💥 „A journalist close to the government had called on Facebook to lock people from Tigray in “concentration camps.”
In Ethiopia, the conflict over control of the northern region of Tigray is intensifying. In the capital Addis Ababa, security forces arrested numerous people from Tigray today. A d p a reporter observed how those arrested were taken away in two police vehicles. The reporter saw two vehicles carrying ethic Tigrayans, with some of them shouting “What did we do? We are innocent people.”At the weekend, a journalist close to the government had called on Facebook to lock people from Tigray in “concentration camps”. The message has since been deleted.
In the past few days, the central government, which is currently waging a military offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), has suffered several defeats. According to information from the rebels, the TPLF is said to have taken control of the city of Kombolcha in the Amhara region yesterday. The military had previously had to withdraw from the neighboring city of Dessie. The capture of the two cities gives the rebels access to one of the main highways into the capital, Addis Ababa.
💭 “The Ethiopian police officers raided the cathedral in Addis Ababa before sunrise, interrupting prayers and forcing a dozen ethnic Tigrayan priests and monks into a pickup truck.”
💭 They gave no explanation for the July raid, but there was no need: The detained men knew right away they were joining the thousands of Tigrayans rounded up for allegedly supporting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front TPLF rebel group.
For the past year, a mass campaign of arbitrary arrests targeting Tigrayans from all walks of life has played out in the capital Addis Ababa and elsewhere in Ethiopia — a mostly hidden feature of the relentless war in the country’s north.
Law enforcement leaders portray it as a legitimate effort to stamp out the TPLF, which they consider a terrorist organisation.
Yet AFP interviews with dozens of detainees, lawyers, justice officials and human rights activists reveal a more indiscriminate operation, ensnaring everyone from high-ranking military officers to ordinary day labourers.
Victims told AFP their experiences smacked of ethnic profiling, with cases built on threadbare evidence.
In the case of the detained clergymen, police held them for more than two weeks, accusing them of fundraising for the TPLF, burning Ethiopian flags and even plotting terrorist attacks themselves.
One of the monks said he could not help but laugh when an investigator asked where they hid their pistols.
“We told them we are men of faith, not politicians,” he told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.
“I don’t know where they get this information. But they are using it to kick Tigrayans’ legs out from under us, to make us live in fear.”
– Military purge –
The detentions began soon after war broke out in Ethiopia’s northernmost Tigray region in early November 2020, the culmination of months of rancour between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the TPLF, which dominated national politics before Abiy took office in 2018.
At first, officials mainly targeted military personnel.
Two weeks after the first shots were fired, dozens of Tigrayan officers were summoned for a televised meeting in Addis Ababa, with state media airing the footage as evidence of the participants’ support for the government.
Yet later, at least three of the officers were arrested and had their homes searched for weapons before being locked up for allegedly conspiring to overthrow Abiy, family members told AFP.
Michael, whose father was among those arrested, said he was mystified by the move.
“He didn’t like to talk about politics,” Michael said of his father, a mid-level officer with a three-decade record of service.
“In fact, he used to scold us when we talked about politics.”
After a state media report in August said a military court had handed down death sentences to some “traitorous” officers, Michael’s worries deepened.
“I fear very much that they may apply the death sentence or life sentence to my father and the people around him,” he told AFP.
A military spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Nearly a year on, Michael’s father remains in custody at a military camp west of Addis Ababa.
With the right to receive visitors three times a week, he is one of the lucky ones, as thousands of others have been held incommunicado.
– Critics silenced –
As the war dragged on into 2021, the detentions steadily climbed, albeit slowly.
But they kicked back into high gear in late June after the TPLF mounted a stunning comeback, retaking control of most of the region including its capital Mekelle and prompting the military to largely withdraw.
Three nights after Mekelle was recaptured, five federal police officers and three plainclothes officers knocked at the Addis Ababa home of Alula, a Tigrayan activist who had been using his Facebook page to highlight massacres and gang rapes in Tigray.
