Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 8, 2021
The United Nations is warning aid convoys to the Tigray region in Ethiopia are being blocked, leaving thousands without humanitarian relief and hundreds malnourished.
Now, after six months of conflict, one of the country’s top religious leaders has spoken out against what he describes as “genocide” in Tigray.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 8, 2021
The head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in his first public comments on the war in the country’s Tigray region is sharply criticizing Ethiopia’s actions, saying he believes it’s genocide: “They want to destroy the people of Tigray.”
In a video shot last month on a mobile phone and carried out of Ethiopia, the elderly Patriarch Abune Mathias addresses the church’s scores of millions of followers and the international community, saying his previous attempts to speak out were blocked. He is ethnic Tigrayan.
The video comes as the conflict in Tigray marks six months. Thousands of people have been killed in the fighting between Ethiopian and allied forces and Tigray ones, the result of a political struggle that turned deadly in November. Dozens of witnesses have told the AP that civilians are targeted.
“I am not clear why they want to declare genocide on the people of Tigray,” Abune Mathias says, speaking in Amharic and listing alleged atrocities including the destruction of churches, massacres, forced starvation and looting. “It is not the fault of the Tigray people. The whole world should know it.”
He calls for strength, adding that “this bad season might pass away.” And he urges the world to act.
The comments are a striking denunciation from someone so senior inside Ethiopia, where state media reflect the government’s narrative and both independent journalists and Tigrayans have been intimidated and harassed. The video also comes as Ethiopia, facing multiple crises of sometimes deadly ethnic tensions, faces a national election on June 5.
Dennis Wadley, who runs the U.S.-based Bridges of Hope organization and has been a friend of the church leader for several years, told the AP he shot the video in an impulsive moment while visiting him last month in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.
“I just pulled out my iPhone and said if you want to get the word out, let’s do it,” Wadley said on Friday after arriving in the U.S. “He just poured out his heart. … It’s so sad. I actually hugged him; I never did that before.”
A church official reached on Friday confirmed the video and the interest of Abune Mathias in making it public. The church patriarch serves alongside a recently returned exile, Abune Merkorios.
“I have said a lot of things but no one allows the message to be shared. Rather, it is being stifled and censored,” Abune Mathias says in the video.
“Many barbarisms have been conducted” these days all over Ethiopia, he says, but “what is happening in Tigray is of the highest brutality and cruelty.”
God will judge everything, he adds.
Ethiopia’s government says it is “deeply dismayed” by the deaths of civilians, blames the former Tigray leaders and claims normality is returning in the region of some 6 million people. It has denied widespread profiling and targeting of Tigrayans.
But witnesses have told the AP about seeing bodies strewn on the ground on communities, Tigrayans rounded up and expelled and women raped by Ethiopian and allied forces including those from neighboring Eritrea. Others have described family members and colleagues including priests being swept up and detained, often without charge.
Churches have been the scenes of massacres — one deacon in Axum has told the AP he believes some 800 people were killed in a November weekend at the church and around the city — and of mass graves.
“People were dropped over the ground like leaves,” the patriarch says of Axum, Ethiopia’s holiest city.
Abune Mathias, born in 1942, has been outspoken in the past. In 1980, he became the first leader of the church to denounce the rule of Ethiopia’s communist regime “and was forced to live abroad for more than thirty years,” according to the United Nations refugee agency.
🔥 “In Sweden — the rape capital of Europe — studies continue to reveal that migrants, mostly from North Africa, the Middle East, and Muslim sub-Sahara, account for the overwhelming majority of rapes,”
🔥 “Four Muslim migrants from North Africa gang-raped a 36-year-old woman on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria, after she stopped to ask how she could help them.”
🔥 “A British woman (alias, Ella) revealed that her Muslim rapists called her “a white whore,” and much worse, during the more than 100 times the Pakistani grooming gang raped her in her youth.”
🔥 “According to Dr. Taj Hargey, a British imam, Muslim men are taught that women are “second-class citizens, little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority.”
🔥 “A Muslim man who almost killed his 25-year-old German victim while raping her — and shouting “Allah!” — afterwards inquired if she liked it.”
