Ethiopia presses ahead with plan to return people displaced by violence

Nairobi — Ethiopia’s prime minister on Thursday pursued a plan to return displaced people to their homes following ethnic violence, meeting communities that recently went home, as relief workers voiced fears that the initiative could provoke fresh violence.

Abiy Ahmed, who took office in April 2018, has won international plaudits for announcing bold reform pledges, but the blossoming of political freedoms over the past year has been accompanied by a surge in ethnic violence.

Rivalries between ethnic groups — once repressed by a state with an iron fist — have exploded into the open, and the UN says 2.4-million Ethiopians are displaced due to these conflicts. More people were displaced in 2018 in the Horn of Africa nation than in any other country, according to data published in May.

Earlier in May, the government announced it was scaling up its plan to return displaced people to their homes as soon as possible, a message Abiy reinforced on Thursday when his office published pictures of him speaking with people from the Gedeo and West Guji areas in southern Ethiopia who had recently returned to their homes.

The area was the site of brutal violence in 2018 — Reuters spoke in August to the family of a coffee farmer whose limbs were chopped off by a mob of young men. About 700,000 people fled ethnic violence in the area in 2018.

Abiy’s delegation, which included his minister of peace, Muferiat Kamil, provided the communities with building materials to rebuild their homes — razed in 2018 during the violence — and the prime minister planted seedlings, according to his office.

The upbeat message contrasts with the views of aid groups and experts who say many of the displaced people are terrified by the prospect of returning to their homelands now, before the causes of the violence along ethnic lines have been resolved.

“Pushing people to return to their home communities prematurely will only add to the ongoing suffering,” Refugees International said in May in response to what it called the government’s “forced returns”.

“There is a risk of further violence that stems from the very ambitious return targets,” said William Davison, senior Ethiopia analyst at the International Crisis Group.

“The problem is there may be lingering resentment and disputes over land and property if adequate work has not been done to assess the situation for returnees and ensure relations have improved,” Davison said.

An aid worker who spoke on condition of anonymity due to tensions between aid groups and the government over the plan, said displaced people “don’t have a voice” in the matter, contradicting the government’s repeated assertions.

The person said that in the past two weeks the government has deployed soldiers in the Gedeo area to dismantle camps, telling people who fled violence in 2018 in the Guji area that they must bundle up their few belongings and head home or have them destroyed.

The prime minister’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment on whether the army has been involved.

Reuters