🔥 Almost 60,000 have sought refugee status in neighbouring Sudan.
The majority here have made a hazardous journey from western Tigray. Some have been forced to flee their homes, others have been banished by militias from the neighbouring region of Amhara.
🔥 When the feared Amhara militia called ‘Fano’ turned up, they took everything the family possessed.
🔥 “Since registering here on 28 January I haven’t received a thing. My children are dying of hunger. We’ve had nothing so far.
🔥 “People are getting sick because they’re hungry. People are dying.”
🔥 His government declared the “law and order operation,” launched against the people who ran Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a success in late November and it is not clear why it has been so slow to offer aid organisations access.
The delay raises important questions – has the central government been trying to hide serious human rights violations conducted by Ethiopian troops – as well acts committed by allied soldiers from Eritrea and Amhara region of Ethiopia?
Alternatively, does this foot-dragging reflect the fact that Ahmed’s administration has failed to bring large parts of the region under its control?
UN officials say between 50,000-60,000 arrivals have turned up at one refuge in the past few weeks alone.
The Tssa hi Elementary School in Sheerae, Ethiopia, offers some sort of sanctuary, a place of refuge for people on the run.
But there is not much here to keep them alive.
A human tide of 300,000 Tigrayans are now camping in this beleaguered city at six schools, a local college and any number of half constructed buildings which dot the city.
A senior UN official told Sky News that 50,000-60,000 arrivals have turned up in the past few weeks alone.
After four months of warfare between Ethiopia’s national defence force and fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), more than 500,000 Tigrayans have lost their homes.
Almost 60,000 have sought refugee status in neighbouring Sudan.
The majority here have made a hazardous journey from western Tigray. Some have been forced to flee their homes, others have been banished by militias from the neighbouring region of Amhara.
The US government, amongst others, has condemned the violence and declared these evictions ‘ethnic cleansing’.
At Tssa hi Elementary, buses and trucks piled up with people’s basic possessions, stop outside the school’s front gate every few minutes.
We stopped one woman called Letay Teweldebrehan who had arrived in Sheerae with her daughter just before nightfall.
“It must be a difficult time for you,” I said.
“Yes, very much, I cannot explain it. We came because of the war. We have been robbed of our things and our animals were taken.”
She told me she was a civil servant from a city called Humera and I asked why she felt she had to leave.
“I work in water development but I have not received my salary for the last four months. We don’t have water, no electricity or medicines. Life is not possible.”
As she readied herself for the night ahead I asked where she thought we was going to sleep.
“I don’t know where. I have left my bed behind.”
There is no space left in the classrooms and the school playground is packed with families wrapped in blankets or balanced on bits of school furniture.
But if Ms Teweldebrehan does find a few square feet she will struggle to find anything else on offer.
Atsede Kidane, a mother of three, has been camping at the school for the past six weeks and she says the interim administration which now runs this region has not provided the residents with a single item of food.
“Since registering here on 28 January I haven’t received a thing. My children are dying of hunger. We’ve had nothing so far.
“People are getting sick because they’re hungry. People are dying.”
Humanitarian organisations could not get into Sheerae until early March and although Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has now given them “unfettered access” in Tigray they must operate in the region at their own risk.
His government declared the “law and order operation,” launched against the people who ran Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a success in late November and it is not clear why it has been so slow to offer aid organisations access.
The delay raises important questions – has the central government been trying to hide serious human rights violations conducted by Ethiopian troops – as well acts committed by allied soldiers from Eritrea and Amhara region of Ethiopia?
Alternatively, does this foot-dragging reflect the fact that Ahmed’s administration has failed to bring large parts of the region under its control?
These matters are no concern of a priest called Teklehaimanot, who has brought his family of eight to Tshaye Elementary School.
His 28-year-old son, Fitsum, contracted a mental illness in the third year of university and his parents have found him difficult to control in the camp. They have decided to chain him to a wooden beam.
“It’s very difficult, we cannot sleep. At night, he tries to go out and he bothers the children, so we have to chain his hands and legs.”
Priest Teklehaimanot said they could not flee their home in a town called Tesgede because they could not leave Fitsum alone.
When the feared Amhara militia called ‘Fano’ turned up, they took everything the family possessed.
“This is my son, because of son, I cannot go anywhere. I don’t even have clothes.
“This is what I have. Everything has been taken, this is it.”
❖ 70,000 Tigrayan Christians Massacred by Jihadist Gragn Abiy Ahmed Ali
🔥 Critical Ethiopian Diplomat urges peace talks in Tigray war
An Ethiopian diplomat who quit his post in the United States over concerns about atrocities in Tigray is calling for peace talks between the government and the embattled region’s fugitive leaders.
Berhane Kidanemariam served as the deputy chief of mission at the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington until early March. In an interview with The Associated Press late Thursday, he warned that a protracted war in Tigray is devastating the region’s 6 million people.
