Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 16, 2021
💭 „Mostly Tigrayans„? The fascist Oromo regime detains only Tigrayans – so they are all Tigrayans.
😈Dark History of The Oromos & Amharas | የኦሮሞ እና የአማራ የጨለማ ታሪክ
The U.N. human rights office is citing reports that authorities in Ethiopia have detained at least 1,000 people, most of them of Tigrayan origin, under a state of emergency the government declared earlier this month after a brutal yearlong war with rival Tigray forces.
The arrests occurred in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, the northern cities of Gondar and Bahir Dar, and other places, according to Liz Throssell, a spokesperson for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
She told reporters Tuesday that Ethiopian authorities have often detained people on suspicion of “being affiliated to or supporting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.”
Ethiopia´s war has killed thousands of people and created one of the world´s worst crises. Hundreds of thousands face famine conditions in the Tigray region under what the United Nations has called a “de facto humanitarian blockade.”
“The state of emergency in force in Ethiopia risks compounding an already very serious human rights and humanitarian situation in the country,” Throssell said, referring to the Nov. 2 government decree. “Its provisions are extremely broad, with vague prohibitions going as far as encompassing ‘indirect moral’ support for what the government has labeled `terrorist groups.´”
“These developments are all the more disturbing given that most of those detained are reported to be people of Tigrayan origin.”
Government spokesperson Legesse Tulu did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Police have previously said the arrests are not ethnically motivated but are aimed at detaining supporters of the TPLF.
The conditions in detention centres were poor and overcrowded and many were not told the reasons for their detention, the United Nations said.
U.N. workers have also been caught up in the arrests.
Could it be that the international community – and particularly the Nobel Peace Committee – perhaps desperate as ever for an African hero, completely overlooked the many warning signs about Abiy’s background, character and intentions when he unexpectedly became Ethiopia’s prime minister in April 2018 and ostensibly embarked on a path of reform, somewhat liberalising the country’s autocratic politics and making peace with its hitherto implacable foe, neighbouring Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki.
J Peter Pham, distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington and recent US special envoy to the Sahel and before that the Great Lakes region, says if anyone was truly surprised by Abiy’s apparent about-turn after he got the Nobel Peace Prize, “it’s only their ignorance or naiveté they have to thank for that”.
As an expert on African security issues who was known to have influence with US policymakers, Pham enjoyed access to some of the highest officials of Ethiopia’s then-ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government and was introduced to Abiy when he was still deputy director-general 0f the little-known Information Network Security Agency (INSA).
“INSA was the prototype – you could say it was first in class or among the first in class and was probably, at the time, best in class – of the African intelligence agencies that snooped around the internet,” Pham said. “It deployed Chinese technology very early on – this was before 2010 – to ferret out dissidents on the internet. And not only did it eavesdrop on them in cyberspace, but it then used electronic trails to locate where they were physically. And the presumption was that someone would then ‘pay them a call’.”
Abiy also sat on the board of state-owned Ethiopian Telecom – “just to make sure the Ethiopian telecoms monopoly did its part in this great national cause”.
“And so when you have this authoritarian background, the notion of Abiy as liberal reformer is difficult to credit.”
They miscalculated because they thought they knew him and underestimated both his ambition and his willingness to turn on the very people and institutions that brought him to power.
He adds that Abiy did not come to power through an election, but was “chosen by barely 100 members of the EPRDF executive committee and council” to replace Hailemariam Desalegn in the middle of a political crisis of mounting regional political protest. And Pham notes that many of the reforms usually attributed to Abiy, including the freeing of thousands of political prisoners, began during the last months of Hailemariam’s tenure.
The EPRDF leadership chose Abiy to be the new prime minister over the more popular Lemma Megersa, the candidate of the Oromo “street” whose protests helped bring about the collapse of the ruling coalition’s nearly three decades of domination, because Abiy was considered by regime insiders to be a safer pair of hands.
“They miscalculated because they thought they knew him and underestimated both his ambition and his willingness to turn on the very people and institutions that brought him to power.”
