Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on August 18, 2021
💭 My Note:
Does the Evil PROJECTOR in-chief A. Ahmed have the audacity to accuse TDF of using child soldiers while detaing, starving and murdering Tigrayan babies?!
“One of those detained described grim conditions in which more than 700 Tigrayan military members, their families and retired peoples are held at a camp in Ethiopia’s Oromia region.„
Where are the Querro Oromos when ethnic cleansing, persecutions, and pogroms are taking place in their own zone? Of course, evil A. Ahmed’s fascist regime which is waging a genocidal war against Tigrayans is entirely an Oromo one – and Oromos like their Muslim brother particularly despise ancient Orthodox Christians and true Ethiopians – which the Tigrayans are.
Last year, on 7 May 2020, addressing Tigray’s preparations for election, the monster Abiy Ahmed who – like many of his brothers and sisters in genocide — sent his biological children to The USA for safety made the following preparatory statement: “in order for politicians to assume power children shall not perish, mothers shall not wail, houses shall not be destroyed and people shall not be displaced”. Isn’t that what’s happening now to Tigray and Tigrayans?
❖❖❖[Mark 9:42]❖❖❖
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.”
Children Reportedly Among Tigrayan Detainees in Ethiopia
Small children are among those held amid a new wave of detentions of ethnic Tigrayans suspected of supporting Tigray forces in Ethiopia’s growing war, one detainee says, while witnesses and a human rights watchdog describe fresh disappearances in recent weeks.
One of those detained described grim conditions in which more than 700 Tigrayan military members, their families and retired peoples are held at a camp in Ethiopia’s Oromia region.
Readily giving his military ID number but speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the non-combatant said that two detainees died after beatings and another died from lack of medication for a pre-existing condition.
“They call us cancers and tell us they will destroy us,” the detainee said, describing how military personnel overseeing the detainees threatened to shoot “each and every one of you” if anyone tried to escape.
New detainees continue to arrive, he said, and they have not appeared in court.
He listed five children detained who are under three years of age.
His account reveals worse conditions than those described in interviews with more than a dozen detainees and their families earlier this year before the resurgent Tigray forces retook much of the Tigray region in June and the Ethiopian military retreated.
His account could not be verified as Ethiopian authorities have not granted the press access to detention facilities.
A spokeswoman for the International Committee for the Red Cross confirmed that the group started visiting detainees in July, months after being made aware of them, but she could not comment on the conditions in which they’re held.
What began as a political dispute between the current prime minister and Tigray regional leaders who dominated Ethiopia’s government for nearly three decades has killed thousands of people since the fighting began in November.
The war has spilled into Ethiopia’s Amhara and Afar regions in recent weeks and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Millions of people in the Tigray region remain cut off from the world, and some have begun to starve to death.
Ethiopia’s government, on the defensive, last week called on all able citizens to stop the Tigray forces “once and for all”, while urging people to watch for suspected collaborators.
Although the government has repeatedly said it is targeting the Tigray forces and not ordinary Tigrayan civilians, numerous witness accounts allege otherwise.
An Ethiopian military spokesman, Colonel Getinet Adane, did not respond to a request for comment on the detainee’s account or a question about why small children are allegedly being held.
Outside the military, thousands of ordinary Tigrayans have been targeted.
In a new report on Wednesday, Human Rights Watch said Ethiopian authorities have carried out “rampant arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances” of Tigrayans in the capital, Addis Ababa, since the stunning turn in the war in June, when Ethiopia withdrew its soldiers from Tigray and announced a unilateral ceasefire.
The rights group cited interviews with eight current and former detainees plus relatives, witnesses and lawyers of 23 others whose whereabouts are unknown.
Several people said they later saw detained civilian relatives or friends in state media broadcasts claiming to show captured Tigray forces.
“The government should immediately stop its ethnic profiling, which has cast unjustified suspicion on Tigrayans,” Human Rights Watch researcher Laetitia Bader said.
The report comes as United States special envoy Jeffrey Feltman visits Ethiopia in the latest effort to press the government and Tigray forces to immediately stop the fighting.
It appeared that Ethiopian prime minister Abby Ahmed, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, would not be meeting the US special envoy, as his office said he had travelled to Turkey to meet with its president.
Mr Abby’s spokeswoman, Billene Seyoum, and the State Department did not comment.
Among the newly detained is Hailu Kebede, an official with the Salsay Woyane Tigray opposition party who has briefed diplomats and others on the war.
His lawyer, Kirubel Gebregziabher, confirmed that he is accused of participating in the war and “misinforming” people about a deadly airstrike by the Ethiopian military on a crowded market in Tigray in June.
His next court appearance was delayed until Thursday in what supporters called an attempt to block any meeting with the US envoy.
While the war is said to be popular among Ethiopians, some have expressed distress at the treatment of Tigrayans in their communities.
Last week a government worker, who described his ethnicity as Amhara and Oromo, wept as he said police and local authorities were going around government housing in his city in the Oromia region and telling Tigrayan families they had hours to clear out.