Four Muslim migrants from North Africa gang-raped a 36-year-old woman on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria, after she stopped to ask how she could help them. According to the March 3 report,
The alleged victim is believed to have lived on the Canary Islands, whereas the suspects are thought to have arrived only recently on a boat…. [T]hey were given initially government-provided accommodations managed by the Red Cross but later kicked out for breaking the rules. They are then thought to have set up camp in the park where the woman was allegedly attacked after enquiring about their situation. The woman had asked if she could help them with anything, but within ‘a matter of seconds’ this had led to her being assaulted…
This woman, who was described “as either an Irish expat or coming from a Nordic country,” joins countless other European women — especially those “from a Nordic country” — to be raped by Muslim migrants.
Why is this ongoing phenomenon not being checked? One of the reasons revolves around the specter of “racism.” The “woke” establishment tends to see European women accusing Muslim men of raping them through a skeptical light.
For example, in Sweden — the rape capital of Europe — studies continue to reveal that migrants, mostly from North Africa, the Middle East, and Muslim sub-Sahara, account for the overwhelming majority of rapes, as captured by the following title: “Report: 9 in 10 Gang Rapists In Sweden Have Foreign Origins.”
To neutralize these findings, on March 9, 2021, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (“Brå”) said that “Immigrants’ sharp over-representation in rape statistics may be due to the fact that Swedish women are more likely to report immigrants for rape than they are to report Swedish men.” Stina Holmberg, a research councilor at Brå, elaborated:
It may be that you are more inclined to report something you [a Swedish women] have been exposed to, if the crime was committed by someone you feel more alien to, and who has low social status.
Skepticism for rape reports against non-white males turns to open hostility whenever this issue is forthrightly discussed, as Sarah Champion, a Labor politician and MP for Rotherham (the epicenter of sex grooming), learned last summer, when she was accused of “fanning the flames of racial hatred” and “acting like a neo-fascist murderer.” Her crime? She had dared to assert that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.” (The same elements that accused Champion of being a “murderer” also, and rather unsurprisingly, characterize the UK’s anti-extremism program, Prevent, as being “built upon a foundation of Islamophobia and racism.”)
Perhaps most telling is an April 2020 article titled, “I was raped by Rotherham grooming gang — now I still face racist abuse online.” In it, a British woman (alias, Ella) revealed that her Muslim rapists called her “a white whore,” and much worse, during the more than 100 times the Pakistani grooming gang raped her in her youth.
“We need to understand racially and religiously aggravated crime if we are going to prevent it and protect people from it and if we are going to prosecute correctly for it,” Ella said in a recent interview.
Prevention, protection and prosecution — all of them are being hindered because we are neglecting to properly address the religious and racist aspects of grooming gang crimes…. It’s telling them that it’s OK to hate white people.
That there are “racial” and “religious” aspects to the epidemic of Muslims raping European women is an understatement. According to Dr. Taj Hargey, a British imam, Muslim men are taught that women are “second-class citizens, little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority.” The imams, moreover, preach a doctrine “that denigrates all women, but treats whites with particular contempt.” Consider a few earlier examples:
Another British woman was trafficked to Morocco where she was prostituted and repeatedly raped by dozens of Muslim men. They “made me believe I was nothing more than a slut, a white whore,” she recollected. “They treated me like a leper, apart from when they wanted sex. I was less than human to them, I was rubbish.”
Another British girl was “passed around like a piece of meat” among Muslim men who abused and raped her between the ages of 12 and 14. Speaking now as an adult, a court heard how she “was raped on a dirty mattress above a takeaway and forced to perform [oral] sex acts in a churchyard,” and how one of her abusers “urinated on her in an act of humiliation” afterwards.
A Muslim man called a 13-year-old virgin “a little white slag” — British slang for “loose, promiscuous woman” — before raping her.
In Germany, a group of Muslim migrants stalked a 25-year-old woman, hurled “filthy” insults at and taunted her for sex. They too explained their logic — “German girls are just there for sex” — before reaching into her blouse and groping her.
Another Muslim man who almost killed his 25-year-old German victim while raping her — and shouting “Allah!” — afterwards inquired if she liked it.