The world wilfully ignored these signs, Pham says – or acted in bad faith. “No one who knows this history can possibly imagine this was a set-up for democratic transformation.”
Unlike Nelson Mandela, who had shown the political wisdom to take just political power – and leave the reckoning of the economic grievances for another day, Abiy had overreached. He not only took political power – and then turned against those who put him in power – but also went after their economic interests, particularly those of Tigrayan elites who had dominated Ethiopian politics since the toppling of the brutal dictator Hailemariam Mengistu in 1991 and used their political ascendency to secure lucrative businesses and other assets.
Pham acknowledges that many Ethiopians were upset by what they believed to be Tigrayans exercising disproportionate control over large parts of the economy, but suggested it was not prudent for Abiy to have attacked both their political and economic power at once.
And Abiy not only alienated the Tigrayans but other ethnic groups, which was why the Oromo Liberation Army is allied with the TPLF against him. And last week a broader political alliance formed to oppose him.
Will Davison, Ethiopia expert at the International Crisis Group, founder of the journal Ethiopia Insight and former longtime correspondent in Addis Ababa, also believes that Abiy’s belligerence after he won the Peace Prize should have come as no surprise to the international community.
Those who were surprised had misread the circumstances in 2018 when he came to power, including his peace deal with Afwerki and his political priorities.
The peace deal was not particularly transparent or institutionalised and seemed to be a very narrow arrangement between Abiy and Afwerki. Davison said Afwerki had rejected offers from previous Ethiopian leaders to unfreeze bilateral relations – demanding that Ethiopia first withdraw from the bloodily disputed border areas between them, which the UN had ruled were Eritrea’s.
Yet he had accepted the same offer from Abiy. Why? Davison suspects this might have been because Abiy had assured Afwerki that his old enemy, the TPLF, would no longer be a dominant force in Ethiopian politics, or even that it would be completely eradicated.
Davison also believes Abiy mishandled the inevitable power shift away from the TPLF especially. It had indeed had its day in the sun and could no longer be the dominant power.
But Abiy blamed them and the Tigrayan securocrats for almost all of Ethiopia’s problems, some justifiably but some not.
“And that fed into a disastrous political falling-out which culminated in the power struggle and the civil war.”
Davison added that Abiy should also have accommodated the Oromo nationalist demands that had been so prominent in bringing him, a fellow Oromo, to power.
These included greater autonomy for Oromia and for the federal state to give back to Oromia more from its own resources.
He also noted that politicians from across the board, including Abiy’s own erstwhile Oromo allies, such as Lemma, had objected to his creation of the more centralised Prosperity Party to replace the federalist EPRDF. This appeared to be a precursor to formally changing the federal constitution, and centralising government power in Addis Ababa.
The TPLF was the most prominent critic of those rejecting the Prosperity Party and in 2020, when Abiy postponed the elections, ostensibly because of Covid-19, the TPLF also became the most defiant opponent of that move and decided to go ahead with its own elections in Tigray, arguing that Abiy had violated the constitution by postponing the elections.
Davison does not blame Abiy entirely for the falling-out and then the war with the TPLF. He also accuses the latter of “pure constitutional brinkmanship. By rejecting the authority of the federal institution, they came up with their own provocative reading of the constitution which pushed, or at least gave the opportunity to those at the centre, to cast the region and the ruling party of Tigrayas unacceptably defiant of the constitutional order – as a rogue region, a state within a state seeking to return to federal power. This was a major contributor to the civil war.”
Even though the federal constitution did accommodate group rights, and the sovereignty and right to self-determination of nationalities and peoples, “ultimately it was an act of defiance by the TPLF of the federal government to take this approach”.
Pham fears that by misreading Abiy well before the civil war started, the international community lost its opportunity to exert some leverage over him, now, to end the war. “Those who bear a lot of the responsibility for this are those within the international community who not only ignored his authoritarian past – thus signalling that they were prepared to overlook abuses – but then exacerbated it by puffing him up with what amounted to adulation. Then, in their embarrassment, they compounded their errors by ignoring the warning signs that, despite the progress that Abiy undoubtedly presided over in some sectors, things were nonetheless going terribly wrong. And so they lost what chance there might have been to head off the dire situation we have today.”
