💭 Germany’s National Public Television. ‘ZDF’ Africa correspondent, Timm Kröger, reports directly from Mekelle, Axum, and Shire. Clips from @ZDFheute news report shows a portion of mass graves from the Axum massacre and IDPs who are living in cramped and terrible conditions in Shire. He randomly interviews people in Axum who confirmed the massacre as as reported by Amnesty International.
💭 Last week marked the two-year anniversary of the Axum massacre in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, where Eritrean forces killed hundreds of Tigrayans over the course of 24 hours. Since then, Ethiopian and Eritrean forces have continued to commit mass atrocities and human rights abuses against Tigrayans. Evidence has mounted of staggering sexual violence, forced displacement, and mass killings, in what Human Rights Watch has termed a campaign of ethnic cleansing. A United Nations commission of experts found that Ethiopian and allied forces blocked humanitarian aid from the Tigray region, and used starvation as a weapon of war. There is also emerging evidence that these crimes may amount to genocide.
As these crimes continue, and the Tigrayan people continue to suffer, rights-respecting countries like the United States should take action.
The war on Tigray rages on. Ethiopia signed a peace agreement with Tigrayan forces on Nov. 2, 2022, but Ethiopia breached the agreement within 24 hours. Drone strikes launched the next day caused civilian casualties in Tigray, and humanitarian aid remained blocked from the region for weeks. Most concerningly, Eritrean forces are still present in Tigray, and reports indicate that they are continuing to commit atrocity crimes against Tigrayans.
Eritrea’s actions in Tigray are equally alarming, reflecting its reputation as among the most repressive regimes in the world. The United Nations commission of experts found reasonable grounds to believe that Eritrean forces “committed the war crimes of violence to life and person, in particular murder; outrages on human dignity, in particular humiliating or degrading treatment; rape; sexual slavery; and sexual violence.”
Not only are Eritrean forces continuing to commit sexual assaults, killings, massacres, and property looting in Tigray, their presence is escalating, with reports of Eritrea deploying additional troops to the region over the last month. Other authoritarian regimes, including Turkey, have been implicated in the conflict as well.
The leaders of the free world should respond. The U.S. can and should impose targeted Magnitsky sanctions on Ethiopian and Eritrean officials who bear responsibility for these crimes. Other countries with similar legislation can and should do the same.
The Biden administration should also allow displaced Tigrayans to seek refuge in the United States, and encourage its allies to do the same. Since the outbreak of the conflict in Tigray in November 2020, over 65,000 refugees have been stranded, in horrendous conditions, in Sudan, while over 2 million are internally displaced within Ethiopia.
The United States should also make a public determination on the question of genocide. In September 2021, the U.S. State Department launched a legal review to determine whether the crimes amount to genocide against Tigrayans. In December 2021, the review was shelved as peace negotiations were ongoing. Now that the peace agreement has been signed, and crimes against Tigrayans have continued, the genocide determination should be re-opened and made public. This will be critical to prevent impunity.
We cannot be misled by the recent peace agreement into thinking that our work here is over. Two years out from the Axum massacre, and the very same Eritrean forces that committed atrocities in Tigray are still present and wreaking havoc in the region. There is no peace. There will never be peace until Eritrea is out of the region, until Ethiopia stops bombing civilians, and until there is justice and accountability for Tigray.
💭 Tigray, Ethiopia Two Years On: An Anniversary of Medieval-like Siege, Massacres & Famine
❖ 70,000 Tigrayan Christians Massacred by Jihadist Gragn Abiy Ahmed Ali
🔥 Critical Ethiopian Diplomat urges peace talks in Tigray war
An Ethiopian diplomat who quit his post in the United States over concerns about atrocities in Tigray is calling for peace talks between the government and the embattled region’s fugitive leaders.
Berhane Kidanemariam served as the deputy chief of mission at the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington until early March. In an interview with The Associated Press late Thursday, he warned that a protracted war in Tigray is devastating the region’s 6 million people.
“We have to prioritize peaceful settlement and negotiation,” he said. “Without peaceful settlement and negotiation, peace couldn’t prevail. The only solution is peace talks.”
Between 60,000 and 70,000 people are now believed to have died in the war since November, he said, citing information gleaned from sources inside Ethiopia. Most of the victims are “civilians, especially the youngsters,” he said.
Ethiopian authorities have not given a death toll in the Tigray war.
Kidanemariam said that Tigrayan fighters “are getting better” in their defenses, increasing the likelihood of a long war in which reported abuses already include massacres, rapes, forced displacement, and the vandalism of priceless cultural sites.
“Anything which the human beings can use” has been destroyed in some way, he said, describing the looting of everything from banks to churches and mosques. “It’s horrible even to explain it.”
Kidanemariam hails from the Tigray region, the base of a party that dominated national politics for decades before the rise of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. But he said his background had not influenced his decision to call it “a genocidal war.”
“I don´t need to be Tigrayan,” Kidanemariam said, referring to his March 10 resignation. “Seeing this kind of horrible, catastrophic war, I couldn´t tolerate it.”
