Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on September 30, 2021
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., September 29, 2021.
The United States condemns Ethiopia’s expulsion of United Nations officials and will not hesitate to use sanctions against those who obstruct humanitarian efforts in the country, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday.
Earlier on Thursday, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was expelling seven senior U.N. officials, two days after the U.N. aid chief warned hundreds of thousands of people in the northern region of Tigray were likely experiencing famine due to a government blockade of aid.
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres was “shocked” by the information that Ethiopia has declared seven senior U.N. officials working in the country persona non grata, U.S. spokesperson Stephanie Tremblay told a press briefing on Thursday.
“We are now engaging with the government of Ethiopia in the expectation that the concerned U.N. will be allowed to continue their important work,” Tremblay said.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on September 30, 2021
💭 ይህን “ሳሙኤል ጌታቸው” የተባለ ውዳቂ የአውሬው ቱልቱላ ቸል እንበለው።
Ethiopia said Thursday it would expel seven senior UN officials for “meddling” in its affairs, a move that came after aid workers sounded the alarm on humanitarian access to conflict-torn Tigray.
The seven, who include individuals from UNICEF and UNOCHA, have been declared “persona non grata” and given 72 hours to leave the country, a statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Thursday.
The foreign ministry said it had “declared a ‘persona non grata’ for seven individuals who are working for various international NGOs in Ethiopia for meddling in the internal affairs of the country.”
“According to the letters addressed to each of the 7 individuals listed below, all of them must leave the territory of Ethiopia within the next 72 hours,” it said on its Facebook page.
The statement named seven officials working for various UN agencies.
.@mfaethiopia declared ”persona non grata” for seven individuals who have been working for some international NGOs in #Ethiopia for meddling in the internal affairs of the country. They must leave the country within the next 72 hrs. 30 September 2021 pic.twitter.com/9sk9e7YFYE
Ethiopia’s northern-most region of Tigray has been mired in conflict since November.
The United Nations has previously estimated that 400,000 people face famine-like conditions there, and fears are growing of deaths from starvation.
The UN has said the region remains under a de-facto blockade and warned of a “looming catastrophe” as fighting between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed‘s forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) has spread to neighboring areas.
The UN’s acting humanitarian coordinator for Ethiopia, Grant Leaity – one of the officials facing expulson – warned this month that stocks of relief aid, cash and fuel were “running very low or are completely depleted” and food stocks had run out in late August.
As the war has expanded, claiming thousands of lives, the humanitarian crisis has only deepened.
Earlier this month, doctors told AFP that Tigray was entering a new phase of fatalities driven by the kind of widespread starvation that turned Ethiopia into a byword for famine in the 1980s.
Opinion by Isha Sesay, Masai Ujiri, Gbenga Akinnagbe and Liz Agbor-Tabi
Isha Sesay is CEO of OkayMedia and a journalist who has previously worked for BBC, Sky and CNN. Masai Ujiri is the president of the Toronto Raptors and co-founder of youth sports organization Giants of Africa. Gbenga Akinnagbe is an actor known for his work on “The Wire,” “The Good Wife” and Broadway’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” and Liz Agbor-Tabi is vice president for global policy and government affairs at Global Citizen, an organization with a mission to end extreme poverty by 2030. The views expressed here are their own.
The sudden fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban has rightly drawn much of the world’s ire and attention. Fears of women’s rights and civil liberties being swept aside by Islamic extremism, along with trepidation about the country’s threat to regional stability, have all justly triggered global concern.
And yet, much to our distress, for nearly a year the world has paid comparatively little attention to another brutal and escalating conflict; the catastrophic violence in Ethiopia that is affecting the lives of millions and imperiling stability in the Horn of Africa.
The fighting, which first erupted in November 2020, is the result of a dispute between the government of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and fighters in the country’s mountainous northern region of Tigray. Thousands of Ethiopians have been killed in the conflict, and there is evidence of massacres of the innocent.
Two million people have been displaced, more than 350,000 are facing famine, and millions more are in need of emergency food aid. Yet continued fighting, bureaucratic hurdles imposed by the federal government and the blocking of key humanitarian aid routes has engendered a growing desperation that’s gone largely unnoticed by the global community.
We have watched in horror as humanitarian groups have sounded the alarm about multiplying accounts of Ethiopian military members, along with allied troops from neighboring Eritrea and various supporting militia, claiming the bodies of Tigrayan women and girls as an extension of the battlefield. The Ethiopian government has pledged investigations into any wrongdoing.
