Thousands of captured Ethiopian government soldiers were marched through Mekelle to prison on Friday, as crowds jeered and applauded. Tigray fighters swiftly defeated the government this week, in a civil war that has displaced nearly two million people in the region.
💭 “Their aim is to leave no Tigrayan,” she said. “I hope there will be a Tigrayfor my children to go home to.”
💭 “Amhara Fano Militias at Humera told me, ‘Go home, you’re Tigrayan,’” she said. “We Tigrayans are Ethiopian. Why do they treat us as non-Ethiopian?”
💭 “Amhara Fano Militias accidentally killed an ethnic Oromo in a Tigrayan household,” she said. “When they realized their ‘mistake,’ they came and buried him.”
A huge fire has broken out underneath Elephant and Castle station leading to explosions and evacuations.
Fifteen engines and 100 firefighters were sent to the south east London station, where the fire had started in garages in the arches of the railway station.
💭 My Note: All of a sudden huge battle breaks out ? Where is Isaias Afewerki’s army? What’s going on?
Is the UN behind this evil Prime Minister and his genocidal war against Tigrayans? Is it part of the UN-Agenda 21- to control the world & “reduce” human population? Reducing the young population of Ethiopia via endless civil wars, the aging population via disease and famine? Are the UN & Co. Ready to intervene now their Nobel Peace Laureate is losing the battle? Do they want to come to his rescue?
It looks a though, all sides are working together to exterminate ancient Christians of Tigray.
They are all working together to exterminate ancient Christians of Tigray. We don’t trust anyone, except The Almighty Egziabher!
💭 Last week,the EU Envoy to Ethiopia, Finland Foreign Minster Pekka Haavisto told us everything:
“..when I met the Ethiopian Leadership😈 in February they used this kind of language, that they are going to destroy the Tigrayans, they are going to wipe out..”
The United States estimates that up to 900,000 people in Ethiopia’s Tigray region now face famine conditions amid a deadly conflict, even as the prime minister says there is “no hunger” there.
The hunger crisis in Tigray is the world’s worst in a decade, and the new famine findings are “terrifying,” the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, said Friday, adding that millions more people are at risk.
The new estimate more than doubles the warning issued earlier this month by the United Nations and aid groups that more than 350,000 people face famine conditions in Tigray.
Even as scattered reports emerge of people starving to death, the real number of people facing famine conditions is unknown because active fighting and access restrictions keep aid workers from reaching all parts of the region of 6 million people.
“Conditions will worsen in the coming months, particularly as Tigray enters the July-to-September lean season, unless humanitarian assistance reaches the populations most in need,” the new USAID analysis says.
This is forced starvation, Tigray residents and some observers have said. Witnesses have described being blocked by Ethiopian soldiers, backed by soldiers from neighboring Eritrea, from planting their fields or having their crops looted or burned since the conflict erupted in November.
Ethiopia’s government says it has delivered food aid to millions of people in Tigray even as its troops pursue the region’s former leaders after political tensions exploded into war.
But Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2019, in an interview aired this week with a state-affiliated network expressed concern that outside aid to Tigray might end up supporting the Tigray fighters, recalling a similar situation during Ethiopia’s devastating famine in the 1980s. Such a situation can’t happen again, he said.
“There is no hunger in Tigray,” the prime minister told the BBC this week.
“This is false,” Power’s tweet said Friday.
The new famine warning adds to pressure on Ethiopia’s government for a cease-fire, especially after an Ethiopian military airstrike this week on a busy market in Tigray killed at least 64 people and the aid group Doctors Without Borders on Friday said three staffers had been murdered in the region.
Addis Ababa – Tigrayan Rebel fighters consolidate their control of Addis Ababa after defeating Mengistu Haliemargovernment troops, 28 May 1991
Thirty years ago, I saw the rebels take Addis Ababa
I was the only foreign correspondent there, and it was the best day of my life
The evening before the assault on Addis Ababa, my guide Girmay and I ventured into a complex stuffed with bombs, bullets and missiles that must have been boobytrapped. A few minutes into taking photos, I heard detonations, and a bunker on the hill above us exploded. We dashed away as the rumbles and bangs behind us gathered in fury and then the earth burst in an eruption of fire, sending a mushroom cloud into the sky. As we ran, rockets and shells rained down on all sides, shrapnel and earth bursting in plumes. We took cover in a dry riverbed and I worked my way through a packet of cigarettes while the ground shook under the relentless explosions until dusk, when we raced madly across plowed fields until we reached safety.