In Austria, an “Arabic-looking man” approached a 27-year-old woman at a bus stop, pulled down his pants, and “all he could say was sex, sex, sex,” prompting the woman to scream and flee.
In short, there certainly is a “racist” aspect to the rape of European women by migrants — though in reverse: nonwhite Muslim men tend to see white women as nymphomaniacs that are “hot” for being degraded and abused — a stereotype that, incidentally, stretches back to the very beginnings of Islamic history.
Even so, Ella’s attempts to highlight these “religious and racist aspects” that fueled the abuse she and other European girls and women experienced — that is, her attempt to connect the dots in an effort to help eliminate this phenomenon — led only to “a lot of abuse from far-left extremists, and radical feminist academics,” she said. Such groups “go online and they try to resist anyone they consider to be a Nazi, racist, fascist or white supremacist.”
“They don’t care about anti-white racism, because they appear to believe that it doesn’t exist. They have tried to floor me and criticise me continually and this has been going on for a couple of months. They tried to shut me down, shut me up… I’ve never experienced such hate online in my life. They accuse me of ‘advocating for white paedophiles’ and being a ‘sinister demonic entity.’”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 15, 2021
Health officials say Ethiopian troops and their allies have been forcing women into sexual slavery in the Tigray region. That is after the conflict began there last year when Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed ordered an offensive. Thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced. Now, a woman’s story of surviving gang rape offers an insight into the sexual violence against women in Tigray and the Ethiopian military’s involvement. A warning – some viewers may find the information in this story distressing.
The young mother was trying to get home with food for her two children when she says soldiers pulled her off a minibus in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, claiming it was overloaded.
It was the beginning of an 11-day ordeal in February, during which she says she was repeatedly raped by 23 soldiers who forced nails, a rock and other items into her vagina, and threatened her with a knife.
Doctors showed Reuters the bloodstained stone and two 3-inch nails they said they had removed from her body.
The woman, 27, is among hundreds who have reported that they were subjected to horrific sexual violence by Ethiopian and allied Eritrean soldiers after fighting broke out in November in the mountainous northern region of Ethiopia, doctors said.
Some women were held captive for extended periods, days or weeks at a time, said Dr. Fasika Amdeselassie, the top public health official for the government-appointed interim administration in Tigray.
“Women are being kept in sexual slavery,” Fasika told Reuters. “The perpetrators have to be investigated.”
Reports of rape have been circulating for months. But Fasika’s assertion, based on women’s accounts, marks the first time an Ethiopian official – in this case, a top regional health officer – has made a sexual slavery accusation in connection with the conflict in Tigray.
In addition, eight other doctors at five public hospitals told Reuters that most of the rape victims described their attackers as either Ethiopian government soldiers or Eritrean troops. It was more common for women to report sexual violence by Eritrean soldiers, the doctors said.
The Eritreans have been helping Ethiopia’s central government fight the region’s former ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), in the conflict plaguing the Horn of Africa nation.
Taken together, the descriptions paint the most detailed picture to date of the sexual violence against women in Tigray and the military’s alleged involvement in it.
Most people interviewed for this article declined to be identified. They said they feared reprisals, including possible violence, by soldiers who guard the hospitals and towns.
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed acknowledged in a speech to parliament on March 23 that “atrocities were being committed by raping women” and promised that the perpetrators would be punished. He did not identify the alleged perpetrators.
He said then for the first time that Eritrean soldiers had entered the conflict in Tigray in support of the Ethiopian government after the TPLF attacked military bases across the region in the early hours of Nov. 4. Ethiopia’s government had previously denied this, and the Eritrean government still does not acknowledge their troops’ presence. The TPLF was the dominant power in the central government when Eritrea fought a bloody border war with Ethiopia a generation ago.
Neither the Ethiopian nor the Eritrean governments responded to Reuters’ questions about specific cases raised by women and their doctors, or about the accusation of sexual slavery. No charges have been announced by civilian or military prosecutors against any soldiers. However, officials in both countries emphasized that their governments have zero tolerance for sexual violence – a point Abiy’s spokeswoman, Billene Seyoum, said the prime minister reiterated recently in discussions with military leaders.
