Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Oromo Community in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Appeal Letter to UNHCR

The following is an appeal letter to the UNHCR from the Oromo Community in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
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Oromo Community in Riyadh
K.S.A
23 November, 2013
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
Riyadh, K.S.A
CC: Headquarters of UN in Geneva
CC: Regional Headquarters
Oromo Community in Riyadh: Appeal Letter to UNHCR
Dear Sir,
The Oromos are one of the largest indigenous nations in the Horn of Africa. They have their own language, culture, and well-developed socio-politico-economics system called the Gadaa System. Under this system, they were practicing equality, democracy, security and safety at their home.
Oromiya had fell under the Ethiopian Empire [in the 19th century;] as history is witnessed, all empires so far known to man were established by genocide and maintained by genocide. Ethiopian empire is such an empire.
Today, a policy of extermination of the Oromo people is underway: the round of men, women, children, students, intellectuals and civic leaders is a routine task of present regime. Arresting, beating, raping, torturing, life imprisoning, looting, and execution into mass graves are a documented tragedy. Those who were not arrested are forced to flee from their homeland through different mechanisms.
In summary, we are also the victims of these events. We become peoples without home. Being an Oromo is a crime. At present, we are living in K.S.A, the present situation in the kingdom is not promising for our existence; moreover, we fear persecution when we returned to our home land. So please, our community is looking forward for your humanitarian protection and safeguard.
Sincerely yours,
Oromo Community in Riyadh

Baddaa Sadeen Booranaa: Kutaa 1ffaa fi 2ffaa




Diddaan Barattoota Oromoo Yuunivarsiitii Gondar Haalaan Jabaatee Barataan Oromoo Tokko Loltoota Wayyaaneen Ajjeefamee Kaan Ammoo Hedduminaan Hidhaa Seenan.

Sadaasa 26,2013 Gabaasa Qeerroo Yuni Gondar

Gonder UniGaaffii mirgaa Oromoo fi addattis lafti Oromoo gurguramuu fi barattooti Yuuniversitiilee adda addaa irraa hidhamuun haadhabatu jechuun barattooti Oromoo diiddaa kaasuun wal qabatee Mootummaan Wayyaanee ilmaan Oromoo keessumaa ammoo barattoota Oromoo hidhaa fi ajjeesaa kan as gehe ammas ittuma fufuun Yuunivarsiitii Gondar keessatti barataa Oromoo ajjeesuu irraan eegalee heddumminaan hiraaresee hidhaatti naqaa jira. Barataan Oromoo Anteeneh jedhamu   barataa FBE marketing tahee waggaa sadaffaa baratu yakka tokko malee mooraa Yuunivarsiitii Gonder keessatti ajjeefamee jira. Barattootni Oromoo gumaa ilma keenyaa ni baafna jechuun diddaa dhageessisuu irratti argamu. Mooraan Yuunivarsiitii Gondaris diddaa kanaan guutamtee mootummaan Wayyaanee TPLF waraana hedduumminaan bobbaasuun dhiphina keessa galee jira.
Waraanni TPLF Yuuniversitichatti bobba’uun barattoota irratti rasaasa dhukaasuun diddaa dura dhaabbachaa jira. Wayyaaneen barattoota ajjeesaa, rasaasaan rukkutaa fi hidhaa as gahe itti fufuun gara jabinaan raawwachuu irraa diddaan jabaatee itti fufee jira. Haala kanaan Sadaasa 25,2013 barattoota Oromoo diddaa gaggeesitan sababa jedhuun hedduu hiraarsaanii kanneen diddicha qindeessitan jedhaman ammo nama 3 fi kanneen kaan hedduun gara mana hidhaa hin beekamneetti ukkaamsee fudhate,kanneen kunis:-
  1. Barataa Taarikuu Tolosaa veternary waggaa 4ffaa
  2. Barataa Teediroos Beezii barataa Veternary waggaa 4ffaa
  3. Barataa Teediroos barataa waggaa 4ffaa veternary dhalootaan naannoo Bishooftu
Kanneen jedhaman dabalatee barattootni hedduun mana hidhaatti ukkaamsamanii jiran. Barattooti Oromoo Yuuniversitii Goonder keessatti argaman kaanis  Ilmaan Oromoo martis iyya  keenya akka nuu dhageessan jechuun dabarfatanii jiru.
Gama kaaniin barattooti Oromoo mooraa Yuuniverstii keessaa bahanii magaala keessa deemuu fi afaan Oromoon haasawaa daandii irra deemuun sadarkaa sodaachisaa ta’etti yakka ta’ee akka jiru gabaasi nu gahe addeessa.

