He Plotted Their Deaths. Now He Will Meet Them.

By Douglas McGill
The McGill Report

ROCHESTER, MN -- An Ethiopian government official
named as a primary architect of a genocide in western
Ethiopia will visit Minneapolis this Saturday, to
directly confront members of the African tribe his
government has targeted for destruction.

The official's impending visit has thrown the
Minnesota community of Anuak into a state of alarm and
intense internal argument.

The Anuak, an African tribe based in western Ethiopia
and southern Sudan, have been immigrating to Minnesota
and elsewhere outside of Africa since the Ethiopian
Army began ethnically cleansing them in the mid-1990s.

Some Minnesota Anuak believe the official's visit on
Saturday should be boycotted while others want the
chance to meet him face-to-face. Still others, saying
the official has perpetrated genocide, are working
through the U.S. State Department to block the
official's entry into the country.

The official, Omot Obang Olom, is the governor of the
western Ethiopian state of Gambella, which embraces
much of the Anuak homeland. Olom was the chief of
security in Gambella in December 2003, when over a
three-day period some 425 Anuak men were killed by the
Ethiopian Army.

"Lots of Smoke"

A Human Rights Watch report in 2005, "Targeting the
Anuak," and earlier reports by human rights groups
including Genocide Watch, have detailed Mr. Olom's
role in the massacre of December 13, 2003, and in a
subsequent bloody crackdown lasting months against
Anuak insurgents and civilians. The Human Rights Watch
report called these events a "crime against humanity."

"This man is a killer," said one Anuak Minnesotan, who
asked not to be named because relatives in Ethiopia
would be endangered if he were. The Anuak plans to
meet the official on Saturday "so that I can ask him:
'The victims of the genocide are gone but what about
the people who are still alive in Sudan and Kenya and
Minnesota? Will you tell the truth about what
happened?'"

A U.S. State Department official said that Minnesota
Anuak community members had called him about the
official's visit. "I've looked into this and he sounds
like a really bad guy," the official said. "There is
a lot of smoke but we don't have the evidence to deny
him a visa."

Civilian Targets

The State Department has walked a tightrope on the
Anuak case since it exploded with the massacre of
December 13, 2003.

Privately, officials in Washington and Addis Ababa
concede that the Ethiopian government is culpable in
the killings, and a 2005 U.S. Embassy press release
said as much. But official U.S. policy is that
Ethiopia is an ally in the "war on terror," which
limits the ability of U.S. officials to criticize the
Ethiopian government, much less to deny diplomatic
visas.

Mr. Olom "has taken an exceptionally hard-line
approach to stamping out the threat to regional
security posed by Anuak shifta," the Human Rights
Watch report stated. "Shifta" is an Ethiopian word for
"bandits" but in reality it very often includes
ordinary Anuak civilians killed by soldiers, the
report said.

"Unarmed young men have been frequently shot at and in
many cases killed while traveling between villages,
and many [Army] patrols seem to view any Anuak
civilian who runs away from them a legitimate target,"
the Human Rights Watch report said.

Arrest for Crimes

The purpose of Mr. Olom's visit to Minneapolis is
among the points vigorously debated by Minnesota
Anuak, who form the largest Anuak diaspora community
outside of Ethiopia.

The Anuak Community Association of North America
(ACANA), based in Minneapolis, says that it invited
Mr. Olom to visit Minnesota so that Anuak community
members could directly ask him to give his account of
December 13, 2003 and the aftermath.

"We wanted the Gambella leadership to come so that
people could ask questions," said Akway Cham, the
president of ACANA. "A lot of Anuak are going through
life as refugees. People are still suffering and they
want to ask 'What are you guys up to and how will you
prevent a future incident like 2003?'"

But many Anuak angrily reject ACANA's rationale,
saying that attempting to arrest Olom for crimes
against humanity -- not giving him a platform for
reconciliation -- is the more appropriate course.

Frustrating Q&A

Olom's visit, they say, is part of a deliberate
Ethiopian propaganda campaign to divide the Anuak
diaspora and to convince the world that far from
committing genocide in Gambella, Ethiopia warmly
welcomes the Anuak.

Indeed, last April 26, two high-ranking Ethiopian
officials met in Minneapolis with Anuak community
members to spread just that message. They told an
audience of about one hundred Minnesota Anuak that the
Ethiopian government is prepared to invest
substantially in economic development in Gambella, and
they wanted members of the Anuak diaspora to return.

But for much of the meeting the officials spoke in
Amharic, the Ethiopian language, and not in Anuak, so
many in the audience didn't fully understand what was
said. Even more frustrating, people who attended the
meeting said, the officials stonewalled during the
question-and-answer period when Anuak audience
members demanded to know if the Ethiopian government
planned to offer reparations for the 2003 massacre.

No Answer on Graves

More specifically, many Anuak asked the officials
where the 425 people who were killed in the December
13 massacre are buried, so that they may be exhumed
and given a proper burial. But the Ethiopian
government insists the massacre never occurred, and no
answer was given.

