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World View Podcast.
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June 23, 2007
nterview by GREG WINTER
Greg Winter and Jeffrey Gettleman discuss
Ethiopia.
GREG WINTER. Welcome to the New York Times
World View podcast, a weekly conversation
with Times foreign correspondents from
across the globe.
I’m Greg Winter, a foreign editor at The
Times.
This week I speak with Jeffrey Gettleman, a
Times East Africa correspondent, about
Ethiopia, its military and the complicated
relationship America has with them.
The Bush administration has joined forces
with Ethiopia to rid the volatile Horn of
Africa of what they both consider a
militant, threatening form of Islam. Just
last winter, they teamed up to oust an
Islamist movement in Somalia, saying it
posed a terrorist danger. But Ethiopia’s own
human rights record is far from clean.
Trained in part by America, Ethiopia’s
military is currently battling its own
rebels and, according to residents and human
rights groups, abusing civilians in the
process.
Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman has
been covering this story and he joins us now
in the studio.
Jeffrey, Hi.
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. Hi, Greg.
GREG WINTER. Good to have you back.
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. Thank you.
GREG WINTER. Jeffrey, you’ve been in the
Ogaden Desert,
the forbidding territory where Ethiopia is
fighting off rebellion. What is it like and
what’s going on there?
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. The Ogaden is part of
eastern Ethiopia. And it’s basically a
desert wasteland. It’s very sparsely
populated, very dry and very hot. The ground
is dry crumbly earth. It’s basically
populated by Somali nomads who identify a
little bit more with Somali culture than
they do with the dominant culture in
Ethiopia. What’s been happening there is for
the past 10 or 15 years there’s been a very
intense separatist war where the people are
trying to fight the government of Ethiopia
to get what they call self-determination.
And we spent a couple weeks in the area
trying to get a sense of exactly what this
fight is about, how this war is playing out,
how the government is reacting to it and how
the people live.
GREG WINTER. Well, tell us about the
civilians you met, more than just the
rebels. The people caught in the crossfire.
Why have they been dragged into this and
what is happening to them?
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. Well, these people are
some of the poorest people on earth. This
area, like I said, is very infertile. The
only way to survive is to be a nomadic
pastoralist. And we met many people who have
cows and camels and who drift around, often
with their homes on the backs of their
camels, surviving off of very little water,
very little food. And on top of this, they
have been caught in the middle of this
separatist war. Many of the civilians we met
supported the rebels because they said that
the Ethiopian government had been abusing
them as a response to fighting this
insurgency. We would come into little
villages with some of these rebel forces and
the women would start cheering. The men
would wave. They’d often give the rebels
food. They’d give them information. And it
really seemed like the local people felt
terrorized by the government and that the
rebels were their only protection.
GREG WINTER. Now, you’ve written that women
have been gang-raped by Ethiopian soldiers;
they’ve been brought in and abused; men have
been “disappeared” into these Ethiopian
jails and into Ethiopian custody. Why are
they bringing in civilians? Are they simply
trying to intimidate the population? Are
they trying to extract information about the
rebels? What is the point of this kind of
abuse?
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. Well, we found it really
surprising. We didn’t expect, when we went
into this area, to experience this and to
encounter all these stories. We had gone
there to try to tell the story of one of
these separatist groups and why they were
fighting the government and how they were
fighting the government. But in the process
of reporting this, we kept meeting person
after person who told us these horrible
stories about how they had been abused. And
what it seems like is that the Ethiopian
government it targeting civilians who they
suspect either support or sympathize with
the separatist rebels. And we met many women
who said they had been taken to police
stations, tortured. We met one woman who
said that Ethiopian soldiers had taken
pliers and twisted her nipples. We met many
people who said they had relatives who had
been captured by Ethiopian forces, people
who had nothing to do with the rebels, and
then had disappeared. We met students who
said that they had been beaten. It seemed
very widespread and systematic, this abuse
toward the civilians. And we couldn’t really
get a response from the Ethiopian government
about why they were doing this, which made
it even more of a mystery of exactly what
the strategy is out there.
GREG WINTER. Now, clearly the Ethiopians are
not eager for this story to get out since
you, along with a Times photographer and
your wife, who is a videographer, were all
imprisoned for nearly a week after reporting
in the Ogaden. Tell us what happened. What
did they do to you and why did they pick you
up?
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. Well, we were blindsided
by this. We had thought that the main danger
to us — the biggest danger to us — was the
rebel forces because this had been a group
that had recently launched an attack on a
Chinese oilfield and had killed some Chinese
workers. So we thought, going into this
area, that if there was any risk, it was
from the rebel side. However, the Ethiopian
government is very sensitive about the
Ogaden region. It seems to be one of the
biggest threats to the stability of the
country. And therefore the military has a
very tight grip on it. After we spent two
weeks walking with the rebels — I think we
covered about 150 miles through very
punishing territory — we emerged in a town
called Deghabur. About 30 minutes after we
arrived at a little hotel, government
soldiers came and they arrested us. They
wouldn’t tell us what we had done wrong or
why we were being arrested but they demanded
that we hand over all of our equipment, our
money, our passports, our notebooks, our
film — everything that we had. They then
kept us for five days. They kept asking us
questions about who we were with, why we
were in that area, what information we could
give them about the rebels. And we insisted
that we were journalists, we had come there
to cover the conflict, that we intended to
get both sides of this conflict and we
really wondered why they were harassing us.
