💭 Ambassador to the US of the fascist Oromo regime, Seleshi Bekele Awulachew, speaks with Connect the World on current developments in Ethiopia. 02 Sep 2022
Yohannes and Gebremeskel knew it would be freezing cold inside the bulk cargo area of the Airbus A350 plane on the long flight from Ethiopia’s capital to Belgium.
But the two ground technicians with Ethiopian Airlines, both of Tigrayan origin, said they felt a threat from the Ethiopian authorities that left them no choice but to stow away among crates of fresh flowers.
Both men said family members had been detained under sweeping emergency laws that have targeted ethnic Tigrayans — and that they feared it was their turn next. The laws were imposed in November as Ethiopian government troops battle forces from the northern Tigray region in a bitter conflict that has now dragged on for 14 months. The government denies the laws targeted any particular group and recently lifted the state of emergency.
A view of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on November 27. Witnesses and Ethiopia's human rights commission accused authorities of arresting people in the capital based on ethnicity, using the wider powers granted by the state of emergency.
A view of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on November 27. Witnesses and Ethiopia’s human rights commission accused authorities of arresting people in the capital based on ethnicity, using the wider powers granted by the state of emergency.
So, in the early hours of December 4, Yohannes and Gebremeskel, both 25, made a spur of the moment decision to climb into the storage section of a converted Ethiopian Airlines cargo plane that was sitting in one of the hangars at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, waiting for the early morning flight to Brussels, Belgium.
As ground technicians with Ethiopia’s flagship commercial airline for the past five years, they had access to the compartment for routine inspection purposes. But if their hiding place was discovered, they would face harsh punishment, they said. CNN has changed both men’s names at their request for security reasons.
For more than three hours before take-off, they hid in the cold among the cabin crew’s luggage, not far away from the plane’s cargo shipment — crates loaded with roses ready to be delivered to Europe.
“We took the risk. We were — we had no choice, we had no choice, we couldn’t live in Addis Ababa, we were being treated as terrorists,” Yohannes, who has now obtained asylum in Belgium, told CNN in one of several phone conversations.
Four of his relatives have been killed, his fiancée is in prison in Ethiopia’s Afar region and his sister, about seven months pregnant, was seized from his house along with his furniture, he said. Yohannes believes these killings and detentions were motivated by their Tigrayan ethnicity and actioned under Ethiopia’s new emergency laws. “I don’t know where she [his fiancée] is currently,” he added. CNN has not been able to independently verify the deaths or imprisonment of Yohannes’ relatives.
“We took the risk. We were — we had no choice, we had no choice, we couldn’t live in Addis Ababa, we were being treated as terrorists.”
Yohannes
A spokeswoman for the office of Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed noted in an emailed statement to CNN that the state of emergency was lifted on January 26, 2022.
“You would note that the Council of Ministers have today decided to lift the State of Emergency. Individuals apprehended under the SOE [State of Emergency] have been released in great numbers, over the past weeks by the security sector, following investigations,” spokeswoman Billene Seyoum Woldeyes said.
“The SOE was never enacted to ‘persecute’ any group of people based on their identity,” she said.
The pair are not the only airline employees to attempt a risky escape from their home country in recent weeks. On December 1, shortly before Yohannes and Gebremeskel fled to Belgium, two other Ethiopian Airlines technicians concealed themselves in a passenger aircraft destined for Washington, DC, a spokesperson for the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirmed to CNN via an emailed statement.
Yohannes and Gebremeskel decided to flee from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport after reports that security was more lax there following the suspension of dozens of Tigrayan guards.
Yohannes and Gebremeskel decided to flee from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport after reports that security was more lax there following the suspension of dozens of Tigrayan guards.
They had concealed themselves in the ceiling space above the seating, according to a source at Ethiopian Airlines with firsthand knowledge of the internal investigation that was launched afterward.
Their journey would last more than 36 hours in total, as the plane flew from Addis Ababa via Lagos, Nigeria, and Dublin, Ireland, before finally landing at Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC.
Upon arrival in the US, the individuals were detained by the US Department of Homeland Security before later being transferred to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
CNN has also spoken to several other Tigrayan employees of Ethiopian Airlines who have fled Ethiopia in recent months through their jobs as flight crew. They told similar stories of widespread detentions of Tigrayans in Ethiopia and of targeted ethnic harassment from within the airline.
Concealed above plane crew’s bunk
CNN has been unable to speak directly to the stowaways who reached Washington, DC, but the source at Ethiopian Airlines said that both men were also of Tigrayan origin.
A CBP spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that after an identification and security examination, officers discovered the two “possessed Ethiopian Airlines employee identification cards, and that they stowed away with the intent of claiming asylum in the United States.”
“The two Ethiopian males are presently housed at a federal detention facility pending a hearing before an immigration judge,” the statement added. “CBP issued a civil penalty to Ethiopian Airlines for the security breach and were briefed on measures the airline is undertaking to enhance the airline’s aircraft security plan.”
CNN has obtained photos of the inside of the Boeing 777 aircraft as it looked during an inspection in the aftermath of the escape. In some pictures, it is possible to see the crew bunk in the center of the plane’s seating area, which the two men reportedly entered before lifting a mattress to reveal a maintenance access panel.
