💭 “It’s just horrifying, Tigrayan deportees are being disappeared and detained back home. After suffering sometimes years of awful abuse, (in Saudi Arabia) they are now being persecuted by their own government, denied freedom of movement and any contact with their loved ones.” Nadia Hardman of HRW.
💭 “There are Tigrayans in Saudi Arabia who now fear deportation more than they do imprisonment in Saudi Arabia,”
“Many of our friends who were returned stop answering their phones after a few weeks in Ethiopia. We have no idea where they are, and we fear the worst.”
💭 Saudi Arabia Should Stop Deporting Tigrayan Migrants to Ethiopia
Thousands of ethnic Tigrayans deported from Saudi Arabia have been detained, abused or forcibly disappeared after arriving back home in Ethiopia, Human Rights Watch said in a new report Wednesday.
The ethnic profiling and mistreatment of returnees detailed by HRW took place as the federal government fought Tigrayan rebels in a grinding year-long war that has cost thousands of lives and pushed many more people into famine.
Tigrayans repatriated from Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians have migrated to seek work over the years, were singled out and held in Addis Ababa and elsewhere against their will upon returning, HRW said.
Others were prevented from returning to Tigray, the northernmost region of Ethiopia, after being identified at roadside checkpoints or airports and transferred to detention facilities, the report said.
“Ethiopian authorities are persecuting Tigrayans deported from Saudi Arabia by wrongfully detaining and forcibly disappearing them,” said Nadia Hardman, refugee and migrants rights researcher at HRW.
The rights watchdog interviewed Tigrayans deported from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia between December 2020 and September 2021, during which tens of thousands were repatriated under an agreement between the two countries.
Some of the Tigrayan deportees detained after arriving in Ethiopia reported suffering physical abuse, including beatings with rubber or wooden rods.
Others were accused of colluding with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which ran Tigray before the start of the war, and is now considered a terrorist group by Addis Ababa.
Two deportees told HRW they were taken with other men from migrants centres by police and bused to coffee farms, where they were put to work in terrible conditions for no pay and little food.
Many were denied contact with family, and feared their relatives thought they were still in Saudi Arabia.
“The Ethiopian authorities’ detention of thousands of Tigrayan deportees from Saudi Arabia without informing their families of their arrest or whereabouts amounts to enforced disappearance, which also violates international law,” the report said.
In late 2021 the United States and its allies called on Ethiopia to stop unlawfully detaining its citizens on ethnic grounds under a wartime state of emergency declared in November.
Ethiopia’s own state-affiliated rights watchdog estimated that thousands had been caught up in sweeps that appears to target Tigrayans on their ethnicity alone.
As Prime Minister Abiy prepares what is possibly a final, bloody stand in the war he has wrought
There are similar efforts to scapegoat all Tigrayans, led personally through the prime minister’s statements and state media, though the rampant use of hateful and dehumanizing speech makes the case that the government may well be inciting genocide as part of its last-ditch defense effort to save itself.
As Ethiopia crosses the one-year mark since the start of its devastating war in the Tigray region, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is preparing the capital, Addis Ababa, for one final stand against a blitzkrieg attack at the hands of Tigrayan rebels, who months ago turned the tide of the war and who now stand poised to turn out the country’s Nobel prize-winning prime minister.
In the process, as international diplomats and Ethiopian-Americans scramble to leave the country, the risk of state-sponsored genocide, and even state collapse, remain frighteningly real scenarios that will have catastrophic consequences for the country, the region, and U.S. interests for years to come.
This was an unfathomable scenario at the start of the conflict. Abiy promised a limited “law-and-order operation” against a select number of Tigrayan leaders who challenged his rule through, in his mind, an unwavering commitment to an anachronistic ethnically-based system they put in place during their more than 20 years of autocratic rule.
In reality, Abiy likely never believed Tigrayans would “go along to get along” and so set about from the start of his time in office to weaken their ties to the state and ensure their future banishment from power. It was those efforts to treat Tigrayans as Tigrayans treated the majority of Ethiopia’s ethnic groups during their time in power that created the self-fulfilling prophecy Abiy is now struggling to survive.
But with the bulk of the Ethiopian army’s best fighters and tacticians hailing from Tigray, the government has slowly seen its overwhelming strategic advantage eroded on the battlefield against a rump force more adept at insurgency combat and clearly more motivated by a fight for its literal survival.
The government’s response to its own tactical shortcomings and sagging morale has been to wage an asymmetric battle against not just the Tigrayan Defense Forces but more broadly against the people of Tigray. A recent joint report from the United Nations and Ethiopia’s own human rights body points out the widespread use of sexual violence as central to the government’s war strategy.
An ongoing government humanitarian blockade of the region has for months put more than 900,000 civilians at risk of famine and forced Tigrayan fighters to expand their fight into neighboring Amhara and Afar regions in a bid to break the siege, expanding the death toll and humanitarian suffering.
