💭 Climate activists decapitate prominent Berlin Christmas tree
Last Generation climate activists calling for tougher government action to combat the global climate crisis sawed the top off a Christmas tree at the Brandenburg Gate. Police said they attended the scene and took action.
Climate activists in Germany chopped the top off a famous Christmas tree outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on Wednesday in the latest in a series of public stunts.
Members of the group Last Generation used a cherry picker to reach the top of the 15-meter-high (50-foot) Nordmann fir.
They then cut off the top of the tree and unfurled a banner that read: “This is just the tip of the Christmas tree.”
“So far we’re seeing only the tip of the underlying disaster in Germany,” said one of the activists, Lilli Gomez, in a statement.
“While all of Germany spends the week getting the best gifts from the biggest stores, others are wondering where they will get their water to drink after droughts and floods have destroyed their crops.”
The actress and comedian was detained after Peachtree City Police got a call about 2:30 a.m. regarding a driver asleep at the wheel on a highway, Assistant Police Chief Matt Myers said in a news release. An officer saw a vehicle matching the caller’s description and stopped Haddish as she pulled into the yard of a residence, Myers said.
Haddish later posted $1,666 bond and was released from the Fayette County Jail, Myers said. He did not release any information about a possible court date.
A spokesman for Haddish did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Haddish was the breakout star of the smash comedy “Girls Trip” and has starred in such movies as “The Kitchen,” “Night School” and “Like A Boss.” She’s also written the New York Times best seller, “The Last Black Unicorn” and hosted the popular television show “Kids Say The Darndest Things.”
Peachtree City is located about 40 miles (63 kilometers) south of Atlanta.
😈 A $1,666 bond? Woow!
💭 Evil Isaias Afewerki’s Useful Idiot Tiffany Haddish Cries after Stuck in Antichrist Turkey | Sign of The Times
💭 Evil Isaias Afewerki’s Useful Idiot Tiffany Haddish Breaks Down Cries After Stuck At Turkey Airport Trying To Make It Home To Dying Aunt
Actress and Comedian Tiffany Haddish has a break down at Turkey Airlines and treated rude as she tried to make it back into the States to see her aunt before she pass. She’s stuck in Turkey until after Christmas.
💭 Tiffany Haddish Praised Eritrea’s Dictator. Then She Doubled Down In DMs With Young Eritrean Americans.
Standing side by side in front of rows of cultivated plants, a man and a woman beam at the camera, in a photo that could come straight from a family holiday album. The woman on the left is instantly recognizable to millions of people: the actor, comedian, and author Tiffany Haddish. The man on the right is less familiar, but behind the warm smile and the friendly arm across Haddish’s shoulder is one of the world’s longest-ruling dictators, Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki. Since coming to power 27 years ago he has been accused of ruling in a ruthless and brutal manner, as Eritrea earned the nickname the North Korea of Africa in the process.
The picture was taken in January 2018 when Haddish visited Eritrea, the country of her father’s birth, for the first time.
In May 2019, she returned to become a naturalized citizen, and left behind a copy of her acclaimed autobiography, The Last Black Unicorn, for Isaias. It was signed with the message, “my brother, my president, thank you for doing what you do.” Her visit coincided with Eritrean Independence Day.
For many Eritreans in the ever-growing diaspora, the handwritten message confirmed their worst fears — that Haddish was inadvertently laundering the Eritrean regime’s reputation in the West by appearing to endorse its hardline leader.
In tweets and Instagram comments, Eritreans living outside of the country wrote to Haddish about the thousands of people, including children, imprisoned without trial, the underground prisons, the indefinite national service program likened to slavery by the UN where people are raped and tortured, the 5,000 people who flee the country every month. They begged her to speak out against the regime, not appear to endorse it.
Days after she gained Eritrean citizenship, Haddish responded: She agreed to talk about the situation in Eritrea with a group of young Eritreans mainly from the US in a Twitter DM conversation.
This is where I come into the story: I’m a Swedish Eritrean activist and freelance journalist based mainly in London. At the time the group chat was being set up, I was an undergrad student also working as a journalist alongside my studies. The young Eritreans setting up the group chat knew me from my Eritrean activism, so they asked me to join because they thought I could help convince Haddish to stop appearing to endorse Isaias and the regime.
Prior to the conversation, the young Eritreans shared Haddish on a Google Doc with all the main points they wanted to tell her about the nightmare inside Eritrea for normal people, including news articles and reports by the UN and Human Rights Watch. The young Eritreans looked forward to hearing how Haddish would respond. But what she said left them utterly crestfallen.
