NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Dozens of women and girls have been raped and hundreds of civilians killed during fighting in Ethiopia´s Tigray region, according to an official document seen by The Associated Press.
Roughly 40 girls and women between the ages of 13 and 80 were raped in the town of Sheraro in northwestern Tigray, according to the document prepared by Tigray´s regional Emergency Coordination Centre. The center includes regional government bureaus, U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations.
The document reports eight more rapes, “including gang rape,” in the district of Tselemti, also in northwestern Tigray.
Issued Oct. 14, the document did not state who was responsible for the sexual violence. Nor did it state the time frame in which it occurred.
According to diplomatic sources, Eritrean and Ethiopian forces took control of Sheraro last month. Eritrean troops have fought alongside Ethiopia´s federal military since hostilities resumed in Tigray on Aug. 24 after a lull in fighting.
Diplomats have expressed alarm over reports of civilian casualties in the region as Ethiopia´s federal military this week took control of the major town of Shire and the federal government expressed its aim to capture Tigray´s airports and federal institutions.
A humanitarian worker based in Shire told the AP the town´s airport is now manned by Eritrean forces. Ethiopian and Eritrean forces have captured warehouses belonging to NGOs there, and Eritrean forces are specifically looting vehicles, according to the aid worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of safety fears.
U.S. officials have called on Eritrean forces to withdraw from Tigray and urged the parties to agree to an immediate cease-fire. The administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, has described the human cost of the conflict as “staggering.”
The internal document seen by the AP said 159 individuals have been “shot dead” in the Tahtay Adiyabo, Dedebit and Tselemti areas of northwestern Tigray, adding that others were maimed by gunshots and shelling.
A further 157 people were “taken by Eritrean forces” in Tselemti, Dedebit and Sheraro, according to the document, which said there is “no information (on their) whereabouts.”
The latest fighting has halted aid deliveries to Tigray, where around 5 million people need humanitarian help. A lack of fuel and a communications blackout are hindering the distribution of aid supplies that were already in the region.
Ethiopia´s federal government said Thursday it would participate in African Union-led peace talks expected to begin in South Africa next week. Tigray’s fugitive authorities are yet to confirm their attendance but have previously committed to participating in talks mediated by the African Union.
Both the U.N. Security Council and the African Union’s Peace and Security Council were due to discuss the conflict on Friday.
A World Food Program spokesperson told the AP “an armed group” entered its warehouse in Shire on Oct. 18, a day after Ethiopia´s federal government announced the town’s capture.
“WFP is actively working to confirm if the armed individuals remain and if any humanitarian stocks or assets have been taken or damaged,” the spokesperson said.
All sides have been accused of atrocities since the conflict in northern Ethiopia began almost two years ago.
Last week a report by the Amhara Association of America advocacy group said the Tigray forces had killed at least 193 civilians and raped 143 women and girls since August in the Raya Kobo area of the Amhara region, which borders Tigray.
The conflict, which began nearly two years ago, has spread from Tigray into the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara as Tigray´s leaders try to break the blockade of their region.
“Calling out the atrocities for what they are would at least put Ethiopia and Eritrea on notice that the world is watching, and the long arm of international justice could ultimately prevail. Offenders in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, to name a few, ultimately faced justice after all.”
While the world’s eyes are trained on the war in Ukraine and whether Vladimir Putin is unhinged enough to use nuclear weapons, another war rages mostly unseen some 3,000 miles away in Ethiopia.
The war is centered on the northern region of Tigray, where a long-standing political conflict between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) turned violent in 2020. The region has been under a near total blockade for most of the time since, cut off from humanitarian aid, electricity, telecommunications and banking, leaving 5.3 million civilians in dire straits. The Ethiopian government’s renewed offensive has escalated the crisis even further.
Accurately estimating the dead while war continues is difficult, but the best estimates available suggest at least half a million people have died so far from direct violence, starvation and lack of access to health care. Starvation seems to be a feature rather than a bug in the government’s battle plan. More recent estimates suggest that this number have died in combat alone, possibly bringing the overall deaths closer to a million.
To put it in perspective, the United Nations estimates about 6,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine so far, and estimates put military deaths in the tens of thousands. Even if these estimates are low, the best available numbers suggest that the scale of death in Ethiopia exceeds that in Ukraine many times over. And yet Ethiopia has received a small fraction of attention, both from policymakers and the media.
