Save The Ogaden – SaveOgaden.Org

NAIROBI, Kenya — The United States and other Western governments are ignoring clear evidence of war crimes by Ethiopia, a key U.S. ally that launched a military crackdown on rebels last year, a human rights group said Thursday.

Separately, a U.S.-based science group said satellite images confirm reports that villages have been destroyed in the country’s Ogaden region.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said America’s relationship with Ethiopia means an alliance with a country repeatedly accused of violating human and political rights. In recent years, Ethiopia has become a U.S. partner in the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots in the Horn of Africa.

“The United States is being willfully blind,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director for Human Rights Watch. “Because Ethiopia is viewed as a key ally in the counterterrorism efforts, they are perhaps prepared to look the other way at abuses committed by Ethiopian soldiers.”

In a 130-page report, Human Rights Watch said Ethiopian troops have beaten and strangled civilians, staged public executions and burned villages during a year-old campaign against rebels in the Ogaden, an arid stretch of land on the border with Somalia. The group said the allegations were based on more than 100 eyewitness accounts.

The country in the Horn of Africa is an ally in President Bush’s fight against terrorism.

U.S. says it’s not ignoring war crimes reports
A State Department spokesman on Thursday dismissed claims that the U.S. is minimizing or even ignoring war crimes by the Ethiopians. Gonzalo Gallegos said officials “strongly reject” Human Rights Watch’s allegations.

The report said that since early 2007, when Ogaden rebels attacked a Chinese oil site, “the Ethiopian military’s killings, torture and rape of civilians have driven thousands of people from the region, while trade restriction and limited relief aid are exacerbating the humanitarian situation.”

Gallegos said the U.S. has received reports from international nongovernmental organizations and other aid groups of serious abuses and harsh intimidation tactics by Ethiopian government soldiers and fighters of the Ogaden National Liberation Front.

For the past year, he said, U.S. and nongovernmental personnel have investigated, but it has been impossible to identify who carried out the atrocities.

The U.S. ambassador “has persistently raised concerns over human rights abuses with the highest level of the Ethiopian government, as have senior U.S. government visitors” to the country, Gallegos said.

At the same time, Gallegos said, the U.S. military aid program has continued, with $700 million given last year.

“U.S. government military assistance to Ethiopia is designed to transform the military into an apolitical professional defense force that can secure its borders and protects human rights,” he said.

Ethiopia denies allegations
Bereket Simon, special adviser to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, denied all allegations in the report.

“It’s the same old fabrication,” he said.

But satellite images confirm reports that the Ethiopian military has burned towns and villages in Ogaden, the American Association for the Advancement of Science reported on Thursday.

Eight sites in the rocky, arid region, which borders Somalia, have clear signs of burning and other destruction, the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program said.

AAAS

In this image of the town of Wardheer, Ethiopia, from Dec. 30, 2007, yellow dots indicate structures removed since a previous image from February 2006. Red dots indicate new structures added in that same period.

The commercially available images corroborate the report by Human Rights Watch, which also relies on eyewitness accounts of attacks on tens of thousands of ethnic-Somali Muslims living in the area, the AAAS said.

“The Ethiopian authorities frequently dismiss human rights reports, saying that the witnesses we interviewed are liars and rebel supporters,” Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

“But it will be much more difficult for them to dismiss the evidence presented in the satellite images, as images like that don’t lie,” he said.

Ethiopia, a key regional ally of the United States, launched its latest offensive after the Ogaden National Liberation Front attacked a Chinese-run oil field in the region in April 2007, killing more than 70 people.

Lars Bromley, project director for the Science and Human Rights Program at AAAS, said his team analyzed several before and after satellite images of villages identified by Human Right Watch as possible locations of human rights violations.

They found eight, mostly in villages and small towns in the Wardheer, Dhagabur and Qorrahey Zones, that appeared to have been burned or destroyed recently.

Reports difficult to corroborate
For example, in the town of Labigah, 40 structures identified in a September 2005 image were gone in images taken in February 2008. In the Human

Rights Watch report an eyewitness said the Ethiopian army “went into every village and set it on fire.”

Such reports are nearly impossible to corroborate because the region “may well be the most isolated place on earth, save perhaps the densest parts of the Congolese or Amazon rain forests,” Bromley said.