The alleged sexual violence has drawn international attention.
Billene said the United Nations, the African Union and Ethiopia’s state-appointed human rights commission have been authorized to carry out joint investigations into alleged abuses by all sides in the conflict. That includes the “criminal clique,” she said, referring to the TPLF.
An Ethiopian military spokesman and the head of a government task force on the Tigray crisis did not respond to phone calls and text messages seeking comment. Reuters could not reach military leaders in either country.
Asked about the reports that Eritrean troops have committed rapes in Tigray and are keeping women in sexual slavery, the country’s information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, accused TPLF activists of “coaching ‘sympathizers’ to create false testimonies.”
“All the fabricated stories – which are alien to our culture and laws – are peddled to cover up the crimes of the TPLF which started the war,” he told Reuters in a written response.
Reuters was unable to reach a TPLF spokesman.
RECORDS OF ABUSE
Fasika, the health official, said at least 829 cases of sexual assault have been reported at the five hospitals since the conflict in Tigray began.
Those cases were likely “the tip of the iceberg,” Fasika said. Rape is under-reported in Ethiopia because it carries a huge stigma. Also, most of the region’s health facilities are no longer functioning, and travel between towns remains dangerous, he said.
Most of the women who have come forward are either pregnant or sustained severe physical injury from the rapes, Fasika said.
Reuters interviewed 11 women who said they had been raped by soldiers from Eritrea, Ethiopia or both. Four said they were kidnapped, taken to military camps and gang raped, in some cases alongside other women. The women did not know the camp names but said they were located near Mekelle and the towns of Idaga Hamus, Wukro and Sheraro.
Five other women said they were held in fields or deserted houses for up to six days. And two said they were raped in their own homes.
Reuters could not independently verify their accounts. However, all told similar stories of being beaten and brutalized. Healthcare providers confirmed that the 11 women’s injuries were consistent with the events they described, and they showed Reuters medical records for three of the women detailing their conditions.
The health care providers also shared details of nine other cases of sexual assault, including the ordeals of two 14-year-old girls.
Although Ethiopia’s government declared victory over the TPLF in November, fighting continues in some areas, and medical workers say new rapes are reported at the region’s health facilities every day.
“This is being done to dishonour the women, to break their pride,” said a doctor at Ayder Referral Hospital, in Mekelle, citing the brutality of the attacks and humiliation of victims. “This is not for sexual gratification. The rapes are to punish Tigray.”
‘TELL MY STORY’
The 27-year-old mother said uniformed soldiers from Eritrea pulled her off a minibus on the road from Mekelle to the city of Adigrat on Feb. 6. They tied her up and marched her through fields to a bush camp, she said. After 11 days of rapes and beatings, she said, the soldiers forced nails, cotton, plastic bags and a rock into her vagina and left her alone in the bush.
Villagers found her unconscious and brought her to a nearby hospital.
She said she was still bleeding from severe internal injuries and could not control her urine, walk without a crutch or sit up for long periods. One leg was broken, she said.
She also described a different kind of pain: While in the hospital, she has no way to speak to her 4-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter because the Eritrean soldiers took her cellphone. She had left the children with her mother to search for food and never returned. At the time, the family had less than a week’s worth of bread.
“I don’t know anything, if they are dead or alive,” she said. “The enemy destroyed my life.”
A 32-year-old mother in Mekelle told Reuters that soldiers removed her from a minibus on the same road at the end of February. They were dressed in Ethiopian uniforms, she said, but spoke with an Eritrean accent and had traditional facial scarification typical of the neighbouring country. She said they shot her 12-year-old son dead in front of her, then brought her to a camp where she was held with other female captives and repeatedly raped for 10 days.
“Tell my story,” she said. “This is happening to women out there right now. I want this to end with me.”
A 28-year-old house cleaner said soldiers grabbed her from a street in Mekelle on the afternoon of Feb. 10 and took her to a field outside a military base where she was raped by more than 10 men wearing Ethiopian or Eritrean uniforms.
Wiping away tears, she said that during her two-week ordeal, soldiers doused her with alcohol and mocked her as they assaulted her. She escaped when her captors were distracted by gunfire, she said.
