How $800M U.S. Aid Makes Ethiopians Want To Die

With $800 million a year efforts to “aid” Ethiopia, one of America’s biggest aid recipients, the United States is supporting forcible resettlement of 200,000 self-sufficient tribal people, causing those who’ve survived thus far to want to die rather than be raped, beaten and arrested for resisting.

Many Ethiopians have standards and principles that outmeasure what is seen in the United States. Discipline, determination, justice on the local level without prisons… The list continues, as seen in the YouTube video below by World Focus

Promises Of Modern Development Like Americans Have

U.S. and British aid has left thousands of Mursi, Kwegu and Bodi tribal people with no land, cattle herds or livelihood. Unable to sustain themselves, they say now they’re just ‘waiting to die’.

This plan has been justified in a country renowned for famine, by claiming it will give the tribes ‘a modern life.’

Modern life in the United States means lower standard of living for more, lower sustainability, higher disease rates, lower education rates, less human empowerment and greater power to the corporate government.

Many tribal people know that and are resisting.

So called beneficiaries of this US ‘development’ scheme are being arrested, beaten and raped. Some are victims of targeted killings.

Their grain stores are being destroyed in an effort to force them off their lands and their ways of life. 

The result has been a humanitarian catastrophe, similar to but on an even greater scale than such modern developments are causing in the United States and other western nations.

Two July 2013 reports from the Oakland Institute, Development Aid to Ethiopia: Overlooking Violence, Marginalization, and Political Repression and Ignoring Abuse in Ethiopia: DFID and USAID in the Lower Omo Valley, show how Western “development” assistance supports forced evictions and massive violations of human rights in Ethiopia.

The Ethiopian government’s “villagization” resettlement program, clearing vast areas for large-scale land investments is funded mainly by international development organizations.

Development Aid to Ethiopia establishes direct links between development aid at an average $3.5 billion a year, equivalent to 50 to 60% of Ethiopia’s national budget, and industrial projects violating human rights of people in the way these projects are implemented.

That report shows how indirect support, in the form of funding for infrastructure, such as dams for irrigation and electricity for planned plantations, plays a role in repressing local communities and oppressing people.

Sources: Oakland Institute, Survival International

Photo: Survival International