And so he is not optimistic about current international mediation efforts because the international community had not only missed some opportunities, but had also lost credibility in the process with both Abiy and many of those now fighting him.
The only chance for a “smooth landing” in the conflict is for Ethiopians themselves to do what the international community failed to do: “cast aside wishful thinking and other fantasies, face up to reality – including the impossibility of ‘having it all’ – and begin a national dialogue without preconditions”
💭 Desta Haileselassie | The Man Who Counts The Dead Sees Them Everywhere.
They’re in the handwritten lists of names smuggled out of a region cut off from the world by war. They’re in the images of people shot and tossed off a cliff, tortured and pushed into a river, left unburied for days. They’re announced by grieving families in social media posts.
They are the first thing he sees in the morning when he checks his messages. They are the last thing he sees at night, when they enter his dreams.
He has been living with the dead for a year, since war erupted last November in Ethiopia’s Tigrayregion. Tigrayans, a minority of some 6 million, were encircled as a falling-out with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, turned deadly. It became an ethnic clash when Amhara fighters from a neighbouring region allied with Ethiopia’s government poured in.
Many Tigrayans joined the fight. But the man who counts the dead is in Sweden and could not.
So he quickly decided what he could do to help. In his small, neat apartment at the end of a metro line in Stockholm, Desta Haileselassie would apply his computer science background and research skills to compiling a list of Tigrayan victims, name by name.
It is slow, difficult work. Almost all communication with Tigrayhas been cut off, and foreign media is banned. Many in the diaspora have waited for months to know whether loved ones are alive, terrified to receive messages from home even as they yearn for news.
In the confused first days and weeks, Desta issued pleas on social media for help. He told anguished families that a list of the dead would be a memorial of a war Ethiopia’s government seemed determined to hide. He made dozens of phone calls, then hundreds more.
The work took over his life. He stopped hiking, swimming or going to the gym, and he sleeps poorly. The guitar and keyboard he once played sit in his Stockholm apartment, untouched.
He has collected handwritten testimonies and photographs that make him feel sick or bring him to tears. He tries to calm weeping family members from afar, never meeting them in person. Months of exhaustion have collected under his eyes.
“There are days when I end up crying the whole evening,” Desta says softly. “A very, very hard job to do, but I have to do it … This is the least I can do to help my people.”
Now, a year on, he has confirmed 3,080 names of the dead. The Associated Press has verified 30 of them chosen randomly, speaking with families and friends.
Victim Number 2,171 was Gebretsadkan Teklu Gebreyesus, shot dead by soldiers in the presence of his two young sons, the AP confirmed. Victim 1,599, Zeray Asfaw, was a bridegroom pulled from his wedding party and killed along with his best man, his friends and the father of the bride while the women screamed. Victim Number 2,915 was Amdekiros Aregawi Gebru, an ambulance driver gunned down while driving a woman in labour to a clinic, making it there before bleeding to death.
Desta has another 1,000 names he’s still trying to verify.
“It’s very, very disturbing, I’m very sorry,” he says as he shows photos of corpses on the ground.
His list does not include ethnic Amhara, who are some of the war’s latest victims after Tigray forces started moving toward Ethiopia’s capital.
The Amhara Association of America has its own list of the dead, starting with the killing of hundreds of Amhara in the Tigray community of Mai Kadra in the earliest days of the war. The list has reached 1,994.
The two ethnicities are separate even in death. The United Nations says that while war crimes may have been committed on all sides, the most atrocities have been reported against Tigrayans by Ethiopian soldiers and their Eritrean allies.
One thing all agree on, including experts: The lists represent just a fraction of the dead.
Desta is certain that every Tigrayan has lost someone, whether to fighting or to house-to-house massacres or to starvation under an Ethiopian government blockade. To emphasise the shattered connections, he often mentions when a victim is a parent, or is killed alongside one. The word “mother” appears 43 times.
