Koshe Garbage Landfill is the only landfill site in Addis Ababa. Hundreds of people live in the shadow of the dump’s mountains of trash. Their communities are on the landfill itself. Hundreds of people, adults and children, work on sides of those mountains of trash. On Saturday, March 11, one of the mountains of trash in the Koshe Garbage Landfill collapsed. As of today’s count, 115 corpses have been pulled out from the rubble. 75 of them were women. Of the initial 35 who were pulled out, almost all were women and children. Now the streets are filled with the wailing of women. Ethiopians demand answers. We all should.
Many will ask what happened? What causes garbage mountains to collapse? What caused this particular mountain of trash to collapse? Urban development? Construction? “A simple failure of an oversteepened slope”? What causes garbage mountains to grow? Who builds a city in which hundreds of people spend their lives as scavengers, climbing, descending and burrowing into mountains of trash? What happened Saturday in the Koshe Garbage Landfill?
What happened, as well, to women and children? How is that slightly over 65% of the dead are women and children? How is that human stampedes and urban garbage landslides have the same toxic gender mathematics of mortality? What does it mean that women and children are the sacrifices to the human forces that built and build landfills choked by ever-rising mountains of trash?
The planet of slums has produced a global archipelago of garbage mountains on which mostly women and children work and live. And in that brave new world, there is never a surprise that when the mountains collapse, as they regularly do, the overwhelming majority of the dead are women and children. There was no accident in the Koshe Garbage Landfill last Saturday; there was instead a planned massacre of women and children. Ethiopians demand answers. We all should.
(Photo Credits: Al Jazeera / Elias Meseret / AP)
Ethiopia to resettle garbage landslide survivors http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/Ethiopia-to-resettle-garbage-landslide-survivors/2558-3854708-sqc9c/index.html
Living in landfill http://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/living-in-landfill-a7632996.html
Desperate choice of Ethiopia landslide survivor: run or die http://www.enca.com/africa/desperate-choice-of-ethiopia-landslide-survivor-run-or-die
Buried in Ethiopian dump landslide: a young man and his dream http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-accident-idUSKBN16Q0MY
Article 92(1) of the Ethiopian Constitution states that the “Government shall endeavor to ensure that all Ethiopians live in a clean and healthy environment.”
If, like me, you have lived in Ethiopia and travelled to various places outside of Addis Ababa, and have seen the dire poverty that spreads all across the country, and the awful poverty that is hidden by trees, hotels and malls in the capital, Addis Ababa, you will know how laughable this (and other) sections of the constitution are. You will ask, when you experience the terrible silencing of the people by the corrupt and dictatorial government, where is all the aid money going and why, after 26 years of being in power (through jailing, harassing and killing opposition politicians), the regime can still make the rest of the world believe that Ethiopia is doing well. This collapse of a trash mountain is the tip of the iceberg of neglect and oppression of Ethiopian citizens by its disgusting government.
Ethiopia’s deadly rubbish dump landslide was down to politics, not providence https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/24/ethiopia-deadly-rubbish-dump-landslide-politics-not-providence-reppi
As Trash Avalanche Toll Rises in Ethiopia, Survivors Ask Why https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/world/africa/ethiopia-addis-ababa-garbage-landslide.html
Ethiopia’s rubbish policies http://africanarguments.org/2017/04/11/ethiopias-rubbish-policies/
Garbage dump landslide at koshe in Addis Ababa claimed life again https://borkena.com/2019/06/10/ethiopia-garbage-dump-landslide-koshe-addis-ababa/
Ethiopia builds Africa’s first energy plant that converts trash into electricity https://face2faceafrica.com/article/ethiopia-first-african-country-build-waste-energy-plant
La paradoja de convertir basura en electricidad y perjudicar a los más pobres https://elpais.com/elpais/2020/02/27/seres_urbanos/1582799580_418386.html