The images indicate they then cut a larger hole in the panel to enable them to smuggle themselves through the gap into the plane’s ceiling. They hid in this spot, not far above the aircraft’s toilets, for over a day and a half. CNN showed Boeing the photographs and a Boeing representative deferred to Ethiopian Airlines for comment.
The source at the airline told CNN they believed the fact that the stowaways were former maintenance technicians for the airline enabled them to know exactly where to hide inside the plane to go undetected without damaging the structure of the aircraft.
That they had the necessary tools with them to cut through the panelling might suggest the pair had planned the attempt in advance, the source at the airline added.
In total, 16 Ethiopian Airlines technicians appeared to have escaped via any possible means, either by boarding as cabin crew and walking off or stowing away, he said. CNN has been unable to independently verify this number.
For Yohannes and Gebremeskel, the decision to flee was an impromptu one, they said. They picked the first scheduled flight to a European country that was available and had to leave possessions including their cell phones behind in their lockers.
For the whole of their seven-hour flight to Brussels, they sat in the cargo area of the Airbus A350 with no food, no water, in the freezing cold, unbeknownst to the other members of the crew on board.
“I didn’t even have any clothes with me, I was wearing the uniform for maintenance […] I’m still wearing it,” Yohannes said.
“We don’t have anything to change into here, no underwear, no shoes, even the shoes […] we tried to cover our feet and the legs with what we had, it was night shift, on night shift we have the jacket of Ethiopian Airlines crew,” Gebremeskel, who also obtained asylum in Belgium, told CNN.
It was not how Gebremeskel imagined he would experience his first trip out of Ethiopia. Despite working for five years at Ethiopian Airlines, he had never boarded an international flight.
Airline employees claim discrimination against Tigrayans
Many people have left Ethiopia by land since the conflict began in November 2020. As of mid-December 2021, more than 50,000 people had fled into neighboring Sudan, according to UN figures. At the peak of the influx, “more than 1,000 people on average were arriving each day, overwhelming the capacity to provide aid,” a UN report said.
A refugee camp in Um Rakuba, Sudan, pictured in August. More than 50,000 Ethiopians have fled to Sudan since the Tigray conflict began in late 2020, according to the UN.
A refugee camp in Um Rakuba, Sudan, pictured in August. More than 50,000 Ethiopians have fled to Sudan since the Tigray conflict began in late 2020, according to the UN.
Meanwhile, attempts to leave Ethiopia by air by legal means have become increasingly difficult for Tigrayans, according to Ethiopian Airlines employees CNN spoke with.
Several attempted to leave by boarding planes from Addis Ababa’s Bole Airport as legitimate passengers but were denied access due to their Tigrayan ethnicity, they claimed. One former employee told CNN there were four checkpoints at the airport where passengers had their passports checked before departure.
“They check place of birth and name,” they told CNN, recalling three of their own failed attempts to leave. If the person was born in Tigray or had a Tigrayan name they were denied exit from Ethiopia, the former employee said.
As a result, several employees told CNN they escaped by working on board international flights as flight crew and fleeing when the aircraft landed abroad, often when the destination was in Europe or the US.
CNN has obtained IDs that confirm the identities of all four men who stowed away. Flight paths of the two flights — the one to Brussels and the one from Addis to Dulles airport through Dublin — have also been crosschecked on FlightRadar24.
Ethiopian Airlines has not responded to CNN’s request for comment regarding the stowaways’ journeys or the allegations of discrimination against Tigrayans.
This is not the first time Ethiopian Airlines has made headlines during the conflict in Ethiopia. In October last year CNN revealed that the airline had been ferrying weapons between Ethiopia and Eritrea at the outset of the conflict in November 2020, an act that was condemned by the international community as a potential violation of aviation law.
CNN’s investigation triggered calls by US lawmakers for sanctions and investigations into Ethiopia’s eligibility for a lucrative US trade program. Ethiopia was kicked out of the program over human rights violations at the start of 2022.
The airline has issued multiple denials about transporting weapons.
‘We were shaking’
After the aircraft carrying Yohannes and Gebremeskel landed in Brussels, the two waited for their chance to reach the terminal building.
“There were two guys working on the aircraft. One was unloading the cargo shipment and the other was coming with a torch around the plane,” Yohannes said. “So when the first was unloading the flowers we jumped to the ground — me and my friend — we jumped, and we ran to the terminal.”
Inside, employees gave them water and something to eat, but Yohannes and Gebremeskel were still in shock. “We were afraid they were going to send us back […] The guards, they brought us tea, but we were kneeling down on the ground, we were shaking,” Yohannes added.
Slowly, they felt a sense of relief, perhaps for the first time since they took off from Addis Ababa.
Their decision to flee had been prompted in part by reports that 38 Tigrayan security guards had been recently suspended at Bole Airport, meaning security was more lax than usual, they said.
“We were afraid of course … Luckily, we were not found. If we had been found, the punishment would have been harsh.”
