and Minnesota feels the heat says Doug McGill of Daily Planet.
“What’s going on in Ethiopia is the government is trying to silence all opposition,” said Robsan Itana, director of the Oromo American Citizens Council, based in St. Paul, which represents immigrants of the Oromo ethnic group, the largest in Ethiopia. “They are killing people.”
Another example that is having repercussions in this state is a bloody clash that occurred in May between the Oromo and Gumuz ethnic groups in western Ethiopia, that left more than a hundred people killed.
On the surface, the inter-tribal nature of the Oromo-Gumuz conflict left little trace of Ethiopian government involvement.
Yet Oromo in Ethiopia and in the Minnesota diaspora have charged – as one or another party nearly always does in such cases – that the Ethiopian government instigated the conflict by various means, such as ceding land belonging to one party to another, as a way to foment violence and launch a brutal attack-by-proxy on a targeted ethnic group.
“It’s a nightmare what Oromos are subjected to in Ethiopia,” says Lencho Bati, a professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota, and a native Oromo. “It’s exactly what blacks in South Africa suffered under apartheid – lack of access to resources, education, power, cultural enrichment and the right to self-determination.”
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