💭 Ethiopian Canadians Painfully Watch Tigray Conflict From Afar
👉Courtesy: CBC News
💭 Ethiopian-Canadians have been painfully watching from afar as Ethiopia’s deadly conflict in the Tigray region between government forces and rebels, leaving thousands dead and more at risk of starvation.
💭 Seis meses después del asesinato de nuestros compañeros María, Tedros y Yohannes, siguen sin estar claras las circunstancias y las responsabilidades.
El 24 de junio de 2021, María Hernández, de 35 años, nuestra coordinadora de emergencias; Yohannes Halefom Reda, de 32 años, nuestro coordinador adjunto; y Tedros Gebremariam, de 31 años, nuestro conductor, se dirigían por la región de Tigray, desde Abi Adi hacia el sur, para buscar y recoger a heridos en zonas afectadas por intensos combates entre la RDFE, sus aliados y el FLPT. El equipo de MSF en Abi Adi había recibido información previa referente a un gran número de heridos en Shoate Egum, una aldea cercana al lugar del incidente. A poco más de una hora de viaje el vehículo se detuvo.
El 25 de junio, localizamos su vehículo vacío y sus cuerpos fueron encontrados a una distancia de entre 100 y 400 metros del coche. Sus lesiones mostraban que los tres habían sufrido múltiples disparos a corta distancia. El tipo de heridas sufridas por nuestros compañeros no correspondían a las que hubieran resultado de un fuego cruzado, y confirman que fue un asesinato intencionado de tres trabajadores de ayuda humanitaria. Cada uno de ellos era claramente reconocible como civil y trabajador humanitario en el momento del incidente. El vehículo, claramente identificado con el logotipo de MSF y dos banderas de la organización, recibió numerosos disparos y fue incendiado.
Durante los últimos seis meses, hemos hecho todo lo posible por entender lo que les ocurrió, entablando un contacto continuo con las partes del conflicto. Nos hemos reunido en múltiples ocasiones con varios Ministerios de la República Democrática Federal de Etiopía (RDFE) para asegurarnos de que se investigan sus asesinatos y se nos comunican los resultados. Hemos hecho las mismas peticiones al Frente de Liberación del Pueblo de Tigray (FLPT).
Además, como parte de nuestra práctica interna habitual tras incidentes críticos de seguridad, hemos recopilado y analizado información que nos ha permitido reconstruir la ruta que siguió el coche de MSF, así como el lugar y la hora del incidente y algunas de las circunstancias materiales del asesinato.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 14, 2022
💭 “There’s a lot of areas we haven’t been able to access so we can’t assess what the humanitarian situation is.” 😠😠😠 😢😢😢
Steph Dujarric UN Spokesperson discusses the food, fuel and cash shortage that are adding to Tigray’s humanitarian crises.
“I’m looking at the clock right now. It’s just gone I think about 8:30 in the evening in Tigray. As we’re talking on this program. That means there are a lot of people, millions actually, who are likely going to bed hungry. It’s one thing not to be able to find food for yourself. It’s another thing altogether not to be able to find food for your children.” Zain Asher
💭 On Day Biden Calls Ethiopia’s Leader to Urge Peace, a Drone Strike Kills 17
The attack came days after over 50 people were killed in a strike on a refugee camp, highlighting the growing role of armed drones in a destructive war.
On the same day that President Biden spoke with his Ethiopian counterpart, Abiy Ahmed, about a possible window for peace in the long-running war in Tigray, at least 17 people, including women and children, were killed in an airstrike, aid workers said.
The strike on Monday came days after dozens more were killed after a drone opened fire on a refugee camp in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray and highlighted the increasingly deadly role of armed drones, some supplied by American allies, in a conflict that has badly destabilized Africa’s second most populous country.
Video from the aftermath of the strike on Friday, provided by aid workers, showed the charred bodies of women and children laid out on blue plastic sheeting bearing the United Nations logo. On Monday the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said he was “deeply concerned” about the attack, which occurred hours after the Ethiopian government issued a call for “national reconciliation.” At least 50 people had been killed, he said.
Prime Minister Abiy stoked hopes for a cease-fire on Friday with the release of prominent political prisoners, including a founding member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or T.P.L.F., which Mr. Abiy’s government has been fighting since November 2020.
On Monday, in their first direct conversation as leaders, Mr. Biden called Mr. Abiy, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, to urge him to “accelerate progress toward a negotiated ceasefire” and open up humanitarian access across the country, the White House said in a statement.
