💭 My Note: I think this Ukraine war is designed to divert attention from the #TigrayGenocide.
You have no idea of the scale of evil with which you are dealing in the current Ethiopia. Can you see how evil the fascist Oromo regime of Abiy Ahmed Ali — and his Oromo and Amhara folks are?! They are satrving innocent men, women and children to death.
“While the situation in Ukraine is dire, the world should not forget the crisis in Ethiopia.”
The world should continue to be shocked at what is taking place in Tigray — manmade famine. Half of the population in Tigray will die of starvation by the end of this year.
“The fascist Oromo regime of Ethiopia has blocked virtually all food and medical shipments into Tigray for 16 months, using food as a weapon of war.”
You have no idea of the scale of evil with which you are dealing in the current Ethiopia. Can you see how evil the fascist Oromo regime of Abiy Ahmed Ali — and his Oromo and Amhara folks are?! They are satrving innocent men, women and children to death.
Report highlights Tigray atrocities, says Ethiopia faces famineThe humanitarian situation in Tigray is abysmal, with atrocities similar to war crimes displacing at least 2.5 million
Refugees International, a global organization advocating for displaced and stateless people, said in a report released March 3 that the humanitarian situation in Tigray was abysmal, with atrocities similar to war crimes displacing at least 2.5 million people inside and out of the country.
“The Ethiopian government has blocked virtually all food and medical shipments into Tigray, using food as a weapon of war,” Sarah Miller, a senior fellow with Refugees International, said in the report, “Nowhere to Run: Eritrean Refugees in Tigray.”
With starvation deaths mounting each day, she said in the report, and nearly 900,000 people in famine conditions, there are fears that the current situation in Ethiopia will mirror the Great Famine of the 1980s, when more than one million people died of starvation.
“The world should continue to be shocked at what is taking place in Tigray — manmade famine is something that should outrage all of us, including people of faith,” Miller told Catholic News Service in an interview, while underscoring the role of faith groups in responding to the crisis and refugees in particular.
“Religious leaders inside Tigray and around the world have raised their voices in support of those suffering as a result of the humanitarian blockade. They should continue speaking out as much as they are able and sharing information with their communities about what is going on,” she added.
We have statements indicating that half of the population in Tigray will die of starvation by the end of this year
Her views resonated with those of Catholic clergy from the region.
“We have statements indicating that half of the population in Tigray will die of starvation by the end of this year. In a literal sense, yes: We think this is a direction things may take if things continue as they are,” said a cleric who could not be named for security reasons.
According to the report, among the vulnerable groups, Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia were receiving little attention or support, despite facing unique risks. In early 2021, two Eritrean refugee camps in Tigray were destroyed, allegedly by Eritrean troops, leaving approximately 20,000 Eritrean refugees missing. In January, refugees were killed by airstrikes that hit refugee camps.
In a raft of measures, Refugees International wants the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to reconsider moving the refugees to new camps near active war zones. It also suggests quick resettlement of the refugees and neighboring countries, including Kenya and Sudan, to open their doors to them.
Miller said faith groups in the US can voice support for refugees and welcome them, “including by helping them to find housing, jobs, and enrolling in school, etc.”
She said that, while the situation in Ukraine is dire, the world should not forget the crisis in Ethiopia.
“We hope that people will look beyond the headlines and remember that the crisis in Ethiopia is not over for those facing famine, internal displacement, and for specific refugee groups, including Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, who need international protection and assistance and immediate access to their rights,” she said.
😈 Shame on you, callous President Sahelework Zewde!
😈 Shame on you, ignorant minister Dr. Liya Tadesse!
😈 Shame on you, traitor Journalist Hermela Aregawi!
😈 Shame on you, the heathen Bishop Abune Ermias
👉 Look at Filsan, Y’ALL!
She Was in Abiy Ahmed’s Cabinet as War Broke Out. Now She Wants to Set The Record Straight.
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took a sizable risk when he chose her as the youngest minister in his cabinet: Filsan Abdi was an outspoken activist from the country’s marginalized Somali community with no government experience. She was just 28.
Like so many, she was drawn by Abiy’s pledges to build a new Ethiopia, free of the bloody ethnic rifts of the past — overtures that built Abiy’s global reputation as an honest broker and helped win him a Nobel Peace Prize.
Then the opposite happened.
Less than a year into her tenure, Ethiopia was spiraling into an ethnically tinged civil war that would engulf the northern part of the country — Africa’s second most populous — and as the head of the ministry overseeing women’s and children’s issues, Filsan found herself tasked with documenting some of the war’s most horrific aspects: mass rapes by uniformed men and the recruitment of child soldiers.
This week, Filsan, now 30, broke her public silence in a lengthy, exclusive interview with The Washington Post, in which she told of cabinet discussions in the lead-up to the war, official efforts to suppress her ministry’s findings about abuses by the government and its allies, and the resurgent ethnic divisions fracturing the country.