SHOT FOR RESISTING
The government has set up a task force separate from the human rights commission to investigate the reports of sexual violence. Its head, Mebrihit Assefa, said the body includes representatives from the regional health bureau, the attorney general’s office and federal police.
The task force plans to set up five centres where rape survivors can file reports with law enforcement and receive medical and psychosocial support.
“Our prosecutors (and) police officers are there to investigate all crimes committed, including sexual violence,” said Awol Sultan, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office.
He did not respond to questions about the women alleging they were raped during captivity, or whether prosecutors were in touch with either the Eritrean or Ethiopian militaries. The results of the criminal investigations will be released publicly at an unspecified date, he said.
Abera Nigus, the head of Tigray’s justice bureau, said the legal process was likely to be complicated because most courts are not functioning in Tigray, and many rape victims cannot identify their assailants.
Knowing their rapists are still at large also has discouraged women from seeking help, doctors said.
Many of the women who sought treatment at hospitals had vaginal and anal tears, sexually transmitted diseases and injuries that rendered them incontinent, said the Ayder hospital doctor, an obstetrician gynecologist. The doctor shared notes from 11 cases the hospital had treated involving women raped by soldiers.
One woman had been gang raped on three separate occasions, according to the hospital notes.
Another was five months pregnant when she was raped, the notes indicate. Two 14-year-old girls were sexually assaulted in front of their families. One girl had a hand and foot amputated.
Government Must Take Action To Highlight Plight Of Tigray Region Of Ethiopia – John Brady TD
“We are at a stage now that countless appeals to the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea have proven useless.
Sinn Féin spokesperson on Foreign Affairs and Defence John Brady TD has called on the Irish government to take strong and vocal action to mobilise both the EU and the UN, in order to address the emerging threat of famine and bring to an end the violence in Ethiopia.
The Wicklow TD said:
“We are five months into an emergency in the Tigray area of Ethiopia, where the list of ongoing human rights abuses and atrocities reads like a catalogue of horror.
“The Irish government needs to show leadership, by using its position on the UN Security Council to bring the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia to the consciousness of the international community to the degree that they can no longer ignore the horror of what is occurring on the ground there.
“Having contended with five months of mass killings, mass rapes, and widespread abuses, the civilian population of the Tigray region are facing huge food shortages.
“The World Peace Foundation has issued a warning that the humanitarian situation has deteriorated to the point that the Tigray region is facing into a pending famine.
“Alongside mass rape, starvation crimes are being committed on a large scale.
“To date the cacophony of international criticism has achieved little other than prompting the primary antagonists in the conflict to intensify their military offensive – before the international community acts.
“We are at a stage now that countless appeals to the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea have proven useless.
“Ireland must use the international standing that secured our country a position on the UNSC to become the voice that it promised to be for those who suffer.
“The government must make the international community sit up, listen, and act to end the suffering of the people of the Tigray region of Ethiopia.”
More than 150,000 people have now died. Essential infrastructure – schools, hospitals, universities, factories – has been decimated. 😠😠😠 😢😢😢
💭 Ethiopia, Where The Past Is Threatening The Present
Every year for centuries, the festival of Mariam Tsion, Mary of Zion, has been held in Ackssum, the capital of an ancient kingdom of the same name. Worshippers, dressed in white robes, and accompanied by chanting and drumming, celebrate the saint day of the Holy Mother, the most important celebration of their faith, Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity.
On 28 November last year, over a thousand gathered inside the church of Mariam Tsion after spending the previous night in prayer. They were aware that conflict had broken out in their region, Tigray, on 4 November, but they gathered nevertheless – and their prayers were soon interrupted by gunshots. Eritrean troops drove them outside and, in chaotic scenes, shot over 700 of them dead. Relatives were forbidden to bury the bodies, many of which became food for hyenas.
The celebrations are usually broadcast live on Ethiopian Televistion E T V. But this time, unsurprisingly, a recording of the previous year’s celebrations was aired.
