Oromo Students and Teachers Continue to be targeted by Government

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has published a report on human rights abuses in Ethiopia. NEAR wishes to focus the attention on the continuous harassment that teachers and students of the Oromo group are facing in the country. NEAR has also been informed of several students who had been forced to leave Ethiopia and now taking refuge in Kenya.

HRW reports that in past years, Oromo students at Addis Ababa University and in secondary and junior secondary schools throughout Oromia have organized several public demonstrations against unpopular government policies and actions. Authorities have repeatedly responded to these demonstrations with mass arrests and violence.
Students have frequently been arrested by security forces outside the context of student demonstrations as well. Human Rights Watch interviewed several students who had been arrested and tortured in recent years by police and military officials who accused them of involvement with the OLF (Oromo Liberation Front). One fourth-year Addis Ababa University student who had yet to be readmitted to the University following his dismissal at the time of the January 2004 student demonstrations said that he has been arrested and interrogated repeatedly throughout 2004. Most recently, he was arrested in December 2004 and taken to a police station in Addis Ababa’s Gulele district for questioning: ‘They took me to the police station and asked me to tell them what I knew about the OLF, about their structures here in Addis. I said I didn’t know. Then they asked me for the addresses of some OLF members. I said again that I didn’t know anything about the OLF. Then one of them took a chair and hit me on the head with it, and called in some other police officers to beat me. They beat me repeatedly and locked me in a cell for three days. After three days they brought me a paper that said that if I heard anything from here onwards about the OLF I would report it to the police. Since I had no other option I signed it. They didn’t even take me to court’.
The Union of Oromo Students in Europe reports: ‘Since 2000 more than 20 Oromo students have been killed by the TPLF (Tigrean People's Liberation Front) security and military forces on various occasions of the peaceful demonstrations. Significant numbers have been injured; flee from their home country, dismissed from schools and Universities. Some are still detained and others sentenced by TPLF court for long years of imprisonment.’
HRW reports also that local authorities have employed somewhat more subtle methods of controlling dissent among the student population. School administrators routinely force teachers to provide them with information about who their students are associating with and what they are discussing in class. Teachers in several schools told the organisation that they had been instructed to pay special attention to any incriminating drawings or notes they might find when reading their students’ exercise books. One teacher from Dembi Dollo said that the director of his school even told him to keep an eye out for anything suspicious his students might scrawl onto their desks. One eight-year old student in Dembi Dollo was recently expelled from school for a year after making an “OLF” stamp for a school crafts project. He stated: “I have to follow them as he says and I have reported some students to the director, I worry very much about this because I am being made to oppress my own students. They should have the right to do what they want on their exercise books. But if I do not report and someone else sees they may say that I encouraged the students to do this.”
One former high-ranking local security official who was formerly responsible for supervising this sort of surveillance told HRW that many teachers undertook to gather such information because they were threatened with transfer to remote postings far from their families if they refused. “Many people in government jobs—especially in the school system—become party [OPDO] supporters even if they don’t want to,” he said. “They have families to think of, and so they eventually submit.”

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