Oct 10, 2007 (Ogaden Online) - For years, the Ogaden Online media center has been reporting to the minutest details the brutalities committed against the Ogaden nation by the Ethiopian Junta. This, the Ethiopian Junta, is one that wants the world to believe otherwise. That none of the daily reports and witnesses of Ethiopian brutalities against the Ogaden citizenry is credible.
Yet every time this Junta and its bevy of spokesmen open their mouths in defense of their indefensible actions, all they do is to prove correct what our reporters have reported from Ogaden. Their actions or inactions in Ogaden also prove our report filings of the constant maltreatment and the war crimes subjected to the people of Ogaden.
When Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times, NYT, for example recently visited Ogaden and personally documented the atrocities committed against the people of Ogaden, he himself and his team were subjected to the same atrocities being reported to the NYT team by the people they encountered during their Ogaden sojourn.
He and his team were detained and held in communicado for seven days while the Ethiopian Junta sworn to the American embassy in Addis Ababa that they were not holding Mr. Getleman and his team. Members of the NYT team were physically harmed as well.
If Ethiopia had not subjected Mr. Gettleman and his team the same brutalities, albeit a minor version for them being Americans and journalists, it, Ethiopian junta, could have claimed in its defense laterthat whatever was documented by the NYT team were biased or unfounded.
As if to prove to the world community that one need not commit any crime in order to find oneself in the wrong books of the Ethiopian junta and its minions in Ogaden, David Blair of the Daily telegraph is a prime example of the treatment in store for the people of Ogaden in the hands of this junta.
Even though he wrote an article from Gode , Ogaden, yesterday that was very favorable to the Ethiopian junta his mere presence in Gode have landed him in an Ethiopian interrogation cell. Worse him receiving a phone call from his concerned newspaper escalated the gravity of the predicament he found himself in the hands of the Ethiopian junta.
If an Englishman, a journalist for the Daily Telegraph, and an author of a piece of report that was favorable to the Junta can be interrogated and detained for simply being in Gode and for having received a telephone call from his paper, what chance does an Ogaden citizen have of ever getting a fair treatment from this junta?
Is it a stretch to extrapolate this incident and that of the NYT team to deduce the extent of the brutalities faced by the people of Ogaden in the hands of this junta?
We, the Ogaden Online Editorial Board, believe the detention and deportation of Mr. Blair from Gode is not an isolated incident. But, we believe that Mr. Blair's detention, that of the NYT team earlier in the year, and the expulsion of the ICRC personnel are all connected and are prime examples of the extent this Ethiopian a colonial regime will go to not only wage war crimes in Ogaden but to hide its tracks by restricting access to Ogaden.
If receiving a telephone call had landed Mr. Blair in prison, IMAGINE being an Ogaden Somali accused of, without a shred of evidence, being a member or a sympathizer of Ogaden National Liberation Front, ONLF?
We believe that enough is enough. The world community should follow through the recent United Nations recommendation. The world community should send a VERY strong investigative team to Ogaden to, once and for all, document the atrocities committed against the people of Ogaden.
editorial@ogaden.com
Ogaden Online Editorial
Oct 10, 2007
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