If the neutral left is really neutral, why does it keep coming down hard on the West’s official enemies while ignoring the West’s henchmen?

By Stephen Gowans

Many left activists and progressives claim to be equally opposed to oppression, whether practiced by the friends of imperialist powers or their enemies, but are virtually silent on the well documented oppressions of such US client states as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia, while exhibiting an uncritical zeal in denouncing the enemies of Anglo-American imperialism, often for crimes that have been exaggerated or invented to be used as pretexts for Western intervention and fulfillment of imperialist goals.

There is no better illustration of this tendency to profess principled neutrality while regularly exhibiting a pro-imperialist bias, than the current obsession with the alleged genocide in Darfur and the claims of unjustified political oppression in Zimbabwe, while a virtually unremarked series of crimes and oppressions is carried out by the US and British client government of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia.

In an anti-guerilla war conducted in the country’s Ogaden region, “Ethiopian troops are burning villages, raping women and killing civilians as part of a systematic campaign to drive them from their homes.” Refugees say dozens of villages have been destroyed and have “accused the Ethiopian government of forcibly starving its own people by preventing food convoys reaching villages and destroying crops and livestock.”*

“A former Ethiopian soldier who defected from the army said how he had been ordered to burn villages and kill all their inhabitants. He said the Ethiopian air force would bomb a village before a unit of ground troops followed, firing indiscriminately at civilians. ‘Men, women, children – we killed them all,’ he said.”

The little-known conflict in Ogaden parallels the more widely known war in Darfur. The conflict began when rebels killed scores of Ethiopian guards and Chinese employees at a Chinese-run oil field. The government replied with a harsh crackdown.

“Human rights investigators are gathering evidence of widespread use of rape, with women reporting gang-rapes by up to a dozen soldiers. In some villages, men have been abducted at night, their bodies dumped in the village the next morning.

“While in Darfur, aid agencies have been able to establish camps and provide humanitarian support, they have been blocked from setting up operations in the Ogaden. The International Committee of the Red Cross has been thrown out and Medicins Sans Frontieres has also been prevented from working. Journalists trying to enter have also been banned – those that have tried have been promptly arrested.”

But while neutral leftists have worked themselves into a state of high moral dudgeon over Sudan’s counter-insurgency in Darfur, which “has been described by the US as ‘genocide’ and by the UN as ‘crimes against humanity’”, they have been virtually silent on Ethiopia, a recipient of US and British military and humanitarian aid.

“America’s top official on African affairs, assistant secretary of state, Jendayi Frazer, visited one town in the Ogaden last month.

“On her return to Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, she criticized the rebels and said the reports of military abuses were merely allegations. ‘We urge any and every government to respect human rights and to try to avoid civilian casualties but that’s difficult in dealing with an insurgency,’ she said.”

The West’s official enemies are never allowed the same latitude in dealing with their own (often US and British financed and instigated) insurgencies – a double standard backed by neutral leftists through their voluble condemnations of the anti-insurgency efforts of official enemies and comparative silence on those of Western client states.

“The US provides some $283m (£140m) in military and humanitarian aid to Ethiopia and has trained its military – one of the largest and strongest in Africa.”

Compare Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe with Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. For trying to invest Zimbabwean independence with real content (land reform and indigenization of the economy), Mugabe has been calumniated by British and US officials and the Western media as a strongman who will do anything to stay in power, from stealing elections to repressing the opposition. The elections Mugabe was said to have stolen were endorsed by the South African Development Community, an organization of neighboring states, and the opposition operates freely, despite being openly backed and financed by Western powers in pursuit of a regime-change, anti-independence agenda.

For doing the West’s bidding in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia’s Meles is showered with US and British aid and was handpicked by Tony Blair to sit on Britain’s Commission for Africa, to lead the “African renaissance.” Neutral leftists say little about “the British Government’s – and the West’s – favorite African leader”, channeling their energies instead into calling on the US to intervene militarily in Darfur and in competing to see who can exercise the greatest stridency in denouncing the Mugabe government (contributing to the program of ushering Mugabe and his pro-independence policies out and the MDC and its pro-Western dependence policies in.) Somehow, the end result of all this is to put the West more firmly in control of Africa.