“Without any legal paper, without and reason,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“These are Ethiopians,” he said.
“It’s horrible. … I’m a patriotic person, but that doesn’t mean I support the government to do something unacceptable against Tigrayans.”
Despite claims by both Ethiopia and Eritrea that they were leaving, Eritrean soldiers are in fact more firmly entrenched than ever in neighbouring Tigray, where they are brutally gang-raping women, killing civilians, looting hospitals and blocking food and medical aid, The Associated Press has found.
Multiple witnesses, survivors of rape, officials and aid workers say Eritrean soldiers have been spotted far from the border in Ethiopia, deep in eastern and even southern Tigray, sometimes clad in faded Ethiopian army fatigues.
Rather than leaving, witnesses say, the Eritrean soldiers now control key roads and access to some communities.
At a hospital in Mekele, capital of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, children are being treated for horrific injuries of war.
12-year-old Haftom Gebru’s hand was too mangled during fighting in his village to be saved.
15-year-old Akhbaret Tadesa has deep trauma after a shell detonated near her house.
It has left her trembling all the time, unable to speak or eat on her own.
Her sister and father care for her around the clock, feeding her, talking to her, holding and squeezing her shaking fingers.
These are the scars of the fighting between Ethiopian armed forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
Since the violence erupted last November, there has been an ever-growing number of war-wounded in Tigray, including women and children.
But many at the hospital say that their wounds were caused not by Ethiopian or Tigray fighters – but by fighters from Ethiopia’s one time foe across the border: Eritrea.
Teklemariam Gebremichael is a farmer and says that Eritrean soldiers targeted him for this very reason.
He recounts that he and his neighbours were told that they were no longer allowed to farm.
When Eritrean soldiers came upon him tending to his cattle and harvesting crops, they shot both him and his cows, killing all his livestock.
He survived, but with food now in short supply, his wound is slow to heal.
He appeals for help from the international community.
“They should take immediate action to save the people of Tigray and stand by Tigray, because they are here to ethnically cleanse us,” he says.
Health workers say that they have seen a spike in sexual violence too.
Sister Mulu Mesfin is a nurse at the Ayder Referral Hospital in Mekele.
She has treated 400 rape victims and says that the wards are still full to overflowing.
Some of the women who sought treatment said they had been held in camps and gang-raped by dozens of soldiers for weeks.
Some were so badly injured that they were unable to walk, with complications like fistulas and prolapses.
The sister says most of the gang rapes were carried out by both Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers.
“Most are from Eritreans, but both soldiers are raping,” she says.
Compounding the problem, hospitals in the region have been attacked and ransacked.
Some of them were taken over by fighters and turned into garrisons.
As a result, people have to go further and further to get medical care as the hospitals they once went to are no longer able to function.
The Hawzen Primary Hospital still shows signs of an occupation that doctors and patients say was by Eritrean soldiers.
Birhan – who didn’t want to give her last name – came to seek treatment for her one-year-old baby, who’s been coughing a lot.
She left her two other children at home on their own; she says her husband had fled, as men of fighting age are more likely to be killed by soldiers.
She recalls how Eritrean soldiers took the hospital as a garrison after looting it.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 28, 2021
Alex de Waal
Under the banner of national sovereignty, Ethiopia is subverting Africa’s hard-won norms, principles and institutions.
Ethiopia is bringing Africa into disrepute and Africans should be outraged.
Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers are killing and raping civilians in Tigray. Millions are facing starvation while the authorities choke off essential relief supplies. The European Union and the United States called for an end to the atrocities and access for humanitarian agencies. Addis Ababa’s defence is that national sovereignty protects its right to do these things.
On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced sanctions against Ethiopian officials held responsible for the violence and starvation. Thus far, these are just visa restrictions, alongside a suspension of most development and security assistance.
In response, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs put out a statement: “The attempt by the US administration to meddle in its [Ethiopia’s] internal affairs, is not only inappropriate but also completely unacceptable. Ethiopia should not be told how to run and manage its internal affairs.”
Some Africans appear to take at face value this appeal to African solidarity in the face of external diktat. That’s a mistake.
Under the banner of national sovereignty, Ethiopia is subverting Africa’s own hard-won norms, principles and institutions.
The same argument was trotted out in the 1970s and 1980s when African dictatorships used “sovereignty” as a shield behind which to oppress and exploit their people with impunity. At that time, the Organisation of African Unity stood up for untrammelled sovereign rights. Its reasoning was that the independence of African countries wasn’t secure: Apartheid South Africa, along with outgoing colonial powers and their mercenaries wanted to destabilise and divide African countries. That spelled African silence over Eritrea’s long struggle for independence – an inattention that undermined peace and stability in the region. There was also a growing chorus of dissent criticising the OAU’s whitewashing of military coups, massacres and man-made famines. It was “a trade union of heads of state,” in the words of Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere.