Gebremeskel
But NISS, Ethiopia’s national intelligence security service, was still searching every part of the aircraft before departure, Gebremeskel explained, in order to prevent escapes. The Ethiopian Prime Minister’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, did not comment on these allegations.
Ethiopian Airlines has not responded to CNN’s request for comment on the security situation at Bole Airport
“We had some tools with us, we were afraid they were going to catch us because they check — the guy from the national intelligence security service checks every flight before departure,” Gebremeskel said.
“We were afraid of course. We were sitting with some tools with us. Maybe they will come to check that we’re working on it. Luckily, we were not found. If we had been found, the punishment would have been harsh.”
Yohannes hopes that in Belgium, he will find a country that will “respect my demands, the right to life.”
Pieter-Jan De Block, their lawyer, confirmed in a statement to CNN that both his clients had “obtained international protection in Belgium” and that they’d been released from the center where they were staying.
For Gebremeskel, the picture is bittersweet. With his family still far away — his parents are in a refugee camp in Sudan — and no money or job in Belgium, life is not easy. Although he has accommodation now, his first two nights after being granted asylum were spent sleeping at a train station.
He told CNN he hoped one day to return to Ethiopia but that until the country is a place where “people aren’t treated differently for their ethnicity,” that hope feels very remote.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 29, 2022
💭 “The Ethiopian system of governance is not reformable from within. I had to step out and speak out.” Filsan Ahmed, resigned from Abiy Ahmed’s government in protest. Now she tells me the PM can’t heal a country divided by the Tigray conflict.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 14, 2022
💭 “There’s a lot of areas we haven’t been able to access so we can’t assess what the humanitarian situation is.” 😠😠😠 😢😢😢
Steph Dujarric UN Spokesperson discusses the food, fuel and cash shortage that are adding to Tigray’s humanitarian crises.
“I’m looking at the clock right now. It’s just gone I think about 8:30 in the evening in Tigray. As we’re talking on this program. That means there are a lot of people, millions actually, who are likely going to bed hungry. It’s one thing not to be able to find food for yourself. It’s another thing altogether not to be able to find food for your children.” Zain Asher
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.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 6, 2021
💭 My Note: Today fascist Abiy Ahmed Ali has named a new defense minister, traitor Tigrayan Abraham Belay. It is “symbolically interesting” to see a Tigrayan appointed as defense minister. I’ve stated in the past there are very cynic and satanic motives behind the appointment of all these Tigrayan technocrats.
Preparing for The #TigrayGenocide evil Abiy Ahmed and his Luciferian overlords brought Tigrayans to occupy key positions nationally and internationally:
👉 His Holiness Abune Mathias, Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
👉 Dr. Lia Tadesse Gebremedhin, Minister of Health of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.
👉 Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Director-General of the World Health Organization.
💥 Wow! Let’s connect the dots…this is how monster war criminal Abiy Ahmed Ali and his Luciferian babysitters are literally working hard to destroy Ethiopia, instantly, before our very eyes – with the help of the Amharas — and how they are preparing themselves to blame those Tigrayan appointees for all the evil deeds of the fascist Oromo regime in Addis Ababa.
(CNN) Ethiopia’s government has used the country’s flagship commercial airline to shuttle weapons to and from neighboring Eritrea during the civil war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, a CNN investigation has found.
Cargo documents and manifests seen by CNN, as well as eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence, confirm that arms were transported between Addis Ababa’s international airport and airports in the Eritrean cities of Asmara and Massawa on board multiple Ethiopian Airlines planes in November 2020 during the first few weeks of the Tigray conflict.
It’s the first time this weapons trade between the former foes has been documented during the war. Experts said the flights would constitute a violation of international aviation law, which forbids the smuggling of arms for military use on civil aircraft.
Atrocities committed during the conflict also appear to violate the terms of a trade program that provides lucrative access to the United States market and which Ethiopian Airlines has benefited greatly from.
Ethiopian Airlines is a state-owned economic powerhouse that generates billions of dollars a year carrying passengers to hubs across the African continent and all over the world, and it is also a member of the Star Alliance, a group of some of the world’s top aviation companies.
The airline previously issued two denials about transporting weapons.
Responding to CNN’s latest investigation, Ethiopian Airlines said it “strictly complies with all National, regional and International aviation related regulations” and that “to the best of its knowledge and its records, it has not transported any war armament in any of its routes by any of its Aircraft.”
The governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.
Military refills
Long-simmering tensions between Ethiopia’s government and the ruling party in the Tigray region exploded on November 4, when Ethiopia accused the Tigray People’s Liberation Front of attacking a federal army base.
Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning prime minister, ordered a military offensive to oust the TPLF from power. Government forces and regional militias poured into Tigray, joined on the front lines by troops from Eritrea.
Thousands of people are estimated to have died in the conflict, which by many accounts bears the hallmarks of genocide and ethnic cleansing. While all sides have been accused of committing grave human rights abuses during Tigray’s war, previous CNN investigations established that Eritrean soldiers have been behind some of the worst atrocities, including sexual violence and mass killings. Eritrea has denied wrongdoing by its soldiers and only admitted to having troops in Tigray this spring.