A spokeswoman for Abiy declined to comment on Filsan’s recollections.
“The war has polarized the country so deeply that I know many people will label me as a liar simply because I say the government has also done painful, horrible things,” Filsan said. “I am not saying it was only them. But I was there. I was in cabinet meetings, and I went and met victims. Who can tell me what I did and did not see?”
Disputed story lines
In the 14 months since Ethiopia’s war began, the world has largely relied on the scant access the government has granted to a handful of journalists and humanitarians for any kind of independent reporting. Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost region, where the war had been contained until June, has been subjected to a near-total communications blockade since fighting began in November 2020.
In the information vacuum, a propaganda war has flourished alongside the very real fighting that has claimed thousands of lives, and even the most basic story lines of the war are hotly contested.
Who started it? Who carried out the atrocities — massacres, summary executions, intentional starvation, mass rapes, hospital lootings, the arming of children — that people from across northern Ethiopia have recounted, either in their ransacked villages or in refugee camps? Is ethnic cleansing underway? Is Ethiopia’s government winning or losing the war?
In January, Abiy prematurely answered the last question by declaring the war over. He brought a group of ministers including Filsan to Tigray’s capital, Mekelle, which government troops had taken over from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a well-armed regional political party resented elsewhere in Ethiopia for its outsize role in the repressive government that ran the country for three decades before Abiy’s ascendance.
Abiy accuses the TPLF of instigating the war with an attack on a military base, in which Tigrayan soldiers killed scores of non-Tigrayan soldiers. TPLF leaders say they were defending themselves. In any case, the conflict quickly metastasized, drawing in ethnic militias and the army of neighboring Eritrea.
In Tigray, Filsan was told to create a task force that would investigate widespread claims of rape and recruitment of child soldiers.
“We brought back the most painful stories, and every side was implicated,” she recalled. “But when I wanted to release our findings, I was told that I was crossing a line. ‘You can’t do that,’ is what an official very high up in Abiy’s office called and told me. And I said, ‘You asked me to find the truth, not to do a propaganda operation. I am not trying to bring down the government — there is a huge rape crisis for God’s sake. Child soldiers are being recruited by both sides. I have the evidence on my desk in front of me.’ ”
Filsan said she was told to revise the report to say that only TPLF-aligned fighters had committed crimes. And when her subordinates at the ministry wouldn’t release the full report, she chose to tweet that “rape has taken place conclusively and without a doubt” in Tigray.
Since then, even her childhood friends have shied away from being seen with her, fearful of the association. Colleagues in the ministry referred to her as a “protector of Tigrayans,” she said — implying that she was a traitor.
The task force’s conclusions have since been echoed by a slew of reports by human rights organizations, which have done interviews either with refugees or by phone because of access restrictions. A joint report written by the United Nations and Ethiopia’s state-appointed human rights agencies also found evidence that all sides in the war had “committed violations of international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law, some of which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Widespread allegations of crimes committed by Tigrayan rebels have piled up since June, when the force surged south into the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions, pushing back government troops and aligned militias and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The five-month onslaught was recently reversed when the rebels retreated to within the borders of Tigray.
Filsan argues that the Ethiopian government could have avoided the wave of revenge rapes and massacres of the past months.
“If there had been accountability for the rapes that took place in Tigray, do you think so many rapes would have happened in Amhara and Afar? No,” she said. “Justice helps stop the cycle. But both sides felt they could just get away with it.”
‘Yes, I know the pain, too’
As the pendulum of momentum swings back and forth in the war, and a total victory seems more and more elusive, Abiy’s tone has shifted from the relatively straightforward anti-insurgency rhetoric of late last year to calling the war an existential battle against a “cancer” that has grown in the country.
In his and other official statements, the line between the stated enemy — the TPLF — and Tigrayans in general has increasingly blurred. And under a state of emergency imposed in November, Tigrayans around the country allege, thousands of their community members have been arbitrarily detained. Tigrayans crossing the border into Sudan recently recounted fleeing a final stage of what they say is ethnic cleansing in an area of Tigray claimed by the Amhara people.
Filsan recalled that before she resigned, she had been told first by a high-ranking official in Abiy’s Prosperity Party and then by an official in his personal office that all Tigrayans on her staff — and at other ministries, too — were to be placed on leave immediately.
“I said, ‘I won’t do it unless the prime minister calls me himself, or you put it in writing,’ ” she said, adding that subordinates of hers enforced the order anyway. “Many Ethiopians are lying to themselves. They deny that an ethnic element has become a major part of this war. They have stopped seeing the difference between Tigrayan people and the TPLF, even if many Tigrayans don’t support the TPLF.”