Stories of rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, torture and humiliation have emerged as a grotesque feature of this crisis. Pramila Patten, the UN’s top official on sexual violence in conflict, said in April that Tigrayan women and girls are being subjected to sexual abuse with “a level of cruelty beyond comprehension.” In media reports, local medics have described removing nails and rocks from the bodies of victims.
Again, we ask: Where is the outrage?
According to Amnesty International, more than 1,000 cases of sexual violence were registered by local health facilities within just three months, and yet these estimates are likely just the tip of the iceberg. All too often, fear and stigma prevent many survivors from ever coming forward to report their ordeal.
Though Tigray has been largely cut off from the world, at times deprived of electricity and telecommunications, we know enough from the global media and aid workers who have struggled to gain access that something heinous is happening there.
Yet you wouldn’t know that from the world’s response.
Day after day, as conditions worsened on the ground, we have hoped that the suffering of millions of Africans would trigger a public outcry. We waited for the details of this humanitarian crisis to galvanize mass protests, dominate our social feeds and create a united stand from our global leaders.
But we have yet to see an international joint communique that could bring this devastating violence to an end. Where there should have been bold action, there has been largely silence and half measures — President Joe Biden’s timid authorization of broad sanctions among them.
We had hoped that long before now, the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front would have engaged in urgent talks to end this and allow critically needed aid to pass safely into the region. Instead, this conflict has entered a new and potentially more deadly phase. The war is expanding, with the violence that started in Tigray spreading into the neighboring regions. Dangerous alliances are being formed and the battle lines redrawn. Prime Minister Abiy has called for all able-bodied citizens to root out the TPLF. In recent weeks, Tigrayan rebels have joined with anti-government forces from the Oromo region.
Ethiopia now stands on the brink of a full-blown civil war. This would not only be a tremendous tragedy for the people of Africa’s second-most-populous nation — it could also spark significant trouble for neighboring Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt and Somalia. In truth, a fractious, convulsive Ethiopia would have a massive impact on the entire continent, and the accompanying reverberations have the potential to set off a chain reaction that could impact us all.
The stakes are too high to allow this conflict to continue, which is why this group of prominent Africans from across advocacy, media, sports, arts and entertainment has come together to speak up. We believe that it is incumbent upon us, as Africans, to use our platforms to stand up for and in solidarity with our Ethiopian brothers and sisters who bear the burden of this violence. We cannot sit passively on the sidelines amid mounting ethnic clashes and allegations of crimes against humanity in Africa’s oldest independent country.
We are using our collective voices to demand that leaders from both sides of this conflict halt the violence and immediately allow humanitarian access to the affected regions. We also call on the African Union, the UN and the United States government to redouble their pressure on the warring parties to help ensure a negotiated resolution to the regional conflict in Ethiopia; justice for the victims of sexual violence; and the lifting of restrictions on the media.
We are also directing this call for action to ordinary Americans of all races, ages and walks of life. We take inspiration from the unity shown last summer, when Africans across the continent stood in public solidarity with Americans to protest racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd.
We saw the power of collective action and what can be achieved when we come together for a just and righteous purpose. A new, critical moment has arrived, and we believe this brutal conflict demands that we stand together again as one.
The crisis in Ethiopia is a “stain on our conscience,” the United Nations humanitarian chief said Tuesday, as children and others starve to death in the Tigray region under what the U.N. has called a de facto government blockade of food, medical supplies and fuel.
In an interview with The Associated Press Tuesday, Martin Griffiths issued one of the most sharply worded criticisms yet of the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade after nearly a year of war. Memories of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, which killed some 1 million people and whose images shocked the world, are vivid in his mind, “and we fervently hope is not happening at present,” he said.
“That’s what keeps people awake at night,” Griffiths said, “is worrying about whether that’s what is in prospect, and in prospect soon.”
He described a landscape of deprivation inside Tigray, where the malnutrition rate is now over 22% — “roughly the same as we saw in Somalia in 2011 at the start of the Somali famine,” which killed more than a quarter-million people.
The war in Ethiopia began last November on the brink of harvest in Tigray, and the U.N. has said at least half of the coming harvest will fail. Witnesses have said Ethiopian and allied forces destroyed or looted food sources.
Meanwhile just 10% of needed humanitarian supplies have been reaching Tigray in recent weeks, Griffiths said.
“So people have been eating roots and flowers and plants instead of a normal steady meal,” he said.
“The lack of food will mean that people will start to die.”
