Ethiopia is Deliberately Starving its Own Citizens. The World Should Apply Whatever Pressure it Can to Force it to Stop
💭 My Note: Evil Abiy Ahmed Ali Seems increasingly paranoid and erratic. Yes! A leader of a country starving his citizens because they are not Oromos, Muslims or Pentecostals, rather Tigrayans and Orthodox Christians. And Orthodox Russia is embracing this evil monster! Mind-Boggling, very Sad! Isn’t it?!
➡ From The Economist
Abiy, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2019 for ending a long conflict with Eritrea, seems increasingly paranoid and erratic. But to do anything less would be to stand by as mass murder is taking place. To avert a calamity, Western governments must pull every lever they have.
It is almost a year since Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, launched a “law enforcement” operation against the government of the northern region of Tigray, which he accused of rebellion. Since the beginning, the ensuing conflict has been marked by war crimes. Late last year in the city of Accsoom, for instance, Eritrean troops fighting alongside Ethiopian forces murdered hundreds of civilians, mostly men and boys. Some were lined up and shot in the back. Others were gunned down as they came out of church or murdered while lying in bed in hospital. And the Tigrayans have been accused, among other atrocities, of raping and killing Eritrean refugees in un camps.
Horrifying as these crimes are, they are now being eclipsed by an even more heinous one: a deliberate attempt by the Ethiopian government to starve its own citizens. Since the fighting broke out Tigray has suffered an increasingly restrictive blockade by government forces. Since July it has received only a fraction of the food needed to keep its 6m inhabitants alive, hardly any fuel and no medical supplies at all. More than 5m people do not have enough to eat. Some 400,000 of those are facing what aid agencies call “catastrophic” hunger—the last step on the path to mass starvation. Aid workers compare the crisis to Ethiopia’s famine of the 1980s, when 400,000-700,000 died.
Ethiopia’s government insists it is doing all it can to help the hungry in Tigray and, in particular, that it is letting aid pass through its blockade. Data from the UN tell a different story.
Aid agencies reckon that 100 trucks of food and medicine must enter the state each day to avert famine. Only about a tenth of that is being let through by the government and its allies. Instead of asking international agencies for help to feed its citizens, the government is impeding their efforts. It has suspended the work of two of them, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Norwegian Refugee Council, and has also expelled seven senior un officials, accusing them of “meddling” in its internal affairs.
America and the European Union have taken a few steps to press Ethiopia and the Tigrayans to stop the war and end abuses, including halting the sale of weapons and withholding some bilateral aid. America has also threatened to impose financial sanctions on people implicated in war crimes or in fanning the conflict’s flames.
But the impact has been negligible. To replace arms previously supplied by France, Germany and Israel, Ethiopia has turned to Turkey and Iran, among others. To make up for the reduction in aid, it has asked the IMF for a bail-out and its creditors for forgiveness of some of its $30bn in external debt.
It would take an arms embargo by the UN to stop the government getting hold of deadly weapons. Yet China and Russia are preventing the UN Security Council, which on October 6th discussed the conflict in Tigray for the tenth time, from even condemning the expulsion of UN officials, much less imposing strict sanctions.
Fortunately, Western countries still have considerable leverage. The emergency loan that Ethiopia wants from the IMF and the forbearance it is seeking from creditors depend on the acquiescence of America and Europe. They should not yield until the blockade ends. Trade is another point of pressure. Ethiopia exports about $250m a year to America under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a duty-free scheme. Each country eligible to take part is reviewed by the American authorities every year. They should remove Ethiopia from the list unless Tigray is fed.
These steps may not work. Abiy, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2019 for ending a long conflict with Eritrea, seems increasingly paranoid and erratic. But to do anything less would be to stand by as mass murder is taking place. To avert a calamity, Western governments must pull every lever they have.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 7, 2021
➡ Courtesy: Democracy Now!