There are similar efforts to scapegoat all Tigrayans, led personally through the prime minister’s statements and state media, though the rampant use of hateful and dehumanizing speech makes the case that the government may well be inciting genocide as part of its last-ditch defense effort to save itself.
Reports this past week of mass roundups of Tigrayans living in and around Addis Ababa, under a far-reaching state of emergency declaration “to ensure national security,” suggest a possible last-ditch effort to deter the oncoming onslaught by holding hostage an entire people.
As the situation deteriorates, and the vast human and economic implications begin to take shape for the region, Ethiopia’s neighbors have only just begun to respond. Forced by the possible fall of one of Africa’s most important cities and the continent’s diplomatic capital, after months of callously treating the devastating conflict as Ethiopia’s “internal affair,” Kenya, Uganda and the African Union itself are finally calling for a ceasefire and political talks.
While Washington and its European allies have been sustained in their condemnations of the violence and abuses, they have done little to force either side’s hand to relent. Importantly, a bipartisan Senate bill, introduced last week in the Foreign Relations Committee, makes use of the Biden administration’s own Executive Order sanctions regime — rolled out in September but never applied — by mandating “the imposition of targeted sanctions against individual actors … undermining efforts to resolve the conflict or profit from it.”
Coupled with a freeze of more than $200 million in trade preferences — which, again, the administration was forced to announce last week under congressional deadline — and efforts to impose costs on belligerents are only beginning to take shape after a year of fighting.
As Prime Minister Abiy prepares what is possibly a final, bloody stand in the war he has wrought, will last-minute calls for calm and pressure tactics be enough to change the calculations of the warring parties and avoid catastrophe in the Horn of Africa?
“During the first few decades of their migration, the Oromo moved across lands that were devastated and depopulated by the jihadist wars, the lands relatively empty of people either fled before them or were adopted and assimilated by them.”
„In the place conquer they slay all the men, cut off the privet parts of the boy, kill the old woman and keep the young for their use and service ” Richard Pankhurst, the Ethiopian borderland. (page 284)
5. Historical Geography of Ethiopia, School of African Studies.
6.The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People. Oxford University Press, 1960, Edward Ullendorff
The Gallas had little to contribute to the Semitized civilization of Ethiopia; they possessed no significant material or intellectual culture, and their social organization differed considerably from that of the population among whom they settled. They were not only the cause of the depressed state into which the country now sank, but they helped to prolong a situation from
which even a physically and spiritually exhausted Ethiopia might otherwise have been able to recover far more quickly
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 10, 2021
ዋይ! ዋይ! ዋይ!
😠😠😠 😢😢😢
The November Pogrom, the Holocaust, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide are all back; this time in one country, in Ethiopia – in the 21st century.
💭 Tigrayans are Driven out of their homes in mass sent by the Oromos to concentration camps in Addis Ababa, Debre Zeit, Nazareth/Adama, Jimma, Nekemte, Negele Borana, Arba Minch and in many other unreported villages and towns – many murdered in the mountains, hills, woods and valleys of the Oromia region.
😈 Enabling fascist Abiy Ahmed to commit barbaric acts against Tigrayans, these are some of the Joseph Goebbels of Ethiopia today:
☆ ESAT
☆ Abebe Belew
☆ Ethio 360
☆ Adebabay Media
☆ Ethio-Beteseb Media
☆ Mehal Meda
☆ Haq & Saq
☆ Menilik TV
☆ Zehabesha
☆ Terara Tube
☆ Tswae
😈 Oromo Bilsigna/ Prosperity Party, (PP) = Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, (NSDAP) = Partito Nazionale Fascista, (PNF)
Tigrayan Organizations, parties and leaders must officially and immediately push to outlaw The entire Oromo Biltsigina/ Prosperity Party (PP) of the genocidal fascist regime of evil Abiy Ahmed Ali.
Tigrayan elites should learn from the experience of Germany. In Germany, the very presence of Neo-Nazis openly marching through a city bearing swastika-emblazoned flags is unthinkable, not to mention the formation of a PP like Nazi party. Germany places strict limits on speech and expression when it comes to Fascism and Nazism. It is illegal to produce, distribute or display symbols of the Nazi era — swastikas, the Hitler salute, along with many symbols. Holocaust denial is also illegal.
The law goes further. There is the legal concept of “Volksverhetzung,” the incitement to hatred: Anybody who denigrates an individual or a group based on their ethnicity or religion, or anybody who tries to rouse hatred or promotes violence against such a group or an individual, could face a sentence of up to five years in prison.
These laws apply to individuals, but they and others are also defenses against extremist political parties. The Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest court, can ban parties it deems intent on impairing or destroying the political order.
Furthermore, Germany’s legal ban comes at a cost. Limits on speech are a blunt instrument. Though it seems a legitimate and necessary act of respect toward Holocaust victims and their descendants to outlaw the denial of the Nazi atrocities.