💭 The bodies of at least 46 migrants were found in the back of a hot semi-truck on Monday in San Antonio, Texas. Sixteen others, INCLUDING several CHILDREN, were discovered alive.
💭 White House: Biden not to blame for 50 dead migrants found in Texas 18-wheeler
Her comments came in response to a question from reporters aboard Air Force One Tuesday morning about the dozens of dead migrants found in a tractor-trailer in South Texas late Monday night. As of Tuesday morning, nearly 50 people had been pronounced dead at the scene.
“These deaths are on Biden,” Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) tweeted Monday night. “They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.”
Jean-Pierre told reporters that the White House is “closely monitoring the absolutely horrific and heartbreaking reports out of San Antonio” and that Biden is receiving regular briefings on the tragedy.
She further pledged to continue the administration’s work to disrupt “human smuggling networks” that “exploit and endanger human lives to make a profit” before defending the administration’s decision to loosen pandemic-era border protections when asked about Abbott’s comments.
“The fact of the matter is, the border is closed, which is in part why you see people trying to make this dangerous journey using smuggling networks,” Jean-Pierre stated. “Our hearts go out to the families at this time. We are going to stay focused on the facts and making sure we hold these smugglers accountable.”
At least 23 African migrants seeking to cross into Spain died in a stampede. The incident happened after thousands of migrants tried to breach Morocco’s border fence with Spanish enclave of Melilla. During this, a violent two-hour skirmish broke out between migrants and border officers.
💭 The populist Sweden Democrats (SD) have called for the repatriation of Syrians, Afghans, and Somalis, noting their rate of unemployment and high numbers who have not integrated.
Party leader Jimmie Åkesson and migration policy spokesman Ludvig Aspling have said the Swedish government needs to do more to return migrants to their homelands if they rely on state benefits and do not integrate.
“Since 2010, Sweden has granted over 1.2 million residence permits, equivalent to more than a brand new Stockholm. Unemployment is almost five times higher among foreign-born compared to native-born,” the pair wrote in a debate article for the newspaper Aftonbladet.
The pair add that among Syrians, Afghans, and Somalis, half of the adults earn incomes less than 100,000 Swedish kronor (£8,189/$10,235) per year, and that among foreign-born residents in general some 600,000 are not self-sufficient.
“Remigration is not a miracle solution, but the failures of recent decades show that it must be an option – a solution for all those who live in long-term exclusion,” they said, noting that while Sweden does have a subsidy for those wishing to return to their home countries it is seldom used.
“Incentive structures and the welfare system must be reformed, so that people in exclusion cannot get caught up in welfare dependency, but are either forced into society or encouraged to remigrate,” they wrote.
Åkesson and Aspling also cited the Danish approach to repatriating migrants, quoting Danish government minister Mattias Tesfaye, who has previously stated his goal is that Denmark would receive zero asylum seekers.
The concept of remigration was also used by former French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour during his campaign earlier this year. The populist said that he wished to create a new government ministry specifically to deal with the issue.
Zemmour proposed to send at least a million migrants back to their countries over a period of five years. A poll released in late March revealed that around two-thirds of French people supported a mass remigration of illegals, foreigners on terrorist watchlists, and foreign criminals.
💭 Stranded on trains Africans making their way by car told there’s no exit for them. Many Africans are taking shelter after being left stranded. Most of them are women and children.
Similar actions and stories of blocking, detention and maltreatment filtering out from “undesired” potential African asylum-seekers are widespread in North Africa, Turkey, Yemen, and now even at the Ethiopia-Sudan border, blocking Tigrayans fleeing the #TigrayGenocide.
An estimated 500,000 people have fled Ukraine to the eastern edge of the European Union (E.U.) since Russia invaded Ukraine last Thursday, U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) Filippo Grandi said on Monday.
💭 “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.
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.