Civilians have borne the brunt of hostilities in this war against Tigray. The massacre in Ackssum is one of many that have gone largely unnoticed in this age of social media – because, in the very early hours of 4 November, the Ethiopian government severed Tigray’s communication networks, and electricity and water supplies, before launching a military offensive. Communications were restored to the region’s capital Mekelle some weeks later, but the rest of Tigray is still without telecoms and basic utilities. Banks are still closed, most ransacked and robbed.
The incidence of rape in Tigray, very often gang rape, is off the scale. According to estimates, Ethiopian and Eritrean troops have so far raped 10,500 Tigrayan women and girls, but the UNFPA is currently recruiting sexual health workers for what it estimates will be 52,500 victims in a region with a population of six million. On 8 April, the US awarded additional humanitarian assistance of $152 million to Tigray, a good portion of which is designated for “safe houses and psychosocial support” for women and girls, some as young as eight, who have been raped, mutilated or tortured. A video shows a surgeon removing nails and other metal objects from the vagina of one victim who was raped by 23 Eritrean soldiers. A mother saw soldiers shoot her 12-year-old boy and was then raped. Eritrean soldiers say their orders are to “kill all men and boys above seven years old”.
Why such visceral cruelty? We can guess at an answer from what the perpetrators tell their victims: “You are worthless.” “We are here for revenge.” And, in the case of the Amhara militia, from the region of the same name to the south, “We are purifying your bloodline.” When the abused women are not killed, the aim seems to be to Amharise their offspring.
Western Tigray has already been handed over to the Amhara region. When Anthony Blinken, US secretary of state, designated the violence as ethnic cleansing, the central Ethiopian government hotly denied it. The government had likely promised Amhara expansionists that western Tigray would be handed over to them, just as, along the northern border, swathes of land have been handed over to the Eritrean government. The latter is already issuing Eritrean ID cards to Tigrayans and other ethnic groups such as the Kunama and Irob in eastern Tigray.
These are old enmities. There is widespread conflict across Ethiopia, but it is at its most extreme in the Tigray region – where it is, in part, about the ancient rivalry between the Amhara and Tigrayans, who have both furnished Ethiopia with emperors throughout the country’s long history. The Amharic culture and language has long been dominant across Ethiopia, but excludes the majority of Ethiopians.
The Eritrean government to the north – led by the unelected president of 30 years, Isaias Afwerki, who despises the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – creates an additional danger. The TPLF led the government of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which, with its then allies the Eritreans, ousted Ethiopia’s despotic Derg regime in 1991, facilitating independence from Ethiopia for Eritrea in 1994.
Hostilities erupted when Eritrean tanks invaded northern Tigray in May 1998, following a dispute over currencies. Around 100,000 people died in the resulting war. In the years since, training at Eritrea’s infamous Sawa Military Camp has brutalised recruits, breeding in them a deep hatred of Tigray.
Around the same time, Ethiopia, once a highly centralised state, became a federal democratic republic, with power devolved to the regions – a system highly suited to a vast country with religious, cultural, ethnic, linguistic and economic diversity. Multi-party elections were held in 1995, and the EPRDF won outright. The numerous nationalities were at last governed and taught in their own languages. This continued for 27 years.
What we are witnessing now is an attempt to reverse this process. The past is threatening the present.
During the EPRDF’s tenure, under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the country achieved double-digit economic growth; massively increased access to health and education services; and expanded agricultural production, industrialisation and state infrastructure. The country was often mooted as a role model for the rest of Africa.
But from 2014, angered by political and economic marginalisation, students from the Oromo ethnic group launched protests that spread to other regions and eventually led to Abiy Ahmed becoming Prime Minister on 2 April 2018.
Abiy negotiated a peace agreement with Eritrea which was popular domestically and eventually earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. He launched a series of reforms and released political prisoners. Exiled leaders were invited to return. On a wave of popular support, on 1 December 2019, Abiy Ahmed dissolved the EPRDF coalition and merged its parties into the new Prosperity Party. The TPLF disapproved and withdrew to Tigray.
As prime minister, Abiy was a member of the Oromo section of the EPRDF. Oromos, who make up 40 per cent of the population, felt that they had at last found a champion. But the door was slammed in their face when the PM declared his intention to “return to the old glory of Ethiopia” – meaning Amhara domination and re-centralisation.
