The Politico Paradox: Feeding the Media we Hate
NORTHFIELD, MN – For just a brief moment before Politico.com co-founder John Harris spoke last Friday at his alma mater, Carleton College, he might have allowed himself to think that finally – finally! – he would safely be able to relax in the warm embrace of a completely friendly and appreciative crowd.
After co-founding the gossipy, sensation-loving, successful Washington news web site Politico.com three years ago, Harris has taken plenty of hard public whacks from media critics for having added yet another rumor-mongering, ethically-dodgy “news” outlet to the global media.
A former political reporter for the Washington Post, Harris often fights back when criticized this way by insisting that he in fact despises what he calls “the freak show” of modern American politics and the media. In speeches and a book he calls the freak show “a type of politics that rewards attack, rhetorical bombast, the most flamboyant personalities and the most incendiary arguments.”
Although the dominant mode of public discourse today, “the freak show in an earlier era would have been relegated to the far margins,” Harris said in his Carleton talk.
Freak Show
In that talk, he described in detail how the freak show – fueled by a media hungry for gaudy invective and gossipy tidbits — is degrading American society: “Its incentives are toward ideological certitude and inflexibility and away from problem-solving and compromise; toward an obsession with personalities and the personal foibles of politicians, and away from the substantive work and ideas; and toward rudeness and incivility and away from respect.”
“I’m opposed to the freak show,” Harris concluded. “It offends my values.”
Alas, the skeptical Carleton audience was having none of it.
Before coming to the talk, they perhaps had seen the progressive Media Matters web site call out Politico for frequently hyping rumors planted by political operatives; or how other critics had disparaged the site’s addiction to blind quotes and attributions; or read the Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald multi-article tutorial on how Politico perversely illustrates the most hallowed and fundamental journalistic principles by vividly violating every one of them.
“Aren’t you guilty of what you yourself are speaking out against?” one Carleton student asked in the Q&A, noting Politico’s role in spreading and often originating sensational and trivial “news” items around the clock.
A Confession
In the three years since its founding, some of Politico’s biggest scoops have included breaking the news of John Edwards $400 haircut; of Sarah Palin’s $150,000 wardrobe budget; and of John McCain’s not recalling how many homes he owned.
Another Carleton student in the Q&A challenged Harris to defend Politico’s obsession with “process stories,” i.e. stories that focus on political gamesmanship and maneuvering as opposed to describing the pros and cons of actual policies.
“Can you defend process stories to me? I’m just a little skeptical,” the student asked.
Harris used self-deprecating humor, straightforward answers, and at one point a flat-out confession of Politico’s sins to deflect the audience’s skepticism.
“I have a friend who worked in the Clinton White House who says ‘I can see why you didn’t call it Substanceco.com,’” he cracked ruefully at one point.
He defended Politico’s obsession with “horse-race” or “process” stories by arguing that process and personality both have a great impact on how policy is formed and ultimately passes, and thus all are intertwined.
He distanced Politico stories from the blogosphere by noting that all Politico stories are edited before they are published and that a layer of accountability therefore exists at his web site, unlike on most solo-written blogs.
12-Step Meeting
And yet, Harris also frankly acknowledged that if process and policy are interwoven, so are the freak show and Politico.com.
“The same trends that helped facilitate the freak show are also the trends that helped facilitate Politico. Which leads to an awkward question. Might my publication be a part of the freak show?”
Is it just me, or do the paragraphs above sound a lot like a 12-step meeting? In those quotations and exchanges I hear vivid echoes of classic addict lines:
“Everyone else is drinking so I do too. How can I stop?
“I think I’m addicted but I’m not sure. What do you think?”
“Am I addicted? Yes, I am. No, I’m not.”
“I can stop any time.”
“I hate it but I can’t stop it. I’m a part of the problem I hate.”
If John Harris is addicted to the freak show, he’s not the only one.
In fact with words and language being among the most deeply shared of all human traits – while at the same time being so much more ephemeral than tangible materials and physical actions – our addiction to the freak show may be the ultimate case of “we’re all in this together” as we try to puzzle it out.
Right Speech
If we are addicted to the freak show, what exactly is the heroin that’s hooked us?
What steps should we take to get free of the addiction and what personal, spiritual and emotional supports will we need to stay off the hard stuff for good?
There are pretty good answers to these questions, I think.
They come from an unlikely source — unlikely, that is, from the perspective of 21st century Americans working in media newsrooms and in legislative chambers, or gathered around dinner tables or in kitchens or wherever people talk, reading or watching or listening to the news, discussing the substance of their days.
The source is the spiritual sage and ethicist called the Buddha, especially his teachings on “Right Speech,” a compendium of advice on how to speak to others in such a way that conversation is strengthened and community is sustained.
More on “Right Speech” next week.
Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/politico
A Journey from War to Football and First Snow
ROCHESTER – Since Feras Alkaisi, his wife Sulaf and their two young children moved here four months ago, they’ve experienced a lot of firsts – backyard barbecues, a casino (Treasure Island ), carnival rides (at the Mall of America), watching football on TV, and last week, falling snow.
“I saw snow once before but it was on the ground and just a little bit,” Feras recalls. “I never saw snow falling through the air until last week.” He paused for a moment to take in the new memory, then a question occurred.
“Is it often cold in Minnesota ?”
Newcomers, indeed. And their culture shock is all the greater given their city of origin which is Basra, Iraq, an ancient capital and commercial port that has seen some of Iraq’s worst violence in recent years.
Feras, Sulaf and their two children, Ahmed, 5, and Dima, 2, are one of 16 families that have moved to Rochester in the past year from Iraq, as part of a wave of thousands of Iraq War refugees who are now resettling in the United States.
Thinking Error
The 16 new Iraqi families in Rochester comprise 77 people, with another 100 or so Iraqi refugees planning to resettle in Rochester in the coming year, according to Catholic Charities, the local non-profit that handles refugee resettlement. Some 32,655 Iraqis have resettled in the U.S. in the past two years.
One thing that isn’t giving the Alkaisi family the least bit of culture shock in the U.S., though, is consumer culture — houses, cars, computers and shopping malls.
“There is an error in some thinking here about Iraq,” Feras says. “Many people ask us if we were living in the desert before.” Well, hardly.
Iraq’s major port city on the Persian Gulf, Basra is a metropolis in the heart of the country’s most productive oil fields. Revenues from oil, plus an ancient history tracing to the first human civilization, Sumer, has made Basra one of the most economically and culturally developed cities in the Middle East.
Sometimes called the “Venice of the Middle East” for a system of 17th- and 18th-century canals that runs through the city, Basra is also known as the home of Sinbad the Sailor of the ancient Middle Eastern tale.
