TALKING WITH STRANGERS

ROCHESTER, MN – As usual for a human rights journalist, my email inbox this morning is stuffed with radically, sadly, urgently un-Christmasy tidings.

So many people in this world are suffering.

I could describe one or two of these insistent, important messages. But with fresh snow flakes falling and warm family gatherings planned for the days just ahead, another kind of story –- with a more uplifting holiday message — comes to mind.

One evening last week, I was at the Rochester International Airport with a small group to greet a family of Iraqis who were soon to arrive from Jordan, where they’ve been living as Iraq War refugees for the past two years.

As we waited, I chatted with an Iraqi refugee, a man in his 30’s who has lived in the U.S. for only three months. He was forced to flee his Baghdad home because he worked for the Red Cross in Iraq, which made him a target for assassination by local militias. He said he had a wife and three young children.

“Were you able to bring your family?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he answered. “I would rather have died than leave my family.”

Christmas Gift

It’s not every day that you hear life, death and the family so matter-of-factly assumed – and acted upon — as equivalents. My Iraqi friend spoke with the authority of one who very recently made this calculation every morning as he got up, made his breakfast, sent his kids to school and went off to his dangerous work.

Do I think of my own family in the same way? Do I touch base with them enough, both literally and in the sense of remembering and being grateful for them? Or do I just possibly take them for granted more than I should?

In any case, I’m thinking of my family much differently today than I did yesterday, thanks to my Iraqi friend, and I’m grateful.

I received his fresh perspective as a beautiful Christmas gift.

In its essence, I’ve always felt, working with immigrants and refugees is deeply spiritual work. Because it brings me face to face not just with others, but through others to myself at the ground-floor level of values, morals and ideals – to what really counts. Immigrants always, always show me high ideals to live up to.

Our Souls

Often a spiritually-rich confrontation comes via citizens who’ve lived longer in the U.S. – although not always that much longer – than newly-arrived refugees.

“We already have so many problems in this country,” the question goes. “Why don’t we fix those before we bring in more people with more problems?”

It’s wonderful when that question is asked, I think, because it offers us a chance to mull it over. Especially, to ask that question of ourselves not just with our  intellects but within the space of our hearts, our souls and communities.

Can the newcomer, the stranger, perhaps help us to fix the problems we’re not doing so well at solving ourselves?

What gifts and wisdom does the stranger bring?

It’s the essence of spiritual work – and community work – to find that out.

And it is an absolute ton of wearying work. Every immigrant’s story is a cross-cultural epic and refugees, who often suffer the effects of war and psychological trauma, have that extra challenge. Always, there are tears and exhaustion.

Only Love

But there is also always a flip side, which happens when the tears and exhaustion suddenly resolve into a knowing with absolute certainty that no kind of work matters more in this world, than the work of welcoming strangers.

At this point there is a kind of lifting up, a second wind, a stiffening of the spine and a resolve to take up any burden against all of the injustice, ignorance, and hurt.

Only now it doesn’t feel like a burden any longer.

It simply feels like life’s right and proper work.

“It’s like a paradox,” another refugee social worker told me recently. “You can always give something. You give until it hurts a little bit. You give until it hurts and then you find there’s no hurt left, only love.”

When we help refugees resettle in this country, we help to give them a new life.

This Christmas, what I remember is that they also give us a new life in return.

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

BY DOUGLAS MCGILL

MINNEAPOLIS — Who knows the Minnesota Oromo?

Who knows their dark secret?

Fifteen thousand Oromo live in Minnesota but they blend in almost invisibly, like a stealthy, anonymous population in the state.

They are teachers, doctors and lawyers; they run retail shops and corporations; they attend Viking games, relax at coffee shops and stroll at malls. They are sometimes called “Ethiopian immigrants” because they are indeed from Ethiopia.

But among friends and family, or if you ask them specifically, they carefully call themselves “Oromo.”

Who are the Oromo?