And yet the political repressions of which Mugabe is accused are practiced ardently by Meles. Indeed, even if every charge leveled against Mugabe were true (and most are not), he would still be an angel against Meles.

Following Ethiopia’s May 2005 general election, which the opposition claimed was rigged, “security forces opened fire on protesters, killing 193 people.” Thousands of opposition supporters and leaders were rounded up and thrown in jail.

“More than 100 opposition leaders were put on trial for treason while the police crackdown intensified. Text messages, which had been used to organize the demonstrations in 2005, were banned.”

The state asked that the death penalty be imposed on 38 opposition leaders, including the founder of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, a former UN war crimes prosecutor and the mayor-elect of Addis Ababa. The court rejected the prosecution’s recommendation, but sentenced the opposition leaders to life imprisonment. They were later freed, but only after the US intervened.

“Britain still gives Ethiopia £130m in humanitarian aid each year – more than any other African country,” while carrying out an unremitting campaign of demonization against Robert Mugabe and blocking Zimbabwe’s access to international credit.

How it is it that Meles, who has carried out much graver crimes than any Mugabe has been accused of, is showered with honors and humanitarian aid, while Mugabe is treated as Africa’s version of Hitler and his country is subjected to a campaign of economic warfare?

The answer lies in the reality that Meles acts as Washington’s attack dog in the Horn of Africa, invading Somalia to put down a pro-independence government, while Mugabe pursues an independent foreign policy and implements reforms to give Zimbabwean independence meaningful content.

How is that many left activists and progressives, though professing neutrality, channel much of their energy into campaigns deploring the official enemies of Anglo-American imperialism, while remaining virtually silent on oppressions carried out by US and British client states?

The answer has much to the do with the media and how left activists and progressives react to it. The news media are structured to report on what state officials say and do. To garner support for their policies, state officials make public statements on issues they want to draw public attention to, while steering clear of events they prefer remain unnoticed. Because Western state officials make frequent references to Zimbabwe, and few, if any, to Ethiopia, dozens of media news stories appear on Zimbabwe for every one that appears on Ethiopia. In this way, state officials, working through the media, are able to establish a public agenda, not only for the media but for the neutral left to follow – one which places Mugabe scores of rungs ahead of Meles, and Darfur much higher than Ogaden. Left activists and progressives talk about Mugabe and Darfur because the media do and the media do because Western state officials do. But neutral leftists hardly ever talk about Meles and Ogaden because the media hardly do, and the media hardly do because Western state officials almost never do (and don’t want to.) The result is that while professing neutrality, many left activists and progressives have been unwittingly recruited into agendas set in Washington and London.

These are the conditions that, in part, lead the neutral left to channel considerable energy into denouncing the official enemies of Western governments, while spending little time talking about or campaigning against oppressive regimes that receive Western aid and support. Neutral leftists are quick to denounce the military government of Myanmar (an official enemy) for its crackdown on a religious group, while saying virtually nothing about the military government of Pakistan (a client state) for an equally bloody crackdown on a religious group. Neutral leftists are acutely sensitive to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur (officially condemned), while saying virtually nothing about the much larger humanitarian crisis in Iraq (officially ignored) or the humanitarian crisis in Ogaden (also officially ignored.) Neutral leftists say virtually nothing about Meles Zenawi, a strongman accused of rigging elections who threatens political opponents with the death penalty, has invaded another country, and carries out crimes against humanity within his own borders (and is supported by the West) while spitting out contempt for Robert Mugabe, who has done none of these things (but isn’t supported by the West).

In all it does, despite professions of neutrality, the neutral left is pro-imperialist, not neutral. The moment its members devote half as much energy to railing against the governments of Egypt, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey as they do against Zimbabwe, the Taliban, north Korea, Belarus and Iran, will be the moment their claims to support neither imperialism nor its official enemies unconditionally become something more substantial than deceptive rhetoric.

* All quotes from Steve Bloomfield, “Ethiopia’s ‘own Darfur’ as villagers flee government-backed violence,” The Independent, October 17, 2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article3067244.ece

By Caroline Gammell,

The term Dictatorship means: “A form of government in which absolute power is concentrated in a dictator or a small clique; a government organization or group in which absolute power is so concentrated; a despotic state.”

