Oromo Year in Review 2014: Weighing the Bright and the Dark Side

December 31, 2014 | Oromo Press

  Year of Massacre, Protest and Impunity

For the Oromo, the year 2014 has been simultaneously a year of success stories and tragedy because of the peaceful protests that took place in Oromia from April to June 2014, leading to the massacre of over 200 Oromo students and the imprisonments of thousands. The year is drawing to an end without Ethiopian officials and security personnel responsible for the killings being held accountable locally and internationally. Year of impunity for TPLF ruling elites who went on genocide spree in Oromia. Oromo students were protesting what was termed the “Addis Ababa Master Plan,” a land grabbing genocide plan calculated to evict millions of Oromo farmers from their ancestral land. Many places in Oromia saw many deaths in connection with Oromo Protests. Oromo Protests by Qeerroo Oromiyaa, Oromiya’s youth movement, remains the prominent highlight of the year.


The year has brought us a sour mix of negatives and positives. The positives are that the Oromo have decided to speak up against tyranny; the negatives are that there have been rampant repressions and killings across Oromia by Ethiopia’s ethnic Tigrean-controlled government.

Instead of retelling the massacre of Oromo students and civilians, Oromo Press would like to tell this story through the eye-witness account of one sister who recounts how and why her brother Bikila Belay was killed in slow motion. The following video contains a video testimony in Afan Oromo subtitled in English.

Featured Testimony of the Ambo Massacre:

Because I am Oromo Report

The rampant repressions in Oromia attracted a wide range of attention from international and local human rights groups and media organizations. Among the notable reports highlighting “sweeping” repressions in Oromia is Amnesty International’s “…Because I am Oromo…” is worth mentioning. The report gave us the famous Twitter hashtag “#BecauseIamOromo” under which people discussed news related to the topic and shared opinions, frustrations and recommendations. The report also led to an invited talk by Claire Beston of Amnesty International to the Washington DC Oromo Community. Many Oromo community organizations organized seminars inspired by the report and discussed the grave situation in Oromia. It also led to a few pro-report rallies from Arizona to Oslo. The report is key because it generated wide media coverage in the West about the Oromo who have been systematically rendered invisible in the global narrative. Activities around the report lifted that heavy eclipse invisbilizing the Oromo to the world. It challenged a lot of essentialized and erroneous notions and misrepresentations about the Oromo. Luckily, 2014 gave us that.

 OSA Sponsors AG Bayana Robi’s US Speaking Tour

The traditional leader of the Oromo people (very much like Tibet’s Dalai Lama except that he is not in exile) Abbaa Gadaa Bayyanaa Sanbatoo toured many cities in the United States giving lectures on the Oromo classic democratic system of governance, the Gadaa System from early September to early October 2014. The Abbaa Gadaa gave lectures and interviews on the attempt to restore the system in Oromia to update and use it in contemporary structures.

Deligation Visits UN-Geneva to Fight for the Rights of Children in Oromia, Ethiopia

After issuing a detailed report on the rights of children in Oromia, three delegates from the International Oromo Youth Assoication and The Advocates traveled to Geneva to fight for the rights of children. They were three women prominent human rights advocates: Amy Bergquist, Staff Attorney for The Advocate’s International Justice Program; and Amane Bedasso and Sinke Washo, President and Vice President of IOYA repectively. Read Amy’s post here. In this sense, advocacy for Oromo rights has shown an encouraging tendency toward internationalization of Oromo and Horn issues. It was a year filled with dramatic acvities in response to repressions and killings of children in Oromia.

Flurry of Oromo Civil Society Organizations Founded in Diaspora

2014 has also brought us a number of significant activities in the area of founding civil society organizations, including Children’s Afan Oromo Education organization and the launching of two Oromo media houses– Oromia Media Network (TV) and Madda Walaabuu Media Foundation’s Oromo Voice Radio (OVR). The diaspora media organizations were mainly started and launched in Australia and the United States far away from Oromia to cater to the needs of Oromia. If you scan through the websites of these media organizations, you can find that they have produced television and radio news and opinion programs in Afan Oromo for the population in Oromia, Africa. This is significant because they served the information-starved Oromo people with much-needed news or information. Upset by their significance, the Ethiopian government jammed these stations along other Diaspora broadcasts into the Horn’s troubled country.

Afaan Publications, the Australia-based crowd-funded literacy organization founded by the legendary Toltu Fufa and her strong team, announced on Facbook and Twitter that it has started printing rare Afan Oromo children’s books and that it is campaigning to distribute them in 7 cities in 7 weeks across the globe in the new year.

These are some of the major tragic and sucess stories of 2014 pertaining to the Oromo nation. It’s time to build on the success stories and to stop the tragic stories in 2015. Happy new year everyone. May the coming year be the year of freedom, prosperity and happiness.