After five days of pretty uncomfortable and
frightening conditions, they finally
released us.
GREG WINTER. Did they ever explain why they
had arrested you or taken you in?
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. We never got a very clear
explanation from anybody. Some people said
that we had been in a sensitive area and
that was one reason why the military was so
concerned and so alarmed by our presence.
But we were also told, which was our
understanding going into this, that you
don’t need any special permission to travel
to the Ogaden and that we hadn’t broken any
laws or done anything specifically illegal.
So it still remains a mystery to us exactly
why they took us and why they have our
equipment still, to this day.
GREG WINTER. Now, Ethiopia’s human rights
transgression are well-documented and
well-known by the State Department, the
European Parliament and human rights groups
across the globe. Yet its alliance with the
United States is growing ever stronger. How
does the administration justify this union
and what complications does it cause?
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. Well, I think this is an
ongoing debate right now. There’s more and
more awareness of Ethiopia’s human rights
record. In 2005, there was a very important
election in Ethiopia, the first test of this
new ethnic federalist system that the
government set up, and it was billed as a
real milestone on the road to democracy.
However, shortly after the election, there
was widespread demonstrations. The
government cracked down brutally. It killed
at least around 200 people, wounded hundreds
more and rounded up thousands and thousands
of demonstrators and opposition supporters.
Ever since then there’s been a little more
of a spotlight on Ethiopia’s tactics — on
the government’s tactics — and on their
human rights abuses. The American government
is aware of this. There are State Department
reports that are done each year on
Ethiopia’s human rights situation. And they
delineate many types of abuses —
extrajudicial killings, arbitrary
detentions, cases of torture, allegations of
disappearances.
Human Rights Watch and other human rights
organizations have looked into this, too.
There was a very chilling report issued in
2005 about an organized campaign by
Ethiopian soldiers in western Ethiopia in
which soldiers were accused of gang-raping
women, burning down villages and abusing
civilians left and right. The American
government seems not so comfortable when we
approach them with questions of why do they
support Ethiopia and how do they integrate
the human rights record with their needs.
They — we really didn’t get a lot of firm or
clear answers from the American government.
What we think is that the government sees
Ethiopia as an important ally in a very
volatile region. The Horn of Africa is home
to Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia — countries that
are increasingly violent, increasingly
anti-American and increasingly militant
Islamists. So the Americans have teamed up
with the Ethiopians in an alliance of
convenience to battle what they both see as
a threat.
GREG WINTER. Now, the region does include
some difficult countries for the United
States — notably Sudan and Somalia. What
would happen to the Horn of Africa if the
United States held back and did not get
involved? Would it become, or is it already,
the incubator of terrorism the
administration contends it is?
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. Well, I think that’s a
good question. Some people think the
American involvement in the region has
actually created more of a problem and that
America’s policy toward Somalia, which was
to go in strong in the early 90’s and
completely abandon the country, then support
warlords in an attempt — a failed attempt —
to prevent an Islamic movement from taking
power. A lot of people think that these
policies have actually created more of an
Islamic threat in this part of the world.
It’s not clear how much America’s
intervention has really stemmed the problem.
Right now a lot of people in Ethiopia are
beginning to resent the American government
because they think they’re giving this
repressive Ethiopian government a blank
check. And there are more and more people
that are questioning why does America
support Ethiopia when they have clear
information that there’s many, many human
right abuses.
GREG WINTER. Now, how about for Ethiopia?
Has Ethiopia’s involvement with the United
States increased tensions with its
neighbors? Or has it boosted its stature on
the continent?
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. A lot of people think
that Ethiopia’s increasingly close
partnership with the United States is
helping prop up this government and that if
it wasn’t for the half-billion dollars of
aid and the key diplomatic support that the
U.S. gives Ethiopia all the time, that the
regime probably wouldn’t survive. I don’t
know how true that is because Ethiopia has a
history of having very strong central
governments that have ruled the country by
military force. It’s a very fractious
country. It’s very poor. It has a history of
famines. It has a history of ethnic
conflict. So, many people, in defense of the
government, say this is part of the way
Ethiopia has always done things, which is to
crush dissent fiercely and brutally and make
sure that the country remains intact. I do
think, though, there’s some truth that
without the American partnership, the
government of Ethiopia wouldn’t be as
powerful as it is today.
GREG WINTER. Well, Jeffrey Gettleman, Times
East Africa correspondent, thanks so much
for coming in and speaking with us.
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. Thank you.
GREG WINTER. And thanks for listening. I’m
Greg Winter of The New York Times. We’ll be
back next week with another edition of World
View.
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