Abiy also began demonising Tigrayans, calling them “day-time hyenas”, scapegoating them for much that had gone wrong in Ethiopia. As a result, from mid-2018 many thousands of Tigrayans were attacked and even killed. Prominent Tigrayans were assassinated, as was the president of the Amhara region, who was then replaced by an ally of the prime minister. Hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans were dismissed from their jobs and the army and then placed in custody, many in camps.
In June 2020, the assassination of Hachalu Hundessa, a popular Oromo singer, triggered violent demonstrations. Officials from the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) were detained and its leader, Dawud Ibsa, is still in custody, along with most other opposition party leaders. A full military campaign began against the Oromo and, in Wollega and Guji provinces, the internet was cut off for six months to conceal the atrocities. People were burnt to death in their houses, their crops destroyed, women and children were raped – both Ethiopian and Eritrean troops were responsible, a precursor of what has happened since in Tigray.
And so it was that the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea began their joint military assault on Tigray on 4 November. Their troops were already making their way to Tigray when, on 2 November, Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, called for “de-escalation”. The TPLF’s taking over of an Ethiopian army headquarters in Mekelle, often cited as the catalyst for hostilities, was instead a pre-emptive strike when the region was already threatened by large-scale troop advancements. Armed drones bombed Tigray from the UAE’s military base in Assab, Eritrea, destroying much of the TPLF’s heavy artillery, and mercenaries from Farmajo’s Somalia also joined the conflict.
For its part, the African Union, the continental body that groups 55 countries, has been powerless to intervene. Its offer to chair peace talks was accepted by Sahle-Work Zewde, Ethiopia’s president, in November last year, only for the proposal to be rejected by Prime Minister Abiy.
The UN Security Council has only discussed the conflict as a footnote and, in any case, any effective action is likely to be thwarted, given that Russia and China will block any vote. The Security Council has not even activated its resolution “condemning the starving of civilians as a weapon of war”.
Of course, the Trump administration turned a blind eye to what was happening in Tigray, despite copious evidence of war crimes. The election of Joe Biden has brought a change in US policy and demands are now being made for Eritrean forces to be withdrawn and for humanitarian aid workers to be given access.
The EU, to its credit, has withheld aid until access to the starving is allowed, but unless firmer action is taken many more will perish. Famine is looming. Will the world stand by and facilitate a repeat of 1984?
More than 150,000 people have now died. Essential infrastructure – schools, hospitals, universities, factories – has been decimated. The government expected that the intervention in Tigray would take “a few days, two weeks at the most,” but Abiy recently had to admit that Ethiopian troops are now fighting on eight separate fronts in Tigray alone and that he is “grateful to Eritrea” for all the military assistance it has given. Ethiopia’s army has a significant casualty toll of its own, so it is difficult to see how Eritrea can leave.
Ethiopian elections are slated for 5 June this year. In the circumstances, with the Electoral Board saying that five out of ten regions are not ready, there seems little prospect of any contests being free and fair. The vote would be improved, of course, if opposition party leaders and members were released from prison, and if the tens of thousands of other prisoners were also released, but that still wouldn’t leave much time for proper campaigning. Another postponement of the election may be the best option.
Besides, a different type of national conversation is more necessary at this point: all parties should come together and decide the future not just of Tigray and Oromia, but of the whole country. One Oromo commentator suggests that a referendum could be a central part of that dialogue – to help bring about a clear outcome. The people must decide, as they did during the writing of Ethiopia’s constitution in the early 1990s, when 36,000 groups debated what they wanted to be included.
One Amhara region resident, considering the possibility of Tigray becoming independent last month, stated simply, “But it cannot, it is the beginning of Ethiopia.” This demonstrates the pride that many Ethiopians have in their history, but it is also counsel for those who defend the old ways of dominance and subjugation. Ethiopia flourished in recent decades when the potential of all its peoples was allowed to unfold.
In any case, Ethiopia cannot go back to the past. Even if one side now “wins”, it is a victory that will leave a country scarred and thousands of people angry and bereaved – which is to say, not a victory at all.
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 