2023-02-16_Anno Massacre Report – Public Version
At least 50 people were killed in Ethiopia’s Oromiya region this month in an attack by a banned rebel group, the state-appointed human rights commission said on Wednesday.
Oromiya is home to Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group and has experienced unrest for many years, rooted in grievances about political marginalisation and neglect by the central government.
The killings on Feb. 2 mainly targeted internally displaced persons in the town of Ano, about 380 km (235 miles) west of the capital Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said in a report.
Read the report by Amhara Association of America (AAA)
For a well armed group to go in a shelter and shooting unarmed and defenseless refugees is nothing but savagery. It does not define strength in anyone. What I take away from such massacres is that it does not come as a surprise or is not given widespread coverage in international media. Just look around. That includes media outlets of our own Diaspora. It has become like ‘50 unarmed refugees shot to death: so what?’ I have discussed this with some friends and what one of them told had registered with me as something that has some truth in it. He told me that such numbness started during the days of the bloodthirsty Mengistu when he was throwing tortured bodies of his opponents in the streets which included those as young as 10 year olds. It was a daily part of life to see dead bodies with eyes gouged out and mangled beyond apprehension. Such culture of being oblivious started in those days of atrocities so shocking that the entire generation was left numb. You were not even allowed to mourn their loved ones and if you did pincers and dental drills awaited you. That is why such savagery has become just normal story for many. 50 people killed, so what? 100 peopled killed, so what? 1,000 people killed, so what? 600,000 young people lost their Allah created lives in senseless war, so what? This is something I can’t put my arms around. I will never understand it. Those of you among our Diaspora who go beyond numbness and glorify such band murderous vagabonds, you must be ashamed of yourselves. This is not freedom fighting but rather savagery from the dark ages. You must be ashamed of yourselves!!!
What a sad story! They went out begging for drinking water and ended up dead. Violence against civilians is a never ending story of the old country. Even in Tigray where the guns of the warring factions gone silent a different form of violence is being perpetrated on the civilians of that region. They are now being besieged by former fighters of the TPLF. Robberies, kidnapping and physical assaults of all sorts are said to be daily occurrences in big cities like Mekele. What I heard the reason they are doing that on their own fellow citizens is they have an axe to grind on the civilians. They believe the citizens had stopped supported them during their losing streaks during the days leading to the peace agreement. That is their way of settling scores with the citizens they now think had ‘betrayed’ them. The story will be the same if these gangs of hoodlums now wreaking havoc in the western parts of Oromia. Just look what they have been doing. They have been murdering people they see as their imaginary mortal enemies and those Oromos they suspect as ‘collaborators’. What they do to those collaborators is utter savagery unthinkable. I heard from those who have first hand stories for that area is these brutes butchering the entire members of the ‘collaborators’ including the elderly and even toddlers and nursing mothers. Such savagery is unthinkable in my Oromo culture and values. It is my Oromos who created the system of Gudifachaas, Moggaasas and Ilma-Gosaa of assimilations and these were applied to other ethnic groups. Just imagine what these hoodlums become undisputed rulers of their fantasized ‘republic’. Just imagine that. They will make Idi Amin, Bokassa, Mobutu, Pol Pot, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao and Attila the Hun look like little angels.