👉 Irish politician and member of the European Parliament — Michael Wallace:
The terrible Humanitarian Crisis in Tigray continues. The effective embargo on aid reaching the millions of Tigrayans desperately in need, by the Ethiopian government, is absolutely criminal at the moment. And The EU is apparently afraid to say a bad word to PM Abiy Ahmed Ali. Why hasn’t the EU done more to pressure Abiy Ahmed Ali into ending the persecution of the people of Tigray..? Are they afraid it might impact on future Trade arrangements with Ethiopia? Do lives in Africa matter less?
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 14, 2021
There Has Been Little To No Action Taken To Address The Ethiopian Government’s Ethnically-Based Expulsion And Arrest Of Tigrayan Peacekeepers.
When Tigrayan members of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces. ENDF were deployed to UN peacekeeping missions, they did so under the banner of “Together for Peace”.
Respecting and honouring the brave few who put their own lives at risk in the service of their country and for the cause of world peace is a cherished norm. However, Tigrayan members of UN peacekeeping missions are getting the opposite treatment.
When the Ethiopian government launched an armed offensive against the Tigray region in November 2020, it withdrew troops from international peacekeeping missions to bolster its offensive. Citing fears over their loyalty to the federal government and ENDF, Tigrayan members of this contingent were also purged from their ranks without cause. Other Tigrayans were left with no choice but to seek asylum in order to escape abduction and internment.
Evidence of this purge was first attested to in a leaked video published by The Associated Press in which an Ethiopian military leader speaks of the need to ‘clean out our insides’ in a reference to the removal of Tigrayan service members.
Soon after, an article published in Foreign Policy on 23 November revealed an internal UN document that detailed concerns that these troops were likely to face torture or execution.
The UN’s fears were confirmed after it was revealed that military tribunals are being held to sentence Tigrayan security officers to death. The Ethiopian government is seemingly using the judicial system to make a show of passing judgment on defendants who were in fact criminalised by virtue of ethnic profiling alone. The risk to the lives of these service members, including those who served under the auspices of the UN peacekeeping missions, is real.
In such a context, where identity is being used as evidence of guilt, Tigrayans require protection and open legal proceedings that are monitored and corroborated by independent organisations. The international community’s inaction and silence regarding the horrible reality of these Tigrayans have allowed the Ethiopian government to prolong their suffering.
This same government expelled seven UN officials who were operating in Ethiopia, accusing them of ‘meddling’, and arbitrarily arrested 16 local UN staff members.
The UN Secretary-General stated that “Ethiopia has no legal right to expel” the UN officials. However, the institution has not taken any steps to protect its representatives, who are crucial to address the enormous humanitarian needs in northern Ethiopia.
The UN entrusts peacekeepers to uphold its broader mission of maintaining peace and security around the world, and, in return, these servicemen and women bravely put their lives on the line for this noble cause. Accordingly, the UN has a contractual and moral obligation to protect these brave men and women. However, when it comes to Tigrayan peacekeepers, the UN and the rest of the international community have turned a blind eye.
The UN’s unwillingness to address the imminent threat faced by Tigrayans who served in peacekeeping missions – and lack of persistence in demanding protection for humanitarian workers and respect for international humanitarian law – is emboldening Ethiopia’s violations.
To the honourable men and women inside of the UN peacekeeping apparatus, as well as those in donor and member countries, I ask: If you are unable to protect the bravest who have worn the uniform to promote world peace, then how can you ever realise the dream of standing “Together for Peace”?
While silence or disengagement is to be expected at a certain level from diplomatic actors and entities, given their prerogative to not fuel further division in a space as polarized as Ethiopia’s, the case of Tigrayan peacekeepers exceeds the demands of neutrality and political sensitivity.
Their silence is even more worrying as the decision of the Ethiopian government has created a security vacuum in those areas where they were deployed, such as Darfur and Abyei in Sudan and Somalia, undermining the peacekeeping efforts. These actions also overstretched the capacity of UN peacekeeping troops that are present in these areas, leaving vulnerable communities at risk of immediate violence.
Moreover, since most peacekeeping troops operate under UN contracts, their treatment is a direct violation of the UN’s policy and commitment to world peace. The UN’s inaction may cause other countries to lose trust in future missions, given that there is no guarantee for the safety of their soldiers. Any atrocity committed against Tigrayan peacekeeping troops due to an internal political conflict is, by extension, an attack against peacekeepers around the world.