The U.S. and others must take a more direct approach before the worst fears of the Tigrayan people are realized.
Those fears include a genocide of the people of Tigray. In response to the latest offensive, the United Nations, African Union, United States and other countries have called on all sides to cease hostilities. But generic calls for everyone to stop fighting and quiet behind-the-scenes diplomacy that has been the favored approach so far are a woefully inadequate response.
Tigrayan authorities have indicated that they would respect a cease-fire, but Ethiopian government officials have instead doubled down to lambaste the “evils” of its enemy. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian government has reportedly dropped leaflets in Tigray stating that anyone remaining behind would be considered a combatant, raising clear concerns that all Tigrayans, a distinct ethnic group, would be targets in an assault.
Sources from the area claim Ethiopian and Eritrean forces (their allies) have been instructed to kill three Tigrayans each, including elderly and children, and that victims’ limbs and skulls are on display.
These stories are unverified given the lack of humanitarian and media access to the region. But given the language and actions of Ethiopia so far, along with the death toll and atrocities already committed, there is little reason not to take them seriously.
Eritrea’s role has complicated efforts to reach a peace, too, as few countries have any leverage to influence its actions, and the TPLF is its sworn enemy. There is no guarantee that Eritrea will stop fighting even if the Ethiopian government comes to the table.
While it’s true that all sides have committed abuses, the scale is hardly comparable, with Ethiopia and Eritrea committing the lion’s share of wanton violence and harm against civilians throughout the conflict. When one side holds this level of responsibility for continuing conflict and suffering, those who hold any sway must speak out clearly and directly against it.
At this stage, peace looks like a long shot, but that does not excuse the inadequate efforts made so far.
The U.S. and the United Nations are often loath to invite criticism by directly calling out states for violent acts against their own people when those states are friends and partners, as Ethiopia is.
It won’t likely end the war, but that is a weak excuse for not trying harder. The innocent people of Tigray deserve acknowledgment, and there is a chance that such international pressure, in combination with policy choices that reduce Ethiopia’s support, through international institutions and individual countries alike, could influence the path Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed chooses.
Calling out the atrocities for what they are would at least put Ethiopia and Eritrea on notice that the world is watching, and the long arm of international justice could ultimately prevail. Offenders in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, to name a few, ultimately faced justice after all.
We must stop shying away from uncomfortable conversations when so many lives are at stake. If U.S. leverage is inadequate, we should press the countries who arm and support Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the international financial institutions like the World Bank which keep the country afloat as its economy falters.
The time for quiet diplomacy is over. The time for alarm has long since passed. Echoing what we’ve heard repeatedly about the plight of Ukraine: If Ethiopia stops fighting, the war ends, but if Tigray stops fighting, in the absence of international oversight and an inclusive peace process, the impoverished people of Tigray might end instead.
Just a quick, brief statement. The Security Council just met to discuss the conflict in Ethiopia, in a closed meeting. And I want to take the opportunity to thank the A3 and the African Union for leading on this process, including the statement that was issued by the African Union today, and we were briefed by the African Union.
It is disappointing that the council did not agree on issuing a statement, which is why it’s important for me to come out here today.
As the Secretary-General said this week, “The situation in Ethiopia is spiraling out of control. The social fabric is being ripped apart, and civilians are paying a horrific price.” In the past week alone, we’ve seen a serious uptick in fighting and violence. Thousands of Ethiopian, Eritrean, and TPLF forces are engaged in active combat. The scale of the fighting and deaths rival what we’re seeing in Ukraine, and innocent civilians are being caught in the crossfire. Over two years of conflict, as many as half a million – half a million – people have died, and the United States is deeply concerned about the potential for further mass atrocities. And we all should be.
We’re also horrified by the recent death of an aid worker from the International Rescue Committee and the injuries of others. We heard today that a total of 26 humanitarian workers had been killed over the course of the past two years – that’s approximately two per month. This tragedy underscores the serious dangers facing humanitarian workers in the region. And as I told the Security Council just now, it’s past time for all of the parties to lay down their weapons and return to peace. It is past time for a cessation of hostilities and for unhindered humanitarian access to all those in need. And it is past time for Eritrean Defense Forces to halt their joint military offensive and for Ethiopia to ask Eritrea to withdraw its soldiers from Northern Ethiopia.