It is fundamentally important when governing any variety of semi-fascistic state to ensure that your subjects, citizenry, call them what you will, are absolutely unlikely to depose you. The habitual technique of achieving this situation is by applying brute force. In some cases a dictatorial regime might be held together by the threat of the gun, however this is inherently unstable. Thus, most dictators obstruct human rights, proscribe or limit freedom of speech, lawful assembly, and freedom of the press. Many dictators also prohibit elections entirely. Many others rig elections or blatantly force people to vote for the government’s pre-chosen candidates. In despite of denying citizens’ numerous basic freedoms, many despotic regimes or what I call coarse coalitions call themselves “people’s republics” or “people’s democratic.” The kind of rules employed by unpopular regimes mentioned above only invite armed rebellion; they result lack of social development; or worse they expedite the creation of bigger muscles to overthrow their dictatorial dynasties.

A substitute approach, also very popular with megalomaniacs from all Four Corners of the world, is to convince the oppressed that oppression is actually the best form of governance. In practice, this method can be so effective that the downtrodden and oppressed people will even fight to defend the oppressing state. Most dictatorships are established through violence, force, and sometimes-political trickery. Colonel Mingistu Haile Merriam, for instance used these methods effectively while serving as Military Ruler of Ethiopia from 1974-1991. He used to maintain his power through vicious military force and massacred thousands and thousands, if not millions, of Ethiopians both military men and civilians. Similarly, the current ruler of Ethiopia-moribund Meleze -does the same. In reality, Melez and his cronies, seem to have borrowed a leaf from the past and in particular Mingistu Haile Merriam’s book. The lone reason for the savagery and repression behaviors evident in many regions such as Ogadenia, Oromia and Sidamo to name but a few, by Melez’s  pitiless military recruits are a prime example of desperate dictatorial tactics.

One could plausibly argue that the reason why many people in Ethiopia have fallen victims to drought, starvation, and war is undoubtedly, the cause of the current ruling regime’s policy based on controlling and manipulating people both economically, and politically using all means and ways at its disposal. The immediate concern for Ethiopia’s advertisement of the famine threat, however, is for the advantaged TPLF (Tigranian People’s Liberation Front) ruling elements to divert and distort Food Aid to feed the large number of oppressing forces stationed in many military garrisons throughout the country. On the other hand, they would like to use food donated by the international community as a lethal weapon to deprive the starving people, especially those who oppose the regime or sympathize with the armed opposition, food. In contrast, people who will get food aid donated by the international community through the TPLF government is those who bow to the regime’s policies based on “obey or out.” Consequently, the Ethiopian people are evidently victims of an enigmatic crime engineered by the despotic regime in Addis Ababa led by Prime Minister Meleze Zenawi.

Evidence on the ground point to the fact that the Ethiopian people are suffering from TPLF terror and it’s tyrannic tenets rather than a natural drought and destituteness. Many among the oppressed ethnic groups in various regions such as Ogadenia and Oromia are on melee against the malevolent regime in Addis Ababa.  These people are always fighting for their freedom, and justice. Apparently, it’s their sole source of hope to fight and resist for survival and existence to live a life without havoc, hunger, and panic.

Indigenous inhabitants from regions such as Ogadenia, Oromia, Afar, and Sidamo live under well-documented and inconceivable harsh conditions. Amnesty International, in its 2002 world report (http://web.amnesty.org/web/ar2002.nsf/afr/ethiopia!Open) described eloquently the problems faced by inhabitants of the above mentioned regions. The report states in part:

At least 31 people were killed and over 3,000 arrested during rioting in April. Armed conflict continued within Ethiopia between government forces and Oromo and Somali opponents; many human rights violations by government troops were reported. Suspected rebel supporters were detained, tortured and extrajudicially executed. Several thousand remained in detention; some had been held for years without charge or trial. Journalists, human rights activists, demonstrators and other critics of the government were arrested. Most were held without trial, although some received unfair trials. During local elections in March, April and December scores of opposition party supporters were subjected to intimidation, beatings and arbitrary arrest…

What Amnesty International described above could be said is a basically a systematically planed strategy intended to subdue people and make them conform to Tigranian domination.

