🔥 No one expected fans to congratulate opposing players after a big win, but charging the field? Not sure how many saw that coming, but that’s exactly what happened in Turkey on Sunday.
Violence has erupted again in Turkey’s Super Lig after Trabzonspor fans stormed the pitch and attacked Fenerbahce players – who retaliated in shocking scenes.
Home supporters ran onto the field as the visiting team were celebrating a 3-2 victory at Papara Park in Trabzon.
Images appear to show former Chelsea striker Michy Batshuayi aiming a spinning heel kick at the head of one assailant and ex Queens Park Rangers full-back Bright Osayi-Samuel punching another to the ground.
☪ RAPE JIHAD: ‘We’re here to make you HIV positive’. 15% of women in Tigray contracted HIV
Before the the genocidal war, Tigray and its 6 million inhabitants were a role model in Ethiopia’s fight against AIDS.
Tigray is a highly religious (97% Orthodox) and socially conservative province – it’s the cradle of Ethiopian civilization and Orthodox Christianity
💭 Aid organizations have estimated that 15% of women contracted HIV during the civil war against the region’s rebels and its occupation.
👉 Courtesy:Le Monde, By Noé Hochet-Bodin (Mekele (Ethiopia) special correspondent) , March 16, 2024
Fearing that their stories would disappear, Meseret Hadush has recorded the names of thousands of Tigrayan women who were victims of rape during the civil war in the northern Tigray region of Ethiopia, from 2020 to 2022. Her research has continued, more than a year after the peace agreement between the Ethiopian government and the Tigrayan insurgents of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was signed in November 2022.
After collecting almost 5,000 testimonies with her organization Hiwyet (“healing” in the Tigrinya language), she now fears an AIDS “epidemic” among these women raped by troops from the fascist Oromo army of Ethiopia, the neighboring Amhara region and Eritrea. Some 15% of them are thought to have contracted HIV, according to her organization’s register of their stories.
Before the conflict, Tigray and its 6 million inhabitants were a role model in Ethiopia’s fight against AIDS. The prevalence rate (the number of people infected) had fallen to 1.43%. Then, beginning in November 2020, war struck this mountainous, arid province – once the cradle of Ethiopian civilization. The unprecedentedly violent clashes – which took on a strong ethnic dimension – left up to 600,000 people dead, according to an African Union tally. They were also accompanied by widespread acts of rape. Regional authorities in Tigray have estimated the number of victims of sexual abuse at 120,000.
“A grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter were raped by the same Eritrean soldiers in a suburb of Shire, [a city] in central Tigray, in December 2020,” said Hadush with tears in her eyes, from her office in Mekele, the regional capital. “These three generations of women are now HIV-positive. It’s a tragedy for Tigray’s future.”
‘Time bomb’
The region is still struggling to recover from the civil war. Maimed people, some with “broken faces,” are everywhere in town. In Mekele, where refugee camps still number in the dozens, begging has become the only means of subsistence for all these internally displaced people. Economic activity has almost ground to a standstill, and the drought has brought hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans to the brink of starvation. Hospitals have struggled to regain their pre-war capacity.
“At least we have antiretrovirals,” said Fisseha Berhane, the head of the AIDS department at the regional health office. Tigray was sorely lacking in such supplies over the two years of conflict. “Because of the blockade, HIV-positive people were, at best, taking expired antiretrovirals,” he said. The clashes damaged or destroyed 70% of hospitals or health centers, according to the organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF). “We have lost track of 9,000 of the 46,000 patients registered before the war,” noted Berhane, preferring to use the term “disappeared” to “dead.”
He warned that the region was facing a “time bomb” with the risk of large-scale transmission of HIV. While the authorities have estimated that 5% of raped women are HIV-positive, the situation remains unclear. “There aren’t enough tests available to carry out a comprehensive study in the region, and the federal government isn’t giving us the budget for it, even though it’s urgent,” he asserted.
‘You couldn’t find a single condom in town’
Doctors in Tigray have expressed fears of an outbreak of cases due to sexual assaults, but also because of the lack of any form of sexual protection during the war. “For two years, you couldn’t find a single condom in town,” due to the blockade imposed by federal forces in Tigray, explained Dr. Fasika Amdeslasie, a surgeon at Ayder Hospital in Mekele. “Soldiers had high-risk practices, it was a time when they didn’t think about tomorrow,” he added. During the previous conflict in the region, the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (1998-2000), the prevalence rate within the army ranks had risen by 76%.
“The risk of propagation is manifold, stemming from the fact that a million destitute people are still in camps for displaced persons, from rapid urbanization and from poverty, which drives many mothers to prostitution in Tigray,” added Berhane.
Knowing the prevalence rate among women who have been raped is all the more difficult as many do not report having been assaulted. “They’re afraid of discrimination,” explained Gedey Gebremichael, a 48-year-old HIV-positive Tigrayan woman and member of the association Tesfa Hiwot (“Hope of Living” in Tigrinya), which has helped 1,450 infected women in this highly religious and socially conservative province. “They fear that there will be neither justice nor reparations, only stigmatization.”
Gebremichael has had her own bitter experience of this. When she tested positive for HIV in 2005, her husband immediately left the family home, her neighbors accused her of witchcraft, and the vegetables she sold at the Mekele market were no longer being bought for fear of transmitting the virus.
‘We don’t have the weapons to fight’
“During the occupation, [whether] at the hands of Ethiopian or Eritrean soldiers, the choice for some women was either to die or to be raped,” said Melka Asgedom. “Every day, we have two or three women infected during the war who come to us,” said this director of Tesfa Hiwot, who also fears that “an explosion of cases” would be discovered if the province were in a position to organize a vast screening campaign.
Lacking the necessary resources, her association has been supported by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the French diplomatic corps, which has launched the Feminist Opportunities Now (FON) initiative. “The latest data on HIV in Ethiopia dates from the previous decade and does not take into account the consequences of the war in Tigray,” said Wanjiru Wairimu, a FON program manager. “It’s when these women become seriously ill that they find out they’re HIV-positive, and they have no assistance.”
The Tesfa Hiwot association allows them to sign up and receive skills training, psychological support and funds to open a business. “If only the infrastructure could be rebuilt and the federal government could pay budgets, we could fight AIDS effectively, but today we don’t have the tools to do so,” lamented Asgedom.
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