💭 Malawi Police Exhume 25 Bodies of Ethiopians in Mass Grave. A mass grave was discovered in a government forest reserve in Mzimba district.
Following the discovery of a mass grave in which 25 bodies were found, Malawi police have arrested 72 Ethiopian men who were found hiding in a forest reserve in the northern border town of Karonga.
Ten Malawians have also been arrested on suspicion of being part of a syndicate involved in trafficking the Ethiopians.
On Wednesday, a mass grave was discovered in a government forest reserve in Mzimba district, some 300 km (185 miles) south of where the Ethiopian men were arrested on Thursday.
Young boys from the area are said to have gone into the forest reserve to harvest honey when they were first greeted by the pungent smell of rotting bodies before they discovered body parts including heads and limbs.
The boys reported the matter to village elders who in turn notified the police who went to the forest and discovered the mass grave.
On Thursday morning, a separate grave near the one found on Wednesday was also discovered, where another four bodies were unearthed.
Homeland Security Minister Jean Sendeza, who has travelled to the scene of the mass graves, says authorities plan to conduct a post-mortem to ascertain the causes of death.
Human trafficking has become a huge challenge in Malawi, where hundreds of people are regularly arrested and deported for illegally entering the country with the help of organised syndicates.
Last April, up to 140 illegal immigrants were arrested by Malawi police. They included 133 Ethiopian nationals, six from Bangladesh and one from Pakistan. They are yet to face trial.
Police say the 72 Ethiopians and 10 Malawians arrested on Thursday will soon be taken to court to answer various charges connected to human trafficking and violation of immigration laws.
😈 Saudi King Abdulaziz’s grandson sharply rebuked Joe Biden for threatening to retaliate against OPEC+ oil production cuts. Saudi Prince Saud al-Shaalan reminded President Biden that Saudi Arabia was formed through jihad and martyrdom. It appears that President Biden is dangerously close to losing Saudi Arabia as a U.S. Ally.
❖ Ethiopian New Year’s Day 11. September 2001 (1. Meskerem 1994)
☪ Of the 19 Muslim Jihadists who hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia — and of course, Osama bin Laden was a member of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families.
Immediately after the attacks, the Bush administration downplayed the Saudi connection and suppressed evidence that might link powerful Saudis to the funding of Islamic extremism and terrorism. The Bush White House didn’t want to upset its relationship with one of the world’s largest oil-producing nations, which was also an American ally with enormous political influence in Washington, and much of what the FBI discovered about possible Saudi links to the attacks remains secret even today.
Evidence made available by the British police shows Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi Arabian government operative, hosting two of the 9/11 hijackers a year before they carried out the attacks.
😈 Saudi King Abdulaziz’s grandson sharply rebuked Joe Biden for threatening to retaliate against OPEC+ oil production cuts. Saudi Prince Saud al-Shaalan reminded President Biden that Saudi Arabia was formed through jihad and martyrdom. It appears that President Biden is dangerously close to losing Saudi Arabia as a U.S. Ally.
❖ Ethiopian New Year’s Day 11. September 2001 (1. Meskerem 1994)
☪ Of the 19 Muslim Jihadists who hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia — and of course, Osama bin Laden was a member of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families.
Immediately after the attacks, the Bush administration downplayed the Saudi connection and suppressed evidence that might link powerful Saudis to the funding of Islamic extremism and terrorism. The Bush White House didn’t want to upset its relationship with one of the world’s largest oil-producing nations, which was also an American ally with enormous political influence in Washington, and much of what the FBI discovered about possible Saudi links to the attacks remains secret even today.
Evidence made available by the British police shows Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi Arabian government operative, hosting two of the 9/11 hijackers a year before they carried out the attacks.
💭 Tell Me Who Your Friends Are And I Will Tell You Who You Are!
☆ Roman Catholics and Muslims were Allies since the First Crusade. (No wonder ‘The Second Vatican Council‘)
The conquest of the Byzantine metropolis Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in May 1453. When Ottoman Sultan Mehmet conquered Constantinople in 1453, his first destination was Haghia Sophia, the towering seat of Orthodox Christianity. In front of what was then the largest church in the world, he knelt, sprinkled soil on his turban as a sign of humility and recited the Muslim prayer of faith, turning the church into a mosque: “There is no Allah-god but Allah-god, and Mohammed is his prophet.”. The new Antichrist Sultan Erdogan did the same to Hagia Sophia two years ago.