The prisoner releases, and Mr. Abiy’s calls for a national dialogue, present “a moment of opportunity, if the parties are willing and able to seize it,” a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity told reporters in a briefing about the conversation. Mr. Biden also expressed his concern about civilian deaths from airstrikes.
But hours later, news filtered through of another attack.
Missiles slammed into a flour mill in Mai Tsebri, in the Tigray region, on Monday afternoon, killing at least 17 people and wounding dozens, aid workers with two organizations and local officials said. Witnesses reported seeing drones in the skies before the strike, they said.
Most of the dead were women who had gone to the mill to grind cereals, according to an internal United Nations report cited by one aid worker.
The aid workers spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals from Ethiopia, which expelled several U.N. and international aid officials last year, and has detained numerous journalists including a video journalist accredited to the Associated Press arrested last month.
Col. Getnet Adane, a spokesman for the Ethiopian military, referred questions about the airstrikes to the Ethiopian government spokesman, who did not respond.
A mediator appointed by the African Union, Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president of Nigeria, flew into the Tigrayan capital Mekelle on Tuesday morning, two Western diplomats said. Hours later, gunfire rang out across the city as Tigrayan antiaircraft guns opened fire, apparently in reaction to drones circling overhead, an aid official in the city said.
The United States has repeatedly called on Eritrea, whose troops are fighting in Tigray in support of Mr. Abiy, to withdraw their forces — a call reiterated by the senior American official who briefed reporters on Monday.
But the official declined to comment on the role of other countries accused of fueling the fighting, including the United Arab Emirates — a major American ally.
Powerful Chinese-built drones supplied by the U.A.E. to Ethiopia, as well as less powerful models supplied by Turkey, played a major role in a string of dramatic battlefield victories by Mr. Abiy’s forces in December, Western officials and analysts said.
Understand the Conflict in Ethiopia
A year of war. On Nov. 4, 2020, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed began a military campaign in the country’s northern Tigray region, hoping to vanquish the Tigray People’s Liberation Front — his most troublesome political foe.
Rebels turned the tide. Despite Mr. Abiy’s promise of a swift campaign, the Ethiopian military suffered a major defeat in June when it was forced to withdraw from Tigray. The fighting subsequently moved south.
Tigrayan forces close in. In late October, Tigrayan rebels captured two towns near Addis Ababa, the nation’s capital. The government declared a state of emergency and called on citizens to arm themselves.
Drones tip the balance. A string of victories at the end of 2021 signaled that the Ethiopian government was regaining its footing on the battlefield. A fleet of combat drones acquired from allies in the Persian Gulf region was a decisive factor in the reversal.
Atrocities on both sides. A United Nations report in November offered evidence that all sides involved in the conflict had committed atrocities. Since the start of the war, the Ethiopian and Tigrayan forces have since been accused of carrying out transgressions including extrajudicial killings.
Since August, Ethiopia has also acquired drones from Iran. Websites that track international flights have detected cargo flights into Ethiopia from Chengdu, the Chinese city where the powerful Wing Loong drone is manufactured.
It is unclear which armed drones carried out the latest deadly strikes in Tigray, but supplies of military equipment are increasingly becoming a focus of international efforts to halt the fighting.
The United States pressured the U.A.E. to stop an earlier round of drone strikes in the opening weeks of the war, foreign diplomats say. Last week the White House appointed a new special envoy to the Horn of Africa, David Satterfield, to replace Jeffrey Feltman.
Mr. Satterfield is currently the American ambassador to Turkey and has raised the issue of recent sales of armed drones to Ethiopia with Turkish officials, officials say.
The drone war comes against the backdrop of a soaring humanitarian crisis. At least 9.4 million people in northern Ethiopia urgently need help, the U.N. says, but a government blockade has prevented vital supplies of food and medicine from reaching Tigray, where the majority live.
Less than 12 percent of required supplies got through between July and December, according to the U.N., and last week doctors at Tigray’s main hospital issued a desperate appeal for basic supplies including antibiotics, surgical gloves and medicine to treat cancer.
“We are just counting deaths that happen due to totally preventable causes,” Mussie Tesfay, administrator of the Ayder Referral Hospital, said in an email. “It is just so heartbreaking to see our beloved patients die one by one.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 6, 2022
🔔 For thousands of Ethiopians who have fled fighting in the Tigray region to Sudan, this year’s Orthodox Tewahedo Christmas on January 7 is a sombre celebration. There will be little feasting for those living hand-to-mouth in the crowded Um Raquba refugee camp.