Amid the mounting humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian government has been using the commercial airline Ethiopia Airlines to shuttle weapons and military vehicles from neighboring country Eritrea since the beginning of their civil war, according to a new CNN investigation. This comes as the United Nations estimates more than 5 million people in the country’s Tigray region are now in need of humanitarian assistance in order to survive, but U.N. officials say Ethiopia’s government is blocking the movement of medicine, food and fuel into Tigray. In response, Ethiopian officials expelled seven senior U.N. officials from Ethiopia last week, giving them just 72 hours to leave the country. We look at the latest developments with Nima Elbagir, award-winning senior international correspondent for CNN, and also air her full report documenting ethnic cleansing.
😈 Shame on those African leaders who were at the inauguration of monster mass murderer Ahmed!
👉 It must be a Waaqayyo -Allah-Atete-Voodoo Connection. What a disgrace!
💭 My Note: History repeats itself:
🔥 Amharas & Oromos bombing Tigray, Using Rape, Hunger & forced resettlement (Mengistu did it back then, Ahmed is doing it in the same exact way now) as a Weapon against People in Tigray for the past 130 years:-
😈 Menelik ll: Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
😈 Haile Selassie: Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
😈 Mengistu Hailemariam: Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
😈 Abiy Ahmed Ali ´= Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
The great famine is estimated to have caused 3.5 million deaths. During Emperor Menelik’s Reign, Tigray was split into two regions, one of which he sold to the Italians who later named it Eritrea. Only two months after the death of Emperor Yohaness lV , Menelik signed the Wuchale treaty of 2 May 1889 conceding Eritrea to the Italians. It was not only Eritrea that Menelik gave away, he also had a hand in letting Djibouti be part of the French protectorate when he agreed the border demarcation with the French in 1887. Some huge parts of Tigray were put under Gonder. The Southern part, places like present day Alamata, Kobo etc were put under Wello Amhara administration.
👉 2. Haile Selassie (1892 – 1975)
In 1943, at the request of the Emperor Haile Selassie, the Royal British Airforce bombed two towns – Mekelle and Corbetta. Thousands of defenseless civilians lost their lives as a result of aerial bombardment. It is recorded that ‘on 14th October [1943] 54 bombs dropped in Mekelle, 6th October 14 bombs followed by another 16 bombs on 9thOctober in Hintalo, 7th/9th October 32 bombs in Corbetta’.
Between 2 and 5 million’ people died between 1958 and 1977 as a cumulative result. Haile Selassie, who was emperor at the time, refused to send any significant basic emergency food aid to the province of Tigray,
👉 3. Mengistu Hailemariam (1937 – )
1979 – 1985 + 1987
Due to organized government policies that deliberately multiplied the effects of the famine, around 1.2 million people died from this famine. Mengistu & his Children still alive & ‘well’ while Tigrayans starving again.
👉 4. Abiy Ahmed Ali (1976 – )
2018 – Until today: probably up to 500.000 already dead. 😠😠😠 😢😢😢 Unlike the past famine there is no natural or man-made drought, rather, Abiy simply uses war and hunger as a weapon. Abiy Ahmed sent his kids to America for safety, while bombing & starving Tigrayan kids!
❖❖❖[Galatians 5:19-21]❖❖❖
“Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
By Alex DeWaal
Today, Ethiopia is a land marked by the starkest contrast: feast and famine.
In Addis Ababa, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is holding a lavish celebration to inaugurate his new government, on a scale not seen since the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie almost one hundred years ago. There are vast crowds, parades, state banquets, and soaring speeches about Ethiopia’s proud independence.
In Tigray, children are starving to death in a man-made famine. Clinics and hospitals, stripped bare of even basic medicines, are filled with their faint, pitiful cries. The UN published some of its most disturbing statistics ever: almost four out of five pregnant or nursing mothers were acutely malnourished.
It’s morally repugnant. And it’s politically dangerous too.