“Good morning y’all,” Haddish wrote. “I tried my best to keep my eyes open to chat with y’all but there was so much to read, I fell asleep on y’all sorry about that.”
Haddish doubled down on thanking Isaias: He was, in her view, a veteran soldier, and people should be grateful for veterans. He was building dams to bring electricity to Eritrea. And he had given her honey from his farm, which had made her grandma feel better. The young Eritreans were stunned.
“I hated her response,” said Lidiya, a young Eritrean Canadian in the DM chat who asked that her surname not be used because, like many in the Eritrean diaspora, she fears reprisals against family in Eritrea by the regime as a price for speaking out.
After all, Haddish embracing Eritrean culture was something to be celebrated by the Eritrean community: They cheered when she wore a traditional Eritrean dress on the red carpet at the 2018 Oscars, when Haddish said she was “honoring her fellow Eritreans.”
Many Eritreans living outside of Eritrea were also understanding of how important discovering your roots could be for an individual’s identity, and aware of how this could potentially hinder someone from looking at a situation critically. When Haddish made her first trip to the country in 2018, she did so to bury her father and connect with her extended family, whom she had never met before.
But it was Haddish thanking Isaias on her visit in 2019 that made Eritreans decide to take more proactive action to speak to her about the realities of the regime. Many of the tweets criticizing Haddish used the #IsSheReady4Eritrea hashtag, referencing her signature #SheReady hashtag and She Ready! From the Hood to Hollywood comedy special and tour.
“I remember thinking, Thank you for what?Thank you for running all our youths out of the country? Thank you for locking up our brightest minds? Thank you for destroying our country?” said Lidiya, the young Eritrean Canadian.
“We don’t need celebrity visits that will only be good PR for the dictator, we have solutions and have told her about them for months,” said Yodit Araya, an Eritrean American organizer in the Yiakl movement, which means “‘Enough”’ in Tigrinya, one of the national languages of Eritrea.
The group chat was set up on the premise that Haddish was willing to learn about the situation in Eritrea, and during the exchanges she repeatedly asked what could be done to help. “what can we really do as a Group to make things better?” she wrote. “Come on y’all what can we do? I am only one person.”
Then in an interview with the Hollywood Unlocked show last December, Haddish criticized Eritreans for attacking her without taking any action themselves.
“Y’all can keep telling me all this stuff, but what’s the action? How do you fix it? Don’t come at me with all the shenanigans, rararara, but no damn action,” Haddish said. “Get out of here.”
She went on to defend Isaias and the Eritrean authorities once more.
“I get what that president, I get…look…everybody that’s in office over there, that’s into politics, when you do your research, all of them fought in a war, OK, all of them have fought, they are all freedom fighters, they all fought for their freedom. They have watched their friends die in front of them. So I don’t know about you, but if I’m in a war and I feel like, Oh, if I let this happen or let that happen we’ll be back at war, you’re going to do whatever it takes to defend and protect your land,” Haddish said.
“They were trying to rape that land,” she continued, referring to Ethiopia’s actions in the war. “And they messed it up, they raped the people, they killed a lot of people. So of course he’s going to be a little, maybe overly doing things… I don’t agree with everything that they do, I don’t agree with everything that’s done here in America.”
But Araya, the Eritrean American activist, said that to Isaias and his regime, the war with Ethiopia was “just an excuse, and besides, a peace deal was made more than a year ago, so why has he not changed anything?”
She described Haddish’s comments in the Hollywood Unlocked interview as “extremely disrespectful to the backbreaking work of our activists who have been fighting this regime for decades, most of whom still are imprisoned because of their work.”
“As an immigrant, I really looked up to her and admired how she, despite all the hardship she had gone through, managed to succeed. But I was hoping she would use her success to go back and help the underdog. I wouldn’t think she would turn her back on the underdog.”
Araya said Haddish had failed to grasp the impact someone with such a big profile could have, especially at a time when Eritrea is trying to present a new face to the world and avoid internal reforms.
“She is really famous in the US, she has huge influence. Eritrea is the most censored country in the world — the regime owns the narrative and has made the crisis unknown. Her support is not just symbolic. It’s more than just a picture or innocent visits. She is legitimizing him, whitewashing him,” Araya said.
“We are against her, as a superstar with the platform she has, normalizing our dictator.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on August 20, 2021
The fog of war is a term usually used to describe confusion on the battlefield, but when it comes to Ethiopia, it could just as easily be applied to the bitterly fought information war surrounding the escalating conflict between Tigrayan rebels and government forces.
