SHE flew in on a tourist visa but the souvenirs Susan Pollock brought back were not the standard holiday fare. Tapes of alleged torture victims, photographs of bodies left to rot in fields, and page upon page of carefully copied testimony detailing claims of extra-judicial killings, disappearances, hidden detention centres, rape, and intimidation.
Pollock, 35, from Glasgow, spent four weeks travelling around southern Ethiopia last month, gathering what she says is evidence of human rights abuses on a major scale against the Oromo.
She has called for an international investigation into the situation and says unless the West starts asking some tough questions of the new Ethiopian regime, a fresh human tragedy may be about to unfold.
Political instability and representation have been hallmarks of Ethiopia's history, along with natural disasters, such as drought and famine, on an epic scale. But there have been high hopes for the new democracy since the overthrow of the brutal Marxist Dergue regime, known as the Red Terror, in 1991. More than 250,000 people across the country's 40 ethnic groups were estimated to have been killed in the preceding civil war.
The collapse of the Dergue dictatorship under Mengistu Haile Mariam was brought about by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and the Tigrean People's Liberation Front, and it was the EPRDF who formed the first democratic government after elections in 1992.
Pollock was in Ethiopia during the elections, working among the Oromo as a nurse-midwife for a British aid agency. At the time, the Oromo Liberation Front had withdrawn from the elections and was pitted against the EPRDF.
When hundreds of soldiers loyal to the EPRDF regime surrounded the community in which she was working, Pollock and her colleagues were forced to flee. After walking for four days they reached another settlement but eventually had to leave for the UK when it, too, was surrounded by soldiers.
In the intervening years she heard reports of repression of the Oromo and arranged to return to the region to gather evidence. The EPRDF regime, meanwhile, has consistently denied accusations of human rights abuses.
"The Oromos are seen as being very backward in their lifestyle," said Pollock. "They have always been the slave trade of the country, they have done all the hard work. They are not an educated people and they have been downtrodden for centuries. In a sense their suffering is nothing new but this time they are suffering in a way that they have never suffered before," she said, adding that the government fears the Oromo because there are so many of them. There are around 25 million ethnic Oromo in Ethiopia.
Arriving in the capital, Addis Ababa, as a tourist, she made contacts within the Oromo community and began to interview those who said they had suffered human rights abuses.
"Every day was a risk. I was aware that the people I was speaking to may have been watched, that I may have been watched. When I moved out of the city area into the countryside, I felt very tense at times, because I was aware of the tensions among the people around me. When I went to people's houses to talk to them, I didn't stay for long. Sometimes when I had arranged to talk to people I was taken away out of sight; a lot of it was done in secret."
Among the alleged torture victims, she found a young man in his 20s who had been arrested on suspicion of involvement with the Oromo Liberation Front and she taped his testimony.
He said: "One torture they used involved placing a heavy block of stone on my neck that weighed 70-80 kg. I was forced to walk up and down stairs while soldiers beat my back with guns, sticks, metal bars, and stones. They did this until I fell down.
"After three months of this torture I gradually became weak, my hands could not hold things and I could not walk. Eventually I was so weak that I was taken to a hospital where I lay on a bed for eight months."
Pollock said she examined the man and believed he had suffered permanent nerve damage. "He couldn't walk, couldn't move. He was just lying, 24 hours a day. He is a very young guy, and his life is completely damaged."
Others talked of massive concentration and detention camps, large numbers of people being arrested and detained without trial, and prisoners being summarily executed. She was also given photographs of bodies riddled with bullet wounds and dumped in fields.
In a recent report into the political and social situation across Ethiopia the human rights charity Amnesty International said several thousand suspected government opponents had been detained in 1994, there were widespread allegations of torture, and reports of scores of disappearances and extra-judicial executions.
Amnesty spokeswoman Kathy Daniel said they were aware of the information Susan Pollock had brought back with her and it would be useful to add to other reports.
Pollock, who has worked previously in Pakistan, is hoping to go back overseas once she has completed her report into Ethiopia. She is pessimistic about the West, looking more closely at what's happening in the country, but believes that they could be heading for a new ethnic crisis.
"At the moment it is doing this, it's bubbling," she says, waving her hands in front of her. "But I do envisage an uprising, because there is only so much that people can take. I believe that every single Oromo family has been affected. Every Oromo has a story to tell."