The refugee crisis was the biggest symptom of African governments’ loss of legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens: millions fled their misgoverned countries. Western nations paid the humanitarian aid bills and began to speak about intervening themselves – and actually did so in Somalia in 1992.
The turning point came in April 1994. That month saw the accomplishment of the OAU’s historic mission, when Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa following that country’s first ever democratic non-racial elections. It also saw the genocide in Rwanda, perpetrated without anything more than symbolic hand-wringing in Africa and globally. With the liberation of South Africa, the main justification for the deployment of unfettered sovereignty was gone, while Rwanda showed the bankruptcy of that doctrine.
Africans led the way in formulating new principles. The Sudanese scholar and diplomat Francis Deng developed the notion of “sovereignty as responsibility”: a government’s sovereign privileges extend only as far as it exercises its responsibility for the rights and welfare of its citizens. The OAU set up an International Panel of Eminent Personalities to examine the Rwanda crisis, which coined the “principle of non-indifference”: Africans should not stand by while one of their governments commits mass atrocities. In due course, this became enshrined in the Constitutive Act of the African Union, drafted in 2000 and adopted when the African Union formally took over from the OAU at a summit in Durban, South Africa, two years later. Article 4(h) provides for intervention in the case of “grave circumstances”, defined as war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
These African initiatives were forerunners of the “responsibility to protect”, or R2P, adopted at the United Nations in 2001. Over the years, especially after R2P was invoked by NATO countries for regime change in Libya, many Africans came to see it as imperialism in philanthropic disguise.
By contrast, the African doctrine of non-indifference was crafted in the spirit of pan-Africanism. The vision of Kwame Nkrumah, the Pan-Africanist who led Ghana to independence in 1957, was that Africans are a single people whose struggle for freedom is one and the same. Sovereignty resides with the people, and is shared across the continent.
African peacemaking practice developed the duty to offer good offices for conflict resolution – along with an obligation of the country in conflict to accept them. African diplomats are proactive in peacemaking. It is now standard for the AU and African regional economic communities to respond to a crisis within days. When civil war broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, the foreign ministers of neighbouring countries flew to Juba within a week to press for a ceasefire. Compare that to the first civil war in Sudan (1955-72) when it took 16 years for an international peace effort and the second civil war (1983-2005) when it took eight years.
These peace efforts don’t always work, but it’s surely better than the alternative of allowing conflicts to rage on and escalate. For example, when a border war broke out between South Sudan and Sudan in April 2012, prompt action by the AU Peace and Security Council set out a road map for resolving the conflict. At that time the UN Security Council was deadlocked on almost every issue, but the US, China and Russia all deferred to the African position and adopted the PSC’s formula, word-for-word, in a Security Council resolution.
By comparison, United Nations envoys to Syria and Yemen were frustrated by the absence of a regional mechanism that could have established principles to contain those wars.
Ethiopia’s war in Tigray is a typical civil war: a political dispute that turned violent and became internationalised with Eritrean intervention. The best chance of containing the war was at the beginning before it escalated out of control. African leaders knew this instinctively. Within weeks of the outbreak of fighting in early November, the AU dispatched a team of three former heads of state as special envoys.
But Ethiopia did not play by Africa’s rules. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed rebuffed the AU, making sure that the Peace and Security Council – where Ethiopia sits as a member – did not discuss his war. In fact, he insisted it was only a “law enforcement operation”.
Abiy appears to be following the playbook of his coalition partner in the war in Tigray, Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki, that there should be no constraint on power. Afwerki has defied Africa and the world for decades with a dictatorship without constitution or rule of law. And Eritrea is Africa’s largest generator of refugees relative to its size.
With the AU impotent, Ethiopia’s crisis has gone to the United Nations. But the three African non-permanent members of the UN Security Council – Kenya, Niger and Tunisia – have not spoken out against the war or atrocities. Even when Ireland raised the situation in Ethiopia under the relatively uncontroversial resolution 2417 on armed conflict and hunger, the African representatives wavered. This opened the door for China and Russia to threaten to veto any resolution.
That’s Abiy’s strategy: his government’s statements about “foreign meddling” and “US imperialism” are aimed at winning over China and Russia. Those countries may step in and support him – but for their own interests, not Africa’s. Abiy has shown no regard for Africa and its wisdom. On the opening day of the AU’s February summit, Abiy published an article entitled Towards a peaceful order in the Horn of Africa. He didn’t once mention the AU or Africa’s norms, principles and institutions for peace.
Abiy’s appeal to sovereign impunity is having the exact opposite of its stated goal. Ethiopia faces a catastrophic famine and national crisis – and becoming a cockpit for global rivalries.
Africans should not stand for this. They must stand firm on Africa’s principles: sovereignty entails responsibility, unreserved condemnation of atrocities and starvation crimes, immediate negotiation among the belligerents for a political solution. Or Africa cannot complain if Europeans and Americans take those principles more seriously than they do.