Thousands of captured Ethiopian government soldiers were marched through Mekelle to prison on Friday, as crowds jeered and applauded. Tigray fighters swiftly defeated the government this week, in a civil war that has displaced nearly two million people in the region.
“A cease fire doesn’t mean cutting a region off power or destroying critical infrastructure.
A credible cease fire means doing everything possible so that aid reaches the millions of children, women and men who urgently need it. Saving lives should be a priority for all. #Tigray.” Josep Borrell
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 1, 2021
The ruination of a once-thriving area of Ethiopia is the result of war and its associated crimes. The world needs to wake up
It is hard to believe it’s happening again, even harder to believe that so few people seem to know or care. A massive famine is unfolding in Tigray in northern Ethiopia. Five million people are in need of food aid, and perhaps 900,000 are already starving.
In other words, it’s looking horribly reminiscent of the start of the 1984 famine, in which a million people died, most of them in Tigray. Like the last cataclysm, this has nothing to do with “natural causes”. It’s caused by war and its associated crimes. This time, however, the man in charge is a Nobel peace laureate: the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed. A great weight of evidence suggests that his troops, and those of his Eritrean allies, are using hunger as a weapon of war.
In February, Abiy’s government dissolved the boards of the most effective aid groups: the Relief Society of Tigray and the Tigray Development Association. Since then, their warehouses have been destroyed by soldiers, their offices looted and their vehicles stolen. The Ethiopian and Eritrean armies have blocked supply lines, turned back convoys of food and medicine, burned grain stores, felled orchards, slaughtered oxen and ordered farmers not to till their fields.
This week the Ethiopian government declared a ceasefire, ostensibly to “enable farmers to till their land”, but more plausibly to regroup after an astounding reversal: Tigrayan rebels have recaptured the regional capital. In any case, it’s too late. Tillage should have happened over the past three months. People who are starving today can’t wait for possible harvests in November.
Like his homicidal predecessor, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Abiy flatly denies the famine. Last week he claimed: “There is no hunger in Tigray.” If justice is ever done, we might one day witness the remarkable spectacle of a Nobel laureate on trial for crimes against humanity.
All this would be bad enough. But what sharpens the crime is that Tigray was, until the war began last November, a world-renowned success story.
The traditional explanation of famine, which appears to resist all evidence, is that hunger is caused by a surfeit of people. A rising population overtaxes the land, which can no longer provide sufficient food for those who depend on it. But a fascinating study shows that in Tigray the opposite has happened.
It used photographs dating back to 1868, taken from the same vantage points, to assess the condition of the land. Since then, the population of Ethiopia has risen from 6.6 million to 115 million. A catastrophe? Far from it. The researchers found more trees, more vegetation, less erosion, less degradation. The region, they discovered, is “greener than at any time in the last 145 years”.
Why? Because the main driver of land degradation and hunger is not population. It’s policy. In 1868, the best land was owned by feudal lords. Other people were driven on to steep slopes. Pressed to the margins, without secure tenure, they were forced into destructive forms of land use: mostly uncontrolled grazing. But in the 1970s, land was redistributed to the people. Beginning in the 1980s, the rebels in Tigray, who later formed the national government, launched a programme to protect the soil, catch rainwater and reforest the land. Livestock were fenced out of large areas, steep slopes were terraced, stone walls and soil bunds were built to stop erosion, and trees planted and ponds dug to prevent water from flashing off the land.
The scale of these works is astonishing. Every fit person over the age of 18 spends 20 days a year on collective projects to rehabilitate the land. Entire landscapes, torn apart by gullies and sheet erosion, have been remodelled. The stone and soil moved by hand must amount to millions of tonnes. This might explain an extraordinary finding: the greenest places in Tigray are those with the highest population density. Because of the vast effort required, these works would have been impossible with fewer hands.
There have been similar results in other places: the Karoo Midlands in South Africa, Machakos in Kenya, the Loess plateau in China and the Adarsha catchment in India. In all these cases, population growth has been accompanied by environmental repair.
But Tigray is the outstanding example. The restoration works have caused a huge reduction in soil erosion and water loss, a resurgence of wildlife and improvements in crop production that have easily outstripped population growth. Incomes have risen. Children spend more time at school. In 2015-2016, when a major drought struck, the system helped to avert famine. The reason for its success is local control and enthusiasm for the programme: people feel it belongs to them. As welfare and security have improved, and women have greater rights and opportunities, population growth has fallen.
