Ethiopian Army kills 6 civilians, including a US citizen, in Gambella region

By Anuak Justice Council; March 13, 2013

Background:

For those who do not know, the AJC was
formed following the massacre of the Anuak by the same Ethiopian National Defense
Forces (ENDF) in December 2003. At this time, 424 Anuak leaders were targeted
and brutally slaughtered within three days. Most of their bodies were buried in
mass graves and have never been recovered. This all has been documented by
respected human rights organizations such as Genocide Watch in their two reports
and by Human Rights Watch in their report entitled: “Targeting the Anuak: Human Rights
Violations and Crimes against Humanity in Ethiopia’s Gambella
Region [ http://www.hrw.org/news/2005/03/23/ethiopia-crimes-against-humanity-gambella-region].

Thousands more were killed over the next three years when the military presence
was very heavy surrounding an attempt to drill for oil on indigenous Anuak land,
which eventually failed. Since then, the region has never recovered. The Anuak,
in particular, have never found safety and security and many have left for
neighboring countries.  

The tensions
in the region have only been exacerbated by the large-scale land acquisitions
by foreign and local investors that have displaced 70,000 local people from
land the Anuak and others have depended upon for their livelihoods for
centuries. [For more information on
the displacements, please see the investigation by Human Rights Watch entitled:
“Waiting Here for Death” Forced
Displacement and “Villagization” in
Ethiopia’s Gambella Region. http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/01/16/waiting-here-death

] Between now and 2015, another 150,000 indigenous Gambellans
are to be moved to resettlement villages in a villagization
program that has left the displaced homeless, with inferior land, with poorer
access to water, with fewer or non-existing services and in hunger. In this
milieu, anyone who attempts to defend their constitutional rights to their
indigenous land can be called a terrorist and subject to human rights crimes. 

Incident: From eyewitnesses and testimony from
other local people, the AJC has learned that the incident began when someone
reported to the local security in Gambella that an Anuak farmer had purchased a
gun from the highlands in Ethiopia and had brought it back to this lowland area.
Prior to the Anuak massacre in 2003, the Anuak had been disarmed of their guns
despite using them for hunting and protection from the wild animals in the
region that would prey on their livestock. Notably, the disarmament was ethnic-based
and did not include those from other local ethnic groups. In fact, as of today,
the Anuak remain the only disarmed people in the Gambella region while others
still maintain the right to possess guns.   

After
receiving the report of this gun purchase, authorities had gone to the
farmer’s house on February 28, 2013. He was not at home; however, there
were some other young men in the home, some of his relatives and others his
neighbors. One of his relatives, Mark Omot, who is 26 years old and whose
father was killed in the Gambella massacre of December 2003, was interrogated
and tortured. He was beaten by the barrels of the guns and he sustained many serious
injuries to his head, neck and chest before finally telling the authorities that
during the dry season, the majority of men go to the riverbanks to fish and
hunt. [If you want to eat during the dry season, it greatly helps to have a gun
to hunt.]

A local Anuak
security official, along with the ENDF, took this man and forced him to help
them find the farmer. After a search lasting several days, on the morning of
March 2, the farmer was located about 40 kilometers away on the bank of the
Gilo River near the village of Abelean and Apoo. Mr. Odol and sixteen others,
including a number of children as young as ten years of age, were found sitting
under the shade of a tree. Without warning, the ENDF began shooting at them, killing
six persons, including an eleven-year-old. The others escaped, including the farmer.
No one shot back. After the six men died, the troops searched through the
bodies and their belongings and found only one gun. During their search of the
bodies, they found Omot Ojulu
Odol’s American passport and Washington D.C.
driver’s license on him. This is when the entire situation changed. Instead
of focusing on the farmer, the others they had killed or those who had escaped,
they focused only on Mr. Odol and justified killing
an American citizen by calling him a terrorist. They separated his body from
the others and videotaped his body, propping the gun up beside him along with
his American passport and U.S. driver’s license.

The security
forces left the other bodies behind, without burying them, but took Mr. Odol’s body with them to the town of Pinyudo, the capital of the district of Gok.
When in Pinyudo, they placed his lifeless body in the
back of their army truck, flagrantly displaying him as they drove through the
town, boasting that they had killed the man who did not want investment or
development in the region. They claimed that there would now be peace and
development in the region because this man, who was “anti-development”,
“anti-foreign investment” and “anti-villagization”,
was now finally killed. The location where Mr. Odol
was killed was near to the place where land had been leased to a Turkish land
investor.  They were among those who
had been forcibly displaced from the area, ending up at the location 40
kilometers away where the farmer and they most of them were now living. 