They held him overnight at a police station in the capital, after which soldiers drove him to a military camp 200 kilometres 125 miles east, in the Afar region.
For the next seven weeks, Alula — not his real name — lived off one piece of bread and two cups of water each day.
The camp’s more than 1,000 detainees included journalists and politicians who had spoken out about the horrors of a conflict that has killed thousands and, according to the UN, pushed hundreds of thousands into famine-like conditions.
Alula was released, but he no longer feels safe discussing the war.
“If I do, I’ll get arrested again or maybe killed,” he told AFP.
Along with detentions, officials have closed thousands of “TPLF-supporting” businesses, something a trade ministry official boasted about to state media in September.
On a single block in Addis Ababa, seven bars and two hotels were closed in July because of “noise pollution”, a claim their owners dismiss as baseless.
“Basically they are imagining that Tigrayans were celebrating the TPLF’s advance,” bar owner Michael told AFP.
The closures, he added, are further evidence that officials are targeting all Tigrayans, not just active TPLF backers.
– ‘Every person is uncertain’ –
Given its secretive nature, the full scale of the crackdown is impossible to determine, said Fisseha Tekle, a researcher for Amnesty International who has investigated arbitrary arrests of Tigrayans.
Yet he noted that Amnesty has “received multiple reports” of more than 1,000 people held at one camp alone in “squalid” conditions.
Many detainees remain unaccounted for.
“Family members have travelled hundreds of kilometres in search of detained relatives. Others went round police stations in Addis searching for relatives,” he told AFP.
The arrests have also drawn criticism from some government officials.
In late September, Abraha Desta, a senior official in the Abiy-appointed Tigray interim administration, wrote on Facebook that the authorities had created an environment in which speaking Tigrinya, the Tigrayan language, “is considered a crime”.
The following day Abraha too was arrested, accused of a firearms violation and incitement.
Other officials have reportedly spoken out privately.
During a retreat in September in the city of Adama, Attorney General Gedion Timothewos scolded members of his office’s asset recovery directorate for being overzealous in going after Tigrayan business owners, according to several officials who attended.
At one point he accused the directorate of engaging in an “abuse of power” and called for an end to “ethnic profiling”, the officials told AFP.
Gedion, now the justice minister, did not respond to a request for comment.
Even if the arrests were to stop tomorrow, victims fear they have already severely corroded Ethiopia’s social fabric, especially in Addis Ababa, where Tigrayans once lived freely.
“It’s obvious that every person is uncertain… they don’t know what will happen tomorrow,” said one Tigrayan lawyer currently representing 90 fellow Tigrayans who are detained.
“Even myself, I am not confident. At any time they can detain me.”
💭 The university is now one of the only places in the world where students can learn Ge’ez
Tens of thousands of ancient Ethiopic manuscripts – maybe more – have collected dust for over a century because they are written in what is now a rarely studied language, Ge’ez.
But a new course at the University of Toronto is teaching a new generation of students to understand the ancient Semitic language so that one day they can access this long-lost trove of knowledge.
This week, Professor Robert Holmstedt of the department of Near and Middle Eastern civilizations welcomed 25 students and members of Toronto’s Ethiopian community to the first day of an introductory course on Ge’ez, which like Latin, is only used in religious services, in this case for the Ethiopian Orthodox and Catholic churches.
With this course, U of T becomes one of the only places in the world where students can learn the fundamentals of Ge’ez. The program came about through several significant donations, including from The Weeknd, the Ethiopian community and the Faculty of Arts & Science.
Department chair Professor Tim Harrison has said that he hopes, with continued support, U of T will eventually add more courses and be positioned to launch the first Ethiopian studies program in North America.
Since the subject is so rarely taught, Holmstedt had to invent course materials and revise one of the only Ge’ez textbooks in English, the 40-year-old Introduction to Classical Ethiopic: Ge’ez by Thomas O. Lambdin. Ge’ez is a window into an ancient culture and offers insights into other Semitic languages, he said.