When the Orthodox Church broke away from Rome over the issue of papal authority in 1054, Constantinople became the undisputed political and religious center of the Greek-speaking world.
The city was sacked in 1204 by Western Catholic crusaders, cementing the split between Catholic west and Orthodox east.
In 2004, the late Pope John Paul expressed “disgust and pain” for the sacking of the city by the Fourth Crusade.
☆ Protestantism and ☪ Islam were allies during the early-16th century when the Ottoman Empire, expanding in the Balkans, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. The Turks and Protestants imported the Galla-Oromo tribe from Madagascar to the Horn of Africa to use them in their Jihad on Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia. Aḥmad Grāñ and The 16th Century Jihad In Ethiopia is repeated today in the exact same manner.
Ethiopia: The ‘revenge Jihad’ was sought and pre-planned a 126 years ago – after the defeat of Italian Romans at the battle of Adwa, Tigray, Ethiopia on March 1, 1896 .
Almost two years ago, with the meticulous knowledge of the C.I.A and State department, Anti-christian Jihadist nations and organizations strategically displaced millions of Orthodox Christians from Western Tigray – so that they could be gathered together in such a concentration camp like here in Shire. Now they are attempting to massacre them. All pre-planned by The UN + USA + Europe + UAE + Israel + Egypt + Oromos + Amharas + TPLF — and God forbid, could be finished within short time like Hitler’s Auschwitz and Dachau concentration and extermination camps.
UN + America & Europe allow their proxies; the Islamo-Protestant Perpetrators (Fascist Oromo Regimes of Ethiopia and Eritrea) to commit crimes against Ancient Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia.
💭 In 1999 the US + Europe (NATO) did the same thing directly against Orthodox Christian Serbia to help Albanian and Turkish Muslims – ‘to avenge’ the death of 45 Albanian Muslim terrorists.
💭 Senator Joe Biden, in 1999, bragged “I suggested bombing of Belgrade. I suggested that American pilots go there and destroy all bridges on the Drina”.
The 78 days of air strikes lasted from 24 March 1999 to 10 June 1999. The bombs kept falling even on Serbia’s Easter – called Pascha – which is the holiest day of the Orthodox Christian year. NATO bombed innocent Serbians with Depleted Uranium because they killed 45 Albanian terrorists?! Mind boggling!
In this archived clip, for example, Joe Biden said in a fiery speech, “I will continue with every fiber in my being to keep America involved with troops that can shoot and kill….”
“I believe it is absolutely essential for American troops to be on the ground with loaded rifles and drawn bayonets.”
💭 If you were traveling through the verdant Ethiopian highlands, you might make a stop at the Abba Gärima monastery about three miles east of Adwa in the northernmost part of the country. If you were a man—and you’d have to be to gain entry into the Orthodox monastery—then you might be permitted to look at the Abba Gärima Gospel books. These exquisitely illuminated manuscripts are the earliest evidence of the art of the Christian Aksumite kingdom. Legend holds that God stopped the sun in the sky so the copyist could finish them. Leafing through a Gospel book you would come upon portraits of the four evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—the authors of the book’s contents. You might be surprised to find, however, that there is a fifth evangelist included there.
“A fifth evangelist?!” you say, and rightly so. This fifth portrait is that of Eusebius of Caesarea, the man who taught us how to read the Gospels. A new book, Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity, by Dr. Jeremiah Coogan, an assistant professor of New Testament at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, sheds light on history’s lost “fifth evangelist” and explains the pervasive influence of the bishop who has, arguably, done more than anyone else to shape how we read the gospels.
Eusebius of Caesarea is not a very well-known name outside of scholarly circles. He was born in the last half of the third century in Caesarea Maritima, in what is today Israel. He became first a priest and then a bishop. He would later become a biographer of the emperor Constantine possibly even a wheeler-dealer in the ecclesiastical politics of the imperial court. Under the influence of the third-century theologian Origen, who spent a long period of his life in Caesarea, Eusebius became an accomplished textual scholar.
