(Daniel Berhane) In 2007, in his annual conference with representatives of the Ethiopian youth, drawn from all over the country, the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was asked why the government doesn’t resettle landless youth from land-scare regions to those with vast unused farming lands, such as Gambella. Meles replied that the government decided to conduct settlements with-in a region, until such time when “the scar that forced settlements of the previous regime left on the indigenous community heals”. He was referring to the resettlement of hundreds of thousands people in the south and peripheral parts of the nation by the Dergue regime which is widely perceived as seen as a political project to accelerate assimilation and to weaken demands of cultural autonomy. Shortly, after that conference, however, Meles’s government launched a massive commercial-farming drive by leasing hundreds of thousands hectares land for domestic and foreign investors. Naturally, the primary destinations of investors are those same areas that could have been selected for resettlement. The process, often labeled “land grab”, stirred debate across the political spectrum and remain to be so. Part of the objection came from confusing the land leases as land sell or from idealist ideological position of [...]
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