Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 23, 2021
PRESS STATEMENT
NED PRICE, DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON
The United States is gravely concerned by reports that dozens of civilians were killed or injured during a bombing of a village market in northern Tigray on June 22. We strongly condemn this reprehensible act. There are also credible reports that security forces denied medical personnel access to the victims of this terrible attack. Denying victims urgently needed medical care is heinous and absolutely unacceptable. We urge the Ethiopian authorities to ensure full and unhindered medical access to the victims immediately. We also call for an urgent and independent investigation, as well as remedial action, to hold those responsible for this attack accountable. The United States again urges an immediate ceasefire in Tigray, unhindered humanitarian access, and protection for civilians.
💭 History repeats itself again and again: Even though you are kind to the wicked, they never learn to do what is right.
[Isaiah 26:10] “Though the wicked person is shown compassion, He does not learn righteousness; He deals unjustly in the land of uprightness, And does not perceive the majesty of the LORD.”
32 years ago, as part of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s strategy, the 1984 man-made famine was seen as an opportunity. Denial of humanitarian assistance and indiscriminate massacre and bombing was used to take advantage of the opportunity the famine created. A prominent example is the bombardment of the market town Hawzen, on the very day of June 22, 1988 on market day, killing more than 2,500 innocent Tigrayan civilians. By coincidence?
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 23, 2021
What a wicked loser! 😈
✈️ The Lockheed C-130 Hercules four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft was given to War Criminal Abiy Ahmed Ali in 2018 by The then US Administration – a year later The Nobel Peace Prize 2019 was awarded to this warmonger – so that he could massacre ancient Christians of Tigray. Something makes sense, doesn’t it? Wow!
💭 History repeats itself again and again: Even though you are kind to the wicked, they never learn to do what is right.
[Isaiah 26:10] “Though the wicked person is shown compassion, He does not learn righteousness; He deals unjustly in the land of uprightness, And does not perceive the majesty of the LORD.”
Evil Abiy Ahmed’s Oromo ‘father’, Mengistu Hailemariam,who was the head of state of Ethiopia from 1977 to 1991 massacred and starved to death millions of Tigrayans. Before he was ousted he made the following genocidal statement:
“One way to remove a stinky fish from the sea was to dry the sea in order to remove the fish”. The sea is a reference to the people of Tigray and the fish is to the people of Tigrayan.
Just exactly like what Abiy Ahmed is thinking, planning and executing today.
💭 Last week, the EU Envoy to Ethiopia, Finland Foreign Minster Pekka Haavisto attested as follows:
“..when I met the #Ethiopian Leadership😈 in February they used this kind of language, that they are going to destroy the Tigrayans, they are going to wipe out..” Finland FM Haavisto.
As part of Mengistu’s strategy, the 1984 man-made famine was seen as an opportunity. Denial of humanitarian assistance and indiscriminate massacre and bombing was used to take advantage of the opportunity the famine created. A prominent example is the bombardment of the market town Hawzen, on the very day of June 22, 1988 on market day, killing more than 2,500 innocent Tigrayan civilians. Wow! By coincidence?
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 23, 2021
Medical Official: Air Strike Kills at Least 80 in Ethiopia’s Tigray
An air strike killed at least 80 people in the town of Togoga in Ethiopia’s Tigray region on Tuesday, a medical official told Reuters, after residents said new fighting had flared in recent days north of the regional capital Mekelle.
Ethiopian military spokesman Colonel Getnet Adane did not confirm or deny the incident. He said air strikes were a common military tactic and that government forces do not target civilians.
The bomb hit a market at around 1:00 p.m., according to a woman who said her husband and two-year-old daughter had been injured.
“We didn’t see the plane, but we heard it,” she told Reuters on Wednesday. “When the explosion happened, everyone ran out. After a time we came back and were trying to pick up the injured.”
The woman said the market had been full of families, and she did not see any armed forces in the area. “Many, many” people had been killed, she said.
Reuters could not independently verify her account. She and other sources asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.
The medical official confirmed at least 80 fatalities, citing witnesses and first responders.
A spokesperson for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the head of a government task force on Tigray did not respond to requests for comment on the incident.
