Ogaden refugees vow never to return
DADAAB REFUGEE CAMP, Kenya (AFP) — Halimu, a 20-year-old with a disability, feels she escaped hell when she and three friends embarked on a three-month odyssey to flee Ethiopia's conflict-torn Ogaden region.
Now that she has reached the safety of the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya, she cannot contemplate ever returning to her village.
"The government soldiers attacked our village one day, accusing all of us of supporting the rebels... I woke up that morning and all my family was gone," she recounts, hiding her malformed foot under a long black Muslim garment.
She left what remained of her village of Garbo in January 2008 with three friends her age.
"We had heard and seen what happened to people and were scared of everyone so we would hide during the day and walk at night. We had taken some food with us and sometimes we were able to find some in the villages we found."
Garbo was attacked by rebels from the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) in January 2007 and became the scene of some of the worst violence since the government launched a major crackdown in April the same year.
"I still don't know where the rest of my family is and I'm only in Dadaab for the security but I don't think I will ever go back, I just can't face the idea of risking the same ordeal a second time," Halimu says.
Dadaab, a cluster of three camps sprawling in a hostile area of northeastern Kenya, is home to around 200,000 refugees.
The vast majority are Somalis who fled 17 years of civil unrest and poverty. This year alone, 40,000 have poured in, fleeing the crossfire of almost daily fighting between Ethiopian-backed government troops and Islamist insurgents.
But most Somalis say they are hoping to return to their homeland soon and the fact that their Ogadeni kinsmen have forsaken any desire to return is a measure of the horror they left behind.
As global refugee day is marked on June 20, the plight of the civilian population in Ogaden remains one of the most under-reported crises in the world, due to drastic aid and media access restrictions imposed by Addis Ababa.
In a report released earlier this month, the New York-based organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the Ethiopian army of executing, torturing and raping civilians in the Ogaden.
Ethiopia vehemently denied the allegations, which also include beatings, burning entire villages and other abuses HRW said were tantamount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Abdidahir Osman sees himself as being almost fortunate to have reached Dadaab alive, in barely a month and with his wife and eight children.
The 42-year-old first fled his native Ogaden during the 1977 war between Ethiopia and Somalia. He settled in Mogadishu but returned home when civil unrest broke out following president Siad Barre's 1991 ouster.
Then in February 2008, he left everything he had once again.
"There were too many dangers. We are pastoralists and the army started limiting access to water for our livestock. Our animals gradually died after which several people were arrested and our land was eventually seized.
"Then I had a small kiosque in town, in Laasoole. But the whole place was burned down. Four hundred families were living there... The soldiers forced us to sit and watch while our village was being torched," he says.
"I don't expect ever to go back to my country. Even if I wanted to, everything I had is lost. The place where we lived doesn't exist anymore, it will now remain a place where a village once was," Abdidahir mourns.
Nasra Ali Adan and her six children were also among the 40,000 new arrivals registered in Dadaab since the start of the year.
She fled the Ogaden late last year to join her sister in Mogadishu but was forced back on the road almost immediately by the fighting there.
"I still consider myself Ethiopian but I never dream of going back to the Ogaden... My husband was shot by soldiers in front of me. Now that I'm here in Kenya, I can live without the fear of my children being killed."