Of course, there are plenty of places where higher numbers of people, combined with total institutional failure, harm both the natural world and human welfare. But the important point is that population growth, degradation and famine are not intrinsically connected. What counts is the quality of government.
So there are no excuses. No part of the catastrophe in Tigray is natural or inevitable. Abiy, with his allies in Eritrea, is turning a thriving, prosperous region into the scene of another historic disaster. And he won’t stop until the world wakes up.
🔥 Amhara & Oromos bombing Tigray, Using Rape, Hunger & forced resettlement (Mengistu did it back then, Ahmed will do the same now) as a Weapon against People in Tigray for the past 130 years:-
The great famine is estimated to have caused 3.5 million deaths. During Emperor Menilk’s Reign, Tigray was split into two rgions, 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 adminstration.
👉 2. Haile Selassie (1892 – 1975)
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 are again starving.
👉 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!
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 1, 2021
😈 “He Was Defeated” Ethiopian PM Withdraws from Tigray After Months of Civil War as Famine Looms The Ethiopian military has withdrawn its forces from Mekelle, the capital of the war-torn Tigray region, after the government declared a ceasefire. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed denied reports his military was defeated by Tigrayan forces, and said he had successfully pacified the city. Ahmed, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, launched the offensive against Tigray separatists in November. Since then, thousands have been killed, over a million civilians have been displaced, and some 350,000 people are now on the brink of famine. Alemayehu Fentaw Weldemariam, a constitutional law scholar, political theorist and conflict analyst, says Prime Minister Ahmed’s “unilateral” ceasefire hides the reality of what happened. “He was defeated,” he says. We also speak with Stanley Chitekwe, chief of nutrition at UNICEF Ethiopia, who says the organization is seeing “very high levels of malnutrition” in Tigray, including among children under 5. “This malnutrition situation may deteriorate into famine,” he warns.
👉 Bridge on Tekeze River in Ethiopia’s Tigray Destroyed by Abiy Ahmed & His Oromara Agents
😈😈😈
A bridge on the Tekeze river in Ethiopia’s Tigray region has been destroyed, the International Rescue Committee said on Thursday, adding that as a result getting aid to the war-ravaged region would be “even more severely hampered than before”.
👉 Journalist Seyoum Teshome was told to say this by his evil master Abiy Ahmed. Many will follow. Let them expose themselves. Let’s see & hear them.
❖❖❖Thank you, St. Teklehaymanot!❖❖❖
💭 Two weeks ago, the EU Envoy to Ethiopia, Finland Foreign Minster Pekka Haavisto attested as follows:
“..when I met the #Ethiopian Leadership😈 in February they used this kind of language, that they are going to destroy the Tigrayans, they are going to wipe out..” Finland FM Haavisto.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 30, 2021
💭 CLIP DESCRIPTION:
Von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) orders his men to load the paintings into trucks, but the defeated Nazi soldiers ignore his orders.
💭 FILM DESCRIPTION:
John Frankenheimer directs Burt Lancaster in the tense spy thriller The Train. Lancaster plays Labiche, a French railway inspector. Allied forces are threatening to liberate Paris, so Col. Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) is ordered to move the priceless works of art from the Jeu de Paume Museum to the fatherland. The head of the museum (Suzanne Flon) attempts to convince Labiche that he should sabotage the train on which they are transporting the art. Labiche is more focused on destroying a trainload of German weapons. After his friend is killed trying to stop the train with the art, and after a consciousness-raising conversation with a hotel owner (Jeanne Moreau), Labiche resolves to save the antiquities.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 30, 2021
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy,”Jesussays in [John 10:10]. “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
💭 Reports of Mass Starvation Emerge in Ethiopia’s War-torn Tigray Region
😠😠😠 😢😢😢
The plea arrived from a remote area that had so far produced only rumors and residents fleeing for their lives. Help us, the letter said, stamped and signed by a local official. At least 125 people have already starved to death.
Trapped in one of the most inaccessible areas of Ethiopia’s conflict-torn Tigray region, beyond the reach of aid, people “are falling like leaves,” the official said.
The letter dated June 16, obtained by The Associated Press and confirmed by a Tigray regional health official, is a rare insight into the most urgent unknown of the war between Ethiopian forces backed by Eritrea and Tigray’s former leaders: What’s the fate of hundreds of thousands of people cut off from the world for months?
