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Ethiopia's Genocide of the Anuak Tribe Broadens After December 13 MassacreBy Doug McGill
The McGill Report(The following article appeared on May 6 in the Rochester Post-Bulletin of Rochester, MN.)ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia -- A genocide in western Ethiopia that began last December with a massacre of some 400 Anuak tribe members has broadened into widespread attacks by Ethiopian military troops against more than a dozen Anuak villages in the western Ethiopian province of Gambella, according to Anuak refugees and humanitarian aid groups.
Scorched-earth raids carried out from January through April have destroyed a dozen Anuak villages in Gambella, refugees said. The raids have driven more than 10,000 Anuak into refugee camps in neighboring Sudan and Kenya, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
While the December 13 massacre in Gambella town, the capital of Gambella province, was directed only at educated male Anuak, the new phase of the genocide has seen women and children killed, hundreds of Anuak homes and fields burned, and gang rapes of dozens of girls and women, according to Anuak refugees living in Pocalla, Sudan, and Nairobi, Kenya.
Fleeing earlier episodes of ethnic cleansing, more than 2,000 Anuak refugees have immigrated to Minnesota since the early 1990s. The present crisis, however, is by far the bloodiest phase of the continuing genocide of the Anuak in Ethiopia.
More than two dozen Anuak survivors interviewed in mid-April in south Sudan said that on Dec. 13, several hundred uniformed Ethiopian soldiers led the slaughter of more than 425 male leaders of the Anuak tribe in the town of Gambella. The troops used a list of names to identify educated Anuak men whom they dragged from their homes and shot with AK-47 assault rifles in the streets.
Ethiopian troops also incited hundreds of ethnic Ethiopian "highlanders" living in Gambella to go to their homes to fetch machetes, knives and spears, and to join them in the slaughter, eyewitnesses said. Survivors said the Ethiopian troops burned hundreds of Anuak "tukuls," traditional mud and straw homes, and gang-raped hundreds of Anuak girls.
The Ethiopian military broadened its attacks after Dec. 13 by dispatching troop trucks and, in one case, allegedly a helicopter gunship, against Anuak villages throughout Gambella state. The total casualties from these attacks is said to be more than 1,000.
Full Article @ genocidewatch.orgReflections on the Anuak Genocide Dec 13, 2006 — Early in this century, at a university in the U.S, a professor asked all students to introduce themselves to the class. Among students, there were an Anuak seated in one of the first few rows and a Highlander Ethiopian seated in the last row. When introduction reached the Anuak, he introduced himself as an Ethiopian and Ethiopian Highlander introduced herself as an Ethiopian. Instead of letting other students behind her introduce themselves, she added that the Anuak was from Gambella and she was from Ethiopia despite the fact Gambella is a part of Ethiopia in international map.
In disputing the Anuak citizenship status as not Ethiopian, she repeated the usually claims Anuak people and other Gambellans face when travel in other parts of Ethiopia. When Gambella people traveled in other parts of Ethiopia, many ruling Highlander Ethiopian elite label Gambellans as others, foreigners and potentially obstacle to the economic development and this perception played a largest role in the December 13, 2003 massacre against Anuak people.
Full Article @ sudantribune.com
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