"It was just propaganda," said Apee Jobi, an Anuak who
lives in Brooklyn Park and is editor of Gambella
Today, an Anuak web site. "The real purpose was to
divide the Minnesota Anuak community so that we fight
among ourselves and don't fight the Ethiopian
government. Some side with them and some don't; some
say forget December 13, and some say we can't forget.
They are very good at playing that."

"They are trying to say that nothing ever happened, it
is okay now to come back," said Okuch Kwot, an Anuak
living in Columbia Heights. Kwot's older brother has
lived in a Sudan refugee camp since the 2003 massacre,
while his older brother's wife and children are living
in a camp in Kenya. "But if you try to invest and you
are an Anuak you cannot get a bank loan, you cannot
buy a truck. They will label you as a rebel and
everything will be taken away."

Tragic Journey

Obang Metho, an Anuak activist from Canada who travels
frequently to Minnesota, says that the April meeting
marked the first time that the Ethiopian government
began plying Anuak immigrants with "gifts and favors,"
as it has been doing with other Ethiopian diaspora
populations for several years.

"The government-sponsored delegates thought they could
buy, flatter and persuade the Anuak in the diaspora
into forgetting about the Anuak massacre of 2003,"
Metho recently wrote. "These 'ambassadors bearing
gifts' from the regime have been trying to silence
their critics for the last year by offering
invitations, opportunities and investments in the
country."

Omot's visit to Minneapolis marks a new chapter in a
tragic journey for the Anuak of Minnesota, whose
ancestral territory in Africa lies directly between
civil-war ravaged southern Sudan and famine-stricken
Ethiopia.

Oil and Gold

The Anuak territory in Gambella is fed by several
rivers and has both oil and gold deposits, which makes
their land coveted by the Ethiopian government.

Racial tensions between the dark-skinned Anuak and
lighter-skinned "highlander" Ethiopians, as well as
rights claim battles over Gambella's oil deposits, are
at the root of conflicts dating back several decades.

In the 2003 massacre, Ethiopian soldiers rampaged
through the Anuak town of Gambella, burning down over
a thousand homes, gang-raping women and girls and
slaughtering all but a handful of the Anuak men who
comprised the educated leadership of the small tribe
of only 100,000 members.

Around 12,000 Anuak refugees fled the massacre on foot
through the African bush to seek safety in refugee
camps in southern Sudan, and in vast refugee slum
cities near Nairobi, Kenya.

Four years later, most of those refugees are still
struggling to survive in the desert or in those slums,
their educations and careers permanently disrupted.
Many refugees say they fear returning to Gambella
because Mr. Olom, a widely feared figure before and
during the 2003 massacre, now serves as the governor
of the state.

Cell Phone "Earwitnesses"

This reporter interviewed dozens of Anuak Minnesotans
in the days following December 13, 2003. Many of them
had heard the sounds of gunshots, screaming and crying
over cell phones with friends and family members who
were caught in the midst of the slaughter.

In April 2004, I also traveled to the Pochalla refugee
camp in southern Sudan where some 10,000 Anuak had
fled following the killings, and to the refugee slum
of Ruiru, Kenya, where more than a thousand Anuak had
fled.

In those interviews, and in several human rights
reports published in 2004 and 2005, Omot Obang Olom
was frequently named as a government official who
prior to the 2003 massacre had ordered arbitrary
arrests of Anuak.

A second report on the massacre published by Genocide
Watch, based on interviews with eyewitnesses, reports
accusations that Mr. Olom provided the Ethiopian army
with a list of Anuak leaders to be targeted for
killing.

An Execution List

The Anuak governor of Gambella at the time of the
massacre, Okello Akway, fled for his life to Norway
after the December 2003 massacre.

In a telephone conversation this week, Akway confirmed
that he had seen Mr. Olom pass a list of educated
Anuak men to the Ethiopian army.

Akway says he met with Omot Obang Olom and Tsegaye
Beyene, then Ethiopia's military commander in
Gambella, on the morning of December 13, 2003.

"Omot had a paper in his hand," Akway said. "That
paper was for selecting the people to be killed."
After the killing began, Akway said that he begged
Omot and Beyene to stop the massacre, and was
threatened by Omot.

"Omot said 'If you are talking like this, you will be
killed like Agwa." Agwa Alemo was an Anuak leader and
resistance fighter who was assassinated in 1992 and is
considered a hero by many Anuak.

Typical and Intentional

Rosa Garcia-Peltoniemi, a clinician with the Center
for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, says that the
arguments now dividing the Minnesota Anuak are typical
of what happens to diaspora populations when the
political figures responsible for their exile
suddenly reappear in their midst in Minnesota.

"It's typical and it's intentional," she said.
"Governments that engage in ethnic cleansing do this
deliberately. They want to create dissension and
conflict and distrust between people. It's divide and
conquer."

"These conflicts more and more are quite global," she
added. "The exile communities become very important
because they have economic power. They send money back
home and people also travel back. Even after they
leave their countries for the U.S., it isn't a
complete cut-off."

Olom will meet with Minnesota Anuak on Saturday at
noon at the Four Points by Sheraton Hotel in
Minneapolis at 1330 Industrial Boulevard.

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
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