TOKKUMMAA BARTOOTA OROMO AWUROOPPAA
UNION OF OROMO STUDENTS IN EUROPE

State-Terrorism in Ethiopia: Another Wave of Repression of Oromos by the EPRDF/TPLF Regime

The life of the above people is greatly at risk, because the regime, like the preceding military junta, The detention of the above people is part of the wave of arrests and killings that started at the beginning of October. On October 8, 1997, the state police executed three Oromos named Tesfaye Kumsisa, Guddisa Annisa and Terefe Qumbi in the Makanisa area of Addis Ababa. To cover up the extra-legal execution, the police concocted a story of a shoot-out with "remnants of the OLF army", although the said persons had been abducted hours before the fabrication. The men were peaceful residents of the capital, who were simply massacred in cold-blood as part of the rule of terror that the minority Tigrean regime is practising since its military march into Oromia in 1990.

In addition to the above murder, the terrorist regime has rounded up more than one hundred Oromos during the first week of October. On October 16, 1997, Chief Editor of Urjii Newspaper, Mr. Solomon Namara and his assistant Mr. Tesfaye Dheressa were also detained, apparently for reporting the true circumstances in which the three innocent Oromos were murdered. The General Manager of Urjii, and secretary general of the Human Rights League, Mr. Garoma Bekele, was also arrested on 27 October.

The present crack down against the last Oromo welfare organisation and the independent Urjii newspaper is part of the minority regime's indiscriminate repression that is going on to bring the Oromo people into submission to Tigrean absolute rule, and at stifling any independent voice against its rising tyranny.

The Matcha-Tulama Association was first established in 1963 under the then emperor Haile-Selassie, as an Oromo self-help organisation for community development. As it grew into a pan-Oromo movement that highlighted the socio-economic and political plight of the Oromo, the Haile-Selassie despotic regime saw it as a danger to its colonial autocracy, and thus began a vicious machination to ban it. In October 1966, the regime arrested the whole executive leadership, some of whom were sentenced in a mock justice from few years imprisonment to death. The military junta that ousted the Haile-Selassie regime a few years letter intensified the persecution and even commuted some of the prison sentences to death. After 25 years of ban, the Association was allowed to function legally albeit nominally under the present TPLF/EPRDF regime.

After the closure of the Oromo Relief Association and the confiscation of its properties, the Matcha-Tulama Association was the last independent Oromo civic organisation allowed to function under the Tigrinya occupationist autarchy. The present persecution of the organisation is a vivid testimony that the colonial relation between the Oromo and the Abyssinians (Amhara-Tigre) has never changed, in spite of the fact that three regimes with three different political ideologies have changed hands in Ethiopia.

The Oromo people have counted six years of vicious repression by the occupationist minority regime of TPLF/EPRDF in Ethiopia. Since Meles Zenawi's Tigrean militias, under cover of the name EPRDF, marched into Oromia and controlled the repressive machinery of the communist military junta in 1991, the Oromo people have been the main targets of repressive atrocities. Arbitrary arrest, lynch law, jailing and torture, extra-judicial executions, terrorisation of the civil population and commandeering of Oromo public and private properties for private enrichment, have become the badge of TPLF's rule in Oromia. Thousands of innocent Oromos have been victims of this vicious tyranny. According to confirmed reports, to date, more than 2300 Oromos have been extra-judicially killed, while thousands are being detained, tortured, or have 'disappeared' on suspicion of being Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) supporters. Illegal kidnappings and massive detention of Oromos, both in the towns and countryside, are currently reaching unprecedented proportions.

The EPRDF/TPLF minority regime of Meles Zenawi has taken the silence of the international community and the unconditional support of Western countries in particular, as an approval of its arbitrary rule. It is emboldened to perpetrate such crimes as the gunning down of peaceful people in public. Its current savagery and the way this is publicised is, however, a dangerous trend that is taking the course of the Derg's Red Terror, in which similar massacres used to be publicly glorified as 'heroic' deeds. The horrific trend of TPLF's viciousness shows that it does not shy away from any form of barbarity as to prolong its occupation of Oromia.

We condemn this outrageous act of terrorism by the Tigrinya minority rule of Meles Zenawi. We appeal once again to the international community, human rights organisations, and all peace loving governments to pressurise the Zenawi government in Ethiopia to stop its brutal actions and release the detainees without any precondition. We call upon Western governments and all businesses and institutions to withdraw support from the Ethiopian government until it abides by the rules of law and guarantees human rights and the self-determination of the Oromo and other peoples in Ethiopia.

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