I’m thinking about this now because it’s 30 years to the day since it happened. Girmay was a young Tigrayan rebel officer and I was a foreign correspondent. That night, together with our posse of guerrilla bodyguards, we joined a column of Russian-made rebel tanks thundering towards Addis, entering the city as dawn broke with gunfire and booms of heavy guns. When the column got held up in a traffic jam of blasting tanks I jumped down off our T-54 and asked a shopkeeper if I could use her phone. Finally, I was able to get a call through to my bureau chief, Jonathan Clayton, who was barricaded behind his Hilton hotel room door in town, but ready to take down reams of color copy.
Rolling into the city center with the din of battle all around, we glimpsed a crowd pulling down a giant statue of Lenin. Then our tank roared up to the palace, caterpillar tracks smashing down the iron gates, and everybody cheering with sheer Adrenalin and delight.
Girmay and I jumped down from the tank in clouds of diesel smoke, followed by our teenage bodyguards. Fighting in the palace grounds was still going on as we made our way past a cage inhabited by a starving lion and the latrines down which, we later discovered, the emaciated corpse of Emperor Haile Selassie had been stuffed during the communist revolution 16 years before. At last we found the dictator Mengistu’s inner sanctum. On the walls were pictures of Lenin and snaps of Mengistu and Fidel Castro together, grinning. There was a conference table and red leather chairs embossed with gold hammers and sickles. On the desk, a Lenin paperweight, a lighter inscribed by North Korea’s Kim Il-sung and Bob Marley’s Exodus LP. In the drawers, various drugs, condoms and the supreme leader’s business cards.
Later, I made my way to the Hilton. In the hotel bathroom, I saw myself in the mirror for the first time in weeks, and a sunken- cheeked, dirty, hair-covered face with staring eyes and parched lips looked back at me. On the road to Addis I had drafted my piece a thousand times in my head and now I had it in my grasp, as the only foreign correspondent to have accompanied a 100,000-strong guerrilla army during the capture of a city, I was tongue-tied, unable to write a word. Somehow I cranked it out and after that, Girmay and I went to buy half a cow’s carcass and fed it to that neglected and starving palace lion.
It was the best day of my life. I had traveled a thousand miles and seen two months of fighting in the deserts and stunning mountain landscapes of northern Ethiopia. The London Evening Standard splashed our story on the front page that night: ‘I SEE THE REBELS TAKE ADDIS ABABA — Reuters man rides in with tank convoy’.
‘Yeees, Dad, we’ve heard that story before,’ say my children when I go over it yet again. I am grateful to have been there to witness such events, even though after too many years of it one comes unstuck for a time. And I’m left for ever with my thoughts of Girmay, whose lovely country is now being destroyed by yet another conflict. And I remember my news colleagues, alive and dead. Just in our one Nairobi Reuters team over the years, we lost John, Dan, Hos, Anthony, Mo, Brian, Shafi and Victor. Then a few weeks ago Francis Gaitho, the engineer who used to make all our technology work so that we could flatten the opposition with scoops during the battle for Addis, went too. It had been too long since we had our last Tusker beer in Nairobi.
My Note: Today, TDF should not repeat the same mistake they did back then. Enough is enough! Everything should be made in favor of Axumites – that good-for-nothing ‘Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ ideological game is over. Take care of your people first – protect Tigrayan Ethiopians first. Now, Tigrayans should not allow the war criminal Abiy Ahmed Ali to escape like Mengistu. Until Tigrayans march towards Addis Ababa to overthrow the fascist Oromo regime of cruel Abiy Ahmed Ali, arrest his gangs who are involved in the #TigrayGenocide – there will be neither victory nor celebration. The spiritual, psychological and societal injuries and pains Tigrayans had to endure is immense! Tha Oromos and Amharas will repay the proceeds of their notorious and unforgettable Crimes.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 25, 2021
Ethiopia stands at a crossroads. On June 21, the country finally held the first round of long-delayed elections for the country’s parliament and Regional State Councils. Voting in the remaining 69 of the country’s 547 constituencies will take place in a second round in September. It’s not clear when (or if) voting for the 38 MPs from the war-torn Tigray region will take place.
Two things are almost certain in coming days: Election officials will announce that the governing Prosperity Party has won enough seats to form a government with current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed remaining at its head, and opposition parties will cry foul. Though Abiy’s government will weather the storm, there is more controversy to come as he moves forward with plans to amend Ethiopia’s constitution to change the country’s ethno-federalist structure. Today, Ethiopia’s regions have recognized rights to self-determination. Abiy’s changes would strengthen the country’s federal government at the regions’ expense and create a presidential system of government to political authority. It’s a fight over the essentials of who holds power in an important and potentially unstable country.
That fight has already resulted in bloodshed. In Tigray, combat between government forces and local rebels has killed thousands of people and displaced more than 2 million. Just this week, a government airstrike on a public market in Tigray killed more than 50 people, according to local health officials.