When the BBC was recently offered an interview with teenagers allegedly caught fighting for the rebels, we cautiously accepted.
“I was playing football with friends when I was forcefully recruited by Tigrayan fighters to join their ranks,” one 17-year-old told us, on the phone from Afar, a state which borders Tigray.
The conflict began in Tigray in northern Ethiopia in November, but has since spread to the regions of Afar and Amhara, where the TPLF rebels recently captured Lalibela, a town famous for its rock-hewn churches.
“I was taken by force to the war front,” said another teenager, who told us he was in Year 10 at school in Tigray. “My family couldn’t say anything because they feared for their life.”
A 19-year-old woman said: “We didn’t get any military training. They took us to Afar. They threatened to kill our family if we didn’t join the fight.”
The teenagers told us that around 50 adolescent boys and girls were rounded up near Tigray’s capital Mekelle and forced to fight, before being captured by Afar’s regional forces, who are allied to the federal government.
The first sign something wasn’t right was when the Afar authorities, who offered us the interviews, insisted we conduct them in Amharic – Ethiopia’s lingua franca – and not their native language, Tigrinya.
Then, when we listened back carefully to the recordings, our suspicions were confirmed – at times, we could hear the regional authority spokesman telling the teenagers what to say.
Similar interviews were broadcast on local Ethiopian television channels, with teenagers paraded slowly past the cameras looking like bored senior high school students, some with injuries apparently incurred in the fighting.
‘Catalogue of horrors’
The Tigray conflict began after months of feuding between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), once the dominant party in the federal government, over the prime minister’s reform programme.
Troops from Eritrea also entered the conflict on the side of Mr Abiy.
The prime minister accuses the TPLF of becoming a terrorist organisation, while it insists that it is the legitimate government in its home region of Tigray.
The Ethiopian government has been accusing the Tigrayan fighters of using child soldiers ever since they recaptured Mekelle in June, eight months after government troops took control of it.
The New York Times published a story on this key turning-point in the war including photos of Tigrayan fighters, some of whom appeared to be underage.
Since then, Prime Minister Abiy and his army of social media supporters have accused the Tigrayan rebels of forcibly recruiting child soldiers, doping them with drugs, and pushing them to the front lines.
TPLF spokesman Getachew Reda denied that teenagers were forced to join the group’s ranks.
“If there is a problem with regard to teenagers – 17, 18, 19-year-olds, although 18 is the legal age to join the army – these are children whose parents have been subjected to untold suffering by the Eritreans, by Abiy’s forces, by Amharic expansionists,” he told the BBC.
“We don’t have to force people. We have hundreds of thousands lining up to fight.”
Government officials and rights groups have also accused Tigrayan fighters of committing atrocities, including killing hundreds of people from the Amhara ethnic group in western Tigray at the start of the conflict.
Amhara militias have taken control of parts of western Tigray
Earlier this month, a heavy artillery attack was reported on a health centre in Afar.
Social media was soon ablaze with claims that more than 100 people had been killed by the Tigrayan fighters and the hashtag #AfarMassacre quickly began trending.
The BBC spoke to a local hospital doctor, who said 12 people brought there had died from their injuries, but no-one could give us an official death toll at the scene.
The rebels denied the attack and said they’d welcome an investigation.
Murky war
Claims and counter-claims about every twist in the war are traded all day long on Twitter and Facebook – from the government, the TPLF, and their respective armies of supporters in Ethiopia and the diaspora.
With phone and internet lines down across Tigray for nearly two months now, obtaining information from the region has been almost impossible.
The federal government says communication lines won’t be restored until the rebels accept a ceasefire.
The Tigrayan fighters say they won’t accept a ceasefire until the blockade is lifted and all enemy forces leave the region.
“The federal government is intent on controlling information and the Tigrayan leaders are by no means averse to using propaganda,” says Will Davison, senior Ethiopia analyst at the International Crisis Group think-tank.
“In addition, Ethiopia’s media and civil society are relatively weak when it comes to exposing who is doing what. So there is a cocktail of factors contributing to the murkiness of this war.”
A soldier of Tigray Defence Force (TDF) poses as he walks towards another field at Tigray Martyr’s Memorial Monument Center in Mekele, the capital of Tigray region, Ethiopia, on June 30, 2021
The delivery of aid to Tigray – where experts say hundreds of thousands of people are facing catastrophic levels of hunger – has been another key information battleground.