💭 “This is a war against the people of Tigray. Basically, we are under an existential threat.”
🔥 The young man who made the mistake of getting into a heated argument with a government soldier in a bar. Hours later, friends said, four soldiers followed him home and beat him to death with beer bottles.
🔥 Alefesha Hadusha lost her two brothers and parents last month after Eritrean and Ethiopian troops entered her home and opened fire on innocent civilians.
🔥 Schools house some of the 71,000 people who fled to the city, often bringing accounts of horrific abuses at the hands of pro-government forces.
🔥 But the majority of serious accusations have been aimed at government troops and their allies — the ethnic Amhara militias that moved into the western part of Tigray, and soldiers from Eritrea, Ethiopia’s northern neighbor and one-time enemy.
🔥 At the city’s main hospital, the Ayder Referral hospital, officials said they received the bodies of 250 men, ages 20 to 35, between Nov. 28, when Ethiopian soldiers seized Mekelle, and March 9. Four-fifths of the bodies had gunshot wounds, and the remainder had been injured with knives. Most of the attacks appeared to have been carried out by government soldiers.
🔥 Even more harrowing accounts came from outside the city. One 26-year-old man, Berhe, offered a similar account of that day, saying that his brother and seven other men were picked up and taken to a military camp and executed.
🔥 In western Tigray, American officials found evidence of ethnic cleansing led by ethnic Amhara officials and militia fighters, according to an internal United States government report obtained by The New York Times.
🔥 Tigray’s health services, once among the best in Ethiopia, have been ravaged. On Monday, Doctors Without Borders said that dozens of clinics across the region had been destroyed and plundered by soldiers, often deliberately.
👉 In such a fraught environment, even massacres are contested.
🔥 Mr. Abiy’s officials frequently cite a massacre in Mai Kadra, a town in western Tigray, on Nov. 9, as an example of T.P.L.F. war crimes. Witnesses cited in an Amnesty International report blamed the deaths on Tigrayan fighters.
But at a camp in Mekelle, eight residents of Mai Kadra said the killings had in fact been carried out by the Fano, an ethnic Amhara militia group with a reputation for brutality, and insisted that the majority of victims were Tigrayans.
Solomon Haileselassie, 28, said he watched the slaughter from his hiding place in a garbage dump. “I saw them cut off people’s legs and arms with axes,” he said.
Social Media Posts Falsely Claim that Usaid Found NO Evidence Oo a Massacre In Ethiopia’s Tigray Region
Two weeks after Amnesty International released an in-depth investigation concluding that hundreds of civilians were killed by Eritrean forces in the city of Axum in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, posts circulating on social media claimed that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) conducted its own investigation and found no evidence that the atrocities happened. This is false; USAID told AFP Fact Check that the organisation was not the source of these claims, which were also dismissed on social media.
“Some Good NEWS from USAID, #Axum massacre neither occurred nor substantiated (sic),” reads the caption from a Facebook post published on March 9, 2021.
The post, with more than 130 shares, includes a graphic of a news report by the Ethiopian Herald claiming USAID had found no evidence for the massacre following its own investigation.
Similar claims were shared on Facebook here and here. It was also retweeted hundreds of times on Twitter here and here.
However, the claims are false. USAID spokesman Ryan Essman told AFP Fact Check in an email on March 11, 2021, that the organisation was not the source of the quotes attributed to them in the article.
Essman pointed to two tweets from USAID’s official account that addressed the falsely-attributed statements.
“Contrary to a recent report in the Ethiopian Herald about a USAID investigation in Axum, USAID has neither conducted an investigation nor sent a team to investigate the reported events that took place in Axum,” reads one tweet, posted March 9, 2021.
Another tweet in the same thread said: “The U.S. government encourages independent investigations into all reported incidents of atrocities and remains committed to providing humanitarian assistance to all people affected by the ongoing conflicts in Tigray and other parts of the country.”
On March 1, 2021, USAID assembled a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) to “assess the situation in Tigray, identify priority needs for the scale-up of relief efforts, and work with partners to provide urgently-needed assistance to conflict-affected populations across the region”.
AFP Fact Check contacted the Ethiopian Herald about the newspaper’s article but has yet to receive a response. This fact check will be updated if we receive a comment.
According to social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle, the article, published on March 9, 2021, has been shared on Facebook more than 1,100 times.
Axum massacre
The false claims surfaced shortly after Amnesty International released an in-depth investigation based on satellite imagery and eye-witness testimonies that concluded the killing of hundreds of civilians in Axum by Eritrean troops was “coordinated and systematic” and “may also constitute crimes against humanity”.
The report from Amnesty found that “between 19 and 28 November 2020, Eritrean troops operating in the Ethiopian city of Axum, Tigray, committed a series of human rights and humanitarian law violations, including killing hundreds of civilians”.
The organisation gathered testimonies from more than 240 people but was unable to independently verify the exact death toll. However, the report noted that corroborating testimonies and evidence indicated that hundreds died, as AFP reported.
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