Documents obtained by CNN indicate that flights carrying weapons between Ethiopia and Eritrea began at least as early as a few days after the outset of the Tigray conflict.
On at least six occasions — from November 9 to November 28 — Ethiopian Airlines billed Ethiopia’s ministry of defense tens of thousands of dollars for military items including guns and ammunition to be shipped to Eritrea, records seen by CNN show.
The documents, known as air waybills, detail the contents of each shipment. In one document, the “nature and quantity of goods” is listed as “Military refill” and “Dry food stuff.” Other entries included the description “Consolidated.” The records also had abbreviations and spelling mistakes such as “AM” for ammunition and “RIFFLES” for rifles, according to airline employees. They told CNN the spelling errors were introduced when the contents were manually entered by employees into the cargo database.
Benno Baksteen, chairman of DEGAS, the Dutch Expert Group Aviation Safety, told CNN that these waybills were required for all commercial flights as the crew on board need to know the contents of the cargo to ensure they are transported safely.
On November 9, five days after Abiy ordered a military offensive in Tigray, records show an Ethiopian Airlines flight transported guns and ammunitions from Addis Ababa to Asmara, Eritrea’s capital.
An air waybill and a cargo manifest from that date show that Ethiopian Airlines charged Ethiopia $166,398.32 for about 2,643 pieces of “DFS & RIFFLE WITH AM (sic)” on that flight. DFS is a reference to “dry food stuff,” according to airline sources.
Another air waybill from a few days later, November 13, has the same shipper and consignee. The content of that shipment was “military refill and dry food stuff,” according to the document. The shipments came at a time of increased military activity; security sources in the region told CNN the Eritreans needed re-supply for the fight in Tigray.
As planes went back and forth between the two countries, massacres of Tigrayans in the city of Axum and the village of Dengelat by Eritrean troops took place on November 19 and November 30 respectively.
Cargo documents show that the series of flights between Ethiopia and Eritrea continued until at least November 28, 2020.
Some current and former Ethiopian Airlines employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, said the flights continued past this date but that the majority of arms trips to Eritrea were in November.
Both cargo and passenger planes were used in the operation, though CNN has no evidence that commercial passengers were on any of the flights carrying weapons. Many of these flights do not appear on popular online flight tracking platforms such as Flightradar24. When they do, the destination in Eritrea is often not visible and the flight path vanishes once the plane crosses the border from Ethiopia.
The employees told CNN the staff could manually turn off the ADS-B signal on board to prevent the flights being publicly tracked.
The flights were often assigned the same flight numbers, primarily ET3312, ET3313 and ET3314, with ‘ET’ being the code for Ethiopian Airlines. All the planes mentioned in the cargo files seen by CNN are American-made Boeing aircraft. The airline has been in a long relationship with the US aviation giant.
A Boeing representative declined to comment.
Ethiopian Airlines workers described witnessing other airline employees loading and unloading arms and military vehicles on flights directed to Asmara. A few even claimed they helped load the weapons on the planes themselves. All spoke of being ethnically profiled for being Tigrayan.
CNN has seen the Ethiopian Airlines’ ID cards of these employees and confirmed their identities.
One former employee told CNN they were instructed at Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport to load guns and four military vehicles onto an Ethiopian Airlines cargo plane that was due to fly to Belgium but was sent instead to Eritrea.
“The cars were Toyota pickups which have a stand for snipers,” the employee said. “I got a call from the managing director late at night informing me to handle the cargo. Soldiers came at 5 a.m. to start loading two big trucks loaded with weapons and the pickups.”
“I had to stop a flight to Brussels, a 777 cargo plane, which was loaded with flowers, then we unloaded half of the perishable goods to make space for the armaments.”
The former employee warned soldiers that the vehicles were carrying far more gas than was allowed under international air transport rules, but said they were overruled after a direct call from an army commander.
“He [the commander] said we are going to war and we need the fuel to be loaded,” the employee said. “Then I referred the issue to my manager and my manager took responsibility and allowed them to load it.”
The flight, loaded with both weapons and flowers, traveled to Eritrea, then returned to Addis before flying on to Brussels the following day, the employee said. CNN cross-referenced this testimony with Flightradar24 and found the record of an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft returning from the direction of Eritrea and flying to Brussels the next day, but could not independently verify it was the same flight referred to by the employee.
Days later, the employee said they were temporarily suspended from work. They believe they were suspended for being Tigrayan but also for the incident with the soldiers. The employee fled Ethiopia in March.
Ethiopian Airlines told CNN in its statement that no employees had been suspended or terminated due to their ethnic background.
It appears to be not the only long-distance international flight with unplanned stops. A flight from Addis Ababa to Shanghai on November 9, 2020, took a long detour via Eritrea according to the ADS-B signal that tracks the route on Flightradar24.
Several employees at the Addis Ababa airport said they saw multiple weapons flights leave for Eritrea each day at the outset of the conflict. They also spoke about flights carrying weapons from Eritrea back to Ethiopia. It’s unclear why armaments were being transferred back to Ethiopia.