When the Tekeze Bridge was blown up on 1 July, eliminating a key aid route into the region and one of the few ways of reaching western Tigray, the federal government blamed the TPLF.
But Mr Davison says that argument doesn’t add up.
“Tigrayan forces were on the offensive after the federal retreat, they wanted to reclaim western Tigray and regain access to aid, trade and vital services. Why would they destroy a critical river crossing?” he asks.
“Amhara and federal forces, however, were trying to cut off Tigray after retreating, and they wanted to hold on to western Tigray, so they had every reason to destroy the bridge.”
Thousands of people have been killed since the war began, and millions more have been displaced. Both sides have been accused of human rights abuses.
Following the recent TPLF gains, Mr Abiy called for “all capable Ethiopians of age” to join the fight against the rebels.
Political dialogue appears to be a long way off. The information wars show no sign of dialling down either.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on August 11, 2021
🔥 Destroy, Exterminate, Rape, Steal, Annex!That is evil Abiy Ahmed’s war on Tigray!
Forces aligned to the Ethiopian government subjected hundreds of women and girls to sexual violence
Rape and sexual slavery constitute war crimes, and may amount to crimes against humanity
Women and girls in Tigray were targeted for rape and other sexual violence by fighting forces aligned to the Ethiopian government, Amnesty International said today in a new report into the ongoing Tigray conflict.
The report, ‘I Don’t Know If They Realized I Was A Person’: Rape and Other Sexual Violence in the Conflict in Tigray, Ethiopia, reveals how women and girls were subjected to sexual violence by members of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), the Eritrean Defense Force (EDF), the Amhara Regional Police Special Force (ASF), and Fano, an Amhara militia group.
It’s clear that rape and sexual violence have been used as a weapon of war to inflict lasting physical and psychological damage on women and girls in Tigray
Agnès Callamard
Soldiers and militias subjected Tigrayan women and girls to rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, sexual mutilation and other forms of torture, often using ethnic slurs and death threats.
“It’s clear that rape and sexual violence have been used as a weapon of war to inflict lasting physical and psychological damage on women and girls in Tigray. Hundreds have been subjected to brutal treatment aimed at degrading and dehumanizing them,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
“The severity and scale of the sexual crimes committed are particularly shocking, amounting to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. It makes a mockery of the central tenets of humanity. It must stop.
“The Ethiopian government must take immediate action to stop members of the security forces and allied militia from committing sexual violence, and the African Union should spare no effort to ensure the conflict is tabled at the AU Peace and Security Council.”
The Ethiopian authorities should also grant access to the African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights Commission of Inquiry, and the UN Secretary General should urgently send his Team of Experts on the Rule of Law and Sexual Violence in Conflict to Tigray.
Amnesty International interviewed 63 survivors of sexual violence, as well as medical professionals. Twenty-eight survivors identified Eritrean forces as the sole perpetrators of rape.
Widespread sexual violence
The pattern of acts of sexual violence, with many survivors also witnessing rape of other women, indicates that sexual violence was widespread and intended to terrorize and humiliate the victims and their ethnic group.
Twelve survivors said soldiers and militia raped them in front of family members, including children. Five were pregnant at the time.
Letay*, a 20-year-old woman from Baaker, told Amnesty International she was attacked in her home in November 2020 by armed men who spoke Amharic and wore a mixture of military uniforms and civilian clothing.
She said: “Three men came into the room where I was. It was evening and already dark… I did not scream; they gestured to me not to make any noise or they would kill me. They raped me one after the other… I was four months pregnant; I don’t know if they realized I was pregnant. I don’t know if they realized I was a person.”
Nigist*, a 35-year-old mother-of-two from Humera said she and four other women were raped by Eritrean soldiers in Sheraro on 21 November 2020.
She said: “Three of them raped me in front of my child. There was an eight-months pregnant lady with us, they raped her too… They gathered like a hyena that saw something to eat… They raped the women and slaughtered the men.”
I don’t know if they realized I was pregnant. I don’t know if they realized I was a person
Letay*
Health facilities in Tigray registered 1,288 cases of gender-based violence from February to April 2021. Adigrat Hospital recorded 376 cases of rape from the beginning of the conflict to 9 June 2021. However, many survivors told Amnesty International they had not visited health facilities, suggesting these figures represent only a small fraction of rapes in the context of the conflict.
Survivors still suffer significant physical and mental health complications. Many complained of physical trauma such as continued bleeding, back pain, immobility and fistula. Some tested positive for HIV after being raped. Sleep deprivation, anxiety and emotional distress are common among survivors and family members who witnessed the violence.
