Ethiopian government urged to end 'villagization' programme - The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the Ethiopian authorities to end its 'villagization' programme, under which indigenous people are forcibly relocated to new villages. Under the programme, the government is forcefully relocating approximately 70,000 indigenous people from the western Gambella region to new villages that lack adequate food, farmland, healthcare, and educational facilities, HRW said in a report released Monday and made available to PANA here.

“The Ethiopian government’s villagization programme is not improving access to services for Gambella’s indigenous people, but is instead undermining their livelihoods and food security,” the report quoted Jan Egeland, Europe director at HRW, as saying.

“The government should suspend the programme until it can ensure that the necessary infrastructure is in place and that people have been properly consulted and compensated for the loss of their land,” Egeland said.

According to the report, entitled “Waiting Here for Death’: Forced Displacement and ‘Villagization’ in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region, state security forces have repeatedly threatened, assaulted, and arbitrarily arrested villagers who resist the transfers.

The report examines the first year of Gambella’s villagization programme and details the involuntary nature of the transfers, the loss of livelihoods, the deteriorating food situation, and ongoing abuses by the armed forces against the affected people.

It said many of the areas from which people are being moved are slated for leasing by the government for commercial agricultural development.

The government said the “villagization” programme is designed to provide “access to basic socio-economic infrastructures” to the people it relocates and to bring “socioeconomic and cultural transformation of the people.”

But despite pledges to provide suitable compensation, the government has provided insufficient resources to sustain people in the new villages, HRW said.

The residents of Gambella, mainly indigenous Anuak and Nuer, have never had formal title to the land they have lived on and used.

HRW said the report was based on more than 100 interviews in Ethiopia in May and June 2011, and at the Ifo refugee camp in Dadaab and Nairobi, Kenya, where many Gambellans have fled.

Pana 17/01/2012