Reposted from Cultural Survival
By Bennett Collins and Alison Watson
In April 2014, Cultural Survival reported that there was a “mobilization of national military and police forces in the Gambella region of Ethiopia, accompanied by increasing levels of violence there.” Recent reports now suggest that ethnic tensions have become particularly acute in the Godere district, home to the Indigenous Majengir community. The Majengir are hunter-gatherers and have lived in what is Ethiopia’s only tropical mountain rainforest for generations. The environment is an attractive one for investors, particularly suited to growing coffee, and in the last decade many Majengir have been displaced as their land has been either given to large-scale commercial growers by the Ethiopian government or occupied by those who have migrated into the region in order to work for those investing in the area. The latter has caused an increase in ethnic tensions, and reports suggest that this situation has become particularly acute over the summer, with deaths in both the Majengir and ‘highlander’ communities. Most recently, it has been reported that Enkutatash (Ethiopian New Year) celebrations on September 11 ended in tragedy when eight members of the Majengir community were killed. Since then this number has reportedly quadrupled, whilst homes have been burnt to the ground, and around 3000 members of the community have been displaced and are hiding in the surrounding forests. It is also reported that a number of high-level officials from the Majengir community are being kept in poor conditions in nearby detention camps.
Photo credit: Cultural Survival
This current situation faced by members of the Majengir community is similar to that faced by other Indigenous Peoples in the region, and in other parts of Ethiopia. The history of Indigenous Peoples in Gambella, like the history of so many Indigenous Peoples, is one of persecution and marginalization. Of the five ethnic groups that consider themselves to be Indigenous to the region — the Anuak (Anywaa), Nuer, Majangir, Opo and Komo, the Anuak and the Nuer are the two largest populations, whilst the third-largest population group is ‘highlanders’, the name given to those who have either migrated from other parts of Ethiopia or who are descended from those who have. The lives and livelihoods of these Indigenous communities continue to be placed in jeopardy by land management policies put in place by an Ethiopian government keen to attract investment, and seemingly unconcerned by the costs to Indigenous communities of doing so.
Gambella is a large region, around 30,000km, located in the south-western portion of the country along the border with South Sudan. It’s a very fertile environment, with land that is particularly suited to the large-scale commercial agricultural activity that the Ethiopian government has been so keen to attract. Since 2008, when concerns about a global food crisis increased the international demand for agricultural land, the Ethiopian government has leased millions of hectares of land across the country to domestic and foreign agricultural investors. The Ethiopian government says that such large-scale, largely foreign, investment, is an important part of ensuring the country’s food security, and an important catalyst for development, meaning that land categorized as ‘underutilized’ can be used productively. In reality, however, the policy does little for food security because of what is actually produced. This includes non-food products like cotton and flowers, and food products that are largely for export, such as sugar cane and rice. At the same time as this, the Ethiopian government is also pursuing a policy of villagization, aimed at resettling people from rural areas into communities that have access to basic amenities, such as clean water, medical services and schools. However, these promised services have been slow to arrive, and these new communities are too large for the capacity of the land meaning that people have been left dependent on food support. Although the government says that this policy of villagization is voluntary and unconnected to their desire to lease land for investment income, many of those who leave their land discover – on trying to return – that their land has been lost to them. However, the Ethiopian government’s categorization of land as underutilized – in Gambella, for example, around a third of the land in the region is characterized as underutilized – obscures the traditional ways in which the land has been used. For example, pastoralists have a pattern of movement that means that any one piece of land is not exhausted by over-use. Moreover, although in Ethiopia land is officially owned by the government, occupants of that land have customary rights. Those rights, however, have been consistently violated.
The ongoing events facing the Majangir are echoed in the experiences of other Indigenous communities in the region, and across Ethiopia, and particularly in the experiences of the Anuak. Nyikaw Ochalla, Director of the Anywaa (Anuak) Survival organisation, notes that ‘Indigenous and minority peoples continue to experience marginalization and suffer gross human rights abuses including forceful eviction, displacement and persecution in Ethiopia. They are continually dispossessed and deprived of land rights, access to water, grazing and fishing grounds, and the natural environment, a source of their livelihoods and means of survival.’ Three decades ago, Cultural Survival Quarterly reported that the Ethiopian government had resettled “17,553 heads of families from Tigray … to unoccupied “virgin, fertile” lands in the Gambella region’ and that nowhere did the government say that these lands were the ‘traditional homelands of the Anuak people.” By that time the Anuak, who in 1980 were the largest ethnic group in the region, had already begun to experience the impact of a changing demography that was caused both by a resettlement programme that saw a large population influx form other parts of the country, and by an influx of mainly Nuer refugees from the civil war in Sudan. The Anuak thus became the minority in a region that they considered largely theirs. The result of this has been an ongoing catalogue of ethnic tensions and human rights violations including the reported massacre on December 2003 of over 400 Anuak by Ethiopian National Defence Forces and others. More recently the Ethiopian government’s widespread use of anti-terror legislation has seen the arrest, detention and sentencing of numerous Anuak. With little political representation, the possibilities of reversing the situation seem remote, a situation that is echoed for Indigenous Peoples across Ethiopia.
In a country where a significant percentage of the population can be classified as Indigenous – including 15 million pastoralists (out of a total Ethiopian population of around 90 million) – there remains no national legislation “mentioning or protecting the rights of [I]ndigenous [P]eoples … Ethiopia has not ratified ILO Convention 169 and was absent during the voting on the UN Declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples.” We thus share the concerns of organisations such as the International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Minority Rights Group International (MRGI) regarding the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Ethiopia and the impact of the policies perpetrated against them and call on the government of Ethiopia to sign and ratify the UNDRIP and ILO169, and to begin adhering to these international statues as soon as possible. Moreover, we call on the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) to instigate an enquiry into the actions of the Ethiopian government, and for the new UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli Corpuz, to further investigate the plight of Indigenous Peoples not just in Gambella but across Ethiopia. The international community too should examine its actions, especially given that the World Bank has been implicated by the Indigenous Peoples of southwest Ethiopia in the “grave human rights abuses that are being carried out as part of a resettlement programme headed by the Ethiopian Government.” The Ethiopian government has an opportunity to reverse its policies and in so doing provide a different model of development, one that recognizes the significance to the environment of the knowledge that Indigenous Peoples have in its management, rather than echoing policies that governments have used against Indigenous Peoples for generations and robbing them of their lives, lands and livelihoods.
Bennett Collins and Alison Watson are members of the Centre for Global Constitutionalism at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. This article was originally posted on October 8, 2014 on Cultural Survival’s website.