Yimam Seid, 24, was born and raised in a village named Tole Kela, located in Arjo Gudetu Woreda, west of Nekemte in Oromia’s East Wollega Zone. His family moved to Tole Kela from Wello, driven there by the famine that tore through northern Ethiopia in the 1970s.
Yimam, a former high-school student, once dreamt of building a better life for himself through education, determined to change his family’s fortunes.
Today, that dream is little more than a memory to Yimam, who sits hungry, alone, and mutilated in an IDP camp on the outskirts of Debre Birhan, hundreds of kilometers from the place he and his family had called home for half a century.
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Yimam’s nightmare began four years ago, on a day when he fell victim to the ethnic violence that has become almost synonymous with Wollega.
“Our village was attacked by those they call OLF-Shene. They killed around 1,500 people in our village in a single day. They wanted the land. They killed all the ethnic Amhara there. My friends, brothers, and others were killed,” Yimam told The Reporter. “I still don’t know where my father is.”
The killers left Yimam strewn among the corpses after chopping his arm off at the shoulder. They assumed he was dead.
“I was in the village for days. I was found unconscious, after bleeding out,” said Yimam, who still suffers from low blood pressure.
His rescuers took him to Gimbi, a small town located an hour’s drive west from Arjo Gudetu, for medical treatment. Yimam stayed there for a month and a half.
“Then we fled to Debre Birhan because it wasn’t safe to return,” he told The Reporter.
Yimam was one of 7,063 IDPs residing in Bakello camp on the outskirts of Debre Birhan, a little over 100 kilometers northeast of Addis Ababa, when The Reporter visited last week.
Bakello is one of three major IDP centers near Debre Birhan, along with the ‘Weinishet’ and ‘China camp’.
Together, the three centers house close to 23,000 IDPs. The figure does not include those trying to eke out a living in Debre Birhan, those who left the camps to seek shelter with relatives elsewhere, or those stuck in limbo in an attempt to return to their homes.
Children and the elderly make up most of Bakello’s solemn population. There are no schools, nor is there any form of humanitarian aid. Children, most of whom have lost parents, wander the dreary camp while the elderly sit alone and watch in despair.
Each individual there has a horrific story to tell about atrocities and inhumane attacks on relatives and neighbors. The memories are accompanied by a deep mistrust of the government and other ethnic groups who failed to protect them.
All 7,063 IDPs in Bakello were displaced from Oromia over the past few years, and while they feel lucky to have survived the horrific violence that has claimed so many lives, they have all but lost hope in being able to continue theirs.
Among the most heart-wrenching accounts in Bakello is one shared by a mother-of-four languishing in the camp.
Abebech, whose name has been changed for safety reasons, told The Reporter about the harrowing sequence of events and the despicable acts of violence that led her to where she is now.
Abebech, now 38, was born and raised in Dano Woreda in the West Shewa Zone. Like Yimam, her family relocated to Oromia during the Derg regime, and, like Yimam, Abebech had lived there her entire life, eventually getting married and raising a family.
She never expected to be the target of ethnic violence.
“Armed men of OLF-Shene identify ethnic Amhara in the area in collaboration with locals and government officials,” said Abebech. “They attacked our Woreda. I was kidnapped.”
She says her brothers, worried about such an attack, had already fled to Addis Ababa.
“I had heard OLF-Shene do not kill women so I stayed home. But they took me into the forest and kept me there for over a month. They beat me and gangraped me. My family and children were also beaten the day I was kidnapped,” Abebech told The Reporter.
She says people in her community identified her and her family to the perpetrators.
“We were targeted because we are Amhara. I’ve suffered a lot. I am still ashamed to be seen or talk to people who knew me,” said Abebech.
An 80,000 birr ransom paid by her relatives secured her release, a month and a half after she was kidnapped.
Abebech fled Dano immediately afterwards, eventually finding her way to the IDP camp alongside thousands of others seeking shelter from violence. Her husband, an ethnic Oromo, stayed behind while she fled with four of their children.
“I have nobody to help me here,” Abebech told The Reporter.
