ETHIOPIA: Rebels Deny Claims That They Want An Islamic State

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru and Nhial Bol

LONDON/KHARTOUM, Apr 21 1997 (IPS) - Rebels fighting to topple the government of prime minister Meles Zenawi have rejected claims that their movement wants to create an Islamic state in Ethiopia and say the allegation is an attempt to discredit them internationally.

“We are not a religious group. We are a secular liberation Movement fighting for self-determination for the people of Oromo,” Taha Abdi told IPS.

Abdi, who is the representative of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) in the United Kingdom, was reacting to claims made to IPS last week by an Oromo dissident leader in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

The dissident, who would not be named, said that the OLF was preparing to change its policies to meet supposed grassroot support among the Oromo for the establishment of an Islamic state.

“That is not true. It is just a deliberate misrepresentation of what we stand for. Even our enemies (the authorities in Ethiopia) know that we are not a sectarian organisation,” he said.

Abdi said he strongly believes that it is the government of Zenawi which is trying to play the religious card in order to tarnish the image of the OLF internationally.

“You know how sensitive the issue of fundamentalism is globally,” he said.

The Oromo, also known as the Galla, are the largest single ethnic group in Ethiopia, comprising about 60 percent of the country’s 52 million people. Split almost 50/50 between Christians and Moslems, there is a growing fear in the volatile region that Ethiopia could gradually slip into a bloody religious war.

That will, however, depend on the relations between Sudan and its neighbours. Sudan, which has been isolated by neighbours because of its tendency to expand its brand of Islam, is home to over a million Ethiopian refugees, many of them militant Oromo Muslims. Khartoum has also been accused of being a hotbed of exiled radical Islamic groups from the Middle East and Asia.

Sudan, visibly unhappy with Ethiopia’s alleged support to exiled Sudanese opposition, also hosts the OLF. And, right from the beginning of this year, the OLF has been stepping up its media campaigns in Khartoum.

Last week it issued a statement in which it condemned the recent mass arrest of Oromo people in Ethiopia. The statement, which was distributed to local journalists representing foreign news agencies in Khartoum, accussed the regime of Meles of detaining Oromos without trial.

It also mocks at the government’s so-called federal system of government, which it says is fraught with abuses and has turned Ethiopia into a police state.

“The Oromos and other peoples of the south live in a state of fear and terror,” claimed the statement.

The quarrel between the OLF and the northern-dominated government of Meles erupted when the two groups were waging a bush war against the Marxist regime of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam in the 1970s.

After Mengistu was topped in 1991, the OLF joined a government of national unity, led by Meles. But that honeymoon ended in 1992 after all the OLF representatives quit the government.

According to Abdi, the OLF has not ruled out talks with the government. “We are for a peaceful solution provided that we return to the system that we had agreed upon in 1991,” he said. That system, among other demands, called for multi-party democracy and respect for the rule of law.

Abdi said the uncompromising stance adopted by the Ethiopian government, dominated by Meles’s estimated five million Tigrayans from the north, is driving other Ethiopians to violence.

He cited the incident in November last year, in which an Ethiopian Airways plane, hijacked from Addis Ababa to Australia by a group of disgruntled Ethiopians, ran out of fuel and crashed near the Indian ocean Island of Comoro, killing most on board.

He also cited the two bomb blasts which shattered a top class hotel in Addis Ababa, killing and injuring several people in the past two weeks. No one has claimed responsibility for the bombing.

“We don’t know who is carrying out these bombings. But what’s clear is that that regime is driving people to insanity. It is making life hard for people,” said Abdi.

Human rights groups, like the London-based Amnesty International, also attest to the abuses by the government.

“Hundreds of suspected government opponents detained in previous years continued to be held, including 285 members of the OLF forces detained in 1992, whose trial on charges of armed rebellion began in early 1995 in Ziwai town, 100 kilometres southwest of Addis Ababa,” Amnesty International said in a recent report.

It also said that several hundred people suspected of supporting the OLF were detained without trial in different parts of Ethiopia.

According to the OLF office in Khartoum, 113 Oromo civilians have been killed by Ethiopian army forces in the last three months and that during the operation the army looted 353 head of cattle and ‘tonnes’ of coffee, before torching 10 thatched huts.

And that in the fighting that ensued, OLF forces killed 225 government soldiers and captured three. There was no independent confirmation of the reports.

Nonetheless, those claims are always dismissed by Ethiopian officials as highly exaggerated. Meles told journalists recently that the opposition in Ethiopia were free. And that they enjoy the right to vote, and to criticise the government as they never had before.