Lawlessness
But in recent years, Basra has fallen on very tough times – so bad that thousands of its citizens like the Alkaisis have had to flee for their lives to nearby Kuwait, and to other host countries outside Iraq, especially Syria and Jordan.
When the Iraq War began in 2003, Basra’s 300-mile distance from Baghdad seemed it might protect Basra somewhat from the very worst effects of the war.
But as new figures consolidated power in Baghdad, and especially after the 2007 exit of British forces that controlled Basra, the city deteriorated into lawlessness.
Rival religious militias took over the city as local government crumbled, battling over neighborhoods, looting homes, forcing women to wear headscarves or be killed, and assassinating people who worked for the British and American forces, the United Nations, and international aid and humanitarian groups.
As an employee of the United Nations, where he oversaw a $7 million project to build a thermal camera security system on the Iran-Iraq border north of Basra, Feras Alkaisi and his family were sitting targets for such groups.
Security Fence
In April 2006, Alkaisi’s home was burgled by militiamen who stole cash, jewelry and other valuables. The Alkaisis didn’t report the theft, however, because the police were often sympathetic to the militias – or were militia soldiers themselves.
From there, things got worse. In 2007, Alkaisi appeared on an Iraqi television news program and in newspapers to celebrate the completion of the UN’s security fence.
“I was advised to go into hiding and I moved my family to Kuwait,” Alkaisi said.
His family fled amid a string of disasters befalling friends and acquaintances.
Several Iraqi colleagues at his United Nations job were kidnapped, tortured or killed. A cousin was kidnapped and released after a ransom was paid. Two other cousins were kidnapped and killed. An uncle was kidnapped and hasn’t been found to this day.
Intensive Screening
A 10-year-old nephew was grabbed in an attempted kidnapping but managed to break free and run to safety. Five doctors in Basra were killed for opposing a name change of their hospital to include the last name of Moktada al Sadr, an influential political figure and militia leader.
Alkaisi applied for refugee status in the United States in 2006, but had to wait three years while the UN, the U.S. State Department, and other agencies completed the exhaustive screening process to clear him and his family for resettlement.
In early May, 2009, that process was finally completed and on May 31, the plane carrying Alkaisi and his family took off from Kuwait to the U.S.
“We were told that Boston was our destination,” Alkaisi said. “Then, three days before we left, it was changed to Rochester. They never told us why, so we have no idea.”
Repair Shop
With his workable English, a graduate degree in computer engineering, and management experience working for the United Nations, Feras hoped to land a job here quickly.
But he and the other Iraqi refugees, nearly all of whom are highly educated, mid-career professionals, arrived in the middle of an economic recession.
Few if any have gotten jobs anywhere near the level they’d reached in Iraq.
So for now, Feras is working as intern at the Rochester Community and Technical College, doing computer service work. He has several ideas for businesses, including to open his own computer repair shop in town. First, though, he needs to save enough money to buy a set of tools and set up a shop.
Black Coffee
Sipping Sulaf’s strong black coffee, his two children tucked into bed by 8 p.m., Feras relaxes on his living room sofa. He asks me to be sure that in this story he can publicly thank the local Catholic Charities office for resettling his family.
“They’ve done so much for us,” he says.
He smiles broadly as Sulaf brings out glasses of 7-Up to follow our coffee. But a weariness creeps into his voice as he tells his story of escape from war.
Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report
Her Job is ‘Welcoming the Stranger” to Minnesota
ROCHESTER – When Mary Alessio gave a speech at the Kiwanis Club here last summer, she was shaken when she looked out at her audience and saw dozens of men who looked exactly like her father – row upon row of her father, one father per seat.
“My father’s a tough critic,” Alessio recalls, “and here I was giving a talk to a whole room filled with him.”
To make matters worse for her, Alessio was speaking that day about a topic she knew her father would ask some very demanding questions about – the resettlement of refugees from the world’s most troubled war zones to here in Rochester, Minnesota.
Alessio knows a lot about the subject because she is Director of Refugee Resettlement in Rochester for Catholic Charities, the not-for-profit agency that has resettled thousands of refugees from Somalia, Sudan, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq and other countries gutted by violence, war and famine over the years to this town.
90-to-180 Days
Sure enough, when the Q & A started, one of her fathers out in the audience immediately raised his hand and fired away.
“We have enough problems taking care of people right here in the United States,” he demanded. “Why don’t we focus on solving that instead of taking in all these new people for a short time and then just dropping them?”
There’s no surfire answer to that question, as Alessio has discovered over the past five years, first as a case worker and then leading the agency in its basic daily work of guiding new refugee arrivals through a jam-packed 90-to-180 day resettlement process.
During that time, each new arrival is introduced to the network of city, state and national agencies with programs to help them. Office visits are made to the local government center, the Olmsted County Public Health Services, the Rochester Public Library, to school offices for language testing, and so on.
But Alessio and her agency’s other case workers are known for taking their jobs a step beyond the required checklist of duties.
Eight Percent
One time, Alessio was driving by Miracle Computers on 37th Street NE and on an impulse, she stopped and went in. She told the startled company owner about a newly-arrived Iraqi refugee who was terrific at fixing computers and lined up a job interview for him on the spot. The young Iraqi got the job and he still has it.
According to the 2000 Census, about 9,800 residents or eight percent of the population of Olmsted County was not born in the United States, a number that includes not only refugees but also immigrants who come to the city for employment, and to be reunified with families who arrived here earlier.
Eight percent is three percentage points higher than Minnesota as a whole, where five percent of the population is foreign-born.
In her two and a half years as director of refugee resettlement in Rochester, Alessio has been a leading advocate for the city opening its arms to refugees, often the most vulnerable of all immigrants who arrive in this country.
Problem Spots
“What if by the grace of God we weren’t born in Minnesota?” she asks. “I’ve never lived through a depression or a war, but if the situation was reversed and I was reaching out, I would hope that someone would look at me and welcome me.”
The presentations she makes to local groups are usually geared to answering the most basic questions about refugees such as “Why does Rochester host so many refugees from civil wars and other problem spots around the world?”
Although she’d be the last one to say so, one answer to that question is Alessio herself.
Under her leadership, Catholic Charities convinced the U.S. State Department that Rochester could accept more Iraq war refugees per capita than any other city in Minnesota. As a result, about 75 Iraqi refugees permanently resettled in Rochester last year, with another 100 or so scheduled to arrive in the next 12 months.
By contrast, St. Paul, the Minnesota city that accepted the next-largest number of Iraq refugees per capita last year, accepted 42 refugees between July 2008 and July 2009.
Welcoming Strangers
But the larger answer to why Rochester is home to so many refugees is Rochester itself. Because of its success at absorbing them, more have been attracted to come.