ሁውማን ራይትስ ዋች / Human Rights Watch (HRW ) እ.አ.አ በ1991 ዓ.ም ላይ ባወጣውና ብዙ ጠቃሚ መረጃዎችን በያዘው ዘገባው ፤ “EVIL DAYS 30 YEARS OF WAR AND FAMINE IN ETHIOPIA” ላለፉት ፻፴/ 130 ዓመታት የኢትዮጵያ ፈላጭ ቆራጮች የነበሩት ዲቃላዎቹ ኦሮማራዎች መሆናቸውን እንዲህ ሲል ጠቁሞናል፦
“At the end of the 19th century, the center of power in Ethiopia decisively shifted from the north to Shewa, with the assumption of the title of Emperor by Menelik, King of Shewa. The majority of the inhabitants of the rest of Shewa were Oromo – as is the case today. In terms of descent, the group that became politically dominant in Shewa (and subsequently in Ethiopia) was a mixture of Amhara and Oromo; in terms of language, religion.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on August 6, 2021
After Ethiopia Trip, USAID Administrator Samantha Power Shares View Of Conflict.
Abiy Ahmed’s Brutal Campaign Against the People of Tigray Pushes Ethiopia to the brink.
Samantha Power Has Long Championed Humanitarian Intervention. Ethiopia’s Crisis Is Putting Her to The Test.
On the day Samantha Power landed in Ethiopia this week, its civil war — now escalating and spreading beyond the northern region of Tigray — entered its 10th month.
Amid allegations that Ethiopian troops and their allies have committed war crimes and ethnic cleansing and have driven parts of Tigray into famine, the United States has already withheld security assistance and effectively banned travel for top officials.
But Power, who is in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, holds the biggest American lever of influence over Addis Ababa: more than $1 billion in annual aid ranging from health and education support to food and emergency humanitarian response, which makes the United States the largest aid donor to Ethiopia.
It’s a moment seemingly made for Power, the former U.N. ambassador under President Barack Obama who came to prominence in 2002 with her book “A Problem From Hell,” which excoriated American inaction during mass killings in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, Europe during World War II and the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
“Samantha Power is a world-renowned voice of conscience and moral clarity — challenging and rallying the international community to stand up for the dignity and humanity of all people,” President Biden said in a statement when he appointed her.
Her work inspired a generation of humanitarian activists and helped popularize the notion that Washington bore a unique responsibility to protect the world’s most vulnerable populations, including with military force if necessary.
Power’s one-day trip Wednesday to Ethiopia, which didn’t include a meeting with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, was a test of whether she can restore faith in America’s role in preventing mass atrocities beyond its borders. So far, the U.S. measures curtailing security assistance and sanctioning officials have had little effect beyond turning Ethiopian sentiment against Washington.
“The United States has been working in Ethiopia for 60 years. USAID has spent a billion dollars in the last year in this country, including several hundred million dollars in development assistance. We’re delivering tomorrow 1.4 million vaccines,” Power said in a phone interview from the airport in Addis Ababa as she wrapped up her visit.
“There is so much we want to do together, but this is an own-goal,” she added, referring to the government’s increasingly antagonistic attitude to humanitarian aid groups, journalists and allies in the West.
Unable to control Tigray, Ethiopia isolates region already beset by famine and war
Ethiopia’s government accuses those allies of failing to back its military offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a group the government has designated as terrorists but whom the West dealt with over three decades when the TPLF controlled the country before Abiy’s rise.
Top Ethiopian officials have also accused some international aid groups of not just siding with the TPLF but also helping smuggle arms to it, and they have alleged that Western governments and media have overplayed atrocities linked to Ethiopian government forces while overlooking those allegedly committed by the TPLF.
Addis Ababa has responded defensively to allegations that it has committed crimes against civilians and hindered aid. The government puts nearly all the blame on the TPLF.