If you’ve heard Eusebius’s name before it’s probably because of his Church History, an account of Christianity’s origins from the Apostles to his own day. As influential as the Church History is—and it became the template for how people have written the history of Christianity ever since—it doesn’t compare to the impact of his less visible and least-known literary production, the canon tables (also known as the Eusebian Apparatus).
In Eusebius’ time the contents of the New Testament were not universally established. Though many agreed that there should be four Gospels, and even grounded this assumption in the natural order of the universe, they did not read the Gospels in parallel. At least part of the reason for this was that, practically speaking, this was hard to do. Even if you had a Gospel book that contained copies of the four canonical Gospels, identifying how the various stories related to one another involved familiarity with the text, deductive skills, and a real facility navigating the physical object itself. Gospel books were big and heavy; the text was usually written in a series of unbroken Greek letters; and there were no chapter, verse, or page numbers to help you find your way.
Enter Eusebius, the man whose invention made reading the Gospels in parallel possible. It is basically a carefully organized reference tool that allows you to navigate books. In a period before chapter and verse divisions, Eusebius and his team of literary assistants divided the canonical Gospels into numbered sections and produced a set of coordinating reference tables that allow readers to cross-reference versions of the same story in other Gospels. This was an important innovation in book technology in general. As Coogan put it “the Eusebian apparatus is the first system of cross-references ever invented—not just for the Gospels, but for any text.” Reference tables might not seem sexy, but by producing them Eusebius inaugurated a trend that would dominate how Christians ever since have read the Bible.
“While Eusebius was never formally denounced as a heretic, some of his opinions were pretty unorthodox.”
The enormity of his innovation is hard to see precisely because it has become ubiquitous. We thread the different sayings of Jesus from the Cross together into one story. We merge the infancy stories of Matthew and Luke together to produce a single shepherd and wise men-filled Nativity story. These decisions are relatively uncomplicated, but we should consider the amount of decision-making that went into the production of this reading scheme. First, the team had to decide on unit divisions: what is a unit, where does it begin, and where does it end? While today church services have designated readings, early Christians often read for as “long as time permitted.” In segmenting the Gospel, the Eusebian team was cementing preexisting yet informal distinctions about what constituted a particular story, episode, or section of the life of Jesus.
Once this was accomplished, each unit had to be correlated to the corresponding units in the other Gospels. Some decisions seem easy: Jesus feeds 5,000 people in all four Gospels, for example. But there is an additional story—relayed by Mark and Luke—in which he feeds 4,000 people. What should we do with them? What about chronological discrepancies? The incident in the Jerusalem Temple where Jesus gets into a physical dispute with moneychangers appears in the final week of his life in the Synoptics but kicks off his ministry in the Gospel of John. Are they the same story? Did Jesus cleanse the Temple twice? These were and indeed are live questions for Christian readers, but by drawing up his tables, Eusebius and his team provided answers by means of a simple chart. A great deal of interpretation and theological work happens in the construction of the chart, but the tables seem to be factual accounting. Instead of argumentation that makes itself open to disagreement, we see only beguilingly agent-less lines and numbering.
This kind of schematization might seem to be the ancient equivalent of administrative or clerical work. Indeed, it drew upon technologies and practices from ancient administration, mathematics, astrology, medicine, magic, and culinary arts. The portraits from the Ethiopian Gärima Gospel, however, capture an often-hidden truth: Schematization is theological work. Segmenting the Bible and mapping its contents created theologically motivated juxtapositions and connections. For example, by connecting the story of divine creation from the prologue of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the word…”) to the genealogies of Matthew and Luke (the so-and-so begat so-and-so parts), the Eusebian team could underscore the divine and human origins of Jesus. Equally important, they instructed the reader to read the Gospels in a new way: a way that reoriented the original organization. If this shift seems unimportant or intuitive to us, it is only because we have so thoroughly absorbed it.
Take, say, the interweaving of Jesus’s finals words at the crucifixion. Mark’s version ends with Jesus in psychic and physical distress crying that God has abandoned him. It’s an uncomfortable scene and it is meant to be. Luke and John have more self-controlled conclusions: Jesus commends his spirit into the hands of his father (Luke) and authoritatively proclaims his life “finished” (John). Though Eusebius doesn’t reconcile these portraits himself, his apparatus allowed future generations to combine them in a way that neutralizes the discomfort we have when we read Mark.
