Protesters show they CARE

FARGO – “Who can stop the killing of women and children?” a man yelled outside the post office here Wednesday afternoon.

“U.S.A.!” two dozen protesters responded.

The repeated chants were part of a protest organized by members of the “I CARE Campaign,” a worldwide effort to bring recognition to a conflict in a region of Ethiopia known as Ogaden.

Abdikarim Rabi, 24, was born in Ogaden and moved to the U.S. when he was 11. Now a Fargo resident, Rabi said he and the roughly 20 other Ogaden immigrants at the protest were there to bring awareness to the human genocide happening in his former home.

“There are 12 million people dying there,” Rabi said. “This is the next Holocaust, a Holocaust in the 21st century.”

The “I CARE Campaign” wants the U.S. government and United Nations to force Ethiopian leaders to allow independent humanitarian organizations into the Ogaden region to assess reported killings, torture and rape of civilians.

The Ethiopian government and Ogaden rebels have been at bloody odds since 2007 when rebels killed many civilians at an oil field.

While some Ogaden residents and groups like I CARE claim the Ethiopian government is guilty of killing thousands of civilians to crack down on rebel forces, the group actually responsible is under debate.

A recent report to the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs found the rebels were mostly responsible for massive acts of brutality and killings.

Since media is not allowed into the region, there is little information to determine the extent of the crisis, Rabi said.

Rabi claimed media are considered terrorists by the Ethiopian government.

Protests similar to the one in Fargo were held Wednesday in Minneapolis, San Diego, Denver and Stockholm, Sweden.

Rabi said he and the men, women and children at the protest want Fargo-Moorhead residents to be aware of the problem in Ogaden.

“We want to show the world the truth,” Rabi said. “Everyone who cares about humanity should take immediate action.”

Rabi said he hoped those who saw the protest would take action by contacting their legislators.

Shining a light on plight of invisible refugees Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/shining-a-light-on-plight-of-invisible-refugees-20110630-1gszl.html#ixzz1Qvn9e7hn

WHEN Hassan Nur has to write down his nationality, nobody recognises it. The community worker is from Ogaden, a dagger-shaped eastern province of Ethiopia subject not only to civil war but a total media and aid blockade.
”I write Ogaden and then in brackets, Ethiopia,” said Mr Nur, who came to Australia as a refugee 20 years ago. ”I will not say I am Ethiopian.”
There are about 300 Ogaden families in Melbourne, and 800 across Australia, yet Marta Kreiser, who co-ordinates the Refugee Action Program for the Brotherhood of St Laurence, had never heard of them until she began working with them a year ago.

”Even the multicultural associations didn’t know about them,” Ms Kreiser said. Aid agencies Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Red Cross and Save the Children were expelled from the region in 2007 after filing reports on famine. Journalists from The New York Times who travelled to Ogaden in June 2007 were arrested, their records seized, and deported.
Tomorrow, the Brotherhood of St Laurence hosts Australia’s first conference on the Ogaden province in an attempt to highlight the plight of Australia’s most invisible refugee community. They share the same needs of many migrants from the Horn of Africa, who have seen war and famine and terror up close. But to this must be added the tyranny of silence, as they are all cut off from communicating with anyone back in Ogaden, and the only news is passed on by other refugees.
In a meeting room in the Ecumenical Migration Centre in Fitzroy, two Ogaden women tell their stories, one in rapid, whispered Somali, the other in cautious English. Fartun Abdi arrived in Melbourne 18 months ago with her two children, a girl now 10 and a boy now six. Mr Nur translated as she told The Age she had not heard from her husband, a truck driver, since he was imprisoned six years ago. She says that after his arrest, she was beaten and raped by Ethiopian soldiers, even though she was heavily pregnant. ”Every woman from the Ogaden has gone through it,” Ms Abdi said. ”Pregnant, girl or old woman, they don’t care.”
Nimo Abdirizak was only 11 when she fled alone on foot to Kenya. ”I was fleeing the war, the raping, all this stuff,” she said. Her father and uncle dead, her mother missing, Ms Abdirizak grew up an orphan in a sprawling refugee camp before moving to Australia in 2009 on a humanitarian visa. She now works in Perth as a factory hand.
The Ogaden Annual International Conference 2011 is at Rydges Bell City Hotel, Preston, from tomorrow.
Source:The Age

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