Heads of state and other international dignitaries arrived for the ceremonies at Addis Ababa’s Bole Airport over the weekend. If Abiy had his way, they would have passed by senior United Nations aid officials, on their way out. Seven humanitarian professionals were given 72 hours to leave on Thursday. The UN challenged the legality of the order so the deadline expired on Sunday with their position unclear. The official rationale for their expulsions is that they were “meddling in the internal affairs of the nation”, but it is no coincidence that the decision was announced just two days after the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths, expressed his view that the famine “is man-made, [and] can be remedied by the act of government.” Three months ago, the UN-authorized Famine Review Committee assessed the evidence for food security in Tigray, and concluded that without a huge aid effort and an end to the fighting, massive famine was all-but-inevitable by the end of September. In June, about 400,000 people were in “famine-like conditions”—and that number was certain to grow. In the last three months, less than 10 percent of the aid supplies needed for Tigray have reached the region, feeding just 126,000 people. “The lack of food will mean that people will start to die,” Griffiths said.
The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said he was “shocked” by the expulsions. But he should not have been surprised. Abiy has made clear his intent to starve Tigray into submission—or worse—for many months. It has also been clear that he is following Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki’s absolutist playbook, demanding that the UN be subservient or leave. It took willful optimism on Guterres’s part to continue to express any confidence that the Ethiopian leader would relent and allow aid convoys to move, if the UN continued to try gentle persuasion rather than public pressure.
Concern over armed conflict and food security was the rationale for United Nations Security Council resolution 2417, which among other things reaffirmed that “using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare may constitute a war crime.” But international norms have not deterred the Ethiopian government and its Eritrean ally from committing the widest range of starvation crimes: causing famine and blocking relief.
The slow and painful deaths children and their mothers does not appear to disturb Abiy. Rather, he claims to be leading his country to fulfil its historical destiny of greatness. Abiy also claims an electoral mandate based on winning 95 percent of the seats in last May’s election—a margin of victory that trumpets its hollowness.
Abiy is hoping that the display of popular enthusiasm for his leadership will persuade his visitors—and the world—that he indeed has the mandate to rule a reborn Ethiopia and remold it according to his vision.
Ethiopian rulers have a history of putting on carnivals while their people starve.
Abiy is ignoring the lesson that man-made famine discredits the men who make famine.
In 1973, while the Emperor Haile Selassie celebrated his eightieth birthday with an opulent party, peasants were dying of hunger in Wollo province. The imperial feudal system contributed to the famine and the Lion of Judah, King of Kings, Elect of God, refused to acknowledge it—though he tried to shift the blame to his subordinates for covering it up. Haile Selassie paid the price: the legitimacy of the Solomonic Dynasty wasted away and was overthrown the following year.
In 1984, the military regime of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam covered up the famine raging in Wollo and Tigray so as not to spoil the tenth anniversary celebrations of the revolution, which included a military parade in Revolution Square of newly-acquired Soviet weaponry. Mengistu’s government notoriously stated that “food is a major weapon” against insurgents in Tigray and Eritrea and restricted and manipulated humanitarian aid. Its efforts to deny aid to the famished directly led to a massive cross-border relief operation into the rebel-held areas. Mengistu decried that operation as a violation of Ethiopian sovereignty, but it came about precisely because of his own abuses that discredited the notion of untrammeled sovereignty, in favor of “sovereignty as responsibility” and the subsequent doctrine of the responsibility to protect.
Abiy is ignoring the lesson that man-made famine discredits the men who make famine.
Abiy’s sumptuous replica coronation cannot bring him the legitimacy he craves. Only stopping the war, ending the atrocities, freeing the opposition and feeding the hungry can deliver him that. If Abiy continues to spend his country’s scarce resources on fighting a war, it is not only Tigray that will face food crisis: scarcities will mount throughout the country, and hunger will even visit the capital Addis Ababa. This will be the sovereignty of the famished, jingoism with an empty stomach.
The link between war and hunger runs both ways. This was one of the fears expressed by the UN Security Council when it adopted resolution 2417 in May 2018: “Recognising the need to break the vicious cycle between armed conflict and food insecurity.”
