Refugees and asylum-seekers: human debris of the West’s war machine

My telephone rings twice one Friday morning in September. Anxious Oromo refugees and asylum-seekers in Hargeisa, Somaliland, report beatings and refoulement back to Ethiopia. A young woman with a history of detention and rape is refused asylum in the UK and reports tearfully from Yarlswood Immigration Removal Centre that she is due for deportation to Ethiopia in a few days.

Ordinary people are in extraordinary circumstances because of tyranny in one country and hostility and xenophobia in another. Is this misery, fear and abuse related to militarism and the West’s military-industrial complex? Let’s look more closely at Ethiopia.

Respect for human rights is both foundation and mortar in the building of a developed, democratic society. Despite international plaudits for economic growth and its proclaimed meeting of Millennium Development Goals, the one-party state of Ethiopia abuses its citizens and has formalised its hobbling of civil society and media with three laws passed since 2008.[1]

There has been some ritual clucking from foreign donor states but no effective criticism. The main reasons for Ethiopia’s huge financial and moral support from the USA, UK and the EU, once it jettisoned the Albanian communist ideology of its ruling elite, are its commercial and ideological cooperation, most notably in the ‘war on terror’.

To secure a toe-hold of influence in the Horn of Africa, the West has sacrificed its token regard for human rights as a foreign policy objective. Political killings, arbitrary detention, disappearance, torture and rape - tools of repression routinely and daily practised in Ethiopia - are ignored, despite the ritual categorisation of abuse in yearly State Department reports on the country.

With US encouragement, Ethiopia invaded Somalia at the end of 2006. Atrocities committed against civilians during Ethiopia’s destruction of the Islamic Courts Union,[2] responsible for the first semblance of law and order in Somalia since 1991, spawned a backlash - the murderous insurgency led by al-Shabaab, which now destabilises the region.

Ethiopia’s cooperation with the West goes further. In return for training and supplying the Ethiopian army, the US is permitted to launch drone attacks from the Ogaden against al-Shabaab militants in Somalia.

In receipt, mostly from the USA and UK, of $3 billion per year in aid, a third of its annual budget,[3] Ethiopia has built one of the largest and best equipped armies in Africa. Yet, millions of its people are still in need of food aid.

Ethiopia therefore is a crucible in which the military-industrial complex competes with and supplants economic development and the growth of civil society. Food security and human rights are relegated to the bottom division, despite politically-correct nods in their direction from western donors.

Ethiopia’s abusive and suffocatingly restrictive regime produces as many refugees as Iran.[4] Only Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo surpassed Ethiopia as sources of asylum-seekers awaiting refugee status determination at the end of 2011.[5]

The UN refugee agency’s league tables show the clear relationship between conflict and human rights abuse and the exodus of refugees and asylum-seekers. At the end of 2011 there were 42.5 million displaced people. Over 26 million were displaced within their country of origin. More than 15 million were refugees; 4.8 million Palestinians and 10.4 million under the care of UNHCR, elsewhere.[6]

The role of conflict and abuse, both the results of militarism benefitting from the exploits of the European and American military-industrial complex,[7] is clearly apparent from UNHCR figures. Over 60% of the refugees cared for by UNHCR come from five countries - Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo - all synonymous with conflict and abuse. Those lower down the league table are similarly embroiled in war and human rights violations.[8]

And the refugee burden does not fall on Europe or America, contrary to the scaremongering of political parties and the racist British press;[9] only 17% of refugees live outside their region of origin and four out of five live in developing countries, those least able to afford to provide help.[10]

In the twelve months up to the end of June 2012, there were only 19,959 asylum applications in the UK. Decisions were made in 16,729; 10,922 (65%) were refused. There were 15,014 forced removals from the UK in that twelve month period (with the help of Group 4 Securicor - a security satellite of the military-industrial complex).[11]

Western hypocrisy in redefining ‘economic migrant’ as a derogatory term contrasts with the welcome extended to educated professionals, the middle class of developing countries, while those remaining in war zones are ‘starved, stunted and deprived of education.’[12] Vijay Mehta has written persuasively about the role of western militarism in further impoverishing the developing world;[13] how our ‘the military-industrial complex has promoted an international cycle of war and poverty.’[14]

The USA’s and other countries’ insistence on their ‘fifth freedom’ - to have unfettered access to the world’s resources and markets - is the central tenet of foreign policy strategy. State violence against uncooperative citizens, committed by cooperative and kleptocratic elites, is made possible with the awesome physical power of industrial scale militarism, sold to those elites by the West.

The millions who seek sanctuary from conflict and state violence are a predictable consequence of the West’s prioritising profit over people, in the nourishment of its military-industrial complex. The culpability of western ‘democracies’ in this waste of human lives and resources is compounded by their refusal to shoulder a proportionate burden of the human consequences.

Dr Trevor Trueman, Chair, Oromia Support Group.

18 September 2012.

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http://www.oromo.org/osg