exceptions are not used for promoting and protecting rights, but for the purpose of undermining them.
The OSG reports that about 300 refugees were subject to refoulement from Kenya in 2009, and about 500 Ethiopian Somalis were returned in early 2010 (2010:43). The OSG documents three episodes of refoulement of Oromo refugees to Ethiopia – from Hagadera camp in Dadaab in 2001, and from Nairobi in 2007 and 2008. Three men were also reportedly subject to refoulement from Nairobi in August 2010. I would like to focus on the most recent cases of refoulement and on a few individuals, who were mandated refugees and UNHCR-identification card bearers. This minimalist focus on a few prominent cases will allow me to approach the cases in-depth.
Under normal circumstances, where there is state’s accountability to its peoples, governments are presumed to be the ones which “guarantee the basic human rights and the physical security of their citizens,” (UNHCR, 2001-2010). In the first place, the Oromo refugees, the majority of whom experienced imprisonment and torture, fled Ethiopia to look for alternative sources of the protection of their basic human rights and physical security. This is the rationale under which the UN refugee agency itself operates. It recognizes that refugees own governments often turn out to be the ones which threaten to persecute civilians. By crossing the borders into Kenya and placing themselves in physical and legal spaces “between the global and local” (Goodale, 2007), refugees have automatically lost their citizenship rights, and the privileges and protections that come with it. They enter what I call “the red zone” where they enjoy fewer rights than those who are citizens of the hosting nations (Martin and Schoenholtz, 2007:407). The red zones are dangerous transnational spaces. In the red zone, normally the hosting states or the UNHCR are expected to provide security, food, shelter and medical care (basic human needs). The red zone may not be perfect, but is probably safer than getting killed in the fight between the OLF and the Ethiopian army.
Among the myriad of ways, the Ethiopian state uses three main ways of violating the physical security of Oromo refugees in East Africa: sending spies and generals who pretend to be refugees in order to infiltrate the refugee community, carrying out direct targeted killings via its own security forces and hired thugs, and direct refoulement of refugees with or without the knowledge of the hosting states (OSG, 2010:42, HRLHA, 2010). According to OSG, for instance, a refugee who worked in a Nairobi hotel witnessed seeing meetings among Ethiopian embassy personnel, some Kenyan police and other paid informers. The hotel worker even witnessed seeing monetary transactions between Ethiopian embassy personnel, and security agents and informers. The OSG report contains many credible interviews with regard to Ethiopian military activities in Kenyan territories. Sometimes the security forces try to bribe members of the Oromo community itself to get intelligence. A man nick-named Ibsa was approached by a Nairobi-based Ethiopian general and offered 30,000 shillings to do the dirty job of informing on refugees, but he declined and ran away.
What explanations do the parties give about refoulement and what happens to the refugees after they are passed over? Will they be ‘crucified’ and what does that mean? Let us now turn to instances of individual expulsions and abductions, and the consequences. The argument of the Ethiopian government is that Oromo refugees are associated with the OLF, and therefore, they need to be stamped out. Although human rights reports contain tens of hundreds of cases of refoulement, neither the Ethiopian authorities nor the Kenyan one admit to being behind such violations for fear of being implicated in the violations of major conventions and protocols they acceded to. Despite that, they could not hide the truth from the prying eyes of the Kenyan press and international watchdog groups.
In 2001, Awel Mohammed Hussein, age 38 and a mandated refugee, was grabbed from behind and injected with an unkown substance. This man was transported unconscious to the Moyale military barracks and subjected to torture. The OSG (2010:43) report puts the method of torture employed as, “He was badly beaten and subject to ‘bastinado’ with his arms and legs tied together around a pole and suspended with his feet uppermost, while the soles of his feet were beaten until raw. He was interrogated about any OLF connections.” This individual was not found guilty of any crime nor was he a source of public disturbance in his host country. He was not presented before the court of law before his removal, which violated habeas corpus or due process. That was why the Red Cross interceded on his side and helped free him later. The Ethiopian security forces cited that the man was a threat to public order in the host country as well as to the Ethiopian state. What is clear here is that all provisions in support of the protection of refugees in the 1951 UN Convention and 1967 protocol and the OAU convention were violated. Expulsion led to the persecution of the refugee, who had a well-founded fear of retuning to Ethiopia. His alleged membership in OLF and the social group, Oromo, constitutes and amplifies the seriousness of the violations of international law by Kenyan and Ethiopian authorities.
