The Oakland Institute’s new report: no change and still not factually accurate   (MoFA 07/26/13)- The California-based Oakland Institute has published a number of reports attacking the Gilgel Gibe III Dam on the Omo River in south west Ethiopia and the government’s efforts to provide sustainable development in the Omo Valley and other areas. Last week it produced another. This time, it concentrated less on the developments themselves than on the role of donors, in particular the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID). The report makes a series of allegations that Britain and the US have been ignoring abuses taking place in the Omo Valley. It claims, once again, that forced evictions are taking place in order to make way for commercial farming and a major new dam, and that money from donor countries supports the projects. The Oakland Institute, together with a trio of anti-dam NGOs, Survival International, International Rivers, and the Friends of Lake Turkana, and with the support of Human Rights Watch, have been in the forefront of efforts to stop the construction of Gilgel Gibe III, consistently repeating each others claims over several years, however inaccurate or discredited they may be. In fact, the latest claims, far from being substantiated, are largely sourced to earlier reports by the Oakland Institute and other advocacy organizations which make no secret of being committed to try to prevent the building of the Gilgel Gibe III Dam. None of these bodies appear to have visited the area, nor do they identify their sources. The accounts of alleged abuses are seldom, if ever, specific enough for investigation or allow for the authorities to deal with supposed perpetrators. This is the norm for these reports and it appears intentional to avoid either serious enquiry or possible responses. The report does, somewhat reluctantly, note that there have been international inspections of developments in the Omo Valley and investigations of allegations, notably by USAID and DfID which, for example, conducted a joint field investigation in the Lower Omo in January last year. The Oakland Institute doesn’t appear to have seen their report, nor the report of another investigation by DfID, the EU, and Irish Aid to the sugar plantations last year. It does acknowledge that the UK Government subsequently said “the Department for International Development was not able to substantiate the allegations of human rights violation it received during its visit to South Omo in January 2012. A DfID spokesperson, emphasized that “we condemn all human rights abuses and, where, we have evidence, we raise our concerns at the very highest level. The spokesperson then added, rather pertinently, that “to suggest that agencies like DfID should never work on the ground with people whose governments have been accused of human rights abuses would be to deal those people, a double blow.” Earlier this year, Sir Malcolm Bruce, Chair of the UK’s Parliamentary Committee for International Development, on a visit to Ethiopia, also said that DfID and other agencies had made a dozen or so visits of investigation, and he added that what they had concluded was that they could not, for the most part, find any evidence to substantiate the accusations. He then added, reasonably enough: “We cannot make decisions based on allegations”. Similarly, the US State Department’s Ethiopia 2012 Human Rights Report released in April 2013, indicates that donors’ visits to the area “did not find evidence to support this claim [of human right violations] during visits.” The report was cautious about the claims of abuse. It is always written on the basis of reports and investigations carried out by members of the US Embassy staff in Addis Ababa. It states: “Additional Human Rights Watch reporting stated the government harassed, mistreated, and arbitrarily arrested persons in South Omo in order to clear or prepare land for commercial agriculture; development partners did not find evidence to support this claim during visits.” Another investigation, by Ambassadors from the Development Advisory Group, which is made up of 26 of the major aid agencies that donate to Ethiopia including the UNDP, IMF, and the World Bank, in the latter part of last year, was specifically intended to look at the way the sugar plantations were being developed where priority is being given to voluntary resettlement in appropriate sites related to local communities for these projects and where local communities are involved in consultation and involvement in the resettlement projects. The Ambassadors’ report did nothing to substantiate the more extreme and sweeping allegations of the advocacy groups or the Oakland Institute, though they stressed the importance of communication, consultations and involvement of local communities. They also suggested consultation/coordination between the different authorities involved in the development in the South Omo region could be improved. They also noted that one resettlement area has unacceptable conditions. All this would seem clear enough, but despite the lack of evidence, and indeed the entirely different conclusions of all the various investigations, the Oakland Institute merely concludes that “the blind eye turned by USAID and DFID to the human rights violations and forced evictions that accompany the so-called development strategy of Ethiopia is shocking.” It goes on to make accusations, without a shred of any evidence, claiming “these agencies [DfID and USAID] give virtually unconditional financial, political, and moral support to the Ethiopian government”; adding for good measure: “they are willful accomplices and supporters of a development strategy that will have irreversible devastating impacts on the environment and natural resources and will destroy the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people.” This is actually a typical example of the