Thursday, June 12, 2008

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West ignoring Ethiopian war crimes, says rights body


 


Thursday, June 12, 2008

Nairobi (dpa) - The European Union, British government and US government are deliberately ignoring war crimes committed by the Ethiopian army in the Horn of Africa nation's Somali region, Human Rights' Watch (HRW) said in a report released Thursday.

The Ethiopian army has been carrying out a counterinsurgency operation since an April 2007 attack on a Chinese oil installation by the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) killed more than 70 Chinese and Ethiopian civilians.

However, HRW said the army's response was to use 'brutal force' against ethnic Somali civilians in the Ogaden Area of the Somali Region.

'Our report finds that Ethiopia has been executing, torturing and raping civilians,' Georgette Gagnon, HRW's Africa Director, told journalists at the launch of the report in Nairobi. 'It has burned villages as part of a scorched earth campaign.'

London, Brussels and Washington provide billions of dollars in aid and military assistance to Ethiopia every year, but are overlooking the issue, Gagnon said.

'The silence of donors amounts to complicity,' she said.

The US sees Ethiopia as a key ally in fighting terror in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopian forces are also active in neighbouring Somalia, where they are helping the weak transitional government fight Islamic insurgents the US fears are linked to al-Qaeda.

'Ethiopia is one of the US's key partners in the war on terror,' Gagnon said. 'In this context, the US is allowing Ethiopia to carry out its own war of terror.'

HRW called on Washington to investigate reports of abuse and withdraw funding to the specific units involved.

Peter Bouckaert, HRW's Emergencies Director, said that the US was well aware of the abuses, as it had military personnel on the ground and also some aid workers had been allowed in to the area.

'Its silence is not based on ignorance. It is based on ignoring available information,' he said.

The body called on Brussels and London to condemn the abuses and publicly call on the Ethiopian government, which HRW says is orchestrating the campaign, to investigate the crimes.

HRW interviewed more than 100 victims and eyewitnesses in Kenya, northern Somalia and Ethiopia to put together the report.

According to HRW, the army has executed at least 150 people - many of them in demonstration killings - forcibly displaced tens of thousands of people, burned dozens of villages and conscripted civilians into militias to the fight the ONLF.

One testimony in the report related how Ethiopian soldiers executed two teenage girls.

'They wanted to intimidate the rest of us, so they brought the two girls they said were the strongest ONLF supporter,' an unnamed student told HRW. 'They made the rest of us watch while they killed the two girls. First they tried to get them to confess ... then they shot both of them.'

The body's report showed satellite images of villages before and after allegedly being torched by Ethiopian forces, with many of the structures apparently gone.

HRW said that it believed that the cases documented in the report only represent a fraction of the abuses due to the difficulty of accessing the region.

The peak of the abuses came last year, Gagnon said. However, it has only tailed off because most of the villages have already been burned, she added.

The Ethiopian government has repeatedly denied it is targeting civilians and burning villages.

However, it heavily restricts access to the Somali Region, and HRW is concerned that this could lead to a humanitarian crisis when an expected famine hits Ethiopia this year.

'If famine sets in, the Somali Region will be badly hit. Humanitarian agencies can't get in,' Bouckaert said.

Source: dpa, June 12, 2008

 

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