“I like giving students access to things that 99.5 per cent of the world doesn’t have access to,” he said. “It’s part of advancing our knowledge and the pursuit of truth. This is the very nature of the university. We can’t leave this behind.”
Michael Gervers, a history professor at U of T Scarborough, helped launch the course with a $50,000 donation and a call to Toronto’s Ethiopian community to contribute.
The call was answered and the donation matched by none other than Toronto native and Grammy-award winning artist Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. The Weeknd.
The campaign for the language course has a $200,000 goal and has received support from the Faculty of Arts & Science and the Bikila Awards organization, a local Ethiopian community group named after Olympic marathoner Adebe Bikila.
On Monday, just as he had promised, Gervers sat in on the class, hoping to be one of the first to learn the language at U of T.
Although he has been studying ancient Ethiopia for 40 years – he has swung from ropes to explore rock-cut monasteries in Ethiopia and created a database of tens of thousands of photographs of Ethiopian art and culture – Gervers does not know the language.
Amharic-speaking students helped him with his pronunciation when he was asked to recite a letter of the alphabet.
The course’s first students included members of the Ethiopian and Eritrean communities, students with an interest in Ethiopian culture, medievalists and students in comparative linguistics.
Before any of the students can uncover the secrets of ancient Ethiopic texts, they must learn the basics. In their first class, they were introduced to Ethiopic letters and to the present tense of verbs like “to sit.”
Hours of memorization come next. Holmstedt urged his students to carry a ringlet of flashcards so they can learn the alphabet on the go.
“Walk around campus memorizing words instead of looking at your phone,” Holmstedt said.
Gervers said he hoped the Ge’ez course would be the first of many classes that would form the basis of an Ethiopian studies program at U of T. He has proposed a graduate-level course in the history of Ethiopia.
“Ethiopia is usually left out of the curriculum because it’s so different,” he said. “There is no point of entry through European languages like English, French, Spanish or Italian.”
The campaign will need additional funding to add further courses in Ge’ez – and even more to kickstart Ethiopian studies.
For many students in the course, the subject isn’t only academic.
Sahlegebriel Belay Gebreselassie, a third-year undergrad in international relations and political science, has an “intimate personal connection” with the class.
“It’s a part of learning my history, my language,” he said.
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
“No weapon that is fashioned against you shall succeed, and you shall confute every tongue that rises against you in judgment. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord and their vindication from me, declares the Lord.”
“For the Lord your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory.’”
💭 The United States remains gravely concerned about the ongoing conflict in northern Ethiopia. Reports of an airstrike against the Tigrayan capital of Mekele and continued human rights abuses and atrocities by the Ethiopian National Defense Forces, the Eritrean Defense Forces, Amhara regional and irregular militia forces, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and other armed groups are deeply disturbing.
“We condemn all such abuses against civilians in the strongest possible terms and call on all parties to the conflict to respect human rights and comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law,” said State Department spokesperson Ned Price.
He added, “We agree with the UN Secretary-General and African Union leaders: There is no military solution to the conflict in northern Ethiopia, and a durable political solution must be found. We urge the Ethiopian government and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front to enter at once into negotiations without preconditions toward a sustainable ceasefire.”
The mounting reports of human rights abuses underscore the urgency of independent, transparent and credible international investigations. It is essential that all parties to the conflict allow and facilitate the access necessary for such investigations. We call on the Government of Ethiopia in particular to allow and facilitate such access for all government bodies.
Spokesperson Price said, “We look forward to an update from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. . .on the human rights situation in Tigray and to the release of the joint investigation report of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at the earliest possible opportunity. We also urge full cooperation with the Commission of Inquiry of the [African Union] Commission on Human and People’s Rights.”
Establishing transparent, independent mechanisms to hold those responsible for human rights abuses to account is critical for reconciliation and peace in Ethiopia.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 