Inside the Biden administration, the option of using military force to stop the bloodshed in Tigray is seen as a non-starter. But withdrawing substantial amounts of aid is also seen as a poor option, because it is unlikely to change the Ethiopian government’s war strategy and instead deepen what is already one of the world’s most dire humanitarian crises.
Pressed on how and when punitive measures on aid might come into play, Power said she was still in wait-and-see mode. As for what she achieved at her meetings in Addis Ababa, she said she only got more commitments.
“It’s not the kind of track record that would give one confidence yet that those commitments are imminently to be met,” she said. Her requests were in line with the State Department’s recent public statements: that humanitarian aid be unhindered in delivery and that government-aligned troops from neighboring Eritrea as well as militias from the country’s Amhara region withdraw beyond Tigray’s prewar borders.
The State Department has also called on Tigrayan forces to withdraw from the Amhara and Afar regions, where they have recently gone on the offensive, displacing around a quarter of a million civilians.
“If we do not see progress in these domains, I think the administration made clear that we will not be left with much of a choice,” she said. The European Union has already withdrawn most of its financial support for aid programs in Ethiopia.
The outlook in Ethiopia is decidedly grim. The government initially pushed the TPLF out of Tigray’s main towns, but the TPLF retook most of the region last month in an offensive that analysts say resulted in a large portion of the Ethiopian army being killed or captured.
The TPLF has since moved into neighboring regions with the stated objective of obliterating what’s left of the government and its allies’ military capacity. On Thursday, Reuters reported that the TPLF had taken control of Lalibela, a sizable town within the Amhara region and home to Ethiopia’s famed 12th-century rock-hewed churches.
The Ethiopian government has in turn sought to recruit widely from regional militias, drawing in fighters from parts of the country previously uninvolved in the conflict.
Asked at a news conference in Addis Ababa about Abiy’s recent use of words like “weeds,” “cancer” and “disease” to refer to the TPLF, Power cautioned that “there are many, many people out there who hear rhetoric, hateful rhetoric or dehumanizing rhetoric and take measures into their own hands.”
Power’s past advocacy for humanitarian intervention, including with U.S. military force, has fallen out of favor in recent years as public confidence in Washington’s ability to reshape distant lands wanes. U.S. forces will conclude a 20-year occupation in Afghanistan in September, and the military will formally end combat operations in Iraq by the end of the year, Biden said last week. The two missions have cost thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and fallen far short of U.S. ambitions to bring about stability, democracy or prosperity. The protracted chaos and bloodshed in Libya following the ouster of Moammar Gaddafi in a NATO-led military operation in 2011 also dampened the appeal of humanitarian interventions.
Defenders of the administration say its lack of bold action in confronting the Ethiopian crisis does not indicate a lack of concern.
“There is a false narrative that the Biden administration does not care about mass atrocities, fueled by its decision to risk mass violence in Afghanistan,” said Richard Gowan, a U.N. analyst at the International Crisis Group. “But if you look at Washington’s approach to Ethiopia in particular, you see that the new administration does still have strong humanitarian instincts.”
Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield and the U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, “have all thrown themselves into efforts to halt the Tigrayan war, which hardly seemed to register with the outgoing Trump team,” Gowan said.
Thomas-Greenfield took to Twitter on Wednesday to denounce the Ethiopian government’s decision this week to revoke the operating licenses of Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council, two humanitarian organizations known for their work in war zones.
“This suspension is unacceptable. I know the work of MSF and NRC well, and they are internationally respected,” she wrote, using the French abbreviation for Doctors Without Borders. “Ethiopia must reconsider this decision.”
At least a dozen aid workers have been killed since November, when Abiy sent troops to Tigray to fight the TPLF after the group allegedly staged an attack on a military base.
The United Nations says the war has left 400,000 people facing famine, while UNICEF estimated last week that more than 100,000 children in Tigray could suffer from life-threatening acute malnutrition in the next 12 months — 10 times the annual average.
Meanwhile, “supplies are just running out,” Power said.