The beatings and sexual violence she endured at the hands of OLF-Shene have left her with a broken arm, which has not healed properly. This, and other health complications, leave Abebech unable to provide for her children.
“I tried to find work as a laborer but I can’t do anything,” she said. “I wish I were dead.”
Camp administrators told The Reporter it has been several months since NGOs and aid providers were instructed to suspend their operations in the camps. Deliveries of wheat flour once every three months constitute all the help being extended to Abebech, Yimam and thousands of others like them.
Though far from adequate, Bakello and the other two camps have thus far provided some semblance of security for those fleeing violence and persecution in Oromia, particularly in Wollega and West Shewa. Many have resided here for the past three or four years.
However, even this small mercy is set to be snatched away as the government has ordered all IDPs to leave the camps near Debre Birhan.
Now, they face the prospect of being cast out with nowhere to go.
“The government has told us to leave the camps. NGOs have also been ordered to stop providing support, and nearly all of them have. Officials from the Debre Birhan administration told us to leave. They haven’t given us any other option. They said there shouldn’t be any reports indicating the presence of IDPs in Debre Birhan from here on,” a camp administrator told The Reporter.
Sources say the government is looking to utilize the land hosting the camps for another, as yet unidentified purpose.
“We were told to just leave. They told us we can go back to where we were displaced from, or go to our relatives, or anywhere else. Just not the camps. Everybody is living in fear of the government forcing us from the camp,” said the administrator.
Government officials have reportedly been telling the IDPs it is safe to return to the parts of Oromia they once had to flee. They say the threat posed by OLF-Shene is no longer there.
The IDPs, however, do not buy the story.
“Four months ago, the government forcefully returned some 60 people from Bakello to Wollega and West Shewa. They still live in shelters in towns, unable to go back to their homes in rural areas,” said the administrator.
OLF-Shene remains a very real threat in the remote areas in Wollega and West Shewa, where most of the IDPs used to live.
“Four of the 60 IDPs who returned have been killed so far. They were killed trying to return to their homes,” the administrator told The Reporter.
Other sources say fighting in these areas continues, despite the government’s recent announcement of a peace deal with an OLF-Shene faction.
The conditions mean the IDPs are in no hurry to return, regardless of the orders from a nationwide task force comprising officials from federal institutions, regional administrations and security agencies.
Who displaced them?
Although the people in the IDP camps are ethnic Amhara, they and their families have resided in various parts of Oromia for decades. The majority were relocated during the Derg regime, in the face of the worst famine to hit northern Ethiopia in recent memory. They have lived in Oromia in peace for nearly half a century, intermarrying and raising families in their newfound homes, with many relying on farming and livestock.
But things have changed in recent years, particularly following the political upheaval of 2018.
“For years, especially under EPRDF, through the education system and narratives, ethnic Oromo people have been brainwashed. They were told [Emperor] Menelik killed Oromos. The younger generation, particularly, was raised with this distorted narrative to push them to hate ethnic Amhara people. This has become reality under the current government,” said an IDP sheltering at Bakello.
He, too, was displaced from Dano, where he used to work as a teacher.
“After the current government came to power, we began to receive open threats from the local ethnic Oromo youths. The local Oromo youth, with whom we were raised and went to school, began to say ‘no non-ethnic Oromo should walk on our land,’” said the Teacher.
He told The Reporter the youth began to single out ethnic Amhara in their communities and pass on the information to OLF-Shene members in the area.
“Then, four years ago, they came out from the wilderness and began attacking ethnic Amhara residents, going from door to door. The mass attacks were orchestrated through collaboration between OLF-Shene and the civilian ethnic Oromos who lived with us,” said the Teacher.
Administrators in Bakello camp believe the government has a hand in the atrocities.
“In the months before the attacks started in 2020, officials from West Shewa Zone convened the public and told them OLF-Shene is an enemy of the state. But, at the end of the meeting, the Zone officials convened local administrators and security officers separately and told them that OLF-Shene is a defender of the Oromo,” a camp administrator who used to work as a government official in West Shewa told The Reporter.