methodology used by the Oakland Institute, and other advocacy organizations: make a suggestion, an allegation or a claim, and then a few pages later turn it into a definite assertion of fact, presumably hoping the reader will have forgotten any earlier qualification that might have been made. The Oakland Institute, as it has demonstrated on previous occasions, simply isn’t prepared to accept any evidence with which it disagrees. No matter how well sourced and how accurate this may be, it merely argues that any and all evidence that contradicts its own claims is unreliable, or biased or designed to support government policies and is the result of a blanket refusal to investigate properly. This report, for example, refers to recordings and transcripts of interviews which “leave no room for doubt that the donor agencies were given highly credible first-hand accounts of serious human rights violations during their field investigation and they have chosen to steadfastly ignore these accounts.” That is hardly accurate. It would be rather more correct to say that the USAID and DfID investigators did not share the value judgments of the Oakland Institute that these interviews/translations were “highly credible”. And as noted the judgment of the author of the Oakland Institute report is not shared by any others carrying out independent checks on developments in the Lower Omo. In fact, a significant problem with all the reports of the Oakland Institute and the other advocacy organizations is quite simply their factual inaccuracies, gross exaggerations and frequent contradictions. One report, for example, having insisted, inaccurately, that there had been no impact assessments for the  Gilgel Gibe III Dam, then says a few pages later that “irrigation plans are not mentioned in any of the impact assessments conducted for the dam, nor are the effects these developments will have on local communities and livelihoods.” In fact, none of these reports suggest that any of these groups have looked seriously at the impact and ecological studies of the Omo Valley, reports on the Omo River or the investigations of possible effects on Lake Turkana’s water levels, or queried the inhabitants of the Valley on their views of developments.   The Oakland Institute for example claims the Gilgel Gibe III Dam is going to put an end to flood retreat cultivation along the river on which numbers of people living in the area now depend. It isn’t, though it will provide for regulation of the river’s flow and of the provision of annual floods to enable continuation of such agricultural practices despite the growing uncertainties of drought in the region. There have been claims of imminent ‘catastrophe’ in the Omo Valley, the destruction of the way of life for 500,000 people, the flow of the river reduced by three quarters, a fall in Lake Turkana’s level by up to 22 meters and similar exaggerations. Failing to find acceptable ‘evidence’ of these, opponents of the Dam have now been searching for other ‘concerns’. These have included suggestions that it might "generate a region-wide crisis for indigenous livelihoods and biodiversity and thoroughly destabilize the Ethiopia-Kenyan borderlands around Lake Turkana", inflame cross-border tensions and lead to bloody and persistent conflict all along the border area, embroiling Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan and Ethiopia. Another recent alarmist idea has been to draw parallels with the Aral Sea, and suggest the same thing could happen over Lake Turkana.    The problem with all these extreme scenarios is that there is simply no evidence for them. It doesn’t exist. Far from a social and environmental disaster in the making, all the evidence suggests a major and controlled social and beneficial transformation is in process. Certainly, it will impact on the local population and, yes, it will mean changes – but these will provide major improvements in living conditions and the environment. These assertions remain no more than just that – a series of repeated assertions and alarmist claims, short on fact and long on fiction: as Albert Einstein famously said “doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different result, is the definition of insanity.”    All these reports have reached pre-determined conclusions, and all, without exception, simply refuse to accept any facts that disagree with their “conclusions”.  They even go so far as to claim that Ethiopia’s partners appear to have limited knowledge about the development activities “and associated abuses” currently underway in the Lower Omo. Given the number of visits by embassies, investigations by DfID, USAID and others, as well as the work of NGOs working in the valley, this is hard to believe.   The Oakland Institute claims that USAID and DfID should have accepted that the unproven (and unprovable) allegations of human rights abuse and forced resettlement in the Lower Omo were overwhelmingly likely to be true. One has to ask why?  The past record of external advocacy claims strongly suggests such allegations are seldom correct. Ethiopia fully respects the human rights of its citizens. It accepts that developments for any peoples (and please don’t lets call them ‘tribal’ groups!) cannot justify any limitation of basic rights, whether the right to life, home or food, or in a word –survival. This is why it is implementing a major program of development, why it carries out consultations with local peoples, why it allows donor investigations of alleged abuses. Development in this, and other areas, follows the accepted procedures that resettlement must be voluntary and agreed to by the people concerned, that details should be discussed with the communities which participate in the planning and implementation processes, that prompt and effective compensation should be paid for losses incurred and there should be mechanisms to deal with grievances and disputes.