“What the Ethiopian security forces are doing may amount to crimes against humanity,” Georgette Gagnon, deputy director for the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, told The New York Times reported on Monday, June 18.

The activist branded Ethiopia as one of the most repressive countries in Africa, a characterization that many rights organizations and Western officials agree with.

A clear example of army brutality is evident in Ogaden, a desert region on the borders with neighboring Somalia where the mostly pastoral nomad people have been chafing against Ethiopian rule since 1897.

Many rights groups have documented thousands of cases of torture, gang-raping, burning down huts and killing civilians of the ethnic Somali population in Ogaden.

“They hit us in the face with the hardest part of their guns,” Moualin, whose face still carries the scars of the last Ethiopian raid on his Sasabene village in January, told the Times.

Anab, a 40-year-old Ogadeni camel herder, described how the Ethiopian troops routinely abuse young women in her village.

“Me, I am old,” she said, “but they raped me, too.”

Even in other parts of the country ravaged by poverty and famine, the government’s grip does not get any looser, with a massive clampdown on democracy and opposition groups.

“There are no real steps toward democracy,” said Merera Gudina, vice president of the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces, a leading opposition party.

“No real steps toward opening up space, no real steps toward ending repression.”

During the 2005 elections, the opposition faced a crackdown after winning a record number of seats in parliament.

Government troops opened fire on demonstrators, rounded up opposition supporters and even attempted to kill top opposition leaders.

Overlooked

Civil liberty organizations and Western officials have repeatedly criticized Washington for overlooking the obvious in Ethiopia.

This has also raised the irk of many inside the Congress.

“This is a country that is abusing its own people and has no respect for democracy,” Donald M. Payne, chairman of the House of Representative Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa and global health, told the Times.

“We’ve not only looked the other way but we’ve pushed them to intrude in other sovereign nations,” he added, referring to the Ethiopian invasion of neighboring Somalia last December.

The Ethiopian military, along with the Somali interim government forces, routed the ruling Supreme Islamic Courts of Somalia (SICS) in a two-week war, pushing the war-torn country into abyss.

The Bush administration has defended and supported the offensive as part of global war on “international terrorism.”

It has offered Ethiopia significant sharing of intelligence on the SICS fighters positions and information from American spy satellites.

Ethiopia has long been a strong ally of Washington in the strategic Horn of Africa.

For years the US has been pouring weapons and military advisers into Ethiopia, and the American military has trained Ethiopian troops at bases in the eastern region.

The regime of Meles Zenawi has also received millions of dollars in US military aid since 2002.

Payne and other key Democrats in Congress are currently moving against the American policy toward Ethiopia.

They are questioning the Bush administration’s bid to double aid to Ethiopia from the current $284 million to $481 million next year.