It’s not only Catholic Charity’s proficient handling of its case load, but equally the rich network of local agencies, churches, civic groups and volunteers that the agency depends upon, that has made Rochester welcoming to refugees and other immigrants.
At her Kiwanis speech, Alessio didn’t hesitate when answering her tough first question.
“We have to remember what our country was founded on,” she said. “We began as a home to immigrants. We were founded on the idea of welcoming the stranger. That’s what makes this country great.”
A straight-from-the-gut answer that her Dad would be proud of.
Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report
From Ruin in Iraq, a New Minnesota Life Begins
ROCHESTER, MN – Raad Ghareeb uses the phrase “below zero” quite a bit, but not in the way that Minnesotans employ it during our frozen winter months.
Rather, Raad uses his favorite personal tag line with a grin in sentences like: “When I started my new life in Minnesota, I started below zero,” and: “I had everything in Iraq, but when I lost everything after the war, I fell below zero.”
All said with a dazzling smile, twinkling eyes, and the gregarious energy of a merchant, which was Raad’s line of work before fleeing Iraq in 2006. After a white-knuckle escape into neighboring Jordan he spent two years as a refugee there with his family, and they all arrived in Rochester in July of 2008.
Minnesota Cities
His cheerfulness makes it hard to fathom that Raad’s customized-for-Minnesota pun is tragically true. He and his family of five lost all that they physically owned during the Iraq war; they lost the country where they were born and raised; they left all their friends and relatives behind in Iraq; and they now live in Rochester as refugees trying to make a new life in our strange, nice, so-often-cold state.
The Ghareebs are among 32,655 Iraqi war refugees who resettled in the U.S. in 2008 and 2009, according to the U.S. State Department. In Rochester, between July 2008 and the present, 77 Iraqi refugees in 16 families have started life anew in Rochester, according to Mary Alessio, the refugee resettlement director for Catholic Charities in Rochester, which handles Iraqi resettlement cases here.
The other Minnesota cities that accepted Iraqi refugees from 2007 to July 2009 were St. Paul which accepted 45 refugees; Minneapolis 11; Pelican Rapids six; and Richfield three, according to State Department statistics.
Fast-Tracked
With the number of refugees from other countries dipping and Iraq rising, Rochester is on track to resettle about 70 more Iraqis in 2010, according to Alessio.
The total 32,655 Iraqi refugees who have resettled in the U.S. in the past two years make up less than one percent of the 4.8 million refugees created by the Iraq War.
Like Raad, many of the new Iraqi refugees were fast-tracked for resettlement because they’d helped U.S. forces after the 2003 invasion, and thus had been targeted by Al Qaeda militias for kidnapping, ransoming, or execution.
Raad owned a sporting goods store, Ghareeb Brothers, in downtown Baghdad, where he sold free weights, multi-gyms, boxing gloves and other sports stuff to U.S. soldiers looking to stay fit while they were deployed in Iraq.
“The Right Thing”
“I met many American soldiers and they were great,” said Raad. Despite his personal trials he strongly approves of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the defeat of Saddam Hussein. “It was the right thing to take out Sadaam,” he said. “All the U.S. soldiers treated me well. They were friendly and they were honest.”
His friendly attitude towards GIs got him into trouble with Al Qaeda, but so did another fact that marked Raad and his family for persecution after 2003: they are Assyrian Christians, a religious minority that for centuries has suffered some of the worst ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses of any Middle East group.
An indigenous people of Mesopotamia who trace a history of nine millennia, Assyrians today are mostly Christian and have suffered a deeply troubled relationship with the region’s mostly Muslim Arab majority for hundreds of years.
Businessmen Killed
Many Assyrian Christians fled from Turkey to Iraq in 1915, during the Armenian genocide by the Muslim Ottoman State, which killed between 500,000 and 750,000 Assyrians. In Iraq, which is 97 percent Muslim, the legal system incorporates Islamic elements, and the history of Assyrian Christians there has thus been marked by severe structural discrimination, as well as sporadic massacres.
Such persecution escalated dramatically after the American invasion. As a prominent Baghdad businessman, Raad was vulnerable to having a family member kidnapped for ransom, and businessmen up and down the block where he lived were getting killed. Finally, Raad wired money to a bank in Amman, Jordan; he stuffed a knapsack with the family’s deeds, diplomas, and legal documents; and fled before sunrise one morning with his family in an SUV, driving to Amman.
On a dangerous return trip to Baghdad to try to gather some personal documents he’d left behind, Raad nearly didn’t make it back to Amman.
Empty Garage
“Some Al Qaeda guys followed me in a Toyota out of Baghdad, stopped my car, and drove me to an empty garage,” Raad recalls. “They kept saying, ‘Show us your contract to sell goods to the Americans.’ I told them, ‘I have no such contract.’
“They brought in an enormous man with a long knife in his hand. He stood right in front of me. I thought I had reached the end of my life. I told them, ‘I don’t care if you kill me, but please send my bag of documents to my family in Amman.’”
At that moment, one of Raad’s captors reached into his front shirt pocket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of folded paper on which was printed an Assyrian Christian prayer. Raad was carrying the prayer to protect him against danger on the trip.
New Dream
“‘Oh, great,’ Raad remembers thinking at that moment. ‘Now, besides them thinking I am helping the Americans, they also see that I pray to Jesus Christ. Now they have one more reason to kill me.’”
But instead of slashing his throat, Raad’s captor read the prayer, stood silent for a few moments, and then stuffed the sheet of paper back in Raad’s shirt pocket.
“Go back to your family,” he said, letting Raad walk away with his life.
Raad’s new America dream is to rebuild his life as a merchant.
“Iraq has oil, gold, uranium, minerals, every resource you can imagine in the earth,” he said. “While here in American we have manufactured goods – cars, carpets, clothing, furniture, computers. The question is how can we move the manufactured goods in America to Iraq, and the money in Iraq to America?”
Answering that question, Raad hopes, will push him way back above zero.
Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report
In Minnesota, Ethiopians Brace for a Dreaded Visit
| MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Pulling up folding chairs to round tables, sipping hot sweet tea out of styrofoam cups and arguing politics into the afternoon, the men at the Horn Afrik café here last weekend all had the name of one man on their lips. Every time that man’s name was mentioned, the volume of chatter was deafening.I was the one native Minnesotan in the café, and a journalist, and when the men there learned that I wanted to hear about this man who was causing such a commotion, they gathered around me, eager to tell their stories and to show me their wounds.
