AGENDA 5: ILAY MEDIA. Dear delegates and honourable guests, Discriminatory policy towards Somalis living in the Ogaden is deeply imbedded in Ethiopian policy and disproportionately affects women, children and the elderly. Countless number of women and girls have disappeared after being abducted or detained by Ethiopian armed and security forces, while others disappeared from notorious military detention camps or transferred to secret detention centres. The victims of these disappearances include women, students, political leaders and NGO workers that fall under suspicion of collaborating with the rebel movement. Further, the burning of villages and widespread looting has driven hundreds of thousands of innocent people out of their homes and into squalid refugee camps in Yemen, Somalia, Djibouti and Kenya. As Ethiopian officials repeatedly demonstrated, they want the land not the people by giving contracts to foreign agricultural and oil companies while killing the innocent civilians. They intend to evict the Somali people in the Ogaden from their ancestral land by using all means of implementing ethnic cleansing. Further, since the current Ethiopian government came to power in 1991, it has taken many steps and measures in order to starve out the civilian population in Ogaden. As a part of the Ethiopian government's policy of starving out the civilian population the Ethiopian army imposed an undeclared economic blockade on the entire Ogaden and has closed the border between the Ogaden and Somalia falsely claiming that they are fighting contraband and arms trafficking; this causes enormous human suffering and also disproportionately affects women, children and the elderly. The Ethiopian armed forces indiscriminately mined areas, particularly around water wells and caravan routes which lead to neighbouring countries in order to stop trade movements. They also looted at gunpoint, burned down civilian food store houses and confiscated food supplies for the starving civilian population. Women in the Ogaden are being attacked not only to dehumanize them, but to humiliate, punish, control, inflict fear upon, displace and persecute them all. Consequently, The number of HIV/AIDS virus infected women and young girls due to rape by Ethiopian soldiers have rocketed, There are many women and young girls who have fallen pregnant due to rape and cannot live within the conservative society as this stigma remains for the rest of their lives. As some humanitarian organizations, such as HRW reported, the number of unreported rapes is greater than those reported due to fear of retaliation