Fighting broke out between Somalis and
Oromos in Moyale, a town bordering Kenya, on Thursday and Friday, the Ethiopia News Agency said, citing Suraw Mohammed, deputy spokesman of Somalia Regional State.
With 1.2 million displaced
Oromos, the narrative must change from one of ethnic squabbles to one of ethnic cleansing.
Problems began in mid-September when young ethnic
Oromos started painting the colours of the
Oromo Liberation Front across the capital.
Ethiopia imposed the state of emergency a day after the surprise resignation of then-prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn following two years of protests led by the
Oromo. Unrest among the
Oromos started in late 2015 over a government development plan they decried as unfair, and soon spread to the country's second-largest ethnicity, the Amhara.
Two ethnic groups in the region, the
Oromos and the Amharas, comprise the majority of the Ethiopian population.
Dozens of people were killed in several bouts of violence between ethnic
Oromos and Somalis in the Oromiya region last year.
Somalis and
Oromos have for years squabbled over access to arable land along their borders, but the clashes two months ago were much more widespread, with one local official in a city near the border saying 67,800
Oromos alone had fled.
The
Oromos, Ethiopia's largest ethnic group, feared the Addis Ababa master plan could lead to land grabbing and dislodge millions of them from their ancestral lands.
The
Oromos are an ethnic group primarily in Ethiopia but also in other neighbouring countries.
There is a dearth of information on the situation of the many
Oromos living in the Somali regions.
This paper explores a range of topics that are linked to the Ethiopian language policy: (a) the exclusion of
Oromos from formal schooling; (b) deaths resulting from the misdiagnoses of diseases; (c)
Oromo avoidance of modern health care; and (d) the wider consequences of the language policy such as the loss of property, shelter and social status.
Satisfying the quest for self-determination by its largest nation, the
Oromos, constitutes Ethiopia's pivotal move in the direction of democracy.