Aiding and Abetting -
More Evidence of UK and U.S.
Complicity in Ethiopia's Mass Displacement
In the
face of evidence, the UK and US continue to deny systematic human
rights abuses are occurring in the Lower Omo as thousands are
displaced for an irrigation scheme. The US-based think tank, the
Oakland Institute, recently accused the UK and US governments of
aiding and abetting the eviction of thousands of people from their
land in Ethiopia's Lower Omo Valley. The accusation was not new - it
had been made before by Survival International and Human Rights Watch
amongst others. What was new about this report was that it made use
of transcripts of interviews conducted by officials from the UK
Department for International Development (DfID) and the US Agency for
International Development (USAID), during a field visit to the lower
Omo in January 2012.
The interviews were recorded by the report's
author, Will Hurd, who accompanied the officials and acted as their
interpreter. The recordings contain vivid first-hand accounts of the
abuses suffered by local people at the hands of the government, the
police and the army. Hurd, an American human rights activist who
speaks one of the local languages, decided to release the recordings
to journalists when both agencies claimed publicly, months after
their visit, that they had found no evidence of the 'systematic'
abuse of human rights.
Having spent 40 years working as an
anthropologist in the area myself, I am confident of the accuracy and
authenticity of the report and of the interviews on which it is
based.
So begins an informative article by
David Turton (Senior Research Fellow of the African Studies Centre
and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, both at the
University of Oxford) the whole of which can be read at:
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