Sexual slavery and intention to humiliate
Twelve survivors said they were held captive for days and often weeks, and repeatedly raped, in most cases by several men. Some were held in military camps, others in houses or grounds in rural areas.
Tseday*, 17, told Amnesty International that she was abducted by eight Eritrean soldiers in Zebangedena and held captive for two weeks. She said: “They took me to a rural area, in a field. There were many soldiers; I was raped by eight of them… Usually, they went out to guard the area in two shifts. When four of them went out, the rest stayed and raped me.”
Blen*, a 21-year-old from Bademe, said she was abducted by Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers on 5 November 2020, and held for 40 days alongside an estimated 30 other women. She said: “They raped us and starved us. They were too many who raped us in rounds. We were around 30 women they took… All of us were raped.”
Eight women also told how they had been raped by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers and associated militia near the border with Sudan, as they sought shelter.
Two survivors had large nails, gravel, and other types of metal and plastic shrapnel inserted into their vaginas, causing lasting and possibly irreparable damage.
Soldiers and militia repeatedly sought to humiliate their victims, frequently using ethnic slurs, insults, threats, and degrading comments. Several survivors interviewed by Amnesty International said that the rapists had told them, “This is what you deserve” and “You are disgusting”.
Lack of support for survivors
Survivors and witnesses told Amnesty International that they received limited or no psychosocial and medical support since they arrived in the internally displaced persons camps in the town of Shire in Ethiopia, or in refugee camps in Sudan.
Survivors also suffered because medical facilities were destroyed and restrictions imposed on the movement of people and goods, which hindered access to medical care. Victims and their families said they are short of food, shelter and clothes due to the limited humanitarian aid.
On top of their suffering and trauma, survivors have been left without adequate support
Agnès Callamard
Reports of sexual violence were mostly hidden from the outside world during the first two months of the conflict that began in November 2020, largely because of access restrictions imposed by the Ethiopian government and the communications blackout.
“On top of their suffering and trauma, survivors have been left without adequate support. They must be able to access the services they need and are entitled to – including medical treatment, livelihood assistance, mental healthcare and psychosocial support – which are essential aspects of a survivor-centred response,” said Agnès Callamard.
“We must see all allegations of sexual violence effectively, independently and impartially investigated to ensure survivors receive justice, and an effective reparation program must be established. All parties to the conflict should also ensure unfettered humanitarian access.”
Methodology
Between March and June 2021, Amnesty International interviewed 63 survivors of rape and other sexual violence; 15 in person in Sudan, and 48 remotely on secure telephone lines. Amnesty International also interviewed medical professionals and humanitarian workers involved in treating or assisting survivors in the towns of Shire and Adigrat, and in refugee camps in Sudan, about the scale of sexual violence and for corroborating information on specific cases.
In May, the Ethiopian authorities announced that three Ethiopian soldiers had been convicted and 25 others indicted for rape and other acts of sexual violence. However, no information has been made available about these trials, or other measures to investigate and to bring those responsible to justice.
Amnesty International wrote to Ethiopia’s Office of the Prime Minister, the Office of the Federal Attorney General and the Minister of Women, Children and Youth, to Eritrea’s Information Minister and a senior advisor to President Isaias Afwerki on 26 July 2021 requesting a response to the organization’s preliminary research findings, but had not received a reply at the time of publication.
Since fighting began in the region on 4 November 2020, thousands of civilians have been killed, hundreds of thousands of people have been internally displaced within Tigray, and tens of thousands of refugees have fled to Sudan.
United Nations — Parts of northern Ethiopia’s war-torn Tigray region are on “the brink of famine,” the head of the United Nations said on Monday. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was the most senior voice in a unified warning cry from a range of U.N. agencies that the grinding conflict remained unchecked, with a devastating impact on civilians.
“The magnitude and gravity of child rights violations taking place across Tigray show no sign of abating, nearly seven months since fighting broke out in northern Ethiopia,” said Henrietta Fore, Executive Director of U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.
She said more than 6,000 unaccompanied or separated children had been identified as needing protection and assistance. Much of the region has remained inaccessible to humanitarian workers, meaning health care, food and other supplies haven’t got in since fighting broke out in November 2020 between Ethiopian forces and ethnic Tigrayan separatists in the region.The magnitude and gravity of child rights violations taking place across Tigray show no sign of abating, nearly seven months since fighting broke out in northern Ethiopia.
_______
_______
_______
__________
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 