💭 The remains of hundreds of people are being deliberately destroyed in an organised campaign to dispose of evidence of ethnic cleansing in the west of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, according to interviews with 15 eyewitnesses.
The allegations follow multiple reports of the targeting of the Tigrayan population during the civil war. They also come in advance of the possible deployment of a UN independent investigation team which will be led by former International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.
People belonging to security forces from the neighbouring Amhara region, which are occupying western Tigray, have been identified as digging up fresh mass graves, exhuming hundreds of bodies, burning them and then transporting what remains out of the region, the eyewitnesses said in telephone interviews.
The authorities have acknowledged that graves have been dug up but say that they show evidence that Tigrayan forces had been carrying out its own campaign of ethnically motivated killing in recent decades. Researchers from Gondar University have also been uncovering mass grave sites that they have linked to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
All sides in the on-going civil war have been accused of carrying out mass killings.
But in a recent report, rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accused Amhara officials and security forces of being behind a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayans in the area.
Last December, the UN human rights council passed a resolution to establish an independent investigation into atrocities committed by all warring parties in the conflict.
The Ethiopian government objected to the resolution and vowed not to co-operate, saying the resolution was an “instrument of political pressure”.
In a vote in March, Ethiopia’s bid to block funding for the investigative panel failed. Russia and China had backed the Ethiopian government’s attempt to block funding.
Remains burned
Eyewitnesses have said that three days after the funding was approved, the campaign to destroy evidence of atrocities was launched in western Tigray.
“In the plot of land behind Hamele Hamushte school in Humera town, 200 bodies of ethnic Tigrayan civilians were buried in two mass graves. These were civilians massacred in the early months of the war,” said an eyewitness from the Welkyat ethinc group who lives in Humera.
Whereas Tigrayans either fled the area during the fighting or are in detention, members of the Welkyat ethnic group remained and have provided the eyewitness reports.
“On 4 April, the Amhara militias and the Fano [militia] youth group exhumed the remains. They gathered wood, sprayed something we never saw before and burned the remains they collected. The remains crumbled and turned into ash.”
This testimony was consistent with what other eyewitnesses said about the same incident .
Amhara militia and Fano youth destroyed the remains of bodies buried in another part of Humera, witnesses have said.
“The bodies belonged to civilians who were paraded from detention camps. There were around 100 bodies buried en masse behind the land of the public office of the Humera Agricultural Institute,” said another witness.
“They took the remains to the compound of the institute and turned them into ash using wood, fire, and chemicals that we don’t know. As they were doing that their faces were covered by masks and they wore gloves.”
Adebay is another town in western Tigray where eyewitnesses have described the disposal of evidence by moving human remains.
“On the morning of 10 April, the Amhara militias dug up the four mass graves in the St Abune Argawi church,” a resident of Adebay said.
“There were 150 bodies of civilians killed in the August wave of ethnic cleansing. They loaded the bodies into a lorry. We don’t know where they took the remains.”
Eyewitnesses said that on the same day another mass grave located behind the local government administrative office of Adebay was dug up. Thirty-nine civilians had allegedly been buried there in October 2021 after being rounded up in the town of Adi Goshu and then caught trying to flee.
According to the testimonies the remains were loaded onto a lorry and moved to an unknown place.
👉 Continue reading/ሙሉውን ለማንበብ
In another town, Beaker, which is located between Tirkan and Rawyan, other eyewitnesses described similar activity.
“The bodies belonged to 70 civilians who had been arrested in Beaker. They were massacred nine months ago,” a resident said.
“On 11 April the Amhara militia exhumed them and took them to Sanja, a town in the Amhara region.”
Witnesses said the campaign of the disposal of evidence started on 4 April and was supervised by experts from Gondar University, which is in Amhara region.
“It all started following the visit of experts from Gondar University. When they came, they came with trucks that were loaded with chemicals in white jerry cans. The experts were in the town for a few days giving training to the Amhara militia on how to dispose of the remains and then they returned,” an eyewitness said.
Three residents said that militia members had been publicly talking about the involvement of Gondar University and showing off about how the evidence of the killings would not be discovered.
The university has not responded to a request for comment on the allegations.
But last month, the state broadcaster reported that researchers from Gondar University had been working on 12 mass grave sites in the area and had found evidence that the TPLF had been involved in acts of genocide.
Experts have confirmed that it is possible to dispose of human remains using certain chemicals.
Andrea Sella, professor of inorganic chemistry at University College London, said cremation was possible as long as a high enough temperature was reached.
Gebrekidan Gebresilassie, a doctor in chemical engineering at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany, also said it was possible to destroy forensic evidence with the help of chemicals that are readily available.