Many people could strongly argue that the root cause of lack of development and political instability in Ethiopia is due to the arrogance and tyrannical attitudes of the Abyssinian rulers against other ethnic groups who live in what is nowadays known as Ethiopia. To me the fore-mentioned is a vindication of an old man’s wisdom or saying, which says; “The more you hold down a man; the more you stay down with him.” This saying reminds me the other axiom by the famous former United States President Abraham Lincoln, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God cannot long retain it.” In addition John F. Kennedy said, “…the enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war it self.” In the case of Ethiopia, poverty, disease, tyranny, and the perpetual wars are the by-products of Abyssinian rulers. One could, as a result, plausibly argue that Abyssinian rulers’ extensive denial of people’s rights and freedoms put the whole nation its current position of being the most retarded and paralyzed country in the world. Moreover, the bad policies implemented by the above mentioned rulers resulted the ongoing or the perpetual catastrophes, such as the unceasing droughts, war, and the large number of Diaspora’s who live outside Ethiopia.

Ironically, the International Community has never come up with any sincere strategy or thoughtful solution that can address overtly or covertly the root causes of Ethiopia’s chronic droughts, diseases, and mal-governance that engulfed(ing) millions of the nation’s population. Incongruously, they (International community) always furnish food aid into the wrong hands of unpitying and ill-prepared regimes in Addis Ababa and forget about the fundamental problems. The reality is that people in Ethiopia need an enduring way out with freedom and better system of governance. One of the better ways to address the problem and prevent these disasters from bringing harm to people is for people to live in peace, and freedom and without forgetting that they will have to account for everything perpetrators do.

Furnishing food aid to famine victims while not attempting to understand why famine is the rallying cry of successive Ethiopian regimes is comparable to a doctor who prescribes medicine for his/her patient without a proper examination of the illness. Thus, it does seem paradoxical to distribute food to the needy people without understanding the root causes of the ever-present famine threat and other issues that do affect the lives of the poor and needy people in impoverished regions such as Ogadenia. Trucking food aid from Berbera, which is thousands of miles away, is not a lasting solution to the famine crisis. Let the international community ask itself an honest question. How long will it continue to send food aid from thousands of miles away to feed millions of people made to deliberately starve by a hostile and heedless regime in Addis Ababa?

Finally, without the constitution of a proper distribution system, it will be most probable that the food donated by the international community will not reach its intended target: The poor and needy citizenry of regions such as Ogadenia, Oromia, Afar and Sidamo.

Source: lets change together

TC Daily Planet – August 31, 2009 — The first time I heard Fatima tell her story, I answered in the natural way. “They killed my husband,” she said.  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.  “And they killed my son,” she said. “Oh, I’m so sorry for your losses,” I said. “And they killed my brothers and some of my brothers’ children,” she said, staring at me with eyes that seemed quite without hope and yet that also seemed to ask me, with astonishing tenacity, ‘Are you really listening, do you really understand?’”

I didn’t know what to say to Fatima at this point, as my repeated condolences seemed pointless. So instead I stood up a bit straighter, I took a deep breath, and felt my feet on the ground. I looked back at Fatima with eyes that said that I was willing to stand there and to listen for as long as she wanted.

“And they have killed many of my uncles,” Fatima said.

The Ogaden War

At the Village Market in Minneapolis, the major social hub for Somali-speaking Ethiopian refugees living in the Twin Cities, endless stories like Fatima’s are being urgently swapped every day. They are tales of evil that is so profound it would be unkind of me to suddenly start describing those crimes in detail right now.

You might well not believe the stories anyway. And even if you believed them, you might not believe that such unimaginable crimes could be happening in the world right now, in a little-known corner of Africa called the Ogaden of Ethiopia.

Where are the TV news teams parachuting into refugee camps? Where is the definitive account of the Ethiopian government’s mass destruction of the people and culture of the Ogaden?

Bare Feet

Here is more of Fatima’s story (she like the other witnesses in this story offered only their first names, fearing reprisal against their relatives in Ethiopia if they are identified):

“One day the soldiers came and started shooting, they killed my husband in front of me. Then they tortured and beat me in the same place they killed my husband. On that same day the soldiers also confiscated my home and all of my property and all of my money, leaving me homeless and destitute.”