One said they saw tanks and heavy artillery loaded onto planes coming to Addis Ababa, while small arms — mortars, launchers — were dispatched to Asmara. Employees told CNN they believed the smaller weaponry were being sent to Asmara to arm Eritrean troops.
All the employees said they were instructed by the airline to delete photos of the weapons from their phones. Not all of them did.
In June, photos circulated on social media platforms showing crates containing mortars on board an Ethiopian Airlines flight and the same crates being loaded on the plane in Massawa, Eritrea.
The company released a statement strongly denying the allegation that its planes were transporting weapons and claimed the photos were photoshopped.
However, CNN has corroborated the photos using visual analysis techniques, interviews and documentary evidence, dating them to a 777 Freighter cargo flight that flew from Ethiopia to Eritrea and back between November 8 and 9.
A CNN investigation has uncovered evidence of the torture, mass detention and execution of residents in the the town of Humera in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. CNN’s Nima Elbagir reports.
💭 Selected Comments from CNN Channel:
➡ This is horrible. I can’t wrap my brain around the amount of violence human beings are willing to inflict on each other.
➡ The people who did this are nothing at all but rabid, cruel and most reprehensible monsters on the planet. They deserve the same fate and THEN some.
➡ People are capable of such horrific evil …. I don’t understand why, 😓, I hope there will be some justice. These people need help. International pressure must be placed on the Ethiopian govt. I have so much respect for those people in the Tigray region trying to help bury the dead and act as witnesses to the atrocities happening to their people. Such anguish and misery for these poor people.
➡ I am ashamed by the callously apathetic attitude of the comments below. These are our fellow human beings! Maybe we cannot save all of them but the absolute minimum owed them, as people, is to speak respectfully of them and their experiences until independent investigation finds evidence that torture and murder is NOT at work. You always assume the victim is telling the truth until evidence to the contrary is found.
➡ This is surely the tip of the iceberg! The world is just watching it with bare eyes…
➡ I worked in Atlanta at a Whole Foods about 15 years ago, and we had a huge population of east africans there. Ethiopians, Somalis and Yemenis. There was a huge amount of tension between one of our Ethiopian workers and the two Tigrayans, and one of the Tigrayan women told me about all sorts of hideous things she witnessed at the hands of the Ethiopian military. The oppression has been there for years, but it seems like it’s escalating
➡ The meek shall inherit the earth. May God rest their souls.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on September 7, 2021
This video reflects the severe humanitarian situation in Tigray with supplies of food aid running out and the United Nations warning that a de facto blockade is bringing millions to the brink of famine. Video by WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME via REUTERS
💭 Ethiopia’s Tigray Crisis: Tplf Says 150 Have Died of Starvation
About 150 people died of starvation in Ethiopia’s war-hit Tigray region in August, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) has said.
These are the first hunger-related deaths that the TPLF has reported since its fighters recaptured most of the region from federal forces in June.
There is no independent confirmation of its statement.
The UN previously said that about 400,000 were already living in famine-like conditions in Tigray.
The government has not responded the to the TPLF statement.
About 5.2 million people – or 90% of Tigray’s population – urgently needed aid “to avert the world’s worst famine situation in decades”, the UN said last week.
The TPLF and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed were once allies in the government, but fell out over his political reforms, triggering the war that has killed thousands and displaced millions since November.
TPLF recaptured most of the region, including the capital, Mekelle, in June after losing control of most of it early in the war.
The TPLF says it is the legitimate government of Tigray, having won regional elections in 2020. The Ethiopian government denounced the poll as illegal. It regards the TPLF as a terrorist organisation.
Dying ‘in front of our eyes’
In a statement on Monday, the TPLF said there was a “complete depletion of food stocks” in Tigray.
People living in camps after being displaced by conflict were receiving “no aid” and host communities were running out of food, it said.
The TPLF said the 150 deaths were recorded in the central, southern and eastern zones of Tigray, as well in camps in the city of Shire – the birthplace of the group’s leader Debretsion Gebremichael.
“One million people are at risk of fatal famine if they are prohibited from receiving life-saving aid within the next few days,” it added.
In a BBC Tigrinya interview, TPLF agriculture chief Atinkut Mezgebo said that people were dying “in front of our eyes”.
“In the villages and towns, there is a shortage of food and medicine, and the crisis might be bigger than what we know,” he said.
Dr Atinkut said that women and children were the main victims of hunger.
“Previously, people shared what they had, but now they don’t have anything to eat,” he added.
It is hard to confirm details of what is happening in Tigray as telephone and internet communications have been cut.
The BBC has asked the federal government for a reaction to the TPLF statement but has so far not got a response. But in a statement on Monday, the foreign ministry said the TPLF had exacerbated the humanitarian problems by invading neighbouring regions and looting aid supplies.
Last week, the UN’s acting humanitarian coordinator for Ethiopia, Grant Leaity, called on the Ethiopian government to allow the unimpeded entry of aid to Tigray.
On Sunday, the World Food Programme said that more than 100 trucks of its aid had reached Mekelle for the first time in a fortnight.
In the past, the government has denied that it is blocking aid but has said it is concerned about security.
