ETHIOPIAÂÂ13/2/2004Â18:33
GAMBELLA: 10,000 FLEEING, GOVERNMENT ACCUSES âANUAKâ ARMED GROUPS
At least 10,000 people are thought to have left the area in the far west of Ethiopia, where renewed ethnic violence at the end of January claimed over 200 lives.
The official government figure has been published by the United Nations information network âIrinnewsâ. A few days ago, the news emerged that on 30 January 196 people were killed in the area of the Dima gold mine in the district of Gambella on the border with Sudan; the victims were mostly miners from another part of the country.
The Ethiopian authorities are now blaming âan armed group of roughly 200 Anuakâ, one of the local tribes making up roughly 25-27 per cent of the regional population, for the episode. Witnesses reported further violence in the town of Dima, not far from the gold mines that are plentiful the area, in early February, although these reports are difficult to corroborate due to distance and poor communications with the area.
However, Gambella also saw serious clashes half way through December, in which 300 people died: on that occasion, witnesses said that the Anuak clashed with the Nuer, one of the other communities in this part of Ethiopia, which is also inhabited by the so-called âhighlandersâ (the inhabitants of the highland areas) and tens of thousands of refugees from nearby Sudan.
In a four-page document, the government of Addis Ababa has given its own interpretation of the violence, which it says is due to poor governance and the economic backwardness of the Gambella region. The authorities also say that they want to introduce measures to rebuild trust among the population and restore peace.
However, according to some observers and human rights organisations, the dramatic episodes in western Ethiopia (a federal republic comprising nine states and with a population of over 65 million inhabitants, making it the second most populous country in Africa after Nigeria) also depend on choices made by the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
According to the principal local humanitarian organisation, Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRC), the renewed tension has been fuelled by the decision to divide the country into numerous administrative units on the basis of linguistic and ethnic differences.
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"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the state."
- Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels - Hitler's propaganda minister