Osman had a scar that runs from his lower lip to the tip of his jaw. Mohamed had a raggedy star-shaped scar in the center of his forehead, and another at the crown of his head. With a dozen men standing around me, I asked how many had scars that they associated with this man whose name was inciting them so much. Four quickly raised their hands and the others looked at me shyly, sadly, their heads faintly nodding. Jailing Innocents The dreaded name is that of Mohamed Daud, the President of the Somali Regional State of Ethiopia, also known as Ogaden. According to the men at the café, Daud’s government, implementing central Ethiopian policy, has transformed the Ogaden into a brutal police state committing crimes against humanity including the jailing of thousands of innocent citizens, torture, rape, killings and the destruction of entire villages. One specific bit of news set off the agitation I witnessed at the café: Mohamed Daud may visit Minnesota soon, perhaps this week. “Why is he coming? What does he want to tell us?” asked Hassan, a native of the Ogaden town of Kabridahar, who came to the U.S. in 1996. “The suffering of the Ogaden people is astronomical, so for him to come here is hypocrisy at its peak.” Razed Villages Widespread crimes against humanity in the Ogaden – many bluntly call it a genocide and “the new Darfur” – are hardly a secret by now. The Internet is teeming with documentary videos smuggled out of the region (journalists are banned in the Ogaden); the American Association for the Advancement of Science has shown satellite photographs of razed Ogaden villages; and Human Rights Watch has documented “mass detentions without any judicial oversight” which they called “routine;” as well as “widespread and systematic attacks on villages,” “killings, torture, rape and forced displacement” for which “the Ethiopian government bears ultimate responsibility.” About 5,000 refugees from the Ogaden live in Minnesota today, making it one of the biggest diaspora populations of Ogaden refugees in the world. Several other Ethiopian ethnic groups, such as the Oromo, the Amhara and Anuak, also have among the world’s largest Ethiopian refugee diasporas in the state. Minnesota Visit That makes Minnesota a prime target for visits from Ethiopian leaders eager to build support – and to tamp down opposition – among the many Ethiopian refugee groups here. Last August, Ogaden leaders traveled to Stockholm and London to meet with the Ogaden refugee populations living there, announcing later they had plans to visit North America soon, with Minnesota mentioned in one government announcement. Then, last week, the Minnesota-Ogaden grapevine, which is fed by people close to the Ethiopian government who live in Minnesota, relayed news that Daud might arrive in Washington as early as this week – and might visit Minnesota soon thereafter. Fierce Letter In response, members of Minnesota’s Ogadeni community last Friday delivered a fierce letter of protest to Daud’s visit from the “Ogaden-American Community” to the Minnesota offices of Senators Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, Governor Pawlenty, Congressman Keith Ellison and others. Speaking of the visiting Daud delegation the letter said: “These individuals are the very reason why we came to the United States, to escape with our lives. Now they are here with the sole reason to intimidate and strike fear in the hearts of Ogaden citizens who are living in Minnesota.” “These men are directly responsible for the continuous man-made drought, raping women and young girls, indiscriminate killing, burning of homes, destroying farms, and many other atrocities going on in Ogaden,” the protest letter said. “Running a Genocide” The letter encouraged Minnesota officials to reject any overture made to them by the Daud delegation; to recognize the Ogaden tragedy as a genocide; and to hold Daud and other Ethiopian leaders accountable for crimes against humanity in the Ogaden. The chaos inside the Horn Afrik cafe on Sunday was precisely the effect that Daud wishes to have on the Minnesota diaspora, some men at the cafe said, because emotional outbursts tend to neutralize an otherwise potentially focused and effective Ogaden diaspora. “He wants to confuse us and intimidate us,” said Siyat. “He might want to change our minds, but we can’t accept that because he is running a genocide against our people.” International Opinion None of the men interviewed gave their last names, saying their family members and friends still living in the Ogaden would be at risk of their lives if they did. In recent years, Ethiopia has engaged its refugee diasporas more, recognizing their increasingly large role in shaping international opinion about Ethiopia. International opinion is critically important to Ethiopia because its economy is relies largely on foreign aid. Ethiopia was the world’s 7th largest recipient of foreign aid in 2006, receiving $1.57 billion in annual aid in the early 2000s, according to the Brookings Institution. Aid revenues could dry up if concerns about human rights abuses increase, and in recent years they have done so dramatically, especially in the Ogaden. The Ogaden crisis has been sending refugees to Minnesota for more than a decade. All-Out War But the crisis worsened dramatically in 2007, when the Ethiopian government stepped up a counter-insurgency campaign against a separatist group, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, which it calls a terrorist organization with ties to Somali jihadists. Today, nearly every Ogadeni refugee in Minnesota has friends or family members who are in jail, or who have spent significant time in jail, on suspicion supporting ONLF fighters. This is notwithstanding that the ONLF draws members from virtually every Ogaden town and village, so that declaring all-out war on the ONLF and every last one of its supporters is tantamount to declaring war on the entire Ogaden, its people and culture. When asked how they got their scars, the men at Horn Afrik café all gave the same answer – they were beaten by Ethiopian soldiers, usually struck by their guns. Fear for Family “We are all afraid of Daud, even though we live here now,” said Osman, a 65-year-old clan elder, who says that he lost two sons killed by Ethiopian soldiers. According to his network of clan members with whom he stays in touch, roughly 8,000 Ogadeni citizens are now being held in military prisons in virtually every city in the region. They don’t fear for themselves so much as for their friends and family back home, other Ogadenis at the café said. “Daud wants to identify the activists in Minnesota,” said Abdi. “He will write down our names so he can then go back and find our family members and put them in jail. “Of course, he will have his picture taken with a few people here who support him, so he can go back and say his mission to Minnesota was a success.” Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report
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When Ethiopia Invades Somalia, Minnesota Takes a Hit
ROCHESTER, MN — It sounds a bit roundabout at first, but if Minnesotans truly want to know why Minnesota became a breeding ground for young Somalis who take up arms with Somalia’s extremist militias, we need to look first at Ethiopia.
Specifically, we need to scrutinize U.S. foreign policy towards Ethiopia, which the U.S. has supported with millions of dollars in annual aid for many years.
Connecting the dots is always hard in the Horn of Africa, and therefore also in Minnesota, which has one of the world’s largest diaspora populations from the Horn of Africa, including refugees from Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and Kenya.
Fortunately, a new policy paper from the Council on Foreign Relations does an excellent job of connecting the dots by drawing a bright line connecting U.S. financial and military support for Ethiopia and the rise of Islamist militant groups in Somalia, of the type that recently attracted 20 Somalis living in Minnesota to join.
Somali Militias
Five of those young men have died in the fighting, and one of the largest domestic terrorism investigations ever in the U.S. is underway to determine how Somalis in Minnesota and other states are recruited to fight with Islamist Somali militias.
The connection to Minnesota is implicit in the CFR paper but deeply compelling. It is so because the report clarifies how U.S. support for Ethiopia is a key component – possibly the most critical one – contributing to the radicalization of young Somalis living both inside Somalia and in the global Somali diaspora, such as in Minnesota.
The paper’s very first sentences provide the context for that claim:
“U.S. strategic interests in the Horn of Africa center on preventing Somalia from becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda or other transformational jihadist groups. In pursuing its counter-terror strategy, the United States has found common cause with Ethiopia … But the Ethiopian government’s behavior in recent years, both domestically and in bordering states, poses mounting difficulties for the United States and its long-term goals in the region.”
Ethnic Federalism
For many years, a firm partnership with Ethiopia has been the cornerstone of America’s presence in the Horn of Africa. In a global neighborhood where several countries – Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea – have either harbored (in the case of Eritrea) or been led by Islamists, Ethiopia is the one country that has openly declared its steadfast opposition to such groups. In return, it has received substantial U.S. aid annually, much of which is spent to support and train the Ethiopian army.
The present Ethiopian government, led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, came to power in 1991 by overthrowing the brutal regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam.
Initially, hopes ran high in Ethiopia that under Meles the country would peacefully unite in a multi-party democracy based on “ethnic federalism,” with the country divided into nine ethnic-based regional states. Instead, throughout the 1990s, the Meles government increasingly showed its willingness to suppress dissent through social and economic discrimination and sometimes through extreme violence.
The CFR paper cites numerous such examples, which since 2005 have become more frequent, overt and severe. That year, the Ethiopian army was deployed to violently put-down protests of suspected fraud in Ethiopian national elections. Uniformed Ethiopian troops in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, met the election’s protesters in the streets, detaining thousands, arresting hundreds, and killing dozens.
Counter-Terror
Not holding Ethiopia accountable for massive human rights abuses in the ethnic-Somali Ogaden region of Ethiopia, where Human Rights Watch and other groups have documented widespread crimes against humanity, has also cost the U.S. dearly throughout the region by cementing anti-American sentiment and encouraging extremism, the CFR report says.
The breakdown of legitimate rule in Ethiopia has progressed so far, the report says, that supporting Ethiopia may now be undermining America’s counter-terrorism goals in the Horn of Africa.
That is especially true with American efforts to eradicate Somalia Islamist extremism.
In 2006 and 2007, with significant U.S. financial and military support, the Ethiopian army invaded Somalia, ousting the country’s Islamist government and helping install a government that remains highly dependent on Ethiopian aid and direction.
When the U.S. helped replace Somalia’s Islamist government, using the Ethiopian army as a proxy for its own power, it served U.S. counter-terror goals in the Horn of Africa.
The Shabaab
But that achievement may have come at too high a price, the CFR report says:
“U.S. reliance on Ethiopian military might and intelligence has served to exacerbate instability in Somalia. Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia, and the extended presence of Ethiopian troops in Mogadishu, instead of quelling conflict, has triggered a local backlash that has served as a rallying point for local extremists.”
Which is precisely where the dots connect back to Minnesota:
“It was the development of a complex insurgency against Ethiopian occupation that effectively catapulted a fringe jihadist youth militia, the Shabaab, to power in Somalia. International jihadists have now capitalized on the local insurgency, and on U.S. support of the Ethiopian invasion, as an opportunity to globalize Somalia’s conflict.”
In other words, the anti-American backlash to the U.S.-supported Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was not only local within Somalia – it was global. It was Minnesotan.
Several journalistic accounts have established that many of the Somali men who left Minnesota to join the Shabaab were actually becoming well-assimilated to American society, holding down jobs, attending college, and planning professional careers.
It was only their outrage that their homeland had been invaded by U.S.-supported Ethiopia that stirred them to abandon Minnesota to fight halfway around the world.
Ours is a world without borders to the flow of money, arms, soldiers and suffering.
Our individual actions and collective policies should flow from that fact.
Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/minneopia.htm
Ethiopia in Minnesota: The Local Front of a Distant War
ROCHESTER, MN – What am I, truly? Saint or sinner? Hero or boob?
When I report the harrowing stories of the torture and persecution of Ethiopian refugees who now live safely in Minnesota, am I being “noble” and “brave,” a “freedom-loving” journalist who is “a friend to the voiceless ones“?
Or am I – as dozens of riled-up critics of my reporting charge – in fact being a sucker for refugees who lie to win asylum status, and even worse being a “biased,” “ignorant,” “confused white man” who “sits down in [my] luxurious home in the Twin Cities to write about what happens in the Horn of Africa,” believing that I am helping to heal the world while in fact I am only “fostering more violence”?
When I published two recent articles reporting crimes against humanity that refugees in Minnesota claim are being committed against their families who still live in Ethiopia, a roaring Niagara of comments flooded the Twin Cities Daily Planet. Most of the commenters listed me in one of these two categories – as a magnificent fellow or as a dupe, as a paragon or a propagandist, as a saint or a fool.
Justly Famous
This strange purgatory is well-known to human rights activists and aid workers around the world. Delivering food to starving refugees, they are vilified because the food is sometimes stolen by partisans, diverted to feed militias, or sold by profiteers. Giving medicine to those wounded in war, they are accused of aiding the enemy, fattening soldiers, or choosing sides in the continuing violence.
And yet, I am not reporting from the front lines of an Ethiopian war, drought or famine.
My accounts of the strife of war, which elicited such anguished and desperate response, originated from far behind the front lines, indeed from right here in Minnesota, where I live and work as a journalist. Our state is justly famous as a safe harbor and place of healing for traumatized refugees – so what is going on?
What reality does this depth of response in Minnesota point to?
One way to answer this – and thus to show how the worsening war in Ethiopia is concretely degrading life in our state – is to return to the more than 100 comments posted at the Daily Planet and take a closer look. In particular, in the criticisms of my reporting I see several themes that, were I to engage them, might help to illuminate the strange territory that is diaspora politics – the politics of “here and there,” where “here” is Minnesota and “there” is 8,000 miles away in Africa, yet where the one affects the other like two billiard balls colliding on green felt.
Armchair Journalist?
Here are the four main threads of criticism of my reporting, as I see them, and my response to each:
1. I’m an armchair journalist who is blind to America’s own faults. I should focus on those faults and keep my nose out of Ethiopian affairs.
My answer is that I don’t primarily report on the civil war that is being waged, at various intensities and on several fronts, inside Ethiopia today. Rather, I mainly write about the social, economic and psychological impact of Ethiopia’s civil war on the tens of thousands of Ethiopian refugees who live in Minnesota and beyond, in the U.S. and global diaspora. To understand these impacts on our state and its people, I must, to some degree, and with the help of many sources and readers who are better-informed than I am, try to explain and describe conditions past and present in Ethiopia.