“The global paralysis on Ethiopia’s armed conflict has emboldened human rights abusers to act with impunity,” Human Rights Watch’s Laetitia Bader said.
By The Associated Press
New witness accounts allege that thousands of ethnic Tigrayans have been forcibly expelled, detained or killed in one of the most inaccessible areas of Ethiopia’s yearlong war in the latest wave of abuses carried out with machetes, guns and knives.
It comes ahead of a U.N. Human Rights Council session Friday on Ethiopia, whose government objects to what it considers meddling by the West over the war that has killed tens of thousands of people.
Ethnic Tigrayans have been targeted throughout the conflict as Ethiopian and allied forces battle the Tigray fighters who long dominated the national government before Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office three years ago. Some of the worst abuses have been reported in the western Tigray region, which has been occupied by authorities and fighters from the neighboring Amhara region and soldiers from neighboring Eritrea.
The latest alleged abuses appear to be linked to the Tigray forces’ recent momentum, which Ethiopia’s government asserts has been blunted after the prime minister, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and former soldier, went to the battlefront himself. Witnesses told the AP that authorities in western Tigray warned in public meetings against supporting the Tigray fighters, who themselves have been accused of a growing number of abuses in the war.
The new joint statement by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International says Amhara security forces are responsible for the latest wave of expulsions, detentions and killings, and it warns that Tigrayans in detention are “at grave risk.” It says security forces systematically rounded up Tigrayans in the communities of Humera, Adebay and Rawyan, separating families and expelling women and children.
“They separated the old from the young, took their money and other possessions. … Older people, parents were loaded on big trucks (going) east. They let them go with nothing, while the young remained behind,” one witness in Rawyan told the human rights groups. In Humera, witnesses described seeing as many as 20 trucks carrying people away. It’s not often clear where they are taken.
A spokesman for the Amhara region, Gizachew Mulluneh, and Abiy spokeswoman Bellene Seyoum did not immediately comment.
The United Nations has estimated that 20,000 people were recently evicted from western Tigray, most of them women, children and the elderly. The U.N. has said more than 1 million have been displaced from there since the war began in November 2020.
But not all can leave. Witnesses have alleged that hundreds, if not thousands, of Tigrayans are held in makeshift, overcrowded detention centers in western Tigray, part of thousands being held elsewhere across Ethiopia amid suspicions fueled by hate speech by some senior government officials. The government has said it is targeting only the Tigray forces.
Witnesses told the AP, and the human rights groups, that some people trying to flee the roundups in Adebay were attacked and killed, with some Amhara fighters searching house-to-house with axes. “The whole town smelled” with dead bodies, one man said.
The human rights groups are calling on Ethiopian authorities to end the attacks on civilians and immediately grant access to western Tigray for aid groups. They also call on the U.N. Human Rights Council to establish an independent mechanism to investigate the war’s abuses, including by Tigray forces, and urge the U.N. Security Council to put Ethiopia on its formal agenda.
“The global paralysis on Ethiopia’s armed conflict has emboldened human rights abusers to act with impunity and left communities at risk of feeling abandoned,” Human Rights Watch’s Laetitia Bader said.
👉 „Failure on Ethiopia Sanctions ‘My Biggest Frustration’ This Year, Says EU’s Top Diplomat”
💭 My Note: In other words, Mr. Borrell is telling us: “As long as war criminals Abiy Ahmed Ali, Isaias Afewerki, the Oromo & Amhara special forces continue blocking Tigrayans (potential migrants to Europe heading for EU) from crossing the Ethio-Sudanese border in whatever possible form: By rounding them up, mutilating & dismembering — at the border within Africa – and throwing their dead bodies to the Tekeze river across the border, EU won’t issue sanctions against Abiy Ahmed, Isaias Afewerki and their partners in crime. The are doing a good job in preventing undesired ancient Christian Ethiopian migrants (We saw that when the UN The US and EU all blocked ancient Christians of Syria. Read this: No Christians Allowed: Muslim UN Officials Block Syrian Christian Refugees from Getting Help.
Mr. Borrell said it clearly, albeit concerning Belarus and Ukraine: “We cut the flowing of migrants to Europe…for me this is a source of satisfaction”
May be now The EU is giving money to the dictators of Ethiopia and Eritrea as a reward, instead of sanctioning them?!
After all, EU countries have awarded and honored to those evil monsters with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, and just two months ago, one of the enablers of the #TigrayGenocide, Daniel Bekele with the German Africa Prize. Just unbelievably cruel – the world upside down, isn’t it?!
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