Reviving Afaan Oromo, One Storybook at a Time

toltutufaby Dharra Budicha
(OPride) – More than two decades after it became a working and instructional language in Ethiopia’s Oromia region, Afaan Oromo – the native tongue of over 40 million Oromo people and Africa’s fourth most widely spoken language – remains among the least developed.
The language was officially banned from use in places like courts and media under successive Ethiopian rulers roughly from the late 1880s to 1991. Its legacy is molded as much by the Oromo culture as it is by the history of torture and suppression that the Oromo people continue to face in Ethiopia. Today, however, this legacy is shaky amongst a particular Oromo demographic group: the diaspora-based youth. In the cultural chaos of generational shifts and diasporic identities, most diaspora-based Oromo youth speak very little or broken Oromo with noticeable accents.
While this phenomenon is not unique to the Oromo – a relatively new addition to the larger African diaspora around the world – one Australian Oromo woman is vowing to change this perceived sense of loss amongst the vast Oromo diaspora, one children’s book at a time.
Toltu Tufa, 27, is the heroine behind a new movement called Afaan Publications, which she describes with a tagline: a bold, new way of storytelling. Toltu’s groundbreaking campaign, which seeks torevitalize Oromo language learning, is the first of its kind to leverage modern technology to create culturally appropriate tools and children books in Qubee – the Latin alphabet used to write Afaan Oromo.
In some ways, Afaan is Toltu’s own story. Born and raised in Australia, Toltu was the first female president of the Australian Oromo Community Association in Victoria. Growing up in a biracial Turkish and Oromo household meant that learning the Oromo language was central to Toltu’s childhood.
“Even though my mom wasn’t Oromo and we lived in a foreign country – [my father] was very, very conscious that his children learned his language,” she says in a campaign video uploaded to YouTube. “Speaking Oromo was his connection back to the homeland and by teaching his children that language, he was in affect connecting to the homeland through us, and allowing us to be able to connect back to his sense of home.” Seeking refuge from the Dergue regime’s Red Terror, Toltu’s father, Abdulwahab Tufa, was the first permanent Oromo resident in Australia.
Now a fruitful, vibrant, and abundant cluster, the Australian Oromo community, which Toltu led for many years, is proudly rallying behind her revolutionary campaign. The project itselfgrew out of Toltu’sten years of experience as a weekend schoolteacher with the community in Melbourne. After years of frustration with creating hand-drawn class worksheets to teach Afaan Oromo, and struggling to find high quality and engaging children’s publications, Toltu decided to create her own Oromo children’s literature collection. Focused on quality educational tools, community voices, and children’s literacy, Toltu now hopes to create books that suit “every Oromo child, in every family, in every home.”
“Qubee is not new, and we’re not inventing the Oromo language,” she said. “Rather, we’re reinventing how we approach language towards young children, and that’s through bold, innovative techniques and high quality educational tools that are affordable and accessible.”
AfaanpublicationsHailed as a ‘language revolution!’ barely a month after its initial launch, Afaan is now a global phenomenon, both in process and planning. Initially, while planning the Nov. 3 launch, Toltu visited nine Oromo communities around the world for public consultation and found the response she received overwhelmingly positive.
“The body of feedback was incredibly valuable,” Toltu said. “People feel like they’ve now contributed to this project, and see parts of themselves in it. People resonate with the campaign, the story, and what we’re trying to do.”
And with a string of major media interviews, including mainstream Australian networks, and a well-liked social media campaign, Afaan has indeed revolutionized the ways in which the Oromo story is or can be told. The professionalism and aesthetics of the project ‘s website as well as its promotional materials are beyond impressive.
“Aesthetics were incredibly important for this project,” Toltu told OPride. “Our language deserves no less [of a professional platform]. It is time for our community to be an example on every front for all of Africa and invite the world into the Oromo community.”
Eleven cities across Australia, Canada, the United States, Norway, and Africa are hosting fundraising dinners from which Toltu hopes to raise the $50,000 needed to print and distribute the first batch of Oromo children’s literature in 2014. On Nov. 23, Minnesota and Cairo hosted the first rounds of fundraising events drawingrecord attendance, according to the organizers.
The top three global fundraisers will also be announced ahead of Afaan Publications World Tour sometime early next year. The full campaign, including details about remaining fundraisers, is also available at www.pozible.com and www.afaan.com.au, where pledges will be accepted during the months of November and December 2013.
“A farmer prepares his harvest by planting the seed and preparing the ground,” Toltu said.
“I’m preparing the ground and looking for folks to farm with me. I’m ploughing the ground, and that initial ploughing involves $50,000”.
*Dharra Budicha is a contributing editor at OPride.com and a student at Simon Fraser University. You can follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dbudicha

