"Ignored"
by Sai Mohan
“No one is going to stand up for us, so we must stand up for ourselves. We all need to come together and tell the whole world, and our enemies too, that the Anuak people have a right to live in this, God's world. It is our birth place, just like the rest of the human species.” – family member of Anuak victim of genocide in Ethiopia (McGill)
The Ethiopian National Defense Force has committed repeated and horrific crimes against the minority Anuak population living in the Gambella region in the southwestern corner of that nation. In accordance with the Human Rights Watch analysis, released March 2005, these acts are considered to be genocide and crimes against humanity.
Beginning in December 2003 with a brutal massacre of 424 people, the slow and steady perpetuation of violence including rape, torture, and execution of Anuaks has continued for over a year, almost unnoticed by major international players. The methods of murder threw painful flashbacks to the Holocaust. Educated men were dragged out of their homes and shot with assault rifles. Huts were looted and then destroyed by hand grenades. The accumulating pile of bodies was buried in mass graves that were then exhumed by soldiers looking to destroy evidence. The Ethiopian military added to the carnage by deploying troop trucks and a helicopter gunship against the Anuak villages, killing or wounding over 1,000 people. According to a report by Genocide Watch, this systematic elimination of political and intellectual leaders and large chunks of the entire Anuak population was titled with cruel irony as “Operation Sunny Mountain” (GW).
The motivation for Ethiopia’s destruction of its own people can be traced to the ethnic diversity of the resource-filled Gambella region. As five ethnic groups struggled to maintain their dominance of the region alongside influxes of refugees from Sudan and the highlands, violence broke out and factions were created that threatened the security of the nation as a whole (HRW). The government began inundating the region with military troops, mostly consisting of the highland ethnic group that takes a direct stance against the Anuak population (HRW), who apparently sparked the ongoing violence over the last two years. In fact, the violence occurring over the last two years was apparently sparked by an ambush of the highland people by an Anuak unit. However, this recent crisis reported by both the Human Rights Watch and the Genocide Watch does not fall under the category of armed conflict but is rather a violation of international human rights law. The Ethiopian government is clearly committing genocide.
What is particularly disturbing is the delay between the start of this genocide and the publication of these two reports. Only a handful of newspaper articles covered the initial massacre between December 2003 and February of 2004, when Genocide Watch finally passed its judgment on the region. By then, Ethiopian genocide was basically forgotten by international media. Even after the report was finally published, threats were made and money was appropriated for human rights work in the region, but the killing continued. The ongoing genocide cannot even be considered a failure of international intervention, because no such intervention was really even attempted. Most people do not even know that genocide is occurring in Ethiopia because coverage of the situation by the media is so sparse and barren.
Perhaps the cause for this lack of airtime is simply apathy.
Why should the world focus on a place that does not have anything to
interest an attention-deficit and materialistic public? But one can
only learn from history, which paints a gruesome picture of the consequences
of ignoring the signs of genocide. The world closed its eyes for a moment
and allowed the Holocaust to happen. We hardly remember the mutual massacring
of millions of Hindus and Muslims during the partition of India. As
Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire quotes in his book Shake Hands with
the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, “Engraved still in my
brain is the judgment of a small group of bureaucrats who came to assess
the situation in the first weeks of the genocide: ‘We will recommend
to our government not to intervene as the risks are high and all that
is here are humans.’” What could be more appalling than the devaluation
of human life to the point where it becomes expendable simply because
it cannot be calculated into some country’s GDP? Only at the point of
a gun is life worth more than all the gold in the Gambella region, and
at that point it becomes impossible to save. Out of sheer respect for
humanity, for the right to live, we must stop Ethiopia from slaughtering
its citizens and prevent them from repeating the history of cruel and
unnecessary death that has been written so many times before.