The politics surrounding the prominent refoulement of the two Nairobi-based civil engineers, Tesfahun Chemeda and Mesfin Abebe, was widely publicized after the event, badly reflecting on the UNHCR, Kenya and Ethiopia. They were arrested in a Nairobi restaurant by Kenyan anti-terrorist police in April 2007 and taken to a local police station. They were transferred to Ethiopian security agents and extradited to Ethiopia. After nearly one year of disappearance in the Ethiopian prison system, they were charged under the Ethiopian anti-terrorism law in December 2008. Mesfin Abebe was sentenced to death and Tesfahun Chemeda to life imprisonment (OSG, 2010:44; Biyyaa, 2010: 1; Albert, 2011:1-2). The issues here are twofold: were the men really what they were accused of? How does their case violate international human rights norms?
First, let us start from their experience in Kenya. Contrary to provisions in international and regional refugee conventions, Abebe and Chemeda were not put through due process before they were removed and handed over to Ethiopia, which immediately persecuted them. Because the men were allegedly dangerous to the security of Ethiopia, the second sub-article of the UN convention, which makes exceptions about the discontinuation of the benefits of the convention from persons so regarded, was where Ethiopia and Kenya manipulated the loopholes in the international law to satisfy their interests. The basis on which they were arrested in Kenya constitutes a direct violation of articles 32 and 33 of the UN convention prohibiting expulsion before due process. It also violates Article Two of the OAU convention and the convention against torture.
The engineers meet the definition of the term “refugee” as proven by the fact that they were UNHCR-mandated since 2005. They had been followed by the Ethiopian secret service in Kenya until their final extradition in 2007. They were not presented in the court of law in Kenya before they were smuggled into Ethiopia. This aroused widespread outrage among Kenyan human rights networks and Oromo-related transnational human rights organizations. Terfa Dibaba, the head of the Germany-based Oromo Relief Association (ORA), criticized the Kenyan government for failing to protect Abebe, Chemeda and 21 other refouled refugees. Dibaba is quoted in Albert (2011:1) saying, “We are demanding that the due process of extradition be put through a court of law.” He blamed the entire operation on the section of Kenyan government officials, who are operating in conjunction with Ethiopian security agents. The OSG corroborates Ethiopian agents produced Laissez Passer issued by the Ethiopian embassy (2010:44). Albert questions the veracity of the ground on which the two men were refouled: “There is a contradiction in what the government officials say. If indeed, those arrested are criminal gangs, why are they not being arraigned in a court of law instead of being clandestinely smuggled out and handed over to the Addis Ababa government?” (2011:3). The poor decision-making process by Kenyan officials linked to this extradition violates international human rights norms.
Second, in Ethiopia, the persecution of Abebe and Chemeda point to violations of conventions prohibiting expulsion and persecution. The ways in which Ethiopia manipulated the exception (terrorism) within international law to crack down on peaceful dissent is worth further examination. Human Rights Watch analyzed the 2008 Ethiopian Anti-Terrorism draft law within the context of concerns of repression and argued that it is “dangerously broad and inimical to fundamental human rights,” (HRW,2009). In Part Two – Section 3, the final Anti-terrorism Proclamation Number 652/2009 defines terrorist acts as follows:
Whosoever or a group intending to advance a political, religious or ideological cause by coercing the government, intimidating the public or section of the public, or destabilizing or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional or, economic or social institutions of the country: (1) causes a person’s death or serious bodily injury; (2) creates serious risk to the safety or health of the public or section of the public; (3) commits kidnapping or hostage taking; (4) causes serious damage to property; (5) causes damage to natural resource, environment, historical or cultural heritages; (6) endangers, seizes or puts under control, causes serious interference or disruption of any public service; or (7) threatens to commit any of the acts stipulated under sub-articles (1) to (6) of this Article; is punishable with rigorous imprisonment from 15 years to life or with death.
As the analysis by HRW shows, it appears that the anti-terrorism law broadly and vaguely defines what constitutes acts of terrorism. Classifying serious bodily injuries to a person (does not differentiate homicide from terrorism) can be clearly understood as acts of terrorism. But articles dealing with property damage, disruption of public service and damage to the environment are not even distantly related to standard somatic definition of acts of terrorism. That is why HRW saw the potential of this law as weapon to crack down on peaceful demonstrations and political dissent. For example, according to sub-article four, if a person driving down the road hits another car or a warehouse and damages it, then that person can be charged with terrorism under this law and he/she will face a penalty of 15 years in prison to death penalty without due process.
It was based on the wild interpretation of this law that Ethiopia sentenced Mesfin Abebe to death and Tesfahun Chemeda to life imprisonment. Among the litany of crimes the presiding judge accused them of were: “financing and being members of the OLF, conspiracy to overthrow the ethnic Tigrean-controlled Ethiopian government in order to establish an independent state of Oromiya,” (Biyyaa, 2010:1). Although their extradition from Kenya was on the accusation of terrorism, underneath the rhetoric is the fact that sentencing Abebe and Chemeda are politically motivated as the judges clearly link the individuals with the rebel group opposed to the Ethiopian government. By faith, the accused individuals are from western Oromia with a strong tradition of following African traditional religion Waqeffannaa, or a blend of that and Christianity.
