'Rebels' Documentary Angers Ethiopia

By Philip Emase

A documentary produced by a Kenyan media house has irked the Ethiopian government, threatening to jolt relations between Addis Ababa and Nairobi.

Ethiopia’s ambassador to Kenya sought the intervention of the Kenyan government to stop the broadcast of a four part series about a low-key rebel group in its Southern region of Oromia, which it has dismissed as a minority terrorist group with an anti-peace agenda.

Titled “Inside Rebel Territory : Rag-Tag Fighters of the Oromo Liberation Front,” the documentary traces the identity of the separatist Oromo Liberation Front’s (OLF) rebels in Southern Ethiopia. It was produced by NTV, a private television station in Kenya owned by the Nation Media Group.

Ethiopian Ambassador Disasa Dirribsa wrote a protest letter to the media group as it began promoting the documentary days before airing it, asking them not to broadcast it.

In his letter, Dirribsa dismissed the OLF as a terrorist group that had lost the support of the Oromo people it claims to fight for, and accused the media house of a wider plot to promote terrorist elements in the sub region.

“The OLF has been totally rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Oromo population, who are exercising and enjoying their democratic rights," the envoy wrote.

The OLF was formed 1973 to pursue self determination for the Oromo, a Cushitic people who form the largest single ethnic group in Ethiopia but hold limited power.

In the documentary, NTV reporter Yasin Juma and cameraman Dan Okoth spend five days embedded with the rebels in the arid plains of Oromia, where they witness the OLF fighters carrying out drills and keeping vigil at a night campfire. They also slaughter a camel, eat its meat raw and drink its blood in overflowing mugs before taking turns to drink a greenish slime from the camel’s intestines, which they believe protects them from disease.

At one point, the reporter interviews a sole female rebel who claims she chose to join the OLF three years ago after “being chased” from her former high school in Addis Ababa and thrown into prison along with 13 other schoolmates.

NTV said its intention in producing the documentary was to draw attention to the insecurity and occasionally killings perpetrated by the OLF rebels against Kenyans living in villages along the country’s northern border with Ethiopia.

“Our mission was to reveal the faces of a secretive rebel group whose impact has directly been felt by Kenyans living on the Northern frontier. No media had ever before managed to enter the remote interior of Southern Ethiopia that is home to marauding bands of the rebel Oromo Liberation Front,” Yasin Juma said in his voiceover.

“For more than 30 years, the OLF has evaded the glance, let alone the scrutiny of the media. Their operations have for decades been shadowy, and their leadership faceless,” the reporter added.

The Ethiopian embassy sought the intervention of Kenya’s foreign ministry, saying the airing of the documentary was against Ethiopia’s national security interest. As a result, officials from Kenya’s information ministry called on the Nation Media Group on August 7.

According to the Nation Media Group Managing editor Joseph Odindo, the Kenyan ministry of information did not seek to bar the broadcast, but instead asked them to put the Ethiopian government’s concerns into consideration.

“They simply wanted to tell us formally, as a government, that the Ethiopians were unhappy, and to ask that we take their feelings into account,” Odindo told the International Press Institute (IPI).

The media house said it made effort to interview the Ethiopian ambassador for his side of the story, but was snubbed.

“We have done everything possible to include the point of view of the Ethiopian government, even thought the ambassador refused to participate in it,” Odindo said.

Last July, Ethiopia enacted an “anti-terrorism” law that prescribes up to 20 years imprisonment for anyone who "writes, edits, prints, publishes, publicizes, disseminates, shows, or makes to be heard any promotional statements encouraging terrorist acts.”

Human Rights Watch criticized the new law, saying it could increase the suppression of political opposition and independent criticism of government policy.