Fatima is a devout Muslim woman who wears a veil and will not shake a man’s hand except through the cloth of her robe. But after telling me this story she stretched out her legs and took off her shoes, to show me her bare feet which are twisted and deformed, from the beatings she said. Today, she limps with a cane.

We in Minnesota have a special role in telling about the Ogaden crisis, because Minnesota is home to the largest diaspora population of Ogaden refugees in the world. Some 5,000 Somali Ethiopians have fled to Minnesota in recent years, fleeing precisely the crimes against humanity that Fatima and others describe.

Matching Details

Last week, I walked through the Village Market and spoke with a dozen Somali-speaking immigrants from the Ogaden region. This is what is happening in the Ogaden today, they said:

• People are thrown alive into bonfires by Ethiopian soldiers;

• Men and women are strangled to death by soldiers who wrap a wire around their necks and pull the wire on either side;

• Innocent goat herders are rounded up by Ethiopian soldiers and lynched from trees;

• Young girls are snatched from their homes by Ethiopian soldiers, put in prisons and gang-raped day after day, their dead bodies finally tossed like garbage on the street.

One Ogadeni Minnesotan said to me: “We could tell you stories like this all day and night for a week, and at the end we still would not have told you all the stories of all the killing and suffering that is happening in the Ogaden today.”

A single crazy person, or a small group of organized zealots, could orchestrate lies and propaganda about such horrors being committed on a genocidal scale. But how could it happen that the first 12 people that you meet at the Village Mall all tell the same types of stories over and over, with the details matching perfectly?

An American Ally

All of these horrific crimes and tortures are, the Minnesota Ogadenis say, committed by uniformed Ethiopian soldiers. Ethiopia is an official ally of the U.S. and receives millions of dollars in U.S. tax-funded military aid every year.

The Ogaden is a Texas-sized patch of land in Ethiopia that is inhabited by some four million Muslim, Somali-speaking citizens, most of them nomadic pastoralists.

The sparse grassland and shrubland of the Ogaden has been a battlefield for years between Ethiopia and Somalia, with each of those two nations often acting as proxies for global superpowers including Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

In 1956, when Britain left the Horn of Africa, it set up decades of conflict by handing over the Ogaden, which is populated by ethnic Somalis who are Muslims, to Ethiopia which is mainly ethnic Oromo and Amhara, and Christian. A war was fought over control of the Ogaden between Ethiopia and Somalia in 1977-1978.

In 1984, a separatist militia, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), was formed to pursue autonomy or independence for the Ogaden by violence if necessary. In 2007, the ONLF attacked a Chinese-run oil facility in the Ogaden, killing Ethiopian soldiers as well as more than 70 Chinese and Ethiopian civilians.

Sealed Off

In response, Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, launched a brutal counter-insurgency against the “terrorist” ONLF in the Ogaden. The recent atrocities against ethnic Somalis in the Ogaden have been a part of that campaign, with entire villages being wiped out on the mere suspicion of harboring ONLF fighters. Families and friends of ONLF soldiers are often killed or terrorized and family members tortured to give up information on their relatives.

Here is the testimony of a man named Hassan at the Village Market:

“I was in my home. One night Ethiopian soldiers broke down the door and took me to a military camp in Dhagahbur and beat me. I didn’t commit any crime and none of my family members are in the ONLF. They used the butt of their guns to hit me anywhere on my body where they thought it would hurt the most. I was put in jail just like this on three different occasions and placed in a tiny, dirty cell. I spent ten months in prison without ever being charged, without any explanation. Every day I was beaten and I suffered many cuts, sores and infections, but there was no hospital and I got no care.”

There has been virtually no major media coverage of the Ogaden crisis, and the U.S. and other governments have taken virtually no action. This is partly because the Ogaden has been sealed off to journalists and aid organizations, with the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders forced to abandon operations there in 2007.

But the Internet is teeming with detailed accounts of specific atrocities much like those described at the Village Market, and many YouTube videos graphically show the results of beatings, torture, killings, looting and rape.

“Still in Prison”

Based on interviews with refugees, thousands of whom have gathered in camps in northern Kenya, and other sources, some human rights groups have also been warning about the Ogaden crisis for several years. In 2008, Human Rights Watch published a 139-page report called “Collective Punishment” that documented “widespread and systematic atrocities” and “war crimes and crimes against humanity” committed by the Ethiopian military against Ogadeni citizens.