“His mother alone had to cry over her son’s body all day long,” one entry says.
Desta too has lost loved ones, 19 of them. The self-contained 36-year-old gently deflects questions, saying every victim on his list is like family.
But the thought of adding one name especially close to him is too much to bear. It brings him to tears when her name is mentioned. The single photo on display in the room where he works shows him embracing her as she smiles.
He calls her Amlishaway.
She is his mother.
Victim Number 51: Haben Sahle
Desta’s list includes 102 children. The news of the death of a 15-year-old boy was among the first to reach him.
Haben Sahle was a top student in the border town of Zalambessa and an only son. When the war engulfed Tigray, connection with him was lost.
In faraway California, the boy’s uncle, Angesom, received the first word in a phone call weeks later, in December. It was a well-intended lie.
Relatives in neighbouring Eritrea told Angesom that family members in Zalambessa were fine. But Angesom knew that in their culture, the death of a loved one usually wouldn’t be shared over the phone.
A trio of Ethiopian Orthodox priests broke the terrible news in a surprise visit the following Sunday.
“When priests come to your house without warning, something’s wrong,” Angesom says.
The priests hadn’t known the boy. They didn’t know how he died. It took five more months for Angesom to reach his sister by phone for details.
She told him Ethiopian soldiers, and allied ones from Eritrea, were seeking out and killing men and teenage boys. Decades of rivalries and resentments over Tigrayleaders’ long, often repressive hold on power had turned into slaughter.
As the soldiers approached their home, Haben Sahle’s mother said no one was there but her. But the soldiers fired at random and shot her son hidden inside.
As she recounted the killing, Angesom could finally begin to grieve.
“For six horrible months, I didn’t eat normal, sleep normal, work normal,” he says.
The distance was made worse by fears that Ethiopian authorities were monitoring phone calls. You could only ask loved ones vaguely if they were OK and had food and water, Angesom says.
Now silence has descended again, and he hasn’t reached his family in Tigrayfor the past four months. If he could speak with them again, he would tell them this: He will be their voice forever.
“If this is not genocide,” he says, “there will be nothing that will be labelled as genocide.”
With Angesom’s confirmation of the teenager’s death, Desta added him to his list. More than 90 per cent of the names there are of men and boys, reflecting survivors’ accounts that they were often singled out for killing.
His work had barely begun.
Victim Number 70: Sibhat Berhe Desta. “Killed with other civilians by the Eritrean soldiers near Goda Bottle and Glass Share Company.”
On December 23, a phone connected.
It was Desta’s brother in the Tigray capital, and he was in tears. Nineteen of their family members had been killed.
They were cousins and uncles from their mother’s birthplace. Desta knew some of them well. He had grown up with them, played with them as a child during visits to the village.
“I have a strong attachment to that place,” he says. He recalls Sibhat Berhe Desta as “a very protective and generous uncle. That’s what I vividly remember about him.”
His brother told him that on December 2, Eritrean soldiers had forced their relatives to do manual labour while they stripped down a glass factory and carted the pieces away, part of widespread looting. Then the soldiers killed them.
Family members were forbidden to bury the bodies for 20 days, a grotesque practice widely reported in the war and meant as further insult to the dead.
“I was shocked, but over time I got so emotional,” Desta says. His voice wavers, then steadies.
He has not yet grieved. First, the fighting must end, he says.
Until then, as he counts the dead, he worries about his mother.
“She’s a very brave woman, and she’s my best friend,” Desta says. He covers his face and cries. “She’s always been there.”
In December, he was excited yet terrified to see a social media message from a friend about his mother. It said that with no other way to communicate inside Tigray, she had walked more than 130km from her home to the regional capital, Mekele, to see whether relatives were still alive.
In her late 50s, she hiked through mountainous terrain, sometimes sleeping in caves, taking part in a perilous migration by many Tigrayans searching for loved ones in the chaos. Walking along roads patrolled by hostile forces meant almost certain death.
She could have been killed any second, Desta thought.