The rise of Islamist extremism in Somalia and Ethiopia’s alliance with the United States to stamp it out gives all credibility to Ethiopia if it accuses any of its opposition of terrorism. The impact of the terrorism rhetoric on human rights in the region reverberates as we can see what is happening to refugees, whose goals are not linked to any fundamentalist organization. In fact, some of the Oromo refugees in refugee camps in Somalia, Puntland and Kenya have a long history of being threatened and abused by Somalis, who tell them “al-Shabab is coming to kill you infidels” (OSG, 2010:40). In the Dadaab camp, Somali refugees have been hostile to Ethiopian refugees (Oromo) because of Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia to oust the Islamist Union of Islamic Courts in 2006. None of the returned and persecuted Oromo refugees are terrorists by any measure. Even the OLF, a secular rebel movement whom the government routinely labels “terrorist” has a clear anti-terrorism policy that runs: “The OLF has an unswerving anti-terrorism stand and opposes terrorism as means of struggle to achieve the right of the Oromo people. The organization considers terrorism as act of desperation. Therefore, anti-terrorism remains a core policy of the organization.” It is my observation that the OLF has been following this policy in the last 38 years of its fight with the Ethiopian state for the autonomy of Oromia.
Conclusion: Tyranny of Exceptions
I have pointed out how Ethiopia has literally come to police the East African region. In the process of policing the region, it has exploited exceptions in international human rights laws and instruments to crack down on Oromo refugees by making the case to its neighbors that refugees are wanted for posing threats to the security of Ethiopia. In violation of the major international conventions and protocols cited in this paper, the state has subjected the refouled refugees to torture, death sentence and life imprisonment. The protection of conventions and treaties, therefore, ceased to apply to Oromo refugees although none of the returned refuges had been found guilty of war crime, crimes against humanity and crimes, such as posing credible threat to host nations. Ethiopia ratified many human rights treaties, including International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights (1993), International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1993), Africa Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1998). Nevertheless, its actions towards its own people show that it is not abiding by international standards. It has zero tolerance toward domestic human rights organizations – most are shut down, or their staff and leaders have fled the country over the last two decades.
Ethiopia is not a neo-liberal democracy; it calls itself a “revolutionary democracy” or more recently a “developmental state” modeled after China. The state fears the idea of human rights so much that it has annihilated any human rights organizations in the country. As opposed to the state, the opposition, including the OLF, uses human rights campaigns effectively. The OLF routinely publishes press releases and lists of people who have been arrested, killed or tortured. Proving the “power of human rights” (Goodale, 2009), there are many transitional human rights organizations which lobby western governments to withdraw aid to Ethiopia until it starts protecting human rights. The list includes the Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (Toronto, Canada), the Oromia Support Group (Westminster, the U.K.), the Oromia Human Rights and Justice Council (Minneapolis, U.S.A.), the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (paralyzed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), Human Rights Watch (New York, U.S.A.), Amnesty International (London, the U.K.). All these rights groups have legitimately exposed abuses in Ethiopia and criticized the impunity of Ethiopian security forces in domestic and transnational rights abuses. Often Ethiopia lashes back at them in defiance with its own furious propaganda on the state-run radio and television stations, claiming victimhood at times.
Goodale (2009) traces the growth of transnational human rights to post-World War II Europe – “Human rights emerged out of the ashes of war.” As Goodale argues the idea of human rights consciousness is inevitably spreading like a wild fire in the East Africa as well. The transnational NGOs listed above are responsible for turning this powerful weapon against repressive nation-states. Even if Ethiopia blacks out information on abuses to the external world, the branches of the grapevine have not stopped growing in the daily experience and discourse of the ordinary person. Every news about a death sentence or life imprisonment of innocent civilians will entrench the idea of human rights in the psyche of people, proving the unstoppablity of Eleanor Roosevelt’s idea of the “curious grapevine” (Goodale, 2009:94).
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Endnotes
OSG, (2010:9).
See http://www.ethiopar.net/ for the full constitution of Ethiopia.
See “Ethiopian Census 2007″.
See The Advocates. “Human Rights in Ethiopia: Through the Eyes of the Oromo Diaspora”. The Advocates, 2009. See also Shinn 2009.
See endnote 4.
Oromia Support Group is a U.K.-based non-political organization which attempts to raise awareness about human rights in Ethiopia.
Gadaa.com, December, 2009. http://gadaa.com/oduu/2103/2009/12/28/ethiopia-seye-abraha-person-of-the-year-2009/
UN. 1951. “Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.” See also U.N.´s 1966 protocol on the status of refugees.
Negarit Gazeta ( 2009:4829)
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