As the United States warns that up to 900,000 people in Tigray face famine conditions in the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade, little is known about vast areas of Tigray that have been under the control of combatants from all sides since November. With blocked roads and ongoing fighting, humanitarian groups have been left without access.
A possible opening emerged this week when Ethiopia’s government announced an immediate, unilateral cease-fire after Tigray fighters re-entered the regional capital and government soldiers fled. An official for the United States Agency for International Development told U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday that some aid groups were expected to test the cease-fire immediately in an effort to reach remote areas.
However, it isn’t clear whether other parties in the conflict, including troops from neighboring Eritrea accused of some of the war’s worst atrocities, will respect the cease-fire. A Tigray spokesman rejected it as a “sick joke” and vowed to fully liberate the region.
The letter that reached the regional capital, Mekele, this month from the cut-off central district of Mai Kinetal was just the second plea of its kind, the health official who confirmed it said. The first had been a message from Ofla district reporting 150 deaths from starvation, which the United Nations humanitarian chief shared in a closed-door session of the U.N. Security Council in April, bringing an angry response from Ethiopia’s government.
But the letter from Mai Kinetal is different, the health official said, offering badly needed, well-compiled data that lay out the devastation line by line: At least 440 people have died, and at least 558 have been victims of sexual violence. More than 5,000 homes have been looted. Thousands of livestock have been taken. Tons of crops have been burned.
“There is no access to clean water; electricity, phone communication, banking, health care, and access to humanitarian aid are blocked,” district leader Berhe Desta Gebremariam wrote. “People are unable to move around to save their lives because Eritrean troops completely put us under siege with no transportation, and people are condemned to suffer and die.”
Looted farmers in the largely agricultural district have been left without the seeds to grow food, Berhe wrote, warning that without aid 2021 and 2022 will be catastrophic. The one aid delivery to Mai Kinetal that wasn’t blocked was based on a badly outdated 1995 census, meaning half the district’s residents were left out. The aid was later looted by Eritrean troops.
Residents had been coming by foot from Mai Kinetal with word that people were starving, the Tigray regional health official said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. But the letter confirms the details and extent of the crisis.
“It’s so terrible. It’s so terrible,” he said. “We know that people are dying everywhere.”
Other unreachable districts remain silent, he said, as phone services are cut in much of Tigray.
Asked about Mai Kinetal, a senior U.N. humanitarian official called it “an especially critical area for us to reach” and confirmed to the AP that aid had not made it into the district, and a number of others, since the conflict began.
Overall, the U.N. estimates that 1.6 million people remain in Tigray’s hard-to-reach areas, and the U.N. children’s agency last week warned that at least 33,000 severely malnourished children in hard-to-reach areas face the “imminent risk of death” without more aid. But humanitarian workers warn that the situation is especially fluid now amid some of the fiercest fighting yet.
Even the unilateral cease-fire announced this week is designed not to last. Ethiopia’s government says it will end once the farming season in Tigray is over, which means September. How needed seeds and other supplies will reach farmers across the region in time is not clear.
For Tigrayans with loved ones trapped inside inaccessible areas, the lack of information has meant months of fear and despair.
“Every time I get to talk to someone who managed to flee from the area, it’s like a round of pain and shock again and again,” said Teklehaymanot G. Weldemichel, a diaspora Tigrayan from Mai Kinetal. He said his family home there had been shelled at the beginning of the war, and his parents later returned to find every item in the house taken by Eritrean soldiers, even photo albums and frames.
One resident who fled to Sudan, Kibreab Fisseha, told the AP that a cousin with diabetes who stayed in Mai Kinetal had died because of lack of food. “Both my parents are still there,” Kibreab said. “They are hiding in the house and I hope they are fine until help comes.”
Another Mai Kinetal resident told the AP he has been able to speak with his mother just once since the war began, in a short conversation about a month ago before phone service disappeared again.
“I have been calling ever since the war started,” he said, giving only his first name, Tsige, to protect his family. He said his mother described fierce fighting as Eritreans took control of their village and many people fled.
Tsige’s father, in his 70s, was among those too old to leave. Eritrean soldiers one day came to the house and asked him to bring them water. He did, and the soldiers later spared him. But other residents who were found during house-to-house searches and suspected of links to the Tigray fighters were killed, Tsige said. Homes abandoned by fleeing families were burned.
