Ethiopia shakes down its Minnesota refugees

www.nazrett.com Home of Ethiopian News and Blog Breaking News

Immigrants to Minnesota from eastern Ethiopia are being forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom payments to support an Ethiopian security force that tortures and kills thousands of innocent Ethiopians.



Under an extortion scheme run by the Ethiopian army, soldiers in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia abduct men, women and teenage boys and girls, holding them without charge in one of scores of military jails in the region, which borders Somalia.


Knowing that many Ogaden families have relatives who live in Minnesota, the Ethiopian army tells the prisoners’ families that their loved ones can be freed upon payment of ransoms ranging from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.



Hating to pay the money but having no other choice, the Minnesota refugees empty their personal bank accounts and pass the hat to raise ransoms to release their husbands, wives, sons, daughters and friends from overcrowded jails where torture, rape, beatings and killings are common.







Correction: Photo removed



For about 30 minutes on Monday evening, the Daily Planet ran a photograph of a man being tortured by two uniformed soldiers in a grimy cell. Along with the photograph, we explained that we had decided to publish the photograph even though its origin had not yet been conclusively proved. We did so because the photo had been provided by a usually trustworthy source, though we also welcomed anyone reading the story on the Internet to tell us if they knew anything about the photograph’s true origin.



Within minutes of publication, someone did. If you Google “torture in East Timor,” and click on “Images,” you will see the exact photograph that we published, along with several other photographs that appear to have been taken of men wearing similar uniforms, torturing individuals who look similar to the one in the photograph we published. These photographs are themselves not authenticated as to their source, as best we could tell immediately. But their appearance on Google Images immediately shifted the weight of evidence strongly towards the original photograph that we published not being from an Ogaden prison or in Ethiopia. Therefore, we removed it immediately.



We sincerely regret any damage the photograph’s publication did to the important work, now being undertaken by hundreds of people, to widely publicize crimes against humanity being committed in the Ogaden. At the same time, the nearly instant correction we were able to make, using information offered by readers worldwide, did illustrate a transparency of process that is a hallmark of online journalism and that we strive to maintain to the utmost.




Destruction of Villages

“It is a booming business for the Ethiopian army,” said Mohamed, a Minnesota school teacher who immigrated from the Ogaden in 1993. “It happens every day in the Ogaden, and every day someone in Minnesota is sending money.”

Mohamed and other Ogaden immigrants quoted in this story declined to give their full names for fear that their families and friends living in the Ogaden would be jailed, tortured or killed in retribution for their openness.

In recent years, one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises has unfolded silently in the Ogaden region, where a vicious counter-insurgency campaign by the Ethiopian government has wiped out scores of villages, killed thousands of civilians, and displaced tens of thousands or more to refugee camps in Ethiopia and northern Kenya.

About 5,000 Ogaden refugees have found their way to Minnesota, which has one of the largest refugee populations from the Ogaden crisis in the world. They Ogaden refugees in Minnesota are settled mainly in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Willmar, St. Cloud and Faribault.



Frantic Calls



The ransoming of Ogaden refugees in Minnesota is exacting a disastrous economic, psychological and social toll within the Ogaden community and the broader society, Ogaden immigrants here say.

“I cry every night, believe me,” said Abdi, an Ogaden refugee who has sent $600 ransoms on two occasions. “You are forced to do what is not right, you are forced to do the wrong thing. It’s horrible. It lives with us, it lives with us everywhere. No matter where I am, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the living room, I cannot hold back my tears.”

Being forced to spend thousands of dollars to free their relatives from jail in Ethiopia slows down the Minnesota Ogadeni refugees' attempts to learn English, to get an education and to successfully assimilate into U.S. society, they say.

“We get frantic phone calls day and night,” says Mustafe, an Ogaden refugee who works at Minneapolis employment agency. “Friends and family need money to be freed from jail. They say ‘Please send us money, please send us money!’ We send it, of course, but as a result we go into debt ourselves. I don’t even dream of going back to school to improve myself until the situation in Ogaden changes and improves.”

Financial Aid

In 2007, Mustafe sent $1,500 towards a $4,000 ransom collected in Minnesota to release a teenaged cousin who was jailed for three months, and was released after the ransom was paid. As a result of that and other ransoms Mustafe has paid, plus monthly support he sends back home to relatives, he is about $10,000 in debt.

The ransoming of Ogaden refugees is only one facet of an extreme humanitarian crisis involving countless crimes against humanity bordering on a full-scale genocide, that has been building in the Ogaden for more than a decade, but intensified sharply in 2007.

The roots of the Ogaden crisis lie in the fact that eastern Ethiopia is inhabited by ethnic Muslim Somalis at a time when the Ethiopian government has been waging war against Somalia. In December 2006, with financial aid and military training from the U.S., Ethiopia crushed the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist government that controlled Somalia.

In 2007, the Ethiopia-Somalia war intensified in Ogaden, where the Ethiopian Army launched an all-out counter-insurgency against a separatist militia, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, which it calls a terrorist organization.

Collective Punishment

The ONLF conducts deadly raids against Ethiopian military, such as an April 2007 attack against a Chinese-run oil operation in the Ogaden which killed not only Ethiopian soldiers but several dozen Ethiopian citizens and nine Chinese nationals.

In retaliation for that attack, Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, launched a vicious crackdown on the ONLF, targeting not only ONLF fighters but their families, friends and other supporters throughout the region. In 2008, Human Rights Watch published a report, “Collective Punishment: War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia's Somali Region.”

The report documented hundreds of cases of torture, rape, executions and indeed the destruction of entire Ogaden villages on the mere suspicion that someone in the village was harboring an ONLF fighter. Human Rights Watch said the likely scale of the disaster was far larger than they were able to document in the report.

Since 2007 all foreign journalists and many aid organizations, including the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, have been forced by the Ethiopian government to suspend operations in the Ogaden.

Virtually all of the ransoms paid by Minnesota Ogadeni refugees to the Ethiopian military are to release friends and relatives who have been jailed on suspicion of knowing, sheltering, or aiding ONLF fighters.

Clan Elders

But in a region like Ogaden, where almost every village has at least one son or daughter who has joined the ONLF, to declare war on all people with even a slight relationship the ONLF is tantamount to declaring war on the entire Ogadeni people – on their society and culture. From an Ogadeni perspective, that is what has happened.

In Minneapolis over the past two weeks, I interviewed 18 Ogaden refugees. Every one confirmed knowledge of the frequent payment of ransoms by Minnesota Ogadenis to free imprisoned relatives held by the Ethiopian army in the Ogaden.

About half of the refugees I interviewed said they had personally paid ransoms to free relatives from jail, and some had done so many times.

The ransom amounts ranged from $300 to $1,500. In some cases those amounts were contributions to total collected ransoms of more than $10,000, which seems to be a typical amount needed to release Ogadeni clan elders who are held.

Here are four ransom stories I was told: