UN: Oromo youths flee Ethiopia
2004-04-28 21:03
Nairobi - At least 516 Ethiopian youths from the Oromo ethnic group have arrived in Kenya since last week to escape what they say is a government campaign of intimidation, the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said on Wednesday.
The youths, most of them aged between 15 and 25, started arriving in the Kenyan border town of Moyale on April 19. They were camped at a police station, where they were receiving help from Kenyan officials, the UNHCR said.
"A team of UNHCR officials left Nairobi for Moyale this morning to assess the situation... The priority now is to try to find a way for the students to go back home in dignity and safety," a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Emmanuel Nyabera, said.
In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's Information Minister Bereket Simon accused the rebel Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) of luring the youngsters into Kenya with promises of money and scholarships.
"False promises of good fortune, scholarships and money circulated by OLF agents among the youngsters is the main reason for abandoning their families and studies," Bereket said.
"Any time they wish to continue with their studies they are free to do so. The government has no grudge against any peaceful youngster or anyone else," he added.
The fleeing students, most of them from the secondary school in a town called Moiyale on the Ethiopian side of the border, told UNHCR officials last week that a number of their peers had been arrested.
The Ethiopian government is fighting the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), a separatist rebel group active in the south of the country.
The OLF was part of Ethiopia's transition government from 1991 to 1995, after the fall of the Marxist regime of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam.
After numerous disputes it left the coalition and demanded the creation of an independent state to be called Oromia, located near Ethiopia's southern border with Kenya and Somalia.