On Saturday, it announced that 500 trucks carrying supplies had entered the region, with 152 arriving in the last two days.
“When Kidanemariam, who is from Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, approached the dais to introduce his longtime friend and colleague to the crowd, he said he was greeted with heckles from members of the audience: “Get out of the podium Tigrayan, get out of the podium Woyane,” and other ethnic slurs. He expected Abiy, who preached a political philosophy of inclusion, to chide the crowd, but he said nothing. Later, over lunch, when Kidanemariam asked why, he said Abiy told him: “There was nothing to correct.“”
“Abiy’s early advocates and supporters say he not only misled the world, but his own people — and they are now paying a steep price.
In his open letter announcing he was leaving his post, Kidanemariam wrote of Abiy: “Instead of fulfilling his initial promise, he has led Ethiopia down a dark path toward destruction and disintegration.””
“Abiy, Abiy,” the crowd chanted, waving Ethiopia’s tricolor flag and cheering as the country’s new prime minister, dressed in a white blazer with gold trim and smiling broadly, waved to a packed basketball arena at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, part of a whirlwind three-city tour of the United States to woo the diaspora.
It was July 2018, just three months after Abiy Ahmed had been appointed leader of Africa’s second-most populous country, and his star was rising both at home and abroad. Excitement was surging into an almost religious fervor around the young politician, who promised to bring peace, prosperity and reconciliation to a troubled corner of Africa and a nation on the brink of crisis.
But even in those early, optimistic days of Abiy’s premiership, as he kickstarted a flurry of ambitious reforms — freeing thousands of political prisoners, lifting restrictions on the press, welcoming back exiles and banned opposition parties, appointing women to positions in his cabinet, opening up the country’s tightly-controlled economy to new investment and negotiating peace with neighboring Eritrea — Berhane Kidanemariam had his doubts.
The Ethiopian diplomat has known the prime minister for almost 20 years, forging a friendship when he worked for the governing coalition’s communications team and, later, as CEO of two state-run news organizations, while Abiy was in military intelligence and then heading Ethiopia’s cybersecurity agency, INSA. Before working for Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kidanemariam ran the country’s national broadcaster, the EBC, and he said Abiy sat on its board of directors.
In a recent phone interview, Kidanemariam said he, like many Ethiopians, had hoped Abiy could transform the nation’s fractious politics and usher in genuine democratic change. But he struggled to square his understanding of the man he’d first met in 2004 — who he described as power-hungry intelligence officer obsessed by fame and fortune — with the portrait emerging of a visionary peacemaker from humble beginnings.
In 2018, Kidanemariam was serving as Ethiopia’s consul general in Los Angeles and said he helped organize Abiy’s visit.
When Kidanemariam, who is from Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, approached the dais to introduce his longtime friend and colleague to the crowd, he said he was greeted with heckles from members of the audience: “Get out of the podium Tigrayan, get out of the podium Woyane,” and other ethnic slurs. He expected Abiy, who preached a political philosophy of inclusion, to chide the crowd, but he said nothing. Later, over lunch, when Kidanemariam asked why, he said Abiy told him: “There was nothing to correct.”
“One of the ironies of a prime minister who came to office promising unity is that he has deliberately exacerbated hatred between different groups,” Kidanemariam wrote in an open letter in March, announcing that he was quitting his post as the deputy chief of mission at the Ethiopian embassy in Washington, DC, in protest over Abiy’s monthslong war in Tigray, which has spurred a refugee crisis, atrocities and famine.
Kidanemariam said to CNN he believed Abiy’s focus had never been about “reform or democracy or human rights or freedom of the press. It is simply consolidating power for himself, and getting money out of it … We may call it authoritarianism or dictatorship, but he is really getting to be a king.”
“By the way,” he added, “the problem is not only for Tigrayans. It’s for all Ethiopians. Everybody is suffering everywhere.”
In an email to CNN, Abiy’s spokeswoman, Billene Seyoum, described Kidanemariam’s characterization of the prime minister as “baseless” and a “reflection.”
‘The epitome of hell’
Much has changed since Abiy accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in November 2019, telling an audience in Oslo, Norway, that “war is the epitome of hell.”
In less than two years, Abiy has gone from darling of the international community to pariah, condemned for his role in presiding over a protracted civil war that, by many accounts, bears the hallmarks of genocide and has the potential to destabilize the wider Horn of Africa region.
The 45-year-old’s fall from grace has confounded many observers, who wonder how they could have gotten him so wrong. But diplomats, analysts, independent Ethiopian journalists, acquaintances and others who have followed his career closely say that even at the height of “Abiymania,” there were warning signs.
Critics say that by blessing Abiy with an array of international endorsements, the West not only failed to see — or willfully ignored — those signals, but gave him a blank check and then turned a blind eye.
“Soon after Abiy was crowned with that Nobel Peace Prize, he lost an appetite in pursuing domestic reform,” Tsedale Lemma, founder and editor-in-chief of Addis Standard, an independent monthly news magazine based in Ethiopia, told CNN on a Skype call. “He considered it a blanket pass to do as he wishes.”