They are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, numbering 31 million, and they are the subject of a new report, “Human Rights in Ethiopia: Through the Eyes of the Oromo Diaspora,” prepared by The Advocates for Human Rights, based in Minneapolis.

State Power

The report describes how the Oromo began immigrating to Minnesota from their homeland 30 years ago, and in the process explains why, despite their mostly successful assimilation, they remain relatively little-known here.

First, though, a warning. This column contains language that represents an awful reality, an affliction that at first may seem distant from us, but is actually as near to us as our neighbors — that fellow at the football game, the woman at the mall.

A century of history, summarized in the report, provides the context for understanding the Oromo in Minnesota. From the days of Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia in the late 19th century, and continuing through the tyrannical regime of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi today, the Oromo have been crushed down by state power.

The Oromo’s low profile in Minnesota reflects a century of focused, systematic, brutal campaigns by Ethiopian rulers to render them impotent and voiceless.

Limited Rights

Successive Ethiopian governments for more than a century have defined the Oromo as second-class citizens holding severely limited rights to government representation, education, employment, free speech and property.

These strictures have prompted the Oromo to flee their homeland to a worldwide diaspora that numbers in the tens of thousands or possibly more — with Minnesota hosting probably the largest concentration of Oromo refugees in the world.

But there is yet another reason for the Oromo’s relatively quiet presence in Minnesota all of these years.

That reason is their secret, which is that they have been tortured, or deeply scarred by torture they have personally witnessed, or suffered in their family or among their friends.

“Few Oromos that the Advocates for Human Rights interviewed were unaffected by torture,” the report says. “The particular experience of the Oromo people, victims of torture in extremely high numbers and of repressive practices designed to undermine their very culture, also continues to be felt by those in the diaspora.

“Traumatic experiences are relived over and over again by torture
victims, and this trauma has lasting effects on even those not directly on the receiving end of the torturer’s abuse,” the report says.

Here are three personal stories told by Minnesota Oromo, chosen at random from scores of similar interviews collected in the new report:

“I was turned upside down. They started beating the bottoms of my feet with a piece of tire. Each time they whipped me they ripped my skin. The brought a bucket full of water and bleach in it. When they stopped beating me they put my face in the bucket. I thought I would die.”

And this story:

“The killing of Mustapha created fear in us. They brought him to the city center where everybody could see his body. They nailed him to the ground. They removed his skin and took out his two eyes. They forced people to come and watch. At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t recognize him. I fainted when I saw him.”

And this:

“It is hard for us to talk about this. They put flashlights in the sexual organs of the ladies. There is a woman that they put flashlight batteries in her vagina. She couldn’t hold her urine and she used to urinate on herself.”

Let me confess, I have some beefs with The Advocate’s new report.

The biggest is that its historical sweep dilutes its potential present-day impact.

As horrific as they were, the human rights crimes of earlier Ethiopian dictators are now a part of history.

Meanwhile, the current dictator, now a bloody 18 years in office, urgently requires accountability that a more contemporary report could have provided with greater force.

The report’s scope also leads to weakness in specifics. The cursory treatment of a massacre of 426 men of the Anuak tribe of Western Ethiopia, on Dec. 13, 2003, fails to mention the exhaustive evidence that the massacre was part of a government-planned genocide of the tribe.

The scant two-paragraph mention of the most urgent crisis in Ethiopia today, in the Ogaden region, is also troubling. As is the timidity, even the naivete, of calling upon the present Ethiopian government, which long ago showed the world its spots, to “immediately cease” its abominations.

Yet the report fulfills its most important function.

It helped the Oromo of Minnesota reveal their long-held secret.

With help from The Advocates, the Oromo have shown great bravery in speaking out. Will we return that courage by bravely listening?

After that, what will we do?

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/oromoreport

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – For all its vivid detail, the picture painted by one after another speaker was almost too abstract – not to mention too evil — to fully comprehend.