Where did Ethiopia civil conflict come from?
Ethiopia’s troubles have been simmering, and occasionally boiling over, for many years. Despite strong economic growth over the past decade—Ethiopia’s economy generated “strong, broad-based growth averaging 9.4% a year from 2010/11 to 2019/20,” according to the World Bank—youth unemployment has long been a chronic problem, and a violent response to protests based in economic frustration in 2016 led to widespread and increasingly intense demonstrations.
Africa’s second most populous country has a long history of unrest. Its current constitution divides Ethiopia into ethnic territories, and many of the country’s conflicts come from underlying ethnically based political grievances. There are more than 90 ethnic groups living within Ethiopia’s borders, and many feel almost entirely excluded from political power.
In particular, until three years ago, members of the Oromo and Amhara communities, which together make up more than 60 percent of the population, were angry that Tigrayans, who make up just over 6 percent, had dominated Ethiopia’s government since 1991, when the nationalist Tigray People’s Liberation Front ousted Soviet-backed dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. From 1991 until his death in 2012, Tigrayan Meles Zenawi kept order with an iron fist. Protests finally forced his successor, prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn, to step down in 2018.
Abiy Ahmed, son of an Oromo Muslim father and Amhara Christian mother, replaced Desalegn. Considered Oromo, he is the first member of that group ever to serve as prime minister. His promises for the country’s future quickly drew Western praise. He won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, by ending an intractable war with neighboring Eritrea, freeing political prisoners, welcoming exiled dissidents home, pledging to protect a free press, and committing his government to foster a new national unity while respecting ethnic diversity.
But there’s a troubling parallel here with the former Yugoslavia. The end of authoritarian rule in a country divided into ethnic-dominated territories can open a Pandora’s Box of fear, suspicion, and anger among ethnic groups, as it did among Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, Montenegrins, Kosovar Albanians, and Macedonians in the 1990s. In Ethiopia, ethnic killings began to increase in the country in 2018, displacing nearly three million people during Abiy’s first year in office. Tigray powerbrokers, convinced they would become marginalized by Abiy’s plans, began to talk of secession.
Abiy then responded with what he called a “police action” in Tigray. In November 2020, following an alleged rebel attack on an Ethiopian military base, Abiy launched a military offensive in Tigray. Since then, credible accusations have emerged that Ethiopian forces have used human mass rape, extra-judicial killing and have burned crops, killed livestock, and blocked food aid to starve the region. These actions have drawn condemnation from the Western governments that once saw Abiy as West Africa’s rising star. The U.N. now says that 350,000 Tigrayans face famine. Eritrean forces have also drawn condemnation for deliberately “starving” Tigrayans.
This is the backdrop for the current elections. On Friday, the embassies of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the Delegation of the European Union to Ethiopia released a statement that includes the following warning: “These elections have taken place in very challenging and problematic conditions with a restricted political environment, including the detention of opposition members, harassment of media representatives, and parties facing difficulties in freely campaigning. There is a challenging security environment in many areas, and internally displaced people have not been sufficiently registered to vote or included in the elections. The number of women running for office reduced by almost a third from the last general elections.”
This is the crossroads for Ethiopia. Can the nation survive in its current form? Which is more dangerous for its future: An open hand or a closed fist?
✞✞✞ ነፍሳቸውን ይማርላቸው! Q. D. E. P – Descanse en Paz! R.I.P
Three employees working for the Spanish branch of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) were killed by unknown assailants in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, the medical charity said on Friday.
MSF-Spain lost contact with a vehicle carrying the team on Thursday afternoon, it said in a statement. “This morning the vehicle was found empty and a few metres away, their lifeless bodies.”
“We condemn this attack on our colleagues in the strongest possible terms and will be relentless in understanding what happened,” the statement said.
It identified the victims as emergency co-ordinator Maria Hernandez, 35, from Madrid, assistant co-ordinator Yohannes Halefom Reda, 31, from Ethiopia, and their Ethiopian driver Tedros Gebremariam Gebremichael, also 31.
They are among at least 12 aid workers reported killed since fighting broke out in November between Ethiopia’s military and forces loyal to the region’s former ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The conflict has killed thousands of people and displaced more than 2 million.
Ethiopia’s foreign ministry sent condolences via Twitter, but said it had been urging aid agencies to secure military escorts in the area. The ministry said TPLF forces were active in the town of Abiy Addi where the attack occurred. MSF did not confirm the location.
A TPLF spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.
Spain’s foreign ministry said it was engaging with the aid agency and the Ethiopian government on the attack.
“A heartfelt hug to the family and colleagues of Maria … who has been murdered in Ethiopia where she was helping the population,” tweeted Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who also sent condolences to the families of Yohannes and Tedros.
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 