The war in Tigray is not the first time he’s used that pass, she said, adding that since Abiy came to power on the platform of unifying Ethiopia’s people and in its state, he has ruthlessly consolidated control and alienated critical regional players.
Lemma has covered Abiy’s rise for the Addis Standard — which was briefly suspended by Ethiopia’s media regulator in July — and was an early critic of his government when few were sounding the alarm. Days after Abiy was awarded the Nobel Prize, she wrote an editorial warning that the initiatives he had been recognized for — the peace process with Eritrea and political reforms in Ethiopia — had sidelined a key stakeholder, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and were in serious jeopardy.
The TPLF had governed Ethiopia with an iron grip for decades, overseeing a period of stability and economic growth at the cost of basic civil and political rights. The party’s authoritarian rule provoked a popular uprising that ultimately forced Abiy’s predecessor, Hailemariam Desalegn, to resign. Abiy was appointed by the ruling class to bring change, without upending the old political order. But almost as soon as he came to power, Abiy announced the rearrangement of the ruling coalition that the TPLF had founded — the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Front, or EPRDF, which was composed of four parties — into a single, new Prosperity Party, ostracizing the TPLF in the process.
Abiy’s appointment had been intended to quell tensions. Instead, his drive for a new pan-Ethiopian political party sparked fears in some regions that the country’s federal system, which guarantees significant autonomy to ethnically-defined states, such as Tigray, was under threat.
The Tigrayans weren’t the only ones who were worried. In Abiy’s home region, Oromia, and other administrative zones, people began to demand self-rule. Soon, the government began backsliding into the authoritarian practices Abiy had once renounced: Violent crackdowns on protesters, the jailing of journalists and opposition politicians, and twice postponing elections.
Ahmed Soliman, a research fellow at Chatham House and an expert on the Horn of Africa, said Abiy’s reform plan also increased expectations among constituencies with conflicting agendas, further heightening tensions.
“Abiy and his government have rightly been blamed for implementing uneven reforms and for insecurity increasing throughout the country, but to an extent, some of that was inherited. These simmering ethnic and political divisions that exist in the country have very deep roots,” he said.
Tensions reached a boiling point last September, when the Tigrayans defied Abiy by holding a vote which had been delayed due to the pandemic, setting off a tit-for-tat series of recriminations that spilled into open conflict in November 2020.
This July, in the midst of the war, Abiy and his party won a landslide victory in a general election that was boycotted by opposition parties, marred by logistical issues and excluded many voters, including all those in Tigray — a crushing disappointment to many who had high hopes that the democratic transition Abiy promised three years ago would be realized.
“He sees himself as a Messiah, as chosen, as someone who’s destined to ‘Make Ethiopia Great Again,’ but this country is collapsing,” Lemma said, adding that the international community’s folly was falling for the picture Abiy painted of himself — “a post-ethnic, contemporary capitalist” — in their desperation for a dazzling success story.
‘A monumental failure of analysis’
Still, many Ethiopians are reluctant to lay the blame for the country’s unravelling at Abiy’s feet. Ahead of the election in June, residents in Addis Ababa told CNN they felt Abiy had inherited a mess from the previous regime and had always faced an uphill battle pushing reforms forward — an assessment shared by some regional experts.
“Lots of people were hopeful that the liberalizing changes, after those years of anti-government protests and all of the state violence in response, […] marked a moment where Ethiopia would start to conduct its politics more peacefully. But that thinking glossed over some of the major problems and contradictions in Ethiopia,” said William Davidson, senior Ethiopia analyst with the International Crisis Group.
“There was always a massive challenge ahead for Abiy, and for everyone. Just the promise of a more pluralistic political system did nothing necessarily to resolve the clashing nationalisms, opposing visions, and bitter political rivalries.”
In recent months, Abiy has tried to dodge international condemnation by pledging to protect civilians, open up humanitarian access to stave off famine and kick out Eritrean troops, who have supported Ethiopian forces in the conflict and stand accused of some of the most horrifying of the many atrocities in Tigray — pledges that American officials say he has not delivered on. After the United States issued sanctions in May, Ethiopia’s foreign ministry accused it of meddling in the country’s internal affairs and misunderstanding the significant challenges on the ground.
As the tide of international opinion has turned against Abiy, the prime minister’s office has maintained he is not concerned about his deteriorating reputation; his supporters have increasingly blamed the West for the crisis unfolding in the country. “The prime minister need not be a darling of the west, east, south or north,” Abiy’s spokeswoman Billene Seyoum told reporters in June. “It is sufficient that he stands for the people of Ethiopia and the development of the nation.”
But it is difficult to reconcile the government’s narrative with reality. Setting to one side the staggering loss of life and destruction inside Tigray, the war has eroded Abiy’s aggressive development plans and derailed the country’s economic trajectory, experts say. Ethiopia’s economy had grown at nearly 10% for the last decade, before slowing in 2020, dragged down by a combination of the Covid-19 pandemic, debt and conflict. The war has also drained national coffers, decimated a large slice of the country’s industry and eroded its reputation among foreign investors and financial institutions.