Anyway, could such an extreme scenario, of serial societal extinction no less, really be happening in the world today? An apocalypse of nations falling one by one?

If it is, surely it would be news of the highest order, worthy of shouting from the streets and rooftops, Paul Revere-style.

Because if it were true, it would warn the world of yet another mode of societal collapse — distinct yet closely interlinked with the more familiar human health, environmental, and economic modes — that is stalking the globe today.

It’s already happening in the Horn of Africa, was the message persuasively argued last Friday by four experts on the region. The seven countries of the Horn– Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Uganda and Kenya — form the elbow (or horn) of the northern African continent that juts into the Indian Ocean.

At the Africa Peace Forum held last Friday at the Hubert Humphrey Institute in Minneapolis, the speakers argued that the Horn of Africa is crumbling due to a combination of brutal dictatorship, climate change and global inaction.

Complex Emergencies

The presentations began with an overview from the American Relief Association of the Horn of Africa (ARAHA). The group showed a documentary film citing a recent United Nations report that about 20 million souls – fully 10 percent of the Horn of Africa’s total population — need immediate urgency assistance simply to stay alive.

The same UN report describes the Horn of Africa as suffering from interlocking “complex emergencies” originally triggered by government corruption, but which have now been massively accelerated by drought, disease, religious war, and the global financial crisis that has driven food prices to the heavens and humanitarian aid funding into the ground.

Neither the grimness of the scenario nor its daunting complexity can overshadow the plain and simple fact: The Horn of Africa is dying.

Anuak Genocide

Each speaker described the apocalypse from a different nation’s perspective.

“Can Somalis survive their own political death?” asked Ahmed Samatar, a professor of international studies at Macalester College. “I’m not so sure. One never gives up on others who are still alive, but I’m not sure.” Nearly half of Somalis living today in the Horn of Africa are malnourished, Samatar said, adding that Somalia today “is now objectively speaking the worst country in the world.”

For Obang Metho, another conference speaker and a member of the Anuak tribe of western Ethiopia, the apocalypse of the Horn began on December 13, 2003.

On that one day, uniformed Ethiopian troops massacred 426 Anuak men and boys, dragging them from their homes and shooting them in the streets. That single day set in motion the likely eventual death of his tribe, Metho said, because the Ethiopian soldiers on that day targeted only the educated men to kill in a tribe of only 100,000 or so – decapitating the tribe by killing its educated male leadership.

An audience member from eastern Ethiopia stood up to urgently inform the conference of staggering crimes against humanity being carried out against the country’s five million Somali-speaking Ethiopians.

In the country’s eastern Ogaden region, the Ethiopian government is carrying out a “war on terror,” sometimes by wiping out entire villages in mass killings reminiscent of Rwanda and Darfur.

Alarm and Response

In eastern Sudan, a long-running refugee crisis virtually hidden from the world’s view is worsening daily with thousands of refugees fleeing from Eritrea into 35 camps in Sudan, according to Mohamed Idris, executive director of ARAHA.

“It makes you wonder whether life is worth living” to fully absorb all these crises, said Bereket Habte Selassie, the key speaker at the forum and the chief architect of the Eritrean Constitution. Selassie fled Eritrea and the constitution was never ratified because the country’s President, Isaias Afwerki, assumed dictatorial power by canceling national elections, shutting down the press and jailing his opponents.

Here in the U.S. we are quick to panic, but then are quick to mobilize, upon learning that even a single man or woman in China has contracted a new form of the flu.

Why don’t we respond then with equal alarm – and likewise mobilize to address to the obvious threat — at the news that entire nations are dying one after another?

Throughout history, the fall of nations in sequence was usually due to conquests that swept across continents, often as new borders and empires were created.

Low-Grade Fever

The lesson of the Horn of Africa today is that a new mass death of nations is possible. But this time it spreads not by imperial conquest but instead more like an epidemic or a plague, as one nation after another succumbs to the “complex emergency.”

