EAST AFRICA: Ethiopian Refugees Claim Discrimination

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 16 1996 (IPS) - A solidarity group here has appealed to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Sadaka Ogata, to investigate reports that her agency is dicriminating against Ethiopian refugees in Kenya, Uganda and D’jibouti.

The group, known as the ‘Solidarity Committee For Ethiopian Political Refugees’, claims in a recent letter to Ogata that UNHCR officials in Uganda, Kenya and Djibouti are ignoring asylum pleas and ordering Ethiopian refugees home.

“The complaints are coming from so many diverse individuals and with such consistency that it is not possible to ignore them,” according to the letter, a copy of which was made available to IPS.

It said Ethiopians had reportedly been humiliated by UNHCR officials here and quoted refugees assaying that they referred to them in derogatory terms, calling them ‘Amhara chauvinists’, for example.

The Amhara ethnic group ruled the northeast African country for centuries until 1991, when the the rebel Ethiopia Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), dominated by the rival Tigray ethnic group, seized power.

Abraham Kerbo (not his real name), who fled Ethiopia in 1991, told IPS Friday that “90 percent of applications filed by asylum seekers from Ethiopia are normally rejected by the UNHCR”.

“They tell us that there is peace and stability in Ethiopia and why don’t we go home,” he said. “The thing is, when we return home, it will amount to committing suicide. After all, most of us are wanted in Ethiopia”.

In January, two Ethiopian refugees in Mombasa, some 480 kilometres southeast of here, set themselves on fire to protest what they described as “unfair treatment by the UNHCR.

“One of them — Abdalla Mohamed — whom I knew very well, died of serious burns and we buried him in Nairobi three weeks ago. But his colleague survived. He is admitted in a hospital in Mombasa,” said a former Ethiopian cabinet minister, who refused to be named.

Last year, Fasika Alemu committed suicide at Ifo, a sprawling refugee camp located some 700 kilometres north-east of the Kenyan capital, last year. He left a message behind: “I’ve lost hope. There’s no bright future for me”.

However, a spokesperson at the UNHCR office in Nairobi dismissed the claims by the Ethiopian refugees. She said: “Requests for asylum are treated on an individual basis. It’s not the UNHCR that grants full refugee status. It’s the host country”.

The spokesperson added that “thousands of Ethiopian refugees were voluntarily repatriated in 1993, and some 2,500 will also soon be repatriated”.

But Ethiopian refugees say they have no quarrel with Kenya’s government which, they say, issues identity cards to refugees on request. Kenya hosts more than 300,000 refugees from Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi. Of the total, fewer than 10,000 come from Ethiopia.

Most of the refugees, who live in camps outside Kenya, fled Ethiopia following the fall of strongman Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991. Mengistu, wanted by the government of Ethiopia on charges pertaining to allege human rights abuses, now lives in Zimbabwe where he was granted political asylum.

Ethiopians here say their compatriots who fled to Uganda and Djibouti are also being harassed. There have been reports of forced repatriations from Djibouti and, in Uganda, where there are about 100 of them, three well known refugees — Abraham Yayeh, Dinku Shifferaw and Adugna Ademe — will complete prison sentences in May 1996.

“They face deportation orders without, up to now, any resettlement possibilities having been found for them,” said the Solidarity Committee.

Moreover, it added: “Some weeks ago, another refugee, Solomon Kebede Tafesse, was detained in Kampala on false charges made by the EPRDF using the Interpol.

“Solomon Kebede, a former captain of the Ethiopian army, was previously a refugee in the Sudan and is a political dissident opposed to the existing Ethiopian government which is trying to have him deported”.

But the Ethiopian refugees’ case has been weakened by the fact that the government of their country has a much better reputation abroad than the Mengistu regime and has been scoring important diplomatic victories.

Last week Britain, added Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania to the so- called “white list” of countries from which asylum seekers will generally be refused, as these nations are considered safe.

Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi has been projecting his country of 45 million people as a peaceful nation with no political prisoners, and some members of the Ethiopian diaspora appear to agree with him.

“Today, Ethiopia’s politics represent a major break with its past history of politics of dictatorship,” wrote an individual who signed as Alemayehu Merga in a letter to a Kenyan paper. “The root causes of the 30 years disastrous wars have been laid to rest. Every nationality, including the Oromos, has got the right to administer their own affairs. Every Ethiopian is represented and has got an equal say in the central government.”

The Oromo, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, are waging a guerrilla war against government forces in their region. But, for Merga, “the purported fighting is in the minds of doomsayers as Ethiopia is today at peace with itself”.