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Ogaden: A
Land where A Phone Call Lands You in Jail |
For years, the Ogaden Online media center
has been reporting to the minutest details
the brutalities committed against the Ogaden
nation by the Ethiopian Junta. This, the
Ethiopian Junta, is one that wants the world
to believe otherwise. That none of the daily
reports and witnesses of Ethiopian
brutalities against the Ogaden citizenry is
credible.
Yet every time this Junta and its bevy of
spokesmen open their mouths in defense of
their indefensible actions, all they do is
to prove correct what our reporters have
reported from Ogaden. Their actions or
inactions in Ogaden also prove our report
filings of the constant maltreatment and the
war crimes subjected to the people of Ogaden.
When Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York
Times, NYT, for example recently visited
Ogaden and personally documented the
atrocities committed against the people of
Ogaden, he himself and his team were
subjected to the same atrocities being
reported to the NYT team by the people they
encountered during their Ogaden sojourn.
He and his team were detained and held in
communicado for seven days while the
Ethiopian Junta sworn to the American
embassy in Addis Ababa that they were not
holding Mr. Getleman and his team. Members
of the NYT team were physically harmed as
well.
If Ethiopia had not subjected Mr. Gettleman
and his team the same brutalities, albeit a
minor version for them being Americans and
journalists, it, Ethiopian junta, could have
claimed in its defense laterthat whatever
was documented by the NYT team were biased
or unfounded.
As if to prove to the world community that
one need not commit any crime in order to
find oneself in the wrong books of the
Ethiopian junta and its minions in Ogaden,
David Blair of the Daily
telegraph is a prime example of
the treatment in store for the people of
Ogaden in the hands of this junta.
Even though he wrote an
article from Gode, Ogaden,
yesterday that was very favorable to the
Ethiopian junta his mere presence in Gode
have landed him in an Ethiopian
interrogation cell. Worse him receiving a
phone call from his concerned newspaper
escalated the gravity of the predicament he
found himself in the hands of the Ethiopian
junta.
If an Englishman, a journalist for the Daily
Telegraph, and an author of a piece of
report that was favorable to the Junta can
be interrogated and detained for simply
being in Gode and for having received a
telephone call from his paper, what chance
does an Ogaden citizen have of ever getting
a fair treatment from this junta?
Is it a stretch to extrapolate this incident
and that of the NYT team to deduce the
extent of the brutalities faced by the
people of Ogaden in the hands of this junta?
We, the Ogaden Online Editorial Board,
believe the detention and deportation of Mr.
Blair from Gode is not an isolated incident.
But, we believe that Mr. Blair’s detention,
that of the NYT team earlier in the year,
and the expulsion of the ICRC personnel are
all connected and are prime examples of the
extent this Ethiopian a colonial regime will
go to not only wage war crimes in Ogaden but
to hide its tracks by restricting access to
Ogaden.
If receiving a telephone call had landed Mr.
Blair in prison, IMAGINE being an Ogaden
Somali accused of, without a shred of
evidence, being a member or a sympathizer of
Ogaden National Liberation Front, ONLF?
We believe that enough is enough. The world
community should follow through the recent
United Nations recommendation. The world
community should send a VERY strong
investigative team to Ogaden to, once and
for all, document the atrocities committed
against the people of Ogaden.
editorial@ogaden.com
Ogaden Online Editorial
Oct 10, 2007 |
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