2. I’m a pushover for Ethiopian refugees who invent and exaggerate hardship stories in order to win political asylum in the U.S.
Of course, fabricating persecution stories does happen. But I do my best through various interview procedures to screen out such claims. For example, I try to interview people as close to the time of an actual reported event as possible; and I try to interview people who witnessed an event firsthand if possible. I also find people to interview who are presented to me not through intermediaries and handlers, but rather by approaching people randomly at markets and by reading every email and comment posted to my stories. Finally, I interview a great many people for each article so that patterns of stories, and patterns of details within stories, appear. A pattern is by no means a conclusive verification of fact, because rumors create patterns as well as truths. But when mixed with other elements of reported narratives, such as closeness to the time of an event, the vividness of idiosyncratic detail, and when physical or photographic evidence is also present, patterns of reported stories can solidify trust in a given account.
3. The families of Minnesota refugees live 8,000 miles away in a desert with little communication infrastructure. Why give Minnesota-based accounts of present-day conditions in Ethiopia any credibility at all?
There are two answers to this. One is that cell-phone connections, and in some cases land lines, exist in most of the major cities of the Ogaden region including the capital city, Jijiga, as well as in Dhagahbur, Wardheer, Fiiq, Kabridahar and Gode. Most of the Minnesota refugees from the Ogaden region maintain frequent telephone contact with their families and friends in those cities, as well as in smaller towns and villages throughout the Ogaden. Second, Because Ethiopia has banned foreign journalists from the Ogaden region, information that is passed to Minnesota’s Ogaden refugees and elsewhere in the diaspora over telephone connections is one of the few steady sources of up-to-date information on conditions in the region. Those accounts can be very accurate. On December 22, 2003, by interviewing refugees from the Anuak tribe of Ethiopia who lived in Minnesota, and by interviewing eyewitnesses living in Ethiopia myself over a cell phone, I reported that about 400 Anuak men had been killed by Ethiopian soldiers in the town of Gambella nine days earlier, on December 13, 2003. A year later, in March 2005, Human Rights Watch published its own report on the December 13 massacre, concluding that 424 Anuak were killed that day. (Parenthetically, to the critics who say I’ve never been to Ethiopia, I did travel and report from there, as well as from Sudan and Kenya, in 2004.)
4. I’m being manipulated by the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), a separatist group that fights against the Ethiopian government to achieve autonomy or independence the Ogaden region.
The ONLF is the rebel group in the Ogaden whose attacks on Ethiopian government troops and foreign commercial operations in 2007 unleashed the brutal government counter-insurgency that may have sparked crimes against humanity on the scale of Darfur. The ONLF is represented in the West by educated, fluent English-speaking members of the Ethiopian global diaspora, including perhaps some who live in Minnesota, including some perhaps whom I have met – I just don’t know. This ambiguity is part and parcel of reporting on such a complex situation, and it needs to be kept in mind by journalists and readers alike. This is not to disown my particular responsibilities as journalist, as I’ve defined above in relation to avoiding partisan accounts, and will expand upon below in relation to human rights reporting in particular. It’s only to say that to insist on certainty – “Is so-and-so a member or a sympathizer of the ONLF?” – is both utterly impossible, and utterly a dangerous road to follow. It’s impossible because the ONLF is, with some significant exceptions, a populist militia whose members are drawn deeply and broadly across the Ogaden. It would be impossible in many villages to find a single family that didn’t have a son, daughter, or close relative who had either joined the ONLF or given them aid at some point. And it’s a dangerous road to go down because to demonize such a group is to demonize an entire people, which is the road to genocide. Many human rights groups believe that line has already been crossed and compare the tragedy of the Ogaden to Rwanda and Darfur.
The Human Truth
Defining the proper role of journalism in human rights reporting, to me, is the crux of the matter.
Because the role of the journalist, if journalism means anything, is to find and report the truth. But what truth? The political truth or the human truth?
To which truth does journalism owe its first allegiance? The two truths can collide.
Here in Minnesota, based on what I’ve seen, every single refugee from the Ogaden region is suffering from the loss of close family members, friends and other loved ones. They’re suffering from their separation from their homeland and at times they wonder, in their nightmares, if a single person in the Ogaden will be left alive.
This, as I’ve seen it, is the human truth of the Ogaden diaspora in Minnesota.
The Political Truth
But the political truth is different. When it comes to who has committed atrocities and who has not; and who has committed crimes of war and who has not; these are altogether different questions. Not all victims are necessarily innocent of such crimes, and not all soldiers or government officials are, de facto, guilty of them. In the present case, no one disputes that both parties – the ONLF and the Ethiopian government – have acted atrociously and inhumanely at times.
In my coverage of how the Ethiopian civil war plays out in Minnesota, I follow two rules of thumb to navigate steadily through complex terrain.
The first rule is to remember that those parties who wield the most power – in this case the Ethiopia government by far — need the most careful journalistic scrutiny and attention. There is no doubt that the ONLF is sometimes brutally violent. But it is ridiculous to compare their rag-tag militia to a modern army equipped with tanks, helicopters and fighter jets, that has been supported by U.S. military training, and that receives hundreds of millions of dollars of total foreign aid.
More fundamentally, my second rule of thumb is to seek the human truth beneath the political truth, and to report the underlying human truth as best I can. In saying so, I’m saying no more than that politics itself is meant to serve humans, and that a useful and human politics must be built on sound and accurate human truths.
It’s not only reasonable but necessary for journalism to ferret out, to accurately describe, and to widely share the human truths of our lives on this earth.
Reasonable & Necessary
This is a reasonable journalistic goal, because journalism is a literary form that at its best can convey the authentic poignancy of human suffering, which has proved itself to be one of the strongest motivators of collective global aid and cooperation.
And it’s a necessary goal, because power usually seeks to hide the truth of human suffering. It is doing so with a vengeance in Ethiopia today, barring reporters any access to the Ogaden region, and imprisoning reporters who manage to sneak in.
But in Minnesota, the Ogaden refugees are free to speak. That’s why I sit down with them and listen. Not to determine their “guilt” or “innocence,” their level of “membership” or “sympathizing,” or whether they are politically pure at heart.
Rather, I sit down to listen to their human stories of fear and flight, hope and struggle, suffering and release. Because that’s where good politics must begin.
Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/hrjournalism
Minnesota Ethiopians to Join Pan-Ethnic Washington March on Sunday
ROCHESTER, MN — An unlikely, even unprecedented Ethiopian protest march will be held in Washington, DC this Sunday, bringing together for the first time members of many diverse Ethiopian ethnic groups.