What will be left behind is not a new empire but a charnel ground.

How long will it take for this virus to reach the United States? Or has it already reached us in the form of a low-grade fever that might one day fatally explode?

The lesson of the forum was simple.

We should care about the Horn of Africa, not just on behalf of those who are already suffering terribly there – but also for ourselves.

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/dyinghorn

BY DOUGLAS MCGILL

ROCHESTER, MN — I’m going to break one of my own writing rules today.

In the six years that I’ve written about Ethiopian immigrants and politics in Minnesota, I’ve never editorialized directly against the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi.

Instead, I’ve limited myself to reporting on the experiences, outlooks and opinions of Ethiopian immigrants who live in Minnesota, a hub of the global Ethiopian diaspora.

Today I’m making an exception, though, because of what strikes me as the exceptional danger posed by  Meles’ most recent global political moves — a grave danger for Ethiopians and Africans, and possibly far beyond.

For once, I’ll offer my personal view.

I’m talking about Meles’ theft-in-plain-sight of the African leadership role at the United Nations Climate Change Conference that begins in Copenhagen next Monday. As the spokesman for the 52 African nations at the conference, Meles holds potentially enormous disruptive power over agreements reached among the 190 total nations represented in Copenhagen.

Meles has already threatened to lead a walk-out of the African delegation if their demand for hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation payments from developed nations aren’t met.

Arrest and Torture

It’s crazy for one of the world’s bloodiest dictators to hold such global power.

It’s a farce that Meles, whose environmental and human rights polices in Ethiopia are profoundly retrograde, has been given a global platform from which to scold other nations.

Meles runs his own country by a “divide and conquer” strategy and through the  systematic, brutal dispensation of arbitrary arrest and torture – hardly the best model for global collaborative decision-making on the world’s most pressing environmental crisis.

To be more specific, the Meles regime has held its grip on power the past 18 years through the use of genocide, ethnic cleansing, gulag prisons, a sham court system, medieval property laws and the jailing, torture and lawless execution of civilians and political opponents.

Why would Denmark even allow this man to step foot in their country?

Directly to the point of the hypocrisy of Meles’ role as Africa’s chief climate change negotiator, Ethiopia is now facing one of the worst famines in its history as a consequence of his own environmentally disastrous laws and policies.

Absolute Power

These include property laws that prevent farmers from owning their own land; that forbid foreign research and aid groups from entering the country; and a governing system that prevents orderly agriculture and environmentalism, because Meles stays in power by keeping his country mired in a permanent state of war.

The evidence for Meles’ crimes is far too extensive, public, and exhaustively well-documented to summarize in detail here.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Genocide Watch, the International Crisis Group, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, countless other aid groups and even the U.S. State Department have all for years now published report after detailed report on Meles’ crimes – reports stuffed with details of collective punishment, prison torture, slaughter of street protestors, on and on.

The picture painted is of a shrewd, pitiless tyrant who stays in power through total control of his country’s political, economic, legal, media and military systems.

The only mystery that remains is why the world appears simply not to notice, to respond, or even to care in the least about the Ethiopia’s abysmal suffering.

Rule of Terror

It’s Rwanda and Darfur all over again. And it has been that way, although getting progressively worse, since 1991, the year that Meles took power in a coup and immediately began ethnic cleansing as a central tactic of his governing style.

Meles’ 18-year rule of terror in Ethiopia has easily earned him a place alongside dictators such as Kim Jong-Il, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Qaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Omar al-Bashir, Than Swhe, and Ali Khamenei.

Would any of these despots be welcomed in Copenhagen?

Would any be given the chance to potentially veto a global climate accord?

Of course, Meles won’t do that. What he will do, though, is maximize his leverage through every means possible to further secure what for 18 years he has ruthlessly sought and won in Ethiopia, which is absolute power.

He’d let the world burn to a crisp before he relinquished that.

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report