Last week the AP, citing witness accounts and internal documents, reported the first starvation deaths since Ethiopia’s government imposed the blockade on the region of 6 million people in an attempt to keep support from reaching Tigray forces.
But the problem is not hunger alone.
The U.N. humanitarian chief, who recently visited Tigray, cited the lack of medical supplies and noted that vulnerable children and pregnant or lactating mothers are often the first to die of disease. Some 200,000 children throughout the region have missed vaccinations since the war began.
And the lack of fuel — “pretty well down to zero now,” Griffiths said — means the U.N. and other humanitarian groups are finding it all but impossible to reach people throughout Tigray or even to know the true scale of need.
Phone, internet and banking services have also been cut off.
Billene Seyoum, the spokeswoman for Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, did not respond to questions. The government has blamed problems with humanitarian aid delivery on the Tigray forces, who long dominated the national government before Abiy sidelined them. Abiy’s government also has alarmed U.N. officials and others by accusing humanitarian workers of supporting the Tigray fighters.
Griffiths called such allegations unacceptable and unfair. He said he has told the government to share any evidence of misconduct by humanitarian workers so the U.N. can investigate, but “so far as I’m aware, we haven’t had such cases put to us.”
Humanitarian workers boarding flights to Tigray are told not to bring items including multivitamins, can openers and medicines, even personal ones. The U.N. humanitarian chief said he too was searched when he visited Tigray, with authorities examining everything in his bag and even questioning why he was carrying earphones.
Ethiopia’s crisis has led the U.N., the United States and others to urge the warring sides to stop the fighting and take steps toward peace, but Griffiths warned that “the war doesn’t look as if it’s finishing any time soon.”
On the contrary, in recent weeks it spread into the neighboring Amhara region. Griffiths said the active battle lines are making it challenging to get aid to hundreds of thousands more people.
Ethiopia will see the formation of a new government next week with another five years in office for the prime minister. Griffiths, who said he last spoke with Abiy three or four weeks ago, expressed hope for a change of direction.
“We’d all like to see is with that election inauguration, that we would see new leadership leading Ethiopia away from the abyss that it’s peering into at the moment, that the national dialogue process which he discussed with me in the past, and his deputy discussed with me last week, that needs to happen,” Griffiths said.
“It needs to be coherent, it needs to be inclusive and it needs to be soon.”
“When we have done something we have never done before that is suddenly suppressing one of these receptors that are highly responsible for keeping cancers in check …”
He is basically saying that the jabs are suppressing that part of our immunity that keeps cancer in check.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on September 28, 2021
💭 Your Words Not Mine: A Message to PM Abiy in His Own Words
This is a slightly modified version of the message sent by PM Abiy Ahmed in December 2018 to the people of Yemen, re-worded to address him and the people of Ethiopia amidst the ongoing war on Tigray.
To the people of the Land of Origins,
To the people of the Land of the thirteen months of sunshine
To the people who pioneered civilization and are the descendants of the architects of Axum and Lalibela
To the people of wisdom since the rule of the Queen of Sheba
To the people of a country like no other. A country that was mentioned over 40 times in the Bible and which is called the land of origins, the cradle of humanity, and the source of Blue Nile.
To you, the people of Happy Ethiopia, to whom the Prophet Muhammad once sent his earliest followers seeking refuge safe haven because he believed the Negashi of Ethiopia would not “wrong anyone”
To the owners of gentle and soft hearts, and the people endowed with wisdom.
To the people of faith. . The bloodshed between your people is haram and immoral.
Why do you drain your resources, and destroy your country, and the lives of each other?
Why do you destroy your civilization, your progress, and your glory?
Why abandon your families?
Why do you turn your own children into orphans, and deprive them of enjoying a calm and serene life in a country that has always been lauded as a happy one?
Everyone, I refer to all the parties fighting in political and on devastating battlefields, is a loser in war as war brings nothing but destruction, loss, devastation, hatred. and riots. War causes scourge and separation to spread. So how can this happen between the people of one land and one nation? War destroys your foundations, your relationships, and your kinship, causing nothing but destruction and ignorance.
What Ethiopia are you fighting for when you’ve destroyed every corner of your country? Why don’t you use reason, when you are the ones who were described as wise? Why do you teach the language of war and fighting rather than the language of dialogue, when you are the owners of eloquence? Why don’t you sit at a table and talk, negotiate, and discuss what is best?
You should agree and disagree without bloodshed, and without wars, as the people of one home.