“From where I sit, I think there was a monumental failure of analysis, internationally,” Rashid Abdi, a Kenya-based analyst and researcher who specializes in the Horn of Africa, said, including himself in that group. “I think people failed to apprehend the complex nature of Ethiopia’s transition, especially they failed to appreciate also the complex side of Abiy, that he was not all this sunny, smiling guy. That beneath was a much more calculating, and even Machiavellian figure, who eventually will I think push the country towards a much more dangerous path.”
“We should have begun to take notice of some of the red flags quite quickly. A lot of complacency is what got us here,” he added.
The seventh king of Ethiopia
During his inaugural address to parliament in 2018, Abiy made a point of thanking his mother, a Christian from the Amhara region, who he said had told him at the age of seven that, despite his modest background, he would one day be the seventh king of Ethiopia. The remark was met with a round of laughter from his cabinet members, but Abiy’s belief in his mother’s prophecy was no joke.
“In the initial stages of the war, actually, he spoke openly about how this was God’s plan, and that this was a kind of divine mission for him. This is a man who early in the morning, instead of meeting his top advisors, would meet with some of his spiritual advisers, these are pastors who are very powerful now in a sort of ‘kitchen cabinet,'” Abdi said.
But the most glaring of warning signs, by many accounts, was Abiy’s surprise allegiance with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, for which he ultimately won the Nobel Prize.
Abiy’s critics say that what cemented his status as a peacemaker on the world stage was based on a farce, and that the alignment with Eritrea was yet another effort to consolidate his power, paving the way for the two sides to wage war against their mutual enemy, the TPLF. Soon after the Eritrea-Ethiopia border reopened in 2018, reuniting families after 20 years, it closed again. Three years on, Eritrean troops are operating with impunity in Tigray, and there is little sign of a durable peace.
In response, Abiy’s spokeswoman rejected this assertion, calling it a “toxic narrative.”
Mehari Taddele Maru, a professor of governance and migration at the European University Institute, who was skeptical of the peace deal early on — a deeply unpopular view at the time — believes the Nobel Committee’s endorsement of Abiy has contributed to the current conflict.
“I am of the strongest opinion that the Nobel Prize Committee is responsible for what is happening in Ethiopia, at least partially. They had reliable information; many experts sounded their early warning,” Mehari, who is from Tigray, told CNN.
“The Committee was basing its decision on a peace deal that we flagged for a false start, a peace that is not only achieved but perhaps unachievable and an agreement that was not meant for peace but actually for war. What he [Abiy] did with Isaias was not meant to bring peace. He knew that, Isaias knew that. They were working, basically, to execute a war, to sandwich Tigray from South and North carefully by ostracizing one political party first.”
The most palpable and lasting impact of the award, according to several analysts and observers, was a chilling effect on any criticism of Abiy.
The persona he cultivated, cemented in part through his many early accolades — being named African of the Year in 2018, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, and one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Global Thinkers in 2019 — captivated the imagination of Ethiopians, the country’s large diaspora and the world. Many now feel betrayed, having lost any optimism about the future of the country, but others are still intent on retaining that glittering image of Abiy, reluctant to see the writing on the wall.
“By the time the war started in November, the international community was extremely committed to the idea of Abiy Ahmed as a reformer still, and they didn’t want to give up on that,” said Goitom Gebreluel, a Horn of Africa researcher from Tigray, who was in Addis Ababa at the start of the conflict.
“I had meetings with various diplomats before the war and it was obvious that the war was coming, and what they were saying was, ‘you know, he still has this project, we have to let him realize his political vision,'” he said. “To this day, I think not everyone is convinced that this is an autocrat.”
Now, with Ethiopia facing a “man-made” famine and a war apparently without end, Abiy stands alone, largely isolated from the international community and with a shrinking cadre of allies.
Abiy’s early advocates and supporters say he not only misled the world, but his own people — and they are now paying a steep price.
In his open letter announcing he was leaving his post, Kidanemariam wrote of Abiy: “Instead of fulfilling his initial promise, he has led Ethiopia down a dark path toward destruction and disintegration.”
“Like so many others who thought the prime minister had the potential to lead Ethiopia to a bright future, I am filled with despair and anguish at the direction he is taking our country.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 5, 2021
🔥 #TigrayGenocide / የትግራይ ጀነሳይድ
💭 “Many people believe that it is now genocidal, that what is a political intent to destroy is becoming now an intent to destroy, in whole or part, a people,”
We get an update on how the Ethiopian government has announced Eritrean forces are withdrawing from the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, where harrowing witness accounts have emerged of Eritrean soldiers killing Tigrayan men and boys and rape being used as weapon of war by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. Eritrea entered the Tigray region to support Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s military offensive in November targeting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The true death toll from the conflict remains unknown, but researchers recently identified almost 2,000 people killed in 150 massacres by warring factions. CNN senior international correspondent Nima Elbagir, who just returned from reporting on the region, says what started as a “competition for power” has descended into ethnic cleansing. “Many people believe that it is now genocidal, that what is a political intent to destroy is becoming now an intent to destroy, in whole or part, a people,” says.
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