How the UN handles the case of Tigrayan peacekeepers in Ethiopia – many of whom have been incommunicado for over a year – will be a testament to how much the intergovernmental organisation values those it entrusts to uphold its mission.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 14, 2021
💭 My Note: In other words, Mr. Borrell is telling us: “As long as war criminals Abiy Ahmed Ali, Isaias Afewerki, the Oromo & Amhara special forces continue blocking Tigrayans (potential migrants to Europe heading for EU) from crossing the Ethio-Sudanese border in whatever possible form: By rounding them up, mutilating & dismembering — at the border within Africa – and throwing their dead bodies to the Tekeze river across the border, EU won’t issue sanctions against Abiy Ahmed, Isaias Afewerki and their partners in crime. The are doing a good job in preventing undesired ancient Christian Ethiopian migrants (We saw that when the UN The US and EU all blocked ancient Christians of Syria. Read this: No Christians Allowed: Muslim UN Officials Block Syrian Christian Refugees from Getting Help.
Mr. Borrell said it clearly, albeit concerning Belarus and Ukraine: “We cut the flowing of migrants to Europe…for me this is a source of satisfaction”
May be now The EU is giving money to the dictators of Ethiopia and Eritrea as a reward, instead of sanctioning them?!
After all, EU countries have awarded and honored to those evil monsters with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, and just two months ago, one of the enablers of the #TigrayGenocide, Daniel Bekele with the German Africa Prize. Just unbelievably cruel – the world upside down, isn’t it?!
💭 EU top diplomat Josep Borrell criticised EU member states on Monday (13 December) for failing to agree on sanctions against those suspected of war crimes in Ethiopia’s civil war, expressing frustration over Europe’s failure to give an effective policy response to “large scale human rights violations” there.
The EU’s response to the civil war in Ethiopia was “one of my biggest frustrations” of the year, said Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs high representative. He said the EU had not been able to stop “mass rapes using sexual violence as a war aim, killings and concentration camps based on ethnic belonging,” pointing to the lack of unanimity among EU governments.
It is understood that Germany is one of the leading countries reluctant to impose sanctions, though Borrell told reporters that “many countries felt that it (sanctions) wasn’t an adequate solution.”
While the Biden administration in the United States has imposed sanctions under its human rights Magnitsky Act, the EU has not followed suit beyond freezing $107 million in budget support to Ethiopia.
Last month, EU officials told EURACTIV that sanctions were being discussed within the context of the bloc’s Human Rights Sanctions regime, but little progress has been made.
EU prepared to issue sanctions over Tigray war, officials confirm
The European Union is prepared to issue sanctions against those responsible for the war and humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia’s Tigray province, EU officials confirmed to EURACTIV on Thursday (5 November).
In the meantime, the EU has continued to supply humanitarian aid, despite continued difficulties in aid reaching those in need. Aid experts in Ethiopia say that only around 10% of aid reaches those who need it most.
Borrell acknowledged that while sanctions would not have halted the conflict, they “would have, in my view, influenced the behaviour of the actors.”
Alongside multiple reports of human rights abuses by both sides in the conflict, the fighting has had devastating humanitarian consequences. According to the UN’s World Food Programme, more than 400,000 people are estimated to be living in famine conditions in Tigray. Around 9.4 million people in Ethiopia are now in dire need of food aid, it said.
The war has derailed the economic and political reform agenda, which had earned wide international praise to Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
The civil war started last November when federal forces entered the country’s northern province after rebels from the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front launched an attack on a government military base.
The Abiy government subsequently cracked down mercilessly on the insurgents and ignored all demands by the international community for a ceasefire and peace settlement with the TPLF. Instead, Abiy has stated that nothing short of total military victory will be sufficient.
African Union mediator Olesegun Obasanjo and Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta have been leading regional efforts to broker peace.
Earlier this week, local media reported that TPLF forces had retaken the historic town of Lalibela, in the neighbouring Amhara province, though government forces are also reported to have recaptured towns in Tigray in recent weeks.
Slovenia, in its capacity as head of the EU’s Council presidency, on Monday requested a special session of the UN Human Rights Council on the situation in Ethiopia.
More than 50 countries supported the call, Slovenia’s Permanent Mission to the UN Office in Geneva announced.
The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a special session on Friday on the “grave” situation in Ethiopia at the request of the EU, according to a UN statement issued on Monday.
The Ethiopian government has reacted furiously to the calling of the special session, and described it as an “unjust and counterproductive attempt by some to exert political pressure”.
The UN Council had ignored calls to investigate human rights violations and atrocities by the TPLF in Amhara and Afar province, said Ethiopia’s foreign ministry.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 8, 2021
No Favours For Nobel Peace Laureate Mass Murderer
Rep. Michael McCaul is the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs committee. He calls for a bipartisan response to possible war crimes in Ethiopia.