Brought together with affection, familiarity, love, and the interest of one united nation. Offer yourselves and your children a future that is built on the foundation of science, knowledge, and development. Plan your growth and progress and keep up with the civilization that you were once at the forefront of.
You are all responsible and accountable for the state that your country is in; the county we care for and love and are concerned about its security and stability. You are the first to shake hands, so shake each other’s hand and meet each other with hearts full of love. Let your wisdom guide you.
Think about what your country has come to from separation, fighting, and killing. Think of the common good rather than personal interests, and renounce sectarianism and fragmentation.
Come to a common conclusion that you agree on, in the interest of your honorable people who have suffered so much from the scourge of this useless war; the war that will only leave behind destruction and ruin.
Pull all your differences on the proverbial table of dialogue, reason, wisdom, and equity.
Agree among each other as a family and as loved ones and then surrender to peace and enter it with all the forces you can muster as it is in the benefit of your country and the future of your civilization that flourishes like a garden as you enjoy the goodness of the land and the forgiveness of God.
With all love and pride, we look forward to the certainty that wisdom is rightful. And we are ready to do all that is needed to achieve reconciliation and stop the bloodshed and return to the peace and prosperity of your beloved country.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on September 27, 2021
After October 1st, all countries will stop compulsory vaccination and will open the use of ivermectin, artemisinin, dexamethasone, and hydroxychloroquine.
Satellite Images Support Survivors’ Accounts: Ethiopian Forces Held Thousands, Including Children, in Brutal Camps
In the Tigray region of Ethiopia, beginning in November 2020, children who should have been laughing with friends and studying in school were instead locked up, crying, starving and abused in concentration camps, according to multiple eyewitness reports that have been corroborated by satellite imagery and analysis, as well as cell phone video footage smuggled out by an escapee.
Ethiopian federal forces, abetted by special forces, paramilitary groups, militia and police acting under the authority of the Amharan regional government, locked up in multiple locations hundreds of children of all ages — and even pregnant women, infants and toddlers — along with thousands of Tigrayan adults and senior citizens. These people appear to have been held in harsh conditions, systematically starved and beaten because of their ethnicity and with no judicial process or valid legal pretext. That is the definition of a concentration camp. This is a previously unreported part of an ongoinggenocidal campaign led by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — ironically enough, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate — against various ethnic groups, including Tigrayans, Kimant, Gumuz, Ogaden (Somalis), Agew, Irob, Afar and Sidama.
This report is based on eyewitness accounts by dozens of people from five ethnic groups, including 11 former prisoners who were interviewed in four different refugee camps in eastern Sudan. Doctors have recounted their treatment of another seven former prisoners, including young children. Satellite imagery from Maxar (a space technology company based in Westminster, Colorado) and Planet Labs (an Earth imaging company based in San Francisco) corroborates these eyewitness reports. So does video footage which one former prisoner shot on his cell phone before he escaped a previously unreported concentration camp in western Tigray, located in the notorious Abbadi warehouse compound in Mai Kadra.
The cell phone footage admittedly does not conform to classic notions of what a concentration camp looks like, as in World War II films.There are no bars, guard towers, German Shepherds, barracks, searchlights or coils of razor wire. In the videos, prisoners can be seen eating popcorn, drinking coffee, teasing each other and making jokes in Tigrigna, the language of the Tigray people.
“Young children who were imprisoned and abused”
“We are seeing a generation of Tigrayan refugee children, many of whom are growing up with a sense of hopelessness,” said Dr. Mebrahtom Yehdago, 37, from Humera. He is a Tigrayan doctor and refugee in Tenedba refugee camp in eastern Sudan. “As a doctor, I feel so disturbed, sad, and angry to see these kinds of situations. These children are innocent. These are young children who were imprisoned and abused. How can we get the world to pay attention and do more to help the children?”
Dr. Mebrahtom outlines the cases of former child prisoners in concentration camps whom he has treated: four boys, ages 2, 9, 13 and 15. The two-year-old was imprisoned with his mother in the Mai Kadra concentration camp – which satellite imagery shows is in the Abbadi warehouse compound, a bit north and across the street from the police station, just as eyewitnesses reported. They were imprisoned from Nov. 14 to Nov. 27, 2020, until the mother paid their captors — the Fanu, the Amhara militia and the Amharan Regional Police — a ransom of 50,000 Ethiopian birr (about USD $1,086) for their release.