As Ethiopia slides deeper into food insecurity it will become a more unstable and dangerous country. Humanitarian failure is already escalating the war in a direct fashion. The Tigrayan Defense Forces have taken the offensive, sending units beyond the boundaries of their region, saying they are determined to break the starvation siege by any means necessary. If the international community doesn’t bring aid to end famine in Tigray, Ethiopia and the whole Horn of Africa will face a widening war.
Guterres has protested the expulsions of his staff and demanded that Ethiopia allow them to continue their activities. He has pointed out that the formula of “persona non grata” does not apply to the UN and has asked for evidence for their alleged transgressions. But the Secretary General didn’t get the backing of the UN Security Council, which could not agree even on a timid statement at its meeting on Friday. Most likely, leaders didn’t want to spoil Abiy’s party or have their envoys feel awkward at the banquets tonight.
Such acceptance of Ethiopia’s fig-leaf of national sovereignty is not only morally wrong but politically dangerous too. The hunger plan of Abiy and Isaias doesn’t strengthen Ethiopia’s sovereignty or legitimize its ruler. On the contrary, while hunger kills Ethiopians, a monumental famine will likely kill Ethiopia.
👉 CIA agent Evil Abiy Ahmed Ali is Among The world’s Most Dangerous Men.
💭 My Note: Somebody just sent this tweet: “Australia: If You Haven’t Had A Vaccine By The 15th Of October, Then You Will Starve.„
👉 Readers Reaction: “Australia is the new Ethiopia. WHO / UN will set up refugee camps and start flying in bags of rice.„
By Michael Rubin, The Washington Examiner
When Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, he was the toast of the town.
Today, he is among the world’s most dangerous men. Almost a year ago, he sent his army into Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region after leaders there defied his order to postpone elections. Abiy apologists blame his former partners in the Tigray People’s Liberation Front for sparking the conflict by attacking an Ethiopian military position . But Abiy’s subsequent operation appeared preplanned, and the collective punishment upon ethnic Tigrayans in Tigray and in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa was clearly illegal. Abiy moved to isolate Tigray, restrict media access, and prevent food and humanitarian aid from reaching the province. Abiy calculated that military intervention would be swift and decisive.
He was wrong. While the Ethiopian army initially cut through Tigray and forced Tigrayan fighters into the countryside, he wildly inflated the claim of their defeat. In July, Tigrayan forces recaptured their provincial capital and marched several thousand Ethiopian army prisoners through it. Abiy sought to raise ethnic militias from Ethiopia’s other provinces to do what the Ethiopian army could not. This, too, backfired: Not only was it throwing water onto a grease fire, but many Ethiopians also did not want Abiy to drive them into an unwise and unnecessary civil war that increasingly appeared to have more to do with Abiy’s ego than necessity. Indeed, all of Ethiopia has suffered from Abiy’s militaristic turn. He has transformed a promising economy into ruin.
In recent days, the situation has deteriorated further.
On Sept. 28, Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’s undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and its emergency relief coordinator, warned that famine was imminent in Tigray unless the Ethiopian government allowed aid trucks into the province. Abiy responded by expelling seven U.N. employees, including the heads of the Ethiopian offices of UNICEF and the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. According to the U.N., 400,000 Tigrayans are at risk of imminent starvation. Abiy’s actions drew harsh White House condemnation .
What is worse, however, is the defiant rhetoric that Abiy and his close circle of cronies have adopted.
Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development who once wrote a book on genocide, noted that the virulent rhetoric of Ethiopian officials toward Tigray and that of Ethiopian online trolls mirrored the dehumanizing rhetoric that often preceded genocides elsewhere. Abiy has vowed to crush “the weeds” of Tigray, while his regime has promised to uproot the cancer.
In 1994, the U.N. and the world largely stood aside as Hutu militants, , prepared to wage genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsis. So, too, did the United States. In terms of rhetoric and militancy, Abiy and the Amharas with whom he allied appear prepared for a repeat. If the world does not take concrete action against Abiy to compel him to stand down on his plan, the question is not if there will be genocide against the Tigrayans, but when.
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.
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.”
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