North American Oromo’s Appeal Letter about Oromo Refugees in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The following is an appeal letter from the Oromo Studies Association, the Oromo Community Association of Chicago, the Oromo Community Association of Ohio, the Oromo Community Association of Michigan, the Oromo Community Association of Kentucky, the Oromo Community of Minnesota, the Minnesota Oromo Elders Council, and the Oromo Community of South Dakota.
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November 25, 2013
Mr. Antonio Guterres
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
Case Postale 2500
CH-1211 Genève 2 Dépôt Suisse
Email: InfoDesk@ohchr.org; guterres @unhcr.org
Subject: North American Oromo’s Appeal Letter about Oromo Refugees in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Dear Mr. Guterres,
We, the Oromo community associations in North America and the Oromo Studies Association, write this letter in relation to the situation of the Oromo refugees and asylum seekers from Ethiopia. We heard and observed with disbelief and a profound sense of grief the awful news coming from Saudi Arabia. The graphic images and videos of indiscriminate beatings of defenseless immigrant workers, ostensibly by Saudi Arabian law enforcement officials and vigilantes, clearly shocked and enraged us. Law enforcement officials have randomly rounded up, kept tens of thousands of the immigrants in concentration camp-type facilities, and deported many thousands more to Ethiopia without regard to individual cases and needs. While we have sympathy for all Ethiopians who have been subjected to untold suffering in Saudi Arabia, we like to call your attention to the unique case of Oromo immigrants who are lumped together with all Ethiopians and subject to arbitrary measures.
The Oromo people, the single largest nation in the Horn of Africa, constitute about 40 percent of the population of Ethiopia. The ruling Ethiopian regime, dominated by the former rebel group Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), came to power in 1991, following the collapse of the military dictatorship of Mengistu Hailemariam. The TPLF hails from the Tigray people of North Ethiopia that approximately constitutes about 6 percent of the Ethiopian population. The Oromo country, the largest and richest region in Ethiopia, is often considered the breadbasket and the economic backbones of Ethiopia. Therefore, in Ethiopia, despite their numeric superiority and richness of their land, the Oromo have always been treated as a minority group, perpetually subjected to political, economic, and cultural depredations and dispossession. Because of their preponderant number, the Tigrayan minority considers the Oromos an existential threat to its political hegemony. For this reason, the TPLF regime is hell-bent on weakening the human, economic, and intellectual capacity of the Oromo people. Political killings, abductions and disappearances, unlawful imprisonments and torture against the Oromo people have been widespread for over two decades. To escape from such gross human rights violations, many Oromo refugees have been forced to flee their homeland and are dispersed all over Africa and the world. Oromo Refugees are experiencing a multitude of human right violations including violent attacks, torture and rape, and falling prey to human traffickers and body organ harvesters. Notwithstanding the fact that the Ethiopian government is hunting them in refugee camps to kill them, or forcefully taking them back to Ethiopia by either pressuring host countries or bribing security officers.
Unfortunately, in several hosting countries, the local people see these refugees as job stealers and criminals, and are hostile to them. Out of thousands of refugees and immigrant workers, indeed, it is unavoidable to have a few trouble-makers. Reports obtained from refugees suggest strongly that the majority of individuals who are involved in illegal activities are, in fact, agents of the Ethiopia government and want to tarnish the image of the immigrants.
The Oromo Support Group (OSG), the Human Rights League of Horn of Africa (HRLHA), and the Human Rights Watch (HRW), have documented numerous cases of rapes, abduction, tortures and killings of UNHCR recognized Oromo refugees in the neighboring countries of Ethiopia. In this connection, the report of the Danish Refugee Council and Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat (DRCRMMS) noted: “The [Ethiopian] regime had made alliances with neighboring countries. Djibouti, Somalia, Yemen, Kenya committed a crime on refugees and also immigrants. The refugees, even those who are living with [the protection of the UNHCR] mandate are not safe.”
For instance, Engineer Tasfahun Chamada, a UNHCR recognized political refugee, died in prison, in August 2013, after refoulement from Kenya. In light of this fact, we believe and have a concern that the same fate awaits some of refugees and asylum seekers indiscriminately deported, under the banal of the illegal immigrants, to Ethiopia.
Given this reality, the wholesale roundups and deportations of Oromo refugees and asylum seekers to Ethiopia, along with immigrant workers, will lead to their further victimization. We urge the UNHCR to work with and encourage the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to respect the basic human rights and refugee protections under the international law.
We believe that the Saudi Arabian government has right to promulgate and enforce suzerain laws within its territories. But the Saudi government should not enforce its laws in the manner that undermines international laws and norms. Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”
Although we know that the majority of the refugees in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are migrant domestic workers looking for better opportunities, a sizable number of the Oromo are refugees and asylum seekers who fled political and religious persecutions in Ethiopia. We believe that grouping refugees together with the so-called immigrant workers and deporting in the indiscriminate manner violates the cardinal principle of international law, non-refoulement.
As the UNCHR makes status determination for refugees on behalf of the Kingdom, we, therefore, kindly request and urge your good office the followings:
Gadaa.comconvince the government of Saudi Arabia to reconsider the status of Oromo refugees and asylum seekers in the process of the haphazard roundups and deportations;
Gadaa.commaking proper screenings before the deportations of people who are rounded up randomly;
Gadaa.comfacilitate the resettlement of Oromo refugees and asylum seekers to a third country if Saudi Arabia no longer want to host them;
Gadaa.comconvince the government of Saudi Arabia to respect basic human rights and afford them refugee protections under the international and Saudi laws;
Gadaa.comprovide basic needs such as food, shelter, and medical attention to the refugee and asylum seekers.
Respectfully,
Ibrahim Elemo, M.D., M.P.H
President, Oromo Studies Association
P.O.Box: 6541, Minneapolis, MN, 55406-0541
E-mail: ielemo@weisshospital.com
The Oromo Studies Association/Waldaa Qorannoo Oromoo
Oromo Community Association of Chicago
Oromo Community Association of Ohio
Oromo Community Association of Michigan
Oromo Community Association of Kentucky
Oromo Community of Minnesota and Minnesota Oromo Elders Council
Oromo Community of South Dakota