“These chemicals destroy the forensic evidence… But from a chemical point of view even the ashes can show some evidence. It is difficult to destroy it all,” he said.
The prime minister’s office has not responded to a request for comment, however a senior Amhara official and the speaker of the federal parliament, Agegnehu Teshager, denied the accusations that evidence was being systematically destroyed.
He did say that exhumations were going on but that the bodies that were being removed were those of ethnic Amharas who had been killed over the past 40 years.
“It was not possible to exhume the mass graves and show it to the world until these days because the TPLF was ruling the country,” he said. The TPLF had been the dominant party in the coalition that governed Ethiopia from the 1990s until 2018, when Mr Abiy came to power.
Mr Agegnehu also rejected the reports of ethnic cleansing in western Tigray including those from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. He described them as a lie.
“They are sensational reports which do not take into account the reality on the ground,” he said.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 13, 2022
💭 Evidence emerges of war crimes by forces allied to Abiy Ahmed’s government
👉 From The Economist
The lucky ones were frogmarched onto buses and driven across the river. The less fortunate were slung into detention camps and left there to rot. Others were murdered in the streets or hacked to death as they cowered in their homes. “We don’t need a single one of them any more,” a militiaman told a foreign researcher last year. “They cannot be trusted.”
Since the start of Ethiopia’s bloody civil war 18 months ago, there have been frequent allegations of ethnic cleansing targeting people from the northern region of Tigray. Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, first levelled this charge more than a year ago, infuriating the government of Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, which strongly denied it. Because the government has imposed a tight blockade of the region, it has been hard to assess the claims of atrocities. But some horrifying hints have emerged, such as the corpses with their hands bound that have washed up on river banks in Sudan.
Now a thorough investigation by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, two pressure groups, leaves little doubt of the enormities committed by government forces and their allies. The joint report, published on April 6th, concludes that authorities from the Amhara region have systematically killed or evicted hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tigrayans from territory seized from Tigray since the start of the war. The campaign, carried out with the connivance of federal authorities, was as methodical as it was brutal. Notices ordering Tigrayans to leave were pinned around towns. Freshly appointed Amhara officials handed out title deeds for plots of stolen land. Identification cards were given to new Amhara arrivals, but denied to Tigrayans, who were prevented from receiving aid and government services. The new authorities even granted permits for shipments of looted sesame, a lucrative cash crop at the heart of the territorial dispute between the two regions.
This matters not only because of the frightful human toll. The contested area, known officially as Western Tigray before the war, is now arguably the biggest obstacle to ending the conflict. “It’s definitely the thorniest issue,” says a senior official of the ruling party. Both sides have long claimed this land. Both are hardening their stances. Just days before the report was published Amhara investigators announced the discovery of mass graves, which they allege contain the remains of Amharas murdered decades ago by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the party-cum-militia that runs Tigray.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans are starving. A “humanitarian truce” that started on March 24th is already teetering. The government has allowed just one aid convoy to enter Tigray (the first since mid-December) and has been withholding permission for more until the tplf withdraws to Tigray. The tplf wants aid to flow freely before it pulls back entirely, ideally in tandem with the withdrawal of Amhara forces from Western Tigray. Without a breakthrough to ease the blockade, the horror of ethnic cleansing will be matched by an equally grotesque abuse: deliberate, mass starvation.
💭 Starving people based on their ethnicity, covering up atrocities by disinformation and evading accountability have become acceptable norms and values in Ethiopia. I’m not sure we will ever recover from this.
💭 Ethnic Cleansing Documented in Western Tigray – Amnesty and HRW accused Amhara forces and officials of denying humanitarian aid to civilians in western Tigray
Ethiopian paramilitaries have carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Tigray, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes using threats, killings and sexual violence, according to a joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
The rights groups accuse officials and paramilitaries from the neighbouring Amhara region of war crimes and crimes against humanity in western Tigray, in northern Ethiopia.
“Since November 2020, Amhara officials and security forces have engaged in a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing to force Tigrayans in western Tigray from their homes,” said Kenneth Roth, director of HRW.
According to the report, militias from Amhara joined the Ethiopian armed forces and its allies to seize western Tigray in the first few weeks of the war, using indiscriminate shelling and execution to force people to leave.
The report said these forces also put up signs in towns demanding that people leave and made threats to kill civilians who wanted to stay.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said the level of abuse of civilians had not been taken seriously enough internationally. “The response of Ethiopia’s international and regional partners has failed to reflect the gravity of the crimes that continue to unfold in western Tigray,” she said.