All of these groups – including members of Ethiopia’s Oromo, Amhara, Tigray, Anuak and Ogaden ethnicities – all say they have suffered brutal economic, military and social repression under the regime Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, which took power in Ethiopia in 1991.
But never before have members of these different groups joined together in a large-scale march and protest in Washington. Some 20 Ethiopian immigrants living in Minnesota, representing several ethnic groups, will take part in the march, its organizers say.
“Ethiopians from one group usually don’t talk to others, thinking that the others are causing the problems,” said Ahmed Hussein, an Ethiopian immigrant of Oromo ethnicity from Brooklyn Park, MN who will participate in the Sunday march. “But now everyone is feeling the pain. This government is killing its own people and has no respect for human rights. This march is a way to show that Ethiopians are united against this government.”
Taxi Posters
Organized by a recently-formed group called the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia, the protest’s leaders say they hope to draw several thousand marchers drawn from many of Ethiopia’s dozens of ethnic groups. The marchers will proceed from the White House to Capital Hill under banners reading: “Stop Genocide and Dictatorship in Ethiopia.”
Over the past two weeks, taxicabs with roof-mounted posters bearing the same slogan have been driving around Washington, DC.
Obang Metho, the group’s founder, is a member of Ethiopia’s Anuak tribe from the western state of Gambella. He was politicized in 2003 when the Ethiopian army killed 425 Anuak men on December 13 of that year, as part of ethnic cleansing of that tribe that has gone on before and since December 13, 2003.
Originally, Metho founded the Anuak Justice Council to memorialize the victims of December 13 and to press the international community to bring Meles Zenawi and others in the Ethiopian government to justice for the genocide of the Anuak people.
Unlawful Acts
More recently, Metho formed the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia, whose membership is open to Ethiopians of all ethnicities, because he saw that the Anuak’s plight was not unique in Ethiopia. The Oromo, the Amhara, the Ogadeni, the Tigray and members of many other Ethiopian ethnicities have all increasingly tried to draw the world’s attention to crimes against humanity committed by the Meles regime.
Increasingly, human rights groups, social justice groups, and other international organizations have taken notice – some of them publishing lengthy reports detailing thousands of cases of unlawful detention, torture, rape, and extrajudicial killings carried out by uniformed members of the Ethiopian army and related security forces.
For example, Human Rights Watch in 2008 published “Collective Punishment: War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in the Ogaden Area of Ethiopia’s Somali Region.” Human Rights watch in 2005 also published “Targeting the Anuak: Human Rights Violations and Crimes Against Humanity in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region.”
Other groups including the International Committee for the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Genocide Watch, and The Advocates for Human Rights have all documented severe human rights abuses, often including crimes against humanity, carried out by the Ethiopian military against the members of many of Ethiopia’s ethnic groups.
“Where Are You?”
“In Ethiopia today, people live in terror and fear,” Obang Metho said. “The whole country is under siege. It is filled with prisons. No one has been brought to justice and the killer is walking free. This march is not about political issues, it’s about survival. We are trying to stop a dictatorship.”
A primary goal of the march, Metho said, is to try to influence the United States to change its official policy of friendship and support for Ethiopia, which it considers an ally and as helpful as a base for anti-terrorism operations in the Horn of Africa. In December 2006, the U.S. gave military aid and training to help Ethiopia crush the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist government that controlled Somalia.
“What we are saying to the U.S. taxpayer is, you are killing us,” Metho said. “We are saying to the media, your silence is killing us. Where are you?”
Ethiopia Shakes Down its Minnesota Refugees
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Immigrants to Minnesota from eastern Ethiopia are being forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom payments to support an Ethiopian security force that tortures and kills thousands of innocent Ethiopians.
Under an extortion scheme run by the Ethiopian army, soldiers in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia abduct men, women and teenage boys and girls, holding them without charge in one of scores of military jails in the region, which borders Somalia.
Knowing that many Ogaden families have relatives who live in Minnesota, the Ethiopian army tells the prisoners’ families that their loved ones can be freed upon payment of ransoms ranging from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
Hating to pay the money but having no other choice, the Minnesota refugees empty their personal bank accounts and pass the hat to raise ransoms to release their husbands, wives, sons, daughters and friends from overcrowded jails where torture, rape, beatings and killings are common.
Destruction of Villages
“It is a booming business for the Ethiopian army,” said Mohamed, a Minnesota school teacher who immigrated from the Ogaden in 1993. “It happens every day in the Ogaden, and every day someone in Minnesota is sending money.”
Mohamed and other Ogaden immigrants quoted in this story declined to give their full names for fear that their families and friends living in the Ogaden would be jailed, tortured or killed in retribution for their openness.
In recent years, one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises has unfolded silently in the Ogaden region, where a vicious counter-insurgency campaign by the Ethiopian government has wiped out scores of villages, killed thousands of civilians, and displaced tens of thousands or more to refugee camps in Ethiopia and northern Kenya.
About 5,000 Ogaden refugees have found their way to Minnesota, which has one of the largest refugee populations from the Ogaden crisis in the world. They Ogaden refugees in Minnesota are settled mainly in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Willmar, St. Cloud and Faribault.
Frantic Calls
The ransoming of Ogaden refugees in Minnesota is exacting a disastrous economic, psychological and social toll within the Ogaden community and the broader society, Ogaden immigrants here say.
“I cry every night, believe me,” said Abdi, an Ogaden refugee who has sent $600 ransoms on two occasions. “You are forced to do what is not right, you are forced to do the wrong thing. It’s horrible. It lives with us, it lives with us everywhere. No matter where I am, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the living room, I cannot hold back my tears.”
Being forced to spend thousands of dollars to free their relatives from jail in Ethiopia slows down the Minnesota Ogadeni refugees’ attempts to learn English, to get an education and to successfully assimilate into U.S. society, they say.
“We get frantic phone calls day and night,” says Mustafe, an Ogaden refugee who works at Minneapolis employment agency. “Friends and family need money to be freed from jail. They say ‘Please send us money, please send us money!’ We send it, of course, but as a result we go into debt ourselves. I don’t even dream of going back to school to improve myself until the situation in Ogaden changes and improves.”
Financial Aid
In 2007, Mustafe sent $1,500 towards a $4,000 ransom collected in Minnesota to release a teenaged cousin who was jailed for three months, and was released after the ransom was paid. As a result of that and other ransoms Mustafe has paid, plus monthly support he sends back home to relatives, he is about $10,000 in debt.
The ransoming of Ogaden refugees is only one facet of an extreme humanitarian crisis involving countless crimes against humanity bordering on a full-scale genocide, that has been building in the Ogaden for more than a decade, but intensified sharply in 2007.
