Human Rights Issues in Development-Induced Displacement of the Indigenous People: A Look in to Villagization Program in Anywaa Zone, Gambella Peoples' National Regional State

Abstract

The government’s effort to improve the lives of the rural population in Gambella Peoples’ Regional State (GPNRS) as whole and Anywaa zone in particular has stirred up the need for clustering the rural populations, leading to the villagization or resettlement program in most parts of the Regional State. While the villagization program seems sustainable on account of the government’s perceived improvement of the livelihoods of the displaced populations through creation of access to basic socio-economic infrastructure for those people who were living scattered in different locations and along the riverside which are prone to flood hazards, and those who practiced cut and burn shifting cultivation, and ultimately to enable them be food secured and to bring socio-economic and cultural transformation of the people, the genuine sustainability it has is, in many cases, doubtful since it can impose negative effects on the resettled people. According to the regional villagization action plan, 45,000 rural households have been displaced in the whole GPNRS. Now the question is to what extent the villagization program has affected the human rights and livelihoods of the displaced populations. This thesis can be seen as a contribution to the various ongoing researches in Gambella and other parts of Ethiopia as well as all over the world that tries to answer this question. In general, those resettled end up with their human rights getting violated and pauperized, at least in part, after resettlement. This particular research applied the Impoverishment Risks and Reconstruction (IRR) model of Michael Cernea to identify the extent to which the involuntarily resettled indigenous people in Anywaa zone have been pauperized. This is scrutinized in the light of human rights throughout the resettlement process. Because of time limitations, the researcher chose to concentrate only on five out of eight impoverishment risks (e.g. landlessness, joblessness, food insecurity, loss of access to common property and loss of access to public services). In this research, nine villagization or resettlement sites have been investigated in Anywaa zone: Abol-Kiir, Nyikwo, and Kobon villages in Gambella district; Chobo-Kiir, Pokedi and Abari-Meti in Abobo district; and Gog-dipach, Thatha and Pochalla in Gog district. Both questionnaires and in-depth interviews have been carried out to scrutinize this topic. As a result, this research reveals that all investigated human rights issues and risks that the resettlers faced were present in all of the nine resettlement villages. Therefore, these results reveal that the villagization program in Anywaa zone has led to a number of human rights violations and has not been truly sustainable due to its negative effects on the livelihoods of the resettled populations. So, in order to overcome human rights violation and also pauperization of the displaced people in the future, it is crucial to enforce existing resettlement policies and enhance participatory mechanisms since the resettled households lack any influence concerning their own resettlement.