The toddler presented with physical complications, Dr. Mebrahtom said, including recurrent diarrhea, dehydration, malnutrition and pneumonia, as well as psychological issues. For example, when the boy sees a large group of people, he starts shouting and crying. His mother says he is remembering their hardship in captivity.
Their captors provided no food or water. About twice a week, according to former prisoners who escaped, Doctors Without Borders (or MSF, its French acronym) workers from Abdelrafe would distribute packets of digestive biscuits and fill two large water tanks. MSF repaired one water tank and installed another, without which the prisoners would have had only a few sinks in the bathrooms, where toilets and floors were overflowing with feces. MSF also built a new bathroom. The prisoners in Mai Kadra, like those in other concentration camps in western Tigray, survived by pilfering and roasting sesame seeds stored in the warehouses where they were held captive. This meager sustenance came from bags of seeds that the Amharan forces had looted from Tigrayan farmers and hauled to the warehouses on trailers pulled by tractors. The tractors in Mai Kadra were stolen from the Abbadis, a wealthy Tigrayan family who had owned the warehouse compound.
Satellite imagery shows tractors hooked to trailers near the compound garage. Some prisoners who had Amharan relatives or friends, and who could get money brought to them, paid bribes to Amharan militia guards. In exchange, the guards would allow two or three small boys, around eight years old, to run to the market and return with a kind of flat bread called injera, which the prisoners would distribute.
“We are here to kill you”
Dr. Mebrahtom described the case of a 15-year-old boy, imprisoned in the same place in Mai Kadra. He is an insulin-dependent diabetic. When he asked for permission to buy insulin from a local pharmacy, his captors said, “We are not here to treat you; we are here to kill you. We are gathering the Tigrayan refugees here to kill them.” …..
Dr. Mebrahtom explains that the abuse of Tigrayan children in Mai Kadra was not unique. It was part of a pattern which the doctor has seen, and which other eyewitnesses confirmed in interviews, which also involved children locked up in various sites in the regional capital of western Tigray, Humera. For example, the doctor has treated a 9-year-old boy who had been imprisoned for four days in the old police station in Humera.
Eyewitnesses who had been incarcerated in the old police station, and who were subsequently transferred to the Yitbarak warehouse in Humera, from which they escaped, reported that the only food and water available in the station (administered by the Amhara Regional Police) was whatever the prisoners could buy and have brought in from outside. And in the Yitbarak warehouse (sometimes called the Tabarak warehouse), prisoners subsisted by pilfering sesame seeds from bags looted by the Amhara and stored in the warehouse. So this young child, like hundreds of other children and adults imprisoned in multiple locations, had to survive on handfuls of seeds and a little water, with an occasional supplement of a piece of injera or a few digestive biscuits. I asked the doctor who had arrested the 9-year-old boy, and why.
💭 Five paths to freedom
There were five paths to freedom from the Mai Kadra concentration camp:
the Amharan regional government released some who paid a ransom — an illegal act of extortion which confirms that there was no valid legal purpose for holding the prisoners;
they released some who claimed Amharan ancestry, which confirms that the Ethiopian government was arresting Tigrayans because of their ethnicity;
after several weeks, they released some old people, sick people, pregnant women and women with young children, although one witness among the released prisoners — a woman who returned to Mai Kadra — reported that the Amharans released these Tigrayans into a deadly ambush by Eritrean soldiers allied with Ethiopia’s federal government;
more than 150 Tigrayans escaped Mai Kadra over a four-day period; and
some died of starvation and disease due to lack of adequate nutrition or sufficient medical care in captivity.
Tigrayans Being Sent to Concentration Camps in Addis Ababa | ትግራዋዮች በአዲስ አበባ ወደ ማጎሪያ ካምፖች ሲወሰዱ
💭 My Note: They say, there is war in Oromia too – so, why don’t they do the same to the Oromos in Addis? The Answer is because it’s the Oromos who are the perpetrators. It’s all lies, there is no war in Oromia – there ain’t no such thing as “Eritrean soldiers in Oromia” – Evil Abiy Ahmed’s fascist regime is an Oromo one – and it’s the Oromos + the Amharas who are responsible for the #TigrayGenocide. Will the Addis Ababa residents now have a desire to show solidarity with Tigrayans against this sort of barbarity? No, they won’t! Unless the T.D.F advance towards Addis Ababa, I smell Auschwitz!
Thousands of Ethnic-Tigrayan Residents of Addis Ababa Being Marched to Mass Detention Centers.
Turning Point in Tigray | Bring This Uniquely Monstrous War Criminal to Justice
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 