News of the airstrike came as Ethiopian officials counted ballots from national and regional parliamentary elections held this week in seven of the nation’s 10 regions.
No voting was held in Tigray, where the military has been battling forces loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the region’s former ruling party, since November. Security concerns and problems with ballot papers also delayed voting in two other regions.
Residents reported that TPLF forces had entered several towns north of Mekelle in the past three days, withdrawing from one of them within hours.
AMBULANCES BLOCKED
The official and two other health workers helping with the response in Togoga told Reuters on Wednesday that Ethiopian soldiers were blocking the main road from Mekelle to the town and preventing ambulances from reaching the scene.
“Patients are dying right now,” said the official.
He said two ambulances had been able to reach the town via a back road late on Tuesday but did not have the necessary equipment and were not being allowed to leave.
He said the teams had counted at least 40 dead at the scene, three people had died overnight, and there were 44 critically wounded patients needing treatment.
Another medical worker said around 20 health workers in six ambulances had tried to reach the wounded on Tuesday but soldiers stopped them at a checkpoint.
“They told us we couldn’t go to Togoga. We stayed more than one hour at the checkpoint trying to negotiate. We had a letter from the health bureau – we showed them. But they said it was an order.”
Military spokesman Getnet denied that the military was blocking ambulances.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 23, 2021
A child, who fled violence in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, waits to receive food during a food distribution organized by the local NGO Relief Society of Tigray (REST) in Mekelle, the capital of the Tigray region on June 22.
The seven-month conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region has devolved into a humanitarian crisis, with ominous signs that atrocities there could escalate. The U.S. and other countries are finally raising the alarm, but Tigray needs action now.
The Ethiopian military was initially dispatched to Tigray in November 2020, to crush what Ahmed said was a mutiny. The government forces were joined by Eritrean forces. While there have been allegations of atrocities on all sides, there have been credible eyewitness reports of widespread extrajudicial killings, looting and destruction of property, mass executions, arbitrary arrests, rape, deliberate starvation and forced displacement of populations by the Ethiopian and Eritrean military.
These horrific conditions have caused tens of thousands of children and adults to flee their homes and to seek refuge in Sudan, under deplorable conditions. Some 4.5 million of a population of 6 million people are in immediate need of humanitarian assistance. Between 2.5 and 5 million people in the region will experience severe food insecurity at least through September. We must stop this spiral; Tigrayans need concrete action now to prevent worse humanitarian catastrophe to come.
Six distinguished leaders recently joined me in outlining steps that could bring an end to the atrocities in Tigray: former U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, former President of Finland Tarja Halonen, former U.N. and Arab League Special Envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, Emeritus Bishop of Oslo and former vice chair of the Nobel Committee Gunnar Stålsett, former President of Slovenia and former U.N. Assistant Secretary General and President of the World Leadership Alliance Danilo Turk and former U.N. Under Secretary General and Special Envoy for the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng.
Together we urge Prime Minister Ahmed to take the following steps without delay in order to save the lives of the people he was elected to serve, and to resolve this humanitarian crisis. We also urge the United States to use its formidable influence in the region to encourage these steps. We implore Prime Minister Ahmed to act swiftly to end the suffering of Ethiopians afflicted by war in Tigray by taking the following actions:
1) Lead calls for a cessation of hostilities by all actors, announce your willingness to do so, and encourage other parties to commit to ending the fighting immediately;
2) Press for the immediate and verifiable withdrawal of Eritrean and Amhara regional forces from the Tigray region;
3) Facilitate the work of international humanitarian staff including by issuing long-duration visas, expediting the process for the importation and use of satellite communication technology by humanitarian organizations and instructing your military and allied forces to establish a civil-military coordination cell to facilitate the work of humanitarian organizations on the ground;
4) Issue orders to protect all civilians in Tigray and throughout Ethiopia regardless of their ethnicity, including refugees and internally displaced persons, and particularly women in the light of widespread reports of sexual and gender-based violence;
5) Continue your support for investigations into human rights abuses and violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law by all actors in Tigray. We welcomed your support of the joint investigation by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights. We encourage you to ensure other human rights organizations are provided access to document independently ongoing reports of human rights abuses and violations in Tigray; and
6) Open credible and inclusive talks with political and civil society actors in Tigray with the goal of charting a consensual way forward for the region’s future governance.
