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| Omo River [PHOTO: Oxonhutch] |
Nairobi: Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused Ethiopian authorities for “forcibly displacing” indigenous pastoral communities in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo valley “without adequate consultation or compensation to make way for state-run sugar plantations.”
The 73-page report, “‘What Will Happen if Hunger Comes?’: Abuses against the Indigenous Peoples of Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley,” documents how government security forces are forcing communities to relocate from their traditional lands through violence and intimidation, threatening their entire way of life with no compensation or choice of alternative livelihoods.
In a statement issued to the press, the New York-based organisation alleged that “government officials have carried out arbitrary arrests and detentions, beatings, and other violence against residents of the Lower Omo valley who questioned or resisted the development plans.”
“Ethiopia’s ambitious plans for the Omo valley appear to ignore the rights of the people who live there,” said Ben Rawlence, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “There is no shortcut to development; the people who havelong relied on that land for their livelihood need to have their property rights respected, including on consultation and compensation.”
The Lower Omo valley, one of the most remote and culturally diverse areas on the planet, is home to around 200,000 people from eight unique agro-pastoral communities who have lived there for as long as anyone can remember. Their way of life and their identity is linked to the land and access to the Omo River. The Omo valley is in Ethiopia’s Southern Peoples, Nations, and Nationalities Region (SNNPR), near the border with Kenya, and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1980.
The significant changes planned for the Omo valley are linked to the construction of Africa’s highest dam, the “controversial” Gibe III hydropower project, along the Omo River. Downstream, the sugar plantations will depend on irrigation canals. Although there have been some independent assessments of the Gibe dam project, to date, the Ethiopian government has not published any environmental or social impact assessments for the sugar plantations and other commercial agricultural developments in the Omo valley.
HRW interviewed more than 35 residents in June 2011, along with 10 donor officials and at least 30 other witnesses since that time.
As per the rights group, at the time of their visit, military units “regularly visited villages to intimidate residents and suppress dissent related to the sugar plantation development.”
HRW has called on the Ethiopian government to recognize the rights of the Omo valley’s indigenous communities over their historic homelands and engage in meaningful discussion with them over the future use of their land and compensation on that basis, prior to further industrial development in South Omo.