Following
this, the ENDF forces brought Mr. Odol’s body
to the regional capital of Gambella Town, publically announcing their intent to
display his body the following day, Sunday, March 3; however, the next day the
people were told that his body would instead be displayed at the stadium and
that the people should come and see the remains of a man who was “anti-development”
and “anti-foreign investment.”

They claimed that
he had been responsible for the attack on employees at the Saudi Star agricultural
farm in May 2012 and for the deadly bus ambush in April 2012, which had
occurred when he was not in Ethiopia according to reports from the ground.

However, the anticipated
showing of his body in the stadium never took place. Allegedly, the central
government in Addis Ababa stopped their plans, warning local officials that
there could be a backlash because Omot Ojulu Omod had been an American citizen.
This information was also confirmed by Gatluak Tut, Gambella Regional Vice President, when he was interviewed
by the government-run newspaper, “Reporter,” on Wednesday, March
6.  

On Monday,
March 4, some ENDF went back to the village in Gok Depach where the farmer had lived and killed another farmer,
Okwier Ojulu, who lived in
the same vicinity. They saw him walking from his home and they ordered him to
stop but he did not listen to them; knowing what had happened to the others and
that if he stopped, he would be interrogated and possibly tortured. The
soldiers then shot him in the back and killed him. His whole family witnessed
his death. The soldiers left him dead on the road. Soldiers then arrested
another farmer, Omot Abella, and his two teenage sons as well as one other
Anuak farmer. People suspected that the defense forces feared retaliation from
the villagers because of the people killed on the riverbank along with Omot Ojulu Odol.
Those arrested, as well as Mark Omot, remain in custody in Pinyudo
in the military’s detention center. 

Additionally,
two others were also arrested. One was Mr. Oman Agwa,
the chief of police of the Gambella region who had condemned the killing of
Omot and the others, saying that these were innocent people and that there was
no proof of them committing any crimes. Out of guilt or shame, the Anuak
governor of the Gambella region, Omot Obang Olom, who was complicit in
the massacre in 2003 of his own people, along with ENDF commanders, arrested
this man in order to silence him. However, when Governor Olom
was asked during an interview on Voice of America on March 5^th about
the arrest of the chief of police, he claimed that the man had been arrested
because authorities had found a T-shirt in the man’s house that called
for the secession of Gambella from Ethiopia. No one else had ever seen such a
T-shirt, but obviously free speech does not exist in one of the most repressive
countries in the world– Ethiopia. He remains in detention in Gambella.

The second
man arrested is Paul Agwa, a security guard at the Mekane
Yesus Church in Gambella. He was accused of being
related to the farmer who had bought the gun and authorities believed he had
been aware of the purchase of the gun and had not reported it. There are
reports that he was tortured during his arrest.   He remains in custody in Gambella.
These are the facts from the people on the ground. 

The Anuak,
including family members, reported the incident to the U.S. State Department. The
U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa later confirmed the man’s death to the State
Department.

In reports the
AJC received from U.S. government sources, they indicate the following:

Ethiopian officials have informed the
U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa that a U.S. citizen was killed on March 2, 2013, as
part of an Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) operation against a rebel
group that operates in the Gambella region of Ethiopia.

The U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa has
not been able to confirm the details of this reported incident, and is seeking
additional information.

On March 7,
Ethiopian television reported that security forces had killed Omot Ojulu Odol
in Gambella because he was a terrorist. They never
mentioned the other five persons who had been killed, including the eleven-year-old,
perhaps because it would diminish their argument that they were fighting a
“rebel group” operating in the region. 

Conclusion: What began as a report of one gun
being purchased by a farmer for hunting—a crime only for the
Anuak—ended in the ambush and cold-blooded killing of six Anuak people
who had committed no crime. Unknowingly, one of these victims they had killed
had been an American citizen, which totally changed the rationale and focus of
their actions, but yet it gives an accurate picture of the kind of insecurity
the Anuak continue to face on a daily basis.

The AJC, as
an organization that speaks for the well being of the Anuak, wherever they are
found, finds it necessary to respond to the one-sided propaganda given in this
case by the Ethiopian government. Most Anuak consider the TPLF/EPRDF regime,
which has been in power for over 21 years, a terrorist regime that has a record
of killing innocent people, not only in Gambella, but throughout the country. If
they were genuine, they should have reported on the deaths and arrests of the
others, but they did not. Sadly, this kind of biased and untruthful reporting by
ETV and Tesfa– alem Tekle is not unusual, especially when the reporter, as in
this case Tesfa– alem a
hard-core TPLF supporter who based in Mekelle,
northern Ethiopia.