“We have to prioritize peaceful settlement and negotiation,” he said. “Without peaceful settlement and negotiation, peace couldn’t prevail. The only solution is peace talks.”
Between 60,000 and 70,000 people are now believed to have died in the war since November, he said, citing information gleaned from sources inside Ethiopia. Most of the victims are “civilians, especially the youngsters,” he said.
Ethiopian authorities have not given a death toll in the Tigray war.
Kidanemariam said that Tigrayan fighters “are getting better” in their defenses, increasing the likelihood of a long war in which reported abuses already include massacres, rapes, forced displacement, and the vandalism of priceless cultural sites.
“Anything which the human beings can use” has been destroyed in some way, he said, describing the looting of everything from banks to churches and mosques. “It’s horrible even to explain it.”
Kidanemariam hails from the Tigray region, the base of a party that dominated national politics for decades before the rise of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. But he said his background had not influenced his decision to call it “a genocidal war.”
“I don´t need to be Tigrayan,” Kidanemariam said, referring to his March 10 resignation. “Seeing this kind of horrible, catastrophic war, I couldn´t tolerate it.”
💭 “This is a war against the people of Tigray. Basically, we are under an existential threat.”
🔥 The young man who made the mistake of getting into a heated argument with a government soldier in a bar. Hours later, friends said, four soldiers followed him home and beat him to death with beer bottles.
🔥 Alefesha Hadusha lost her two brothers and parents last month after Eritrean and Ethiopian troops entered her home and opened fire on innocent civilians.
🔥 Schools house some of the 71,000 people who fled to the city, often bringing accounts of horrific abuses at the hands of pro-government forces.
🔥 But the majority of serious accusations have been aimed at government troops and their allies — the ethnic Amhara militias that moved into the western part of Tigray, and soldiers from Eritrea, Ethiopia’s northern neighbor and one-time enemy.
🔥 At the city’s main hospital, the Ayder Referral hospital, officials said they received the bodies of 250 men, ages 20 to 35, between Nov. 28, when Ethiopian soldiers seized Mekelle, and March 9. Four-fifths of the bodies had gunshot wounds, and the remainder had been injured with knives. Most of the attacks appeared to have been carried out by government soldiers.
🔥 Even more harrowing accounts came from outside the city. One 26-year-old man, Berhe, offered a similar account of that day, saying that his brother and seven other men were picked up and taken to a military camp and executed.
🔥 In western Tigray, American officials found evidence of ethnic cleansing led by ethnic Amhara officials and militia fighters, according to an internal United States government report obtained by The New York Times.
🔥 Tigray’s health services, once among the best in Ethiopia, have been ravaged. On Monday, Doctors Without Borders said that dozens of clinics across the region had been destroyed and plundered by soldiers, often deliberately.
👉 In such a fraught environment, even massacres are contested.
🔥 Mr. Abiy’s officials frequently cite a massacre in Mai Kadra, a town in western Tigray, on Nov. 9, as an example of T.P.L.F. war crimes. Witnesses cited in an Amnesty International report blamed the deaths on Tigrayan fighters.
But at a camp in Mekelle, eight residents of Mai Kadra said the killings had in fact been carried out by the Fano, an ethnic Amhara militia group with a reputation for brutality, and insisted that the majority of victims were Tigrayans.
Solomon Haileselassie, 28, said he watched the slaughter from his hiding place in a garbage dump. “I saw them cut off people’s legs and arms with axes,” he said.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on March 19, 2021
The Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Conservative MP, Tom Tugendhat and General Director for Medecins Sans Frontieres, Oliver Behn, in Amsterdam to discuss the disturbing reports of violent abuse of women by soldiers fighting in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on March 19, 2021
Sexual violence against women – one of the horrific weapons of war. In Ethiopia where the conflict between Ethiopia’s national defence forces and Eritrean troops on one side, and fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front has been raging since last November, thousands of women have been raped and tortured. The Ethiopian prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the 2019 Nobel peace prize for ending one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts. But he now presides over a country where his troops are accused of aiding the abuse and torture of innocent people. Our Africa Correspondent Jamal Osman managed to get into Tigray . He went to Mekelle the capital of the region – where thousands have already fled and scores of women and young girls have been raped. He is one of the first foreign journalists to hear the stories in person of the women who have suffered unimaginably at the hands of the soldiers who raped and tortured them. This report contains highly distressing testimony.
Social Media Posts Falsely Claim that Usaid Found NO Evidence Oo a Massacre In Ethiopia’s Tigray Region
Two weeks after Amnesty International released an in-depth investigation concluding that hundreds of civilians were killed by Eritrean forces in the city of Axum in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, posts circulating on social media claimed that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) conducted its own investigation and found no evidence that the atrocities happened. This is false; USAID told AFP Fact Check that the organisation was not the source of these claims, which were also dismissed on social media.
