Massacre of Mount Sufi

The Mount Sufi Massacre in the West Hararge zone of Oromia State in Ethiopia

By By Qeerransoo Biyyaa*

Feb 23, 2007 — Residents of Western Hararge of Oromia State witness that over 20 people were massacred on Sufi Mountain. In the zone, reports indicate that killings torture, and arbitrary detentions are escalating. Government security forces do this to revenge an Oromo civil disobedience that started a year ago.

The mount Sufi tragedy like any holocaust is motivated by the ruling party’s hatred against the Oromo people. Parents of holocaust victims who prefer to be anonymous tell tragic stories. A mother to a 14 year old daughter tells us the tragedy of how her daughter was taken from home and killed. She said that Ayisha Aliyi was taken at night by security forces in her nightgown. Ayisha never came back. Local police station told the mother that it does not know the whereabouts of Ayisha. Later, the mother figured out Ayisha was amongst the 20 killed on mount Sufi. She found her hair and bits of her body and clothes.

The local security forces are empowered by the government to kill and deny the act. One might rightly think that one of reasons for the killings is to terrify the local people from participating in protests. We know this because local administrators call meetings and tell people that your so and so was killed and go and find his corpse on mount Sufi.

Prior to killings such as this, people are arbitrarily arrested in the name of supporting the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and taken to an exclusively Oromo concentration camp called “China Camp”; it is named so because previously Chinese people settled there when constructing roads. Later after they finished and left, the Ethiopian government turned it into a concentration camp. Over 30 people are huddled in a room. All sort of heinous abuses take place there: beatings, torturing, raping and so on. And when these abuses are not enough, prisoners are taken to the hills and shot dead at night. The 20 people were all taken from China Camp and killed on mount Sufi.

Even more tragic, the security forces disallow relatives to take the corpse of the dead ones to bury. People have said they have been interrogated and funeral processions interrupted. Security forces go to the funeral and ask the wife, the father or the mother or anybody why they have gone to Sufi to look for the corpses without their authorisation.

How much do we care as human to pay attention to the holocaust on the making on Oromo land? Should the world continue to see Oromos collecting the bits of bodies and clothes of their massacred family members, friends and relatives? Sufi mountain is just an instance of massacres practically taking place in Oromia for their dissent against tyranny. For an observer, however, the Sufi massacre is a vivid depiction of the wider brutal policy of selective killings the Ethiopian government follows against Oromo people.

* The author is based in Ethiopia. He can be reached at meettaa@gmail.com