While others had thought about reading the Gospels alongside one another, it was Eusebius and his team who came up with the tool to do it in a systematic way. From Eusebius onwards, Coogan told The Daily Beast, “most manuscripts of the Gospels included the Eusebian apparatus. When a reader encountered the Gospels on the page, they generally did so in a form shaped by Eusebius’ innovative project. While Eusebius prepared his Gospel edition in Greek, the apparatus had an impact in almost every language the Gospels were translated into. We find it in manuscripts in Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Gothic, Georgian, Arabic, Caucasian Albanian, Nubian, Slavonic, Old English, Middle German, and Dutch. Thousands of Gospel manuscripts, from the fourth century to the twentieth, reflect Eusebius’ approach to reading the Gospels.” Even today when academics think about the relationships between the Gospels and print Gospels in parallel with one another, we are asking the same questions as Eusebius did. It might be said that Eusebius is still controlling how we think.
The truth is however that any kind of supplementary material (scholars call them paratexts) like an index or a table of contents creates new ways to read a text. Matthew or Mark may have wanted you to read their stories linearly from start to finish, but Eusebius and his team gave you a new way to read. You could hunt and peck between the bindings. Reading out of order can be powerful work, as Wil Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church is, because it creates new pathways through the text that disrupt the ways that the authors meant the texts to be read. Most authors don’t write narratives with the expectation that people will just use Google to search inside it.
While Eusebius was never formally denounced as a heretic, some of his opinions—including some of the judgments that inform his apparatus—were pretty unorthodox. Like Origen he was sympathetic to views about the nature of Christ that would later be condemned as heresy. It’s probably because of the ambiguities surrounding his theological views that Eusebius, one of the most influential figures in Christian history, never became a saint. But his story proves that it is sometimes invisible actors who are the most powerful of all.
“Amasra”, anagram: „Asmara„ = capital of the fake state Eritrea. Eritrea, together with the fascist Oromo regime of Ethiopia, Turkey, Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia are waging a genocidal war against ancient Orthodox Christians of Northern Ethiopia – against The Ark of The Covenant.
💭 An explosion deep inside a coalmine in Turkey’s mountainous northern Black Sea region has killed at least 41 people, with rescue efforts and work to contain a fire in the facility continuing on Saturday, hours after the incident.
Turkish officials including the energy minister, Fatih Dönmez, said initial assessments indicated the blast on Friday inside the state-owned mine was caused by a firedamp explosion, a reference to the combustion of pockets of highly flammable gases trapped in the coal bed.
“All search and rescue teams are on duty,” he said, adding that the mine’s ventilation system had continued to work.
State television showed white smoke billowing from the mine entrance over the mountainside in the port town of Amasra, with a reporter at the site stating more than 12 hours after the incident: “The fire is happening underneath us, it’s still active.”
The interior minister, Süleyman Soylu, who travelled to Amasra to oversee rescue efforts, said 110 miners were inside the facility at the time of the explosion, and that 49 had been trapped in a high risk area of the mine.
Rescue workers pushed through the night as concerned relatives of those trapped gathered close to the TTK Amasra Müessese Müdürlüğü mine. Soylu said that by Saturday morning at least 58 had been rescued or escaped from the mine, and a further 11 had been taken to hospital, with the status of one miner unclear.
The incident at a state-run facility in a part of the country traditionally associated with support for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party presents a challenge for the government. There have been a number of high-profile mining disasters in recent memory, drawing questions about whether the state has done enough to protect workers in a dangerous industry.
The head of one Turkish mining union told the local Cumhuriyet news outlet that increasing safety measures after disasters was insufficient. “The important thing is to value people while they are alive,” he said, referencing two major mining disasters in Turkey in 2014. “There are mines all over the world, but these disasters always occur in mines in Turkey,” he said.
A prolonged fire inside a mine in the town of Soma in western Turkey in 2014 caused the worst mining disaster in the country’s history, where 301 miners died from carbon monoxide poisoning and at least 162 others were injured.
That incident drew widespread public outrage, amid questions from families and observers about what they said was insufficient government oversight and lack of safety precautions at the facility.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 
