Ethiopia: Anuak Must Refuse to Move to Concentrated Camps

In May 2010, at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenwai told the audience that, “peasants in Ethiopia will continue to have rights to use their land. We are only leasing idle land to foreign companies.” This, we assume, included the rights of the Anuak in their ancestral land in Gambella. We were dead wrong. Now Meles Zenawi has informed all Anuak in Gambella to move to dry concentrated camps so he can sell their land to Indian and Saudi companies.

Land is the basic for all human existence.  Without a community access to land the community called its own, it existence is nothing more than a dead object. Meles knows this fact: he did not sell land in his region. In fact, has bought farming equipments for Tigray farmers, his political base, and created an advisory body to advise farmers to grow crops such cash crops to increase their incomes.  If his aim was for national development, he would have given the people of Gambella the same farming equipments and create farming advisory body to help farmers in the region to increase their farming skills to boost their incomes without inviting new overbearing colonialists clothed in investment clothing.  

Meles can not sell Anuak land to foreign interests while he pocket money he get from these foreign interests to build  mansions in Tigray region. There is no more crime than forcing a people who have been brutalized by the same regime to move to concentrated camps.   Anuak should not accept things as they are but they must create their own reality. A stand is necessary. They must refuse to move to concentrated camps Meles and his deputies in the regional government are creating.

Anuak also must hold Anuak who are participating in crimes against their own people accountable for their participation in crimes against their own people.  Omot Obang Olum and any other Anuak who are participating in land grab must be held to account for their continued participation in crimes against the people of Gambella.  A crime is a crime whether is committed by a foreigner or a relative.

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