On January 4, or 62 days after the war began, he finally reached his mother by phone. She confirmed that she had gone to Mekele on foot twice and kept both journeys a secret from him. She didn’t want him to worry.
He was angry at her risk-taking, then relieved.
As they chatted, he decided not to mention his work counting the dead. She didn’t need any more stress.
But as they slipped back into daily conversations, he hit “record” each time, and saved the digital files.
He feared each call might be their last.
Victim Numbers 333 and 334: Meaza Goshu and Kalayou Berhe. “Killed a few days after their wedding.”
Victim Number 933: Mariamawit Alemayo, 6 years old. “Killed from heavy artillery shelling in Shire by the Eritrean soldiers. She was the only child to her mom.”
Victim Number 1,577: Aba Gebreselassie. “He was an Orthodox Christian monk.”
The death toll is one of the biggest unknowns of Ethiopia’s war.
Among the world’s most successful projects in counting the dead is The Kosovo Memory Book. It is a near-comprehensive, well-funded list of people killed in a war in a small geographic area that lasted for less than two years in the 1990s. But the Kosovo Memory Book is still updated even now.
Determining Ethiopia’s death toll will be considerably more difficult, says Michael Spagat, chair of the nonprofit Every Casualty Counts, which focuses on how to count the dead in conflict.
The group discovered Desta’s efforts as well as a parallel project by researchers centred at Ghent University in Belgium. Their lists are similar, Spagat says, but they capture “a relatively small fraction of it all”.
The Belgian researchers fear that, too.
“If they’re killing 10 people per village, then it’s easily in the tens of thousands,” says Tim Vanden Bempt, whose wife is Tigrayan. For months, he was tweeting a name from the list of dead every hour. That ended when a renewed government blockade on Tigraycut off the flow of information.
Spagat, an economics professor, calls the work ahead in Ethiopia “challenging in the extreme”. With communications links severed, it’s impossible to conduct even a standard sample survey of households to estimate the dead.
It’s likely that Ethiopian authorities will never help, a stance he describes as common among governments in similar situations around the world.
“In many cases, they have done the killing,” he says. “They’d rather it stay as buried as possible.”
The warring sides have claimed tens of thousands of deaths among fighters alone.
Spagat’s hopes are with the network of Ethiopian Orthodox priests in communities who traditionally are informed when residents die. But Tigrayan leaders in the church say scores of priests and other clergy members have been killed, too.
Despite the painstaking work to bring Ethiopia’s dead out of the shadows, Spagat puts the chances of reaching a final toll at “possibly never”.
The war has not just taken lives. In a nation that takes vast pride in its 3,000-year history, it has also ruptured Ethiopia’s culture of honouring the dead.
It is usually the responsibility of the elderly to announce the death of a loved one. Now many families are scattered, with members missing or unreachable. With Tigraycut off from the world, people often don’t know whether to mourn.
“When we’re mourning, we’re not even together,” says a Tigrayan woman in the diaspora, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear for loved ones still in Ethiopia. “You can’t even cry loudly because of what’s going on.”
Tewodrose had not known of Desta’s efforts to count the dead. He believes as many people as possible should document the horrors of the war.
“I have to prioritise my people,” Desta says.
A red-and-yellow Tigrayflag is displayed on his computer rather than the Ethiopian one. He says he no longer feels Ethiopian and is ready to throw away his passport at any time.
Victim Number 3,081: Yet to come
It’s impossible not to fear the worst.
Starvation is sweeping Tigray, and even basic medicines are running out under the blockade. The government has again bombarded the region with airstrikes. Residents say they kill civilians, including children.
Tigrayforces, which one of Desta’s brothers has joined, are approaching the capital, Addis Ababa. Ethiopia’s government calls this an “existential war”.
Desta hasn’t spoken with his mother since June 26. The phone no longer rings through in a new blackout. Every day’s attempt meets silence.
Their last conversation was a normal one, much like the chats many Tigrayans had until a year ago. Sometimes, to escape the dead, Desta tries to feel that sense of normalcy again.
Alone in his apartment, he turns to his dozens of recorded calls with his mother in Tigray.
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