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
💭 My Note: „could sanction?„ – Feels like they are all buying more time until all ancient Christians of Tigray are starved to death. Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis. Humanity is doomed! 😠😠😠 😢😢😢 But Judgment Day is upon us!
The Biden administration has described a CNN report that Ethiopian Airlines shuttled weapons to Eritrea as “incredibly grave” and warned that it was prepared to impose sanctions on Ethiopia and any other parties who prolonged the conflict in Tigray.
On Wednesday CNN revealed that Ethiopia’s government used its state-owned commercial carrier to move weapons to and from neighboring Eritrea during the first weeks of the conflict. It is the first time this weapons trade between the former foes has been documented during the nearly year-long war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.
Reacting to the investigation, a senior US administration official said: “These allegations are incredibly grave; not only could they constitute a potential violation of the Chicago Convention [on international civil aviation]. The use of civilian aircraft to ferry military hardware upends norms and endangers passenger craft around the world.”
The official added that the US would not hold back from using all the tools at its disposal to put an end to a conflict that has triggered famine and left millions in desperate need of aid — including the sanctioning of officials responsible for drawing out the conflict.
“We have the ability to impose sanctions and are prepared to use them and other tools at our disposal against those prolonging the tragedy in Tigray,” the official said.
A separate senior administration official told CNN that the White House was looking into the allegations detailed in its report. “If true, they would be deeply concerning, as Ethiopia is seriously risking the reputation of its national airline by enlisting it in military operations that have unleashed one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises,” the source said.
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.
Over the past 11 months, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has killed, raped and tortured ethnic-minority Tigrayans en masse. Will the Biden administration label these acts a genocide and impose appropriate consequences? If not, the United States will effectively greenlight genocide for any leader ruthless enough to follow Abiy’s playbook of secrecy, sexual violence and starvation as weapons of war.
The case against Abiy’s administration is straightforward: His government’s actions, as described by countless international monitors, fit the United Nations’ definition of genocide.
The United Nations defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” and calls out five specific acts of genocide. The Ethiopian government has been documented as committing four of these five acts: “killing members of the group,” “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”
In the face of mounting international condemnation, Abiy infamously told the Ethiopian parliament last November that not one civilian had died in Tigray.
But in Ethiopia we have a proverb, “The rod of truth may bend, but it will never break.” Journalists and aid workers risked their lives to share harrowing accounts of war crimes across Tigray by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces: hundreds of civilians slaughtered outside a church in Ethiopia’s holy city of Axum, their rotting carcasses reportedly left for hyenas; dozens of civilians bombed by Ethiopian warplanes at a crowded marketplace in Togoga; mass murders across Western Tigray that Secretary of State Antony Blinken later referred to as acts of “ethnic cleansing.”
And then the world learned of new, unimaginable atrocities. Health clinics reported barbaric sexual violence against women and girls across Tigray. Shocked doctors treated helpless women whose vaginas had been burned, and others whose vaginas had been pummeled, then stuffed with nails and stones. Other women had been gang-raped by soldiers who told them that their Tigrayan wombs must never again bear children. In August, Amnesty International summarized this systematic gender-based violence in a report titled, “I Don’t Know if They Realized I Was a Person.”
Throughout all this, Abiy maintained a constant response to accusations of war crimes: Deny, deny, deny. Deflect and blame Tigray.
Just this past week, Abiy shocked the world by expelling U.N. officials who could help relieve the famine, including the country head of UNICEF. White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted, “We’re deeply concerned that this action continues a pattern by the Ethiopian government of obstructing the delivery of food, medicine and other lifesaving supplies to those most in need.”
With his administration increasingly facing sanctions and economic repercussions, Abiy has warned the world to not meddle in Ethiopia. He and his government claim that any actions to force humanitarian aid into the region — or force his government to negotiate with Tigray’s elected leaders — would violate Ethiopia’s sovereignty.
By this rationale, any genocidal leader can murder millions of his own people, or wipe out an entire ethnic group, as long he does it within his own borders.
If the Biden administration fails to apply the genocide designation to Tigray, the message will be clear to any future war criminal: We will look the other way no matter what you do. You can gang rape girls, starve your people, murder masses of civilians, and in response we will share only toothless statements of concern.
For the sake of my people in Tigray, and people across the world, the United States must immediately call the Ethiopian government’s actions in Tigray a genocide.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 7, 2021
➡ Courtesy: PBS
Wednesday in the United Nations Security Council, the secretary general criticized the Ethiopian government for recently kicking out UN aid workers. He urged the government to allow aid to flow into the northern region of Tigray, where for nearly the last year, Ethiopia and its allies have been fighting an ethnic, regional force.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 