The roots of the Ogaden crisis lie in the fact that eastern Ethiopia is inhabited by ethnic Muslim Somalis at a time when the Ethiopian government has been waging war against Somalia. In December 2006, with financial aid and military training from the U.S., Ethiopia crushed the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist government that controlled Somalia.
In 2007, the Ethiopia-Somalia war intensified in Ogaden, where the Ethiopian Army launched an all-out counter-insurgency against a separatist militia, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, which it calls a terrorist organization.
Collective Punishment
The ONLF conducts deadly raids against Ethiopian military, such as an April 2007 attack against a Chinese-run oil operation in the Ogaden which killed not only Ethiopian soldiers but several dozen Ethiopian citizens and nine Chinese nationals.
In retaliation for that attack, Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, launched a vicious crackdown on the ONLF, targeting not only ONLF fighters but their families, friends and other supporters throughout the region. In 2008, Human Rights Watch published a report, “Collective Punishment: War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia’s Somali Region.”
The report documented hundreds of cases of torture, rape, executions and indeed the destruction of entire Ogaden villages on the mere suspicion that someone in the village was harboring an ONLF fighter. Human Rights Watch said the likely scale of the disaster was far larger than they were able to document in the report.
Since 2007 all foreign journalists and many aid organizations, including the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, have been forced by the Ethiopian government to suspend operations in the Ogaden.
Virtually all of the ransoms paid by Minnesota Ogadeni refugees to the Ethiopian military are to release friends and relatives who have been jailed on suspicion of knowing, sheltering, or aiding ONLF fighters.
Clan Elders
But in a region like Ogaden, where almost every village has at least one son or daughter who has joined the ONLF, to declare war on all people with even a slight relationship the ONLF is tantamount to declaring war on the entire Ogadeni people – on their society and culture. From an Ogadeni perspective, that is what has happened.
In Minneapolis over the past two weeks, I interviewed 18 Ogaden refugees. Every one confirmed knowledge of the frequent payment of ransoms by Minnesota Ogadenis to free imprisoned relatives held by the Ethiopian army in the Ogaden.
About half of the refugees I interviewed said they had personally paid ransoms to free relatives from jail, and some had done so many times.
The ransom amounts ranged from $300 to $1,500. In some cases those amounts were contributions to total collected ransoms of more than $10,000, which seems to be a typical amount needed to release Ogadeni clan elders who are held.
Here are four ransom stories I was told:
Abdi #1: “In 2002, in the city of Harare, Ethiopian soldiers arrested my brother and beat him badly, tying a rope at the top of his elbows. For five nights they beat him. My Dad had to pay money to get him loose. He came back with marks on his arms above his elbows. Another time, my brother-in-law was arrested. On two occasions, his relatives called me in Minnesota to say he is alive in prison and asked us here to send money. So on two occasions since 2002 we sent $600, but my brother-in-law was never released and we still don’t know if he is alive or dead.”
Mustafe: “In 2007 my brother, who was in high school, was arrested and put in jail. They accused him of being a collaborator of the ONLF. They said he was buying khat [a chewed leaf that is a legal stimulant in Ethiopia and a major cash crop there] to give to the ONLF. But he was only a student with no money and he never did that. We collected $4,000 here in Minnesota to release him which they finally did after three months.”
Mohamed: “In 2005 they put my brother in jail. He is a tea shop owner and the Ethiopian army said he sold some food to the ONLF. My brother’s wife and cousins sold their sheep and goats to get the ransom money and he was released, but five months later they put him back in jail. This time, his wife called me and said ‘Mohamed, our sheep and goats are very thin and weak, it’s the dry season, and none of them can be sold. We need money. They will kill your brother if we don’t pay.’ So I sent what I could afford which was $700. Again he was released, but today, only a few hours ago, I got the bad news from my village that my brother and two others were taken by the Ethiopian army and no one knows their fate. So again I don’t know if my brother and the others are okay or if they are killed. If they aren’t killed, I will once again have to pay ransom, for the third time. They said my brother is a sympathizer of the ONLF, but he is only a tea shop owner. How can he discriminate if a customer who comes in who is ONLF? They don’t wear any uniform, how can he tell?”
Abdi #2: “My friend and cousin is named Hassan Ahmed, from the town of Jijiga. Last year he was jailed and sentenced to death for supposedly helping the ONLF. But he has asthma and was seriously sick and he needed to go to the hospital. So his mother called me here in Minnesota and said, ‘If we pay $500 they say they will take him to the hospital.’ So we managed to raise $500 which we sent to the family, and they gave it to the Ethiopian army. But he was never let out of prison and we don’t think he was taken to the hospital either. Instead, after they got the money they said, ‘This guy is sentenced to death, he will never get out.’”
Cell Phones
Mohamed, the Ogaden school teacher, has collected records of 182 separate instances of extortion and ransoming of Ogadeni civilians by the Ethiopian Army. The total amount paid in these cases was $84,500, which Mohamed estimates is less than 1% of the total amount of money extorted and ransomed by the Ethiopian Army in the past two years.
“You cannot imagine how widespread this is,” said Mohamed, who collected the data through cell phone calls to contacts in the Ogaden and the global Ogaden diaspora.
As a result of the humanitarian aid and information blackout imposed by Ethiopia on the Ogaden, accounts given by the Ogaden refugees in Minnesota provide one of the richest sources of information about the crisis there.
Money, Army or Jail
Ogadeni shopkeepers and traders are also frequent targets for Ethiopian army threats and shakedowns, Minnesota’s Ogaden refugees say.
“In the town of Gode,” said Mohamed, ‘the Army just last week gathered more than 100 business people recently and told them, ‘You have three choices: you can give us money, you can join the army, or you can go to jail.”
Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/ransom
Originally published on Sept. 7, 2009 on The McGill Report and republished on this blog on Sept. 13, 2009.
At a Minnesota Market, Tales of a Hidden Ethiopian War
MINNEAPOLIS — 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, are you really understanding?’”
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 into my belly, 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 on such a large scale in the world right now, today, even as you read these words.
Disbelief is also understandable because these atrocities are occurring in a place that few people in the world have even heard of – a place called the Ogaden of Ethiopia.
Where are the TV news teams parachuting into refugee camps teeming with traumatized Ogaden refugees? Where is the definitive account of the Ethiopian government’s mass destruction of the culture and people of the Ogaden?
Bare Feet
Here is more of Fatima’s story (she like the other witnesses in this story only use 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 genocide, 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 uniformed Ethiopian soldiers;
> Men and women are strangled to death by two 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 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 down 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 genocide, 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 genocide 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 genocide. 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 in the town of Garbo 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.
Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report
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Originally published on August 31, 2009 on The McGill Report and republished on this blog blog on Sept. 14, 2009.