When another relative refused to hand over his cattle to Eritrean soldiers, they slaughtered him in front of his grandson, Tsige said. In all, he knows at least 11 people in Mai Kinetal who have been killed, including a deaf man in his 70s.
“Every day could change the lives of my family,” said Tsige, who is studying in Japan and feels helplessly far away. “I have to prepare for the worst. Every few minutes you think about your family, are they alive?”
Tsige is too young to know the famine that ravaged Ethiopia, especially the Tigray region, amid conflict in the 1980s and shocked the world, but he grew up hearing about it from his family. He pleaded for the international community to act and for Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to “be a human person” and end the war.
“It’s happening now again, and we’re just watching it happen,” Tsige said. “I don’t want to see a documentary filmed after my family has died. I want action now.”
😈 “Evil Abiy Ahmed – A Mission-Oriented Child Serial Killer”
Mission-Oriented Child Serial Killers are considered as ordinary persons, and they kill a particular group of people. They may focus on killing people from a specific religion, social class, or race. Their goal is to eliminate the group or exterminate as many of its members as possible.
Child serial killers and adult serial killers exhibit similar characteristics. The fear of death, which normal persons have is absent in serial killers. They enjoy the act of killing, which gives them emotional gratification. They are attracted to kill, as they gain pleasure from the action. In their early childhood, they exhibit one or all the behaviors of the MacDonald triad. The
psychological activities are analyzed from the drive of the killer to the phases of execution.
Those are all the observable characteristics of the person Abiy Ahmed Ali – The anti-Tigrayan, anti-Ethiopia, anti-Orthodox-Christian, anti-Christ serial murderer. He is realizing his dreams of eliminating non Oromos so that he could wage his oromization, islamization and protestantization Jihad against Orthodox Christian Ethiopia – whose cradle is Tigray. He even appointed a Muslim female Jihadist as minister of ‘PEACE’ – to mock Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia – to underestimate or undermine the power of The True Prince of Peace, Lord Jesus Christ and his Gospel of Forgiveness. There will be severe penalties for these wicked individuals and their colleagues.
[Revelation 20:9-10]
They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever
„We call on all parties to commit to an immediate, indefinite, negotiated ceasefire,„
“Our paramount priority is addressing the dire humanitarian situation.„
„We urge all parties to adhere strictly to international humanitarian law and commit to unhindered humanitarian access and independent mechanisms for accountability for human rights violations and abuses.”
💭 Ethiopia (Oromia) Used Hunger as a Weapon of War
There is fragile ceasefire in Northern Ethiopia’s Tigray after Ethiopian and allied forces withdrew after an occupation late in 2020. It’s a dramatic turn in conflict that has killed thousands, uprooted millions and featured atrocities the global community attributes to the government of a Nobel Prize winning prime minister. On Tuesday, Tigrayan rebels were claiming victory. Nick Schifrin reports.
💭 Ceasefire in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region
PRESS STATEMENT
NED PRICE, DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON
The Government of Ethiopia’s announcement yesterday of a unilateral ceasefire in the Tigray region could be a positive step if it results in changes on the ground to end the conflict, stop the atrocities, and allow unhindered humanitarian assistance. We are closely monitoring developments. We call on all parties to commit to an immediate, indefinite, negotiated ceasefire, so as to end the violence, restore stability to Tigray, and create a context for an inclusive dialogue that preserves the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Ethiopian state.
We urge all parties to adhere strictly to international humanitarian law and commit to unhindered humanitarian access and independent mechanisms for accountability for human rights violations and abuses. We continue to call for the immediate, verifiable withdrawal of all Eritrean forces from Ethiopian territory, a necessary step for an effective, sustainable ceasefire and in accordance with the Ethiopian government’s March commitment to do so.
Our paramount priority is addressing the dire humanitarian situation. The United States stands ready to work with the Ethiopian government, Tigrayan authorities, the United Nations, and other international partners to expedite the delivery of life-saving food assistance, including to the estimated 900,000 people likely already experiencing famine conditions. In this regard, we urge the Ethiopian authorities to immediately restore telecommunication services in Tigray and permit unhindered freedom of movement for and ensure the safety and security of humanitarian organization personnel.