The report detailed “routine mass detentions,” “extrajudicial executions,” “rape of women in military custody,” and documented the destruction (sometimes by satellite photographs) of at least a dozen Ogaden villages. Yet the scale of village burnings and other crimes described in the report “is believed to be significantly larger” than those officially documented in the report, its authors warned.

Here is the testimony of a man named Abdulrahman at the Village Market:

“We talk to our friends and family back home, but we never feel safe, because we know that they could be captured, tortured or killed just for talking to us on the telephone. It is a kind of psychological torture we all still suffer in Minnesota. Also there are Ethiopian government collaborators who live here in Minneapolis, who tell the Ethiopian army if we criticize the government, and our family and friends in Ethiopia could be jailed or killed as a result. America is a free country but in this way we are not psychologically free. It is as if we were suffocating and still in prison.”

The atrocities in the Ogaden have even reached the U.S. Congress where Rep. Donald Payne (D-New Jersey), the chairman of the House Subcommitte on Africa, has repeatedly criticized Ethiopia for “deliberating targeting civilians” with “routine raping and hanging” innocent citizens in the Ogaden region. He says the Ogaden crisis is “by far one of the worst” human rights tragedies he has witnessed in his life.

New Intelligence

In October last year, Britain balked at committing foreign aid to Ethiopia after Douglas Alexander, the British international development secretary, discovered on a visit to the Ogaden that the crisis was far more severe than he had thought.

In the U.S., various think tanks and social justice groups have called for the U.S. government to similarly pressure Ethiopia. But the U.S., which regards Ethiopia as an ally in the Horn of Africa which helps to rout Islamist terrorists in neighboring Sudan and Somalia, has so far ignored these warnings and calls to action.

The Minnesota Ogadenis, through their constant cell phone conversations with relatives back home, are unearthing troves of new intelligence about the nature and extent of the Ogaden crisis. For example they report:

• A network of political prisons throughout the Ogaden. An enormous prison in the Ogaden capital city, Jijiga, has been known for years to house thousands of innocent civilians rounded up by the Ethiopian military on suspicion of knowing or harboring ONLF fighters. But the Minnesota Ogadenis say that prison quarters are attached to every military garrison throughout the occupied territory of Ogaden including in the cities of Dhagahbur, Aware, Kabridahar, Fiiq, Wardere, Gode, and Garbo. Many Minnesota Ogadenis have spent months or years in these prisons, or have relatives currently suffering there. They offer details about conditions in the prisons, the crimes routinely committed by the authorities against the prisoners, and the names of those who run the prisons.

• Burning people alive in Garbo, Ethiopia. The torture and killing methods used by the Ethiopian military against the Ogadenis changes over time, with new methods evolving that are ever-more cruel and perverse. For a time, strangling people with rope or wire, with two soldiers pulling on either side, was widely reported. Burying children alive has been reported, as has the sodomization of young boys. Sources in the Ogaden told the Minnesota Ogadenis that this past July, Ethiopian soldiers killed six Ogadenis by throwing them alive into a bonfire.

• Attacking nomads outside of town markets. Most Ogadeni towns have markets where nomads bring their livestock to sell, after which they buy food and clothing before returning to their grazing lands. According to Minnesota Ogadenis, these nomads frequently are attacked by Ethiopian soldiers who lie in wait for them outside of town where they steal their food, clothing and provisions and often kill the nomads while doing so.

Comfort Enough

At one point during my day at the Village Market, a few of us gathered in an office space at the market. Fatima was there along with four other women in veils, and a half-dozen Ogadeni men as well who told me their stories.

We sat on chairs in a circle. As I was listening to another person in the group, I saw Fatima suddenly cover her face with her hands and put her head down towards her lap. Everyone stopped talking.

No one in the group made a move towards Fatima to comfort her. Rather, they allowed her the dignity of her own suffering. Anyway the comfort was simply the supportive presence of the group itself, and everyone knew that was enough.

If was not enough, it was in any case all the comfort there was.

Within a few seconds, Fatima straightened up, daubed her eyes, and everyone continued telling their inconceivable, impossible, true stories of the Ogaden.

Douglas McGill is a former staff reporter for The New York Times and bureau chief for Bloomberg News.