He says local officials were instructed not to harm OLF-Shene members, only to prevent them from damaging government property.
“Because I speak Afan Oromo, they never suspected I was Amhara,” said the former official.
He told The Reporter the government would provide covert support to OLF-Shene using tactics he witnessed during his participation in a number of government-organized campaigns to clear out the armed group.
“At the time, there was the regional special force. Whenever the campaigns were conducted, government forces were deployed to the areas harboring OLF-Shene members and these forces typically took surplus weapons, ammunition, and food with them. Upon arrival, OLF-Shene forces would begin firing in our direction, pointing [their weapons] to the sky. Immediately, our commanders would order a retreat and the government forces would leave behind all the weapons, ammunition, and food they had with them. This is how the government was supplying provisions to OLF-Shene,” the former official told The Reporter.
He is convinced beyond a doubt that the government had no intention to annihilate OLF-Shene.
“We concluded the displacement of ethnic Amhara from Oromia was orchestrated both by the government and the armed forces in Oromia. Ultimately, what they wanted was our property and the land we were holding. We decided it was no longer safe there. It was only a matter of time before they came and finished us all off,” the former official told The Reporter.
Nonetheless, the Oromia regional administration has always placed the blame solely on the shoulders of OLF-Shene. More recently, it issued statements attributing mass killings and atrocities in the region to armed groups based in the Amhara region, which it designated as Fano.
Meanwhile, more than 22,000 IDPs lick their wounds in the camps surrounding Debre Birhan, with the threat of eviction hanging over their heads.
Officials at the Ministry of Peace say efforts to return the IDPs to their homes are underway, alluding to unspecified government support.
A source at the International Labor Organization (ILO), who works closely with refugees and IDPs, sees a grim future ahead for the residents of the Bakello, Weinishet, and China camps. Speaking anonymously, he told The Reporter that political motives play a role in the camps’ appalling living conditions and the government’s desire to tear them down.
“The IDPs and the government have their own perspectives and facts. The IDPs say they are victims of ethnic politics under the current government. The government’s position is that these IDPs serve the narrative of Amhara nationalism,” said the source.
He indicated the government believes that armed groups based in the Amhara region, as well as other political actors, use the IDPs as fodder to assert a narrative that the government is targeting ethnic Amhara people.
“Therefore, the government does not want to perceive them as IDPs but as people being used as political input,” said the source.
He told The Reporter it has become virtually impossible for NGOs to support the IDPs.
“NGOs are unable to engage with these IDPs because the government does not accept them as IDPs in the first place. If NGOs engage with the IDPs without government consent, it would make things difficult for us. Secondly, there are a lot of activists among the IDPs, especially those in the Debre Birhan camps. The activists are capitalizing on the IDPs for the purpose of politics. It is likely the IDPs will remain in limbo,” said the source.
Where to?
The camps in Debre Birhan account for just a fraction of an estimated 4.5 million people currently displaced in both rural and urban locations across Ethiopia, according to the latest report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Close to a million IDPs in Tigray remain in limbo as territorial disputes between the Tigray and Amhara regional governments keep their homes out of reach. A similar number have been displaced by conflict in the Amhara region, while hundreds of thousands in Afar have nowhere to turn.
This is despite 3.3 million IDPs returning to their areas of origin since January 2022, according to the report.
Millions of others are unable to return, and most do not receive adequate humanitarian assistance and government support where they are.
Many IDPs, especially those living in protracted displacement, can be assisted to return, relocate or locally integrate, according to assessments. However, an official at the Ministry of Peace says the government does not have the resources to cope with the situation.
“There are too many IDPs across the country. The government has several other priorities. If it provides support for IDPs in one region, it causes issues in another region,” said the official.
In addition to the glaring security issues, IDPs from Oromia say their homes have been burnt down and destroyed, while their livestock and farms have been looted, preventing them from moving back.
“If the country is safe and stable, we might return. But people who have gone from this camp to Wollega ended up coming back because it’s not safe. If the government provides us with support, we can start life anew,” said Yimam.
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