Waraanni Wayyaanee maqaa sakatta’insa jedhuun baadiyyaa keessa bobba’e uumata saamuu fi humnaan gudeedduun yakka daangaa hin qabne hojjechaa jira.

Qeerroo bilisummaa

Bara dhumaatii abbaa irrummaa isaa keessa mootummaan Wayyaanee waan hojjetu walaaluun bujaajjauu irraan darbee kadhaa biyyoottan alagaa irraa argamuun bittaa umrii isaa dheereffachuuf tattaafachaa ture. Haalli kadhaa fi saaminsaan dinagdee isaa guddisee uummata ittiin bitu wayita fashalu uummata Jumlaan hidhuu, sakattainsaan uummata nagaa rakkisuu fi doorsisuu akkasumas uummata nagaa ajjeesuu filannoo jabaa godhatee jira. Filannoowwan kanneen keessaa maqaa alshabab sakattaana dahoo kan godhateen uummata nagaa golee Oromiyaa mara keessatti doorsisaa fi sakattaa jabaa gaggeessaa jiran. Waraanni mootummaa wayyaanee sakattainsa kanaaf bobbaan kumaataman kan lakkaawaman yoommuu tahu sakattainsaan alatti darbuun afaan qawwee fayyadamuun qabeenya uummataa saamuu fi dubartoota gudeeduu irratti argamu.
Godina Shawaa kaabaa aanaa Alaltuu bakka Fiichee jedhamutti waraanni mootummaa Wayyaanee sakattainsaaf bobbae qabeenyaa ilmaan Oromoo saamee jira. Ilmaan Oromoo hojii isaaniitti bobbaanii jiran dhaabuun maallaqa baaftan fidaa jechuun humnaan irraa fudhachuu irratti argamu. Midhaan konkolaattotaan feamus hin dabarsitan jechuun ilmaan Oromoo rakkoo addaaf saaxiluu irratti argamu.
Qeerroon Godina kanaa diinni maaliif akkas nu godhee irra dura dhaabbanna jechuun uummatni waraana wayyaanee bobbae akka hin nyaachisne, hin obaasne homaa itti hin gurgurre taasisuun hojii waraana mootummaa wayyaanee fashalsuu irratti argamu.