Military means will never resolve the political dispute that led to the Tigray crisis. They will only increase the suffering of the civilians in the region, which has already been far too great. As Ahmed himself said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech two years ago, “There are those who have never seen war, but glorify and romanticize it. They have not seen the fear. They have not seen the fatigue. They have not seen the destruction or heartbreak, nor have they felt the mournful emptiness of war after the carnage.”
For the good of Tigray, Ethiopia, the East Africa region and the world, we ask the prime minister to work toward a political solution as fast as possible. We and others in the international community stand ready to support the effort to achieve lasting peace in Ethiopia, and help Tigray start healing.
José Ramos-Horta is the former president of Timor-Leste and a 1996 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 23, 2021
Dozens of people have reportedly been killed or injured after Ethiopia’s air force bombed a market in the northern region of Tigray.
Eyewitnesses told the BBC the Ethiopian air force struck the town of Togoga on Tuesday, 25 km (15 miles) from the region’s capital, Mekelle.
The Ethiopian military denied targeting civilians, saying it carried out the strikes to neutralise terrorists.
Tigrayan rebel forces are said to have made advances in recent days.
However, this has been denied by the Ethiopian government.
Thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced after conflict erupted almost eight months ago.
What happened in the strikes?
Doctors at the main hospital in Mekelle say they are treating dozens of people, including a two-year-old child left injured by the airstrike.
Medical personnel told Reuters the Ethiopian military blocked them from reaching the site of the attack to help others left behind.
A 16-year-old boy told the BBC from Aider referral hospital that he was struck in the hand by shrapnel and that he saw several people thrown on the ground. He said that the air strike killed a man he knew.
Ethiopia’s army said the strikes were against military targets.
Medical Official: Air Strike Kills at Least 43 in Ethiopia’s Tigray
An air strike killed at least 43 people in the town of Togoga in Ethiopia’s Tigray region on Tuesday, a medical official told Reuters, after residents said new fighting had flared in recent days north of the regional capital Mekelle.
Ethiopian military spokesman Colonel Getnet Adane did not confirm or deny the incident. He said air strikes were a common military tactic and that government forces do not target civilians.
The bomb hit a market at around 1:00 p.m., according to a woman who said her husband and two-year-old daughter had been injured.
“We didn’t see the plane, but we heard it,” she told Reuters on Wednesday. “When the explosion happened, everyone ran out. After a time we came back and were trying to pick up the injured.”
The woman said the market had been full of families, and she did not see any armed forces in the area. “Many, many” people had been killed, she said.
Reuters could not independently verify her account. She and other sources asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.
The medical official confirmed at least 43 fatalities, citing witnesses and first responders.
A spokesperson for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the head of a government task force on Tigray did not respond to requests for comment on the incident.
News of the airstrike came as Ethiopian officials counted ballots from national and regional parliamentary elections held this week in seven of the nation’s 10 regions. [
No voting was held in Tigray, where the military has been battling forces loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the region’s former ruling party, since November. Security concerns and problems with ballot papers also delayed voting in two other regions.
Residents reported that TPLF forces had entered several towns north of Mekelle in the past three days, withdrawing from one of them within hours.
AMBULANCES BLOCKED
The official and two other health workers helping with the response in Togoga told Reuters on Wednesday that Ethiopian soldiers were blocking the main road from Mekelle to the town and preventing ambulances from reaching the scene.
“Patients are dying right now,” said the official.
He said two ambulances had been able to reach the town via a back road late on Tuesday but did not have the necessary equipment and were not being allowed to leave.
He said the teams had counted at least 40 dead at the scene, three people had died overnight, and there were 44 critically wounded patients needing treatment.
Another medical worker said around 20 health workers in six ambulances had tried to reach the wounded on Tuesday but soldiers stopped them at a checkpoint.
“They told us we couldn’t go to Togoga. We stayed more than one hour at the checkpoint trying to negotiate. We had a letter from the health bureau – we showed them. But they said it was an order.”
Military spokesman Getnet denied that the military was blocking ambulances.
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