Ethiopia: DFID Fail to Act on Human Rights Violations
By Gordon Bennett
May 15, 2013

Karo tribe
A Karo man and woman sit in front of Ethiopia's Omo River, which is a lifeline in their parched land (Photo: Survival International)


The tribes of the Lower Omo Valley in south west Ethiopia - chief among them the Mursi, the Nyangatom, the Bodi and the Daasanach - depend on a combination of flood retreat cultivation on the banks of the Omo River, rain fed cultivation further back from the river, and cattle on the grass plains.




At least ninety thousand people will be forced to relocate to permanent 'villages', compelled to give up their herds and become sedentary cultivators. If experience elsewhere in Ethiopia is anything to go by, many will end up dependent on government handouts or starvation wages on the plantations. A pastoralist way of life which has survived for centuries will disappear forever.

An unwelcome jibe

With no political clout, and no chance of redress through the courts, the Lower Omo tribes lack any means to protect themselves. But as the country's second largest donor, the British Government is not without influence in Ethiopia and could, if it chose, do much to ensure respect for their basic rights.

Unfortunately for the Mursi, the Daasanach and the other tribes of the Lower Omo, the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) has proved reluctant to act.

The UK knows there is a problem. With masterly understatement, it has acknowledged that 'past experience in other countries has shown that where people are resettled against their will this can impact negatively on their well-being and livelihoods'. 'Impact negatively' might well be interchanged with 'utterly destroy'.




No feasibility studies were carried out before work started on the plantations. Thousands have already been removed from their land and herded into 'villages' against their will. More forced resettlements are on the way.

No compensation has been paid, and no system has been put in place to handle complaints. When an American observer suggested to a DFID representative in Addis Ababa that few of the Guidelines had been followed, she replied that 'none of them have been followed'.

Atrocities provoke apathy





DFID was sufficiently concerned by the allegations - or at least by the political fallout that it might suffer if they became more widely known - that in January 2012 it sent officials to the area to find out for themselves.



Without Mursi

One Mursi man, for example, had asked: 'Now if you go to the Omo River ... will you see any Mursi there? We have left it without any people there and we are staying here in the plains being hit by the sun. The people were beaten away by the Government that brought its force.'

Another had complained that 'the Government never came here, and we didn't get to discuss with them about the sugar cane. They just went to the bush without talking to us, and looked at all the land, and then drove in their trucks and started clearing'.

A third had told DFID that Government officials 'come and take up all our land and give us violence, and they rape our wives. [They have done this to] the people of Bongo and also in the Bodi.


In October 2012 - shortly after it had been shown the audio transcripts - DFID prepared a so-called 'report' of the January visit. The report was undated, did not name its authors and did not explain the ten-month delay in writing it. The report was released only after Parliamentary Questions about the trip had been put to the Secretary of State.

Perhaps because DFID now knew of the transcripts, the report conceded that the allegations of human rights abuse were 'extremely serious'. It concluded, however, that a more detailed investigation would be required to 'substantiate' them, and that this would have to be based on a 'robust methodology'.

An investigation was apparently regarded as the necessary corollary to the equally 'robust' stand that DFID has taken, so the report claimed, towards the violation of human rights anywhere in the Lower Omo. There was no mention of the fact that ten months down the line none of the allegations had yet been investigated, or were likely to be investigated any time soon.

Perpetuating the abuses


More than a year and a half after they first learned of the allegations of rape, beatings and false arrests nothing has been done to 'substantiate' any of them.



An 'investigation' of the horrific events in the Lower Omo would have faced huge obstacles even if it had been conducted when news of them first unfolded.



Many more will fail to see the purpose of an 'investigation' that is too late to change anything: whatever evidence DAG might now unearth, it will do nothing for the thousands already expelled from their lands by intimidation, assault or worse.

DFID and its colleagues on DAG must be aware of all this. They must realise that it is now well nigh impossible to 'substantiate' the original allegations of multiple rape, land theft and arbitrary arrest in the Lower Omo - and that if they want to take a stand on the violation of human rights at all, they must form the best view they can on what they already know.


They also know, if they have any understanding at all of the Lower Omo Valley, that none of its tribes would willingly give up their ancestral land or the cattle on which they depend to make way for someone else's sugar plantation. Why would they?


How politics trumps ethics

Had DFID really taken a 'robust stand', it would have concluded more than 18 months ago that the allegations of human rights abuse and forced resettlement in the Lower Omo were overwhelmingly likely to be true.


In 2011 - the same year in which state violence began to spread through the Lower Omo Valley - the UK pumped £344 million into Ethiopia. This was more than twice as much as it donated to any other African nation over the same period.

Payments on a similar scale in 2012 and in each of the next three years will give the UK a significant stake in the country's 'success'. DFID has no wish to upset the Ethiopian apple cart, or to abandon the millions of people likely to benefit from British aid who are not to blame for what has happened in the Lower Omo.



But none of these considerations are compatible with DFID policy. It has solemnly announced, for example, that a core 'vision' of its aid programme for the country is 'to protect the most vulnerable Ethiopians'.

The most vulnerable, however they are defined, must surely include the tribes of the Lower Omo, and their 'protection' must at least include the protection of their right to exist.

DFID is equally committed to the four 'partnership principles' that underpin all its development programmes, one of which is that countries which accept British aid must in return respect the human rights of their citizens. If the money continues to flow while this is persistently ignored, this principle is stripped of any meaning.

What is more, as a signatory to the Vienna Declaration, the UK supports the rule that a desire to 'develop' tribal groups cannot justify the abridgement of their basic rights.

The UK wants to avert, if it can, a collision between the principles that it has officially endorsed and what it sees as the realpolitik of Addis Ababa. The pretence that DFID or DAG will eventually conduct some sort of 'investigation' in the Lower Omo, and that in the meantime business must continue as usual, fits the bill admirably.

By the time any report is produced one of the tasks in question - the annihilation of a pastoralist way of life and of the people who live it - will almost certainly have been accomplished. DFID will shrug its shoulders and move on. What else can it do?

There is plenty of long grass in this part of Ethiopia - or at least there was, until the earth moving equipment appeared on the scene - but none as long as the grass into which DFID has firmly kicked the tribes of the Lower Omo.




He has worked on a number of landmark legal cases involving indigenous people: he was lead counsel, for example, for 189 Kalahari Bushmen in their historic lawsuit against the Botswana government, which for the first time established the principle of native title in Africa. - An African-American news and views website.
Copyright 2012