“Concerned governments must help bring an end to the ethnic-cleansing campaign, ensure that Tigrayans are able to safely and voluntarily return home, and make a concerted effort to obtain justice for these heinous crimes.”
Amnesty and HRW also accused Amhara forces and officials of denying humanitarian aid to civilians in western Tigray, an issue the UN has raised concerns about in recent months.
💭 Abuses “amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes,” according to a report from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Widespread abuses against civilians in the western part of Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have charged in a new report.
The crimes were perpetrated by security officials and civilian authorities from the neighboring Amhara region, sometimes “with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopian federal forces,” the rights groups say in the report released Wednesday.
The abuses are “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Tigrayan civilian population that amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes,” the report says.
Two human rights groups have accused armed forces from Ethiopia’s Amhara region of waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayans. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accused Amhara officials and regional special forces and militias fighting in western Tigray of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. They also accuse Ethiopia’s military of complicity in those acts. For more on the report we are now joined via Zoom by Laetitia Bader, Expert and Senior Researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch.
💭 Abuses “amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes,” according to a report from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Widespread abuses against civilians in the western part of Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have charged in a new report.
The crimes were perpetrated by security officials and civilian authorities from the neighboring Amhara region, sometimes “with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopian federal forces,” the rights groups say in the report released Wednesday.
The abuses are “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Tigrayan civilian population that amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes,” the report says.
Ethiopian federal authorities strongly refute allegations they have deliberately targeted Tigrayans for violent attacks. They said at the outbreak of the war in Nov. 2020 that their objective was to disarm the rebellious leaders of Tigray.
Ethiopian officials in Addis Ababa, the federal capital, and in Amhara didn’t respond to requests for comment on the allegations in the rights groups’ report.
The report, the result of a months-long investigation including more than 400 interviews, charges that hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans have been forced to leave their homes in a violent campaign of unlawful killings, sexual assaults, mass arbitrary detentions, livestock pillaging, and the denial of humanitarian assistance.
Fighters loyal to the party of Tigray’s leaders — the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF — also have been accused of committing abuses as the war spread into neighboring regions. Fighters affiliated with the TPLF deliberately killed dozens of people, gang-raped dozens of women and pillaged property for a period of several weeks last year in Amhara region, Amnesty said in a report released in February.
The new report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International focuses on attacks targeting Tigrayans in western Tigray and describes them as “ethnic cleansing,” a term that refers to forcing a population from a region through expulsions and other violence, often including killings and rapes.
Publicly displayed signs in several towns across western Tigray urged Tigrayans to leave, and local officials in meetings discussed plans to remove Tigrayans, according to the report. Pamphlets appeared to give Tigrayans urgent ultimatums to leave or be killed, the report says.
“They kept saying every night, ‘We will kill you . Go out of the area,’” said one woman from the town of Baeker, speaking of threats she faced from an Amhara militia group, according to the report.
Western Tigray has long been contested territory. Amhara authorities say the area was under their control until the 1990s when the TPLF-led federal government redrew internal boundaries that put the territory within Tigray’s borders. Amhara officials moved swiftly to take over the region when the war broke out.
The outbreak of the war “brought these longstanding and unaddressed grievances to the fore: Amhara regional forces, along with Ethiopian federal forces, seized these territories and displaced Tigrayan civilians in a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign,” the report says.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted in March 2021 that ethnic cleansing had taken place in western Tigray, marking the first time a top official in the international community openly described the situation as such. That allegation was dismissed by Ethiopian authorities as “a completely unfounded and spurious verdict against the Ethiopian government.”
The new report corroborates reporting by The Associated Press on atrocities in the war, which affects 6 million people in Tigray alone.
In June Ethiopia’s government cut off almost all access to food aid, medical supplies, cash and fuel in Tigray. The war has spilled into Amhara and Afar regions, with Tigrayan leaders saying they are fighting to ease the blockade and to protect themselves from further attacks.
Facing growing international pressure, Ethiopian authorities on March 24 announced a humanitarian truce for Tigray, saying the action was necessary to allow unimpeded relief supplies into the area. Trucks bearing food supplies have since arrived in the region.
The AP last year confirmed the first starvation deaths under the blockade along with the government’s ban on humanitarian workers bringing medicines into Tigray.
Estimated tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war. But there is little hope for peace talks as Ethiopian authorities have outlawed the TPLF, effectively making its leaders fugitives on the run.