From what we
know, Omot Odol was not a
terrorist. This was someone who was a responsible U.S. citizen who had had a
job and reportedly, had never committed a crime in America, not even a driving
violation; however, he had always spoken out against the human rights abuses
committed by the current TPLF/EPRDF government. His own brother was killed by government-controlled
military forces in 2008 and a few months later, his mother met the same fate. Maybe
this was why he felt compelled to go back home to do what he could to speak out
for justice. We are unaware of any crimes he has ever committed, and according
to reliable sources, he was not even in Ethiopia at the time of either the
Saudi Star attack or the ambush of the bus for which he is being accused.  

On the other
hand, since 2003, the Anuak, simply for being of that ethnicity, have been
targeted for repeated egregious human rights violations in their own land. No
one has yet to be held responsible for these crimes, including for the December
2003 massacre and aftermath. Over the last several years, as the land grabs are
continuing to displace the Anuak, those who speak out against the injustice can
be called terrorists and are at great risk. Those Anuak who return to their
homeland for visits from other countries are regularly targeted as suspicious
persons by the authorities. We have documented more than twenty-one cases over
the last two years where Anuak coming from the US, Canada, Europe or Australia have
been detained and interrogated. Some have even been victims of torture and
abuse by the TPLF/EPRDF. In certain cases, Ethiopian military and other
security forces have even crossed international boundaries to harass and
intimidate Anuak in the Republic of South Sudan and in Kenya. 

The killing
of Omot Ojulu Odol is not unique to Gambella. What
makes it different is the fact that Mr. Odol was an
American citizen and that he was killed without any due process. The Government
of Ethiopia now wants to avoid accountability to the U.S. Government by taking
the easy way out, which is to label him as a terrorist and to accuse him of
crimes that reportedly occurred when he was not even in the country. In a
statement made by Gambella Regional governor, Omot Olom on ESAT [Ethiopian Satellite TV] on Friday, March 8,
2013, he said, “Anyone who broke
the law in Ethiopia could be killed whether an Ethiopian or an American!” 

Last month
Governor Omot detained an Australian Anuak in Gambella, accusing him of aiding
the rebels even though he lived in Australia. Allegedly security officials told
him that they could kill him regardless of the fact he was an Australian
citizen. In other words, educated Anuak from abroad are a real threat to them
and they are obviously willing to break international laws in response to them.

We in the AJC
are working to pressure the American government authorities to do their maximum
in investigating this incident. To start, we have called on them to conduct an
on-the-ground investigation in Gambella, beginning with exhuming the body in
order to conduct forensic DNA tests to determine whether the remains are Omot Ojulu Odol’s,
beyond a doubt. If it matches, we call on U.S. officials to claim his remains
so that they might be given to his family for a proper burial.

As of now, the
ENDF are the only ones who know where the body is buried. We also call on U.S. authorities
to investigate who ordered the killing and who actually killed him so that they
will be held accountable. Even if he was guilty of some crime, they should have
arrested him and brought him to justice because of his American citizenship. This
issue has already been taken up by some in the U.S. Congress and U.S. Senate.

The AJC and the
Anuak as a whole, see Mr. Odol’s death and
those of the other five Anuak killed alongside of him, as more names on the
list of the thousands of Anuak who have already been killed by the TPLF/EPRDF
since they came to power. The Anuak will not rest until justice has been served
for all of them. It may not be done now, but surely there will be a day of
accountability. Until then, the AJC will continue to gather the information and
the names of those implicated in the crimes. When this government changes, the
guilty will be found wherever they are and charged. This demand for
accountability is not only for the Anuak, but for the rest of Ethiopians who
have lost their lives throughout the country. 

May God
comfort and strengthen the families of those who have lost these loved ones. Ethiopia
has become like a weeping mother, crying for her precious children who have
come to a premature end. May their deaths not be in vain but be building blocks
towards a more peaceful, life-affirming Ethiopia. May God strengthen the living
to reach out to each other to bring an end to this regime and their crimes
against our Ethiopian people.

May Ethiopia
stretch out her hands to God who will not abandon us if we call him in humility
and faith. 

=======================ENDS=======================.

Please
do not hesitate to e-mail your questions or comments to Mr. Ochala
Abulla, Chairman of the Anuak
Justice Council (AJC): E-mail: [email protected]