“Some Good NEWS from USAID, #Axum massacre neither occurred nor substantiated (sic),” reads the caption from a Facebook post published on March 9, 2021.
The post, with more than 130 shares, includes a graphic of a news report by the Ethiopian Herald claiming USAID had found no evidence for the massacre following its own investigation.
Similar claims were shared on Facebook here and here. It was also retweeted hundreds of times on Twitter here and here.
However, the claims are false. USAID spokesman Ryan Essman told AFP Fact Check in an email on March 11, 2021, that the organisation was not the source of the quotes attributed to them in the article.
Essman pointed to two tweets from USAID’s official account that addressed the falsely-attributed statements.
“Contrary to a recent report in the Ethiopian Herald about a USAID investigation in Axum, USAID has neither conducted an investigation nor sent a team to investigate the reported events that took place in Axum,” reads one tweet, posted March 9, 2021.
Another tweet in the same thread said: “The U.S. government encourages independent investigations into all reported incidents of atrocities and remains committed to providing humanitarian assistance to all people affected by the ongoing conflicts in Tigray and other parts of the country.”
On March 1, 2021, USAID assembled a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) to “assess the situation in Tigray, identify priority needs for the scale-up of relief efforts, and work with partners to provide urgently-needed assistance to conflict-affected populations across the region”.
AFP Fact Check contacted the Ethiopian Herald about the newspaper’s article but has yet to receive a response. This fact check will be updated if we receive a comment.
According to social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle, the article, published on March 9, 2021, has been shared on Facebook more than 1,100 times.
Axum massacre
The false claims surfaced shortly after Amnesty International released an in-depth investigation based on satellite imagery and eye-witness testimonies that concluded the killing of hundreds of civilians in Axum by Eritrean troops was “coordinated and systematic” and “may also constitute crimes against humanity”.
The report from Amnesty found that “between 19 and 28 November 2020, Eritrean troops operating in the Ethiopian city of Axum, Tigray, committed a series of human rights and humanitarian law violations, including killing hundreds of civilians”.
The organisation gathered testimonies from more than 240 people but was unable to independently verify the exact death toll. However, the report noted that corroborating testimonies and evidence indicated that hundreds died, as AFP reported.
Ethiopia’s government on Thursday faced mounting pressure to withdraw troops from the northern region of Tigray amid growing reports of war crimes in an embattled area that now faces a humanitarian crisis.
Criticism of the conduct of government troops and their allies from neighboring Eritrea grew after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted Wednesday that “ethnic cleansing” has happened in parts of Tigray.
“The challenge in Ethiopia is very significant, and it’s one that we are very focused on, particularly the situation in Tigray, where we are seeing very credible reports of human rights abuses and atrocities that are ongoing,” Blinken told the foreign affairs committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Although Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed expressed concerns about the actions of the fugitive leaders of Tigray, Blinken said, “the situation in Tigray today is unacceptable and has to change, and that means a few things. It means making sure that we are getting into the region, into Tigray. Aid workers and others … to make sure that the people are cared for, provided for and protected.”
Eritrean troops as well as fighters from Amhara, an Ethiopian region bordering Tigray, “need to come out,” he said, adding that the region needs “a force that will not abuse the human rights of the people of Tigray or commit acts of ethnic cleansing, which we’ve seen in western Tigray. That has to stop.”
There was no immediate comment from Ethiopian authorities.
But the fugitive leaders of Tigray seized on Blinken’s comments, issuing a statement on Thursday condemning what they called “the genocidal campaign” targeting their people.
“Thousands of civilians have been massacred, hundreds of thousands forcibly displaced from their homes, civilian installations and Infrastructures systemically destroyed,” said the statement posted on Twitter by Getachew Reda, one of the fugitive leaders of Tigray. “Despite shamelessly protesting its innocence and profusely promising to allow access to humanitarian agencies and international investigation into allegations, Abiy Ahmed’s regime and its partners in crime have only stepped up their war crimes and crimes against humanity in recent weeks and days.”
A senior Ethiopian diplomat on Wednesday quit his post in Washington over concerns about the reported atrocities in Tigray. Berhane Kidanemariam, who served as the deputy chief of mission at the Ethiopian embassy in Washington, slammed Abiy as a reckless leader who is dividing his country.
Accounts of atrocities by Ethiopian and allied forces against residents of Tigray have been detailed in reports by The Associated Press and by Amnesty International. Ethiopia’s federal government and regional officials in Tigray both maintain that each other’s governments are illegitimate after the pandemic disrupted elections.
The conflict began in November, when Abiy sent government troops into Tigray after an attack there on federal military facilities. No one knows how many thousands of civilians have been killed in the conflict.
Humanitarian officials have warned that a growing number of people might be starving to death in Tigray. The fighting erupted on the brink of harvest in the largely agricultural region and sent an untold number of people fleeing their homes. Witnesses have described widespread looting by Eritrean soldiers as well as the burning of crops.
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