Among their recommendations, the rights groups call for a “neutral protection force” in western Tigray, possibly with the deployment of an African Union-backed peacekeeping mission, “with a robust civilian protection mandate.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 21, 2022
❖ ጽላተ ሙሴ ❖ ንግሥት መከዳ ❖ አክሱም ❖ የመን
💭 More than 200 people were killed or wounded in an air strike on a prison and at least three children died in a separate bombardment as Yemen’s long-running conflict suffered a dramatic escalation of violence on Friday.
The Houthi rebels released gruesome video footage showing bodies in the rubble and mangled corpses from the prison attack, which levelled buildings at the jail in their northern heartland of Saada.
Further south in the port town of Hodeida, the children died when air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition hit a telecommunications facility as they played nearby, Save the Children said. Yemen also suffered a country-wide internet blackout.
“The children were reportedly playing on a nearby football field when missiles struck,” Save the Children said.
The attacks come after the Houthis took the seven-year war into a new phase by claiming a drone-and-missile attack on Abu Dhabi that killed three people on Monday.
The United Arab Emirates, part of the Saudi-led coalition fighting the rebels, threatened reprisals.
Aid workers said hospitals were overwhelmed in Saada after the prison attack, with one receiving 70 dead and 138 wounded, according to Doctors Without Borders.
Two other hospitals have received “many wounded” and as night fell, the rubble was still being searched, the aid agency said.
‘Horrific act’
Ahmed Mahat, Doctors Without Borders’ head of mission in Yemen, said: “There are many bodies still at the scene of the air strike, many missing people.”
“It is impossible to know how many people have been killed. It seems to have been a horrific act of violence.”
The UN Security Council, meeting Friday at the request of non-permanent member the United Arab Emirates, unanimously condemned what it called the Houthis’ “heinous terrorist attacks in Abu Dhabi… as well as in other sites in Saudi Arabia”.
The UAE is part of the Saudi-led coalition that has been fighting the rebels since 2015, in an intractable conflict that has displaced millions of Yemenis and left them on the brink of famine.
The coalition claimed the attack in Hodeida, a lifeline port for the shattered country, but did not say it had carried out any strikes on Saada.
Saudi Arabia’s state news agency said the coalition carried out “precision air strikes… to destroy the capabilities of the Houthi militia in Hodeida”.
😈The following entities and bodies are helping the genocidal fascist Oromo regime of evil Abiy Ahmed Ali:
☆ The United Nations
☆ The European Union
☆ The African Union
☆ The United States, Canada & Cuba
☆ Russia
☆ China
☆ Israel
☆ Arab States
☆ Southern Ethiopians
☆ Amharas
☆ Eritrea
☆ Djibouti
☆ Kenya
☆ Sudan
☆ Somalia
☆ Egypt
☆ Iran
☆ Pakistan
☆ India
☆ Azerbaijan
☆ Amnesty International
☆ Human Rights Watch
☆ World Food Program (2020 Nobel Peace Laureate)
☆ The Nobel Prize Committee
☆ The Atheists and Animists
☆ The Muslims
☆ The Protestants
☆ The Sodomites
💭 Even those unlikely allies like: ‘Israel vs Iran’, ‘Russia + China vs Ukraine + The West’, ‘Egypt + Sudan vs Iran + Turkey’, ‘India vs Pakistan’ are all united now in the Anti Zionist-Ethiopia-Conspiracy. This has never ever happened before it is a very curios phenomenon unique appearance in world history.
✞ With the Zionist Tigrayan-Ethiopians are:
❖ The Almighty Egziabher God & His Saints
❖ St. Mary of Zion
❖ The Ark of The Covenant
😇 The Identity of the Queen of Sheba – Ethiopian-Yemeni Queen
The Queen of Sheba was a monarch called “Makeda,” who ruled the Axumite Empire based in northern Ethiopia.
Solomon and Sheba’s child, Emperor Menelik I, founded the Solomonid dynasty. Menelik also went to Jerusalem to meet his father, and received as a gift The Ark of the Covenant.
Archaeological evidence indicates that as early as the tenth century B.C.—about when the Queen of Sheba is said to have lived—Ethiopia and Yemen were ruled by a single dynasty, probably based in Yemen. Four centuries later, the two regions were both under the sway of the city of Axum. Since the political and cultural ties between ancient Yemen and Ethiopia seem to have been incredibly strong, it may be that each of these traditions is correct, in a sense. The Queen of Sheba reigned over both Ethiopia and Yemen.
✞✞✞[Isaiah 33:1]✞✞✞ “Woe to you, O destroyer, While you were not destroyed; And he who is treacherous, while others did not deal treacherously with him. As soon as you finish destroying, you will be destroyed; As soon as you cease to deal treacherously, others will deal treacherously with you.”
💭 “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.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 