When she resigned in September, Abiy told her to postpone her decision for six months, claiming that the war was nearing its conclusion. But by then, she had lost trust in him. Even before the war, in cabinet meetings, Abiy had repeatedly implied that a conflict was coming and that the TPLF would be to blame for it, Filsan said. But she felt that peace had never really been given a chance, and that Abiy seemed to relish the idea of eliminating the TPLF, even though crushing dissent through brute force was a page right out of the TPLF’s playbook.
“It’s now been 100 days since the day we met, and it has only gotten worse. I knew it then, I knew it before then, and I know it now: He’s in denial, he’s delusional. His leadership is failing,” said Filsan.
The feeling that she was being drawn into the same ideology of ethnic domination that the TPLF had espoused when it presided over the country was hard to shake. As a Somali, she came from a community that had been trampled during those decades, and earlier, too, under communists and kings alike. Uncles of hers had been dragged from their beds and beaten; women she knew had to wear diapers after having been raped by soldiers; children were taught to kneel and put their hands up if confronted by a man in uniform.
“So, yes, I know the pain, too, I know the reasons people want revenge. But if we don’t back away from it, we are doomed,” she said. “One day we will wake up from this nightmare and have to ask ourselves: How will we live with the choices we made?”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 9, 2021
The Oromos/Gallas who are unfortunately now in power in Addis, are a nomadic and pastoral people, who 500 years ago were living in what is present day Kenya and Tanzania, were on the move looking for greener pastures for their cattle, which were the backbone of their economy. The Oromos, contrary to current popular belief, were not organized into a single unitary state, but were a fractured society of nomads organized into Gadas. Each Gada had a leader and operated according to the interests of the Gada and not as part of a bigger entity or an Oromo nation. Some of the Gadas moved Westward from present day Kenya, past Lake Victoria and ended up in what is now Rwanda and Burundi (they may have been the ancestors of the people currently known as the genocidal Hutus, who have very close cultural ties to the Oromos that live in present day Kenya and Ethiopia).
Those nomad Gadas that moved north into Ethiopia did so in staggered waves. According to the Portuguese, the Oromos first set foot in Ethiopia in the year 1522. But their advances were checked by the Ethiopians. Only after 10 years of destructive wars between Adal and Ethiopia, which weakened both nations, were the Oromos able to move deeper into Ethiopia and Adal unopposed. Some may not know this, but the reason that the Adals built the wall of Harrer, which still stands today, was to defend the capital from the advances of the Oromo. A very interesting point that I would like to make here is that, it was because of Gragn that the Oromos got what is now largely perceived as a derogatory name – Galla. From my understanding, when Gran realized that the Ethiopians were turning the tides of war against him, he needed allies quickly and approached the Oromo Gada that had settled closest to Adal, seeking a military alliance.
💭 The Gallas had little to contribute to the Semitized civilization of Ethiopia; they possessed no significant material or intellectual culture, and their social organization differed considerably from that of the population among whom they settled. They were not only the cause of the depressed state into which the country now sank, but they helped to prolong a situation from
which even a physically and spiritually exhausted Ethiopia might otherwise have been able to recover far more quickly.
➡ Edward Ullendorff – “The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People.” Oxford University Press, 1960
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 8, 2021
👉 From The Washington Examiner, by Michael Rubin
“To Be a Tigrayan in Abiy’s Ethiopia is to be a Dead Man Walking.”
“በአብይ ኢትዮጵያ ትግራዋይ መሆን ማለት በእግር የሚሄድ የሞተ ሰው ነው።”
“Turkish-backed forces pursued a similar strategy of demographic transformation as they sought to pursue an ethnic cleansing in Syrian districts along the Turkish frontier of their native Kurdish populations”
💭My Note: This was exactly what has happened to the Christians of Northern Ethiopia 500 years ago – and the Turks plus their Adal and Oromo Muslim allies are trying to achieve the same today by pursuing ethnic cleansing of Christian Northern Ethiopians.
Let’s remember, The Oromos/Gallas who are now unfortunately in power in Addis, are a nomadic and pastoral people, who 500 years ago were living in what is present day Kenya and Tanzania, were on the move looking for greener pastures for their cattle, which were the backbone of their economy. The Oromos, contrary to current popular belief, were not organized into a single unitary state, but were a fractured society of nomads organized into Gadas. Each Gada had a leader and operated according to the interests of the Gada and not as part of a bigger entity or an Oromo nation. Some of the Gadas moved Westward from present day Kenya, past Lake Victoria and ended up in what is now Rwanda and Burundi (they may have been the ancestors of the people currently known as the genocidal Hutus, who have very close cultural ties to the Oromos that live in present day Kenya and Ethiopia).
Those nomad Gadas that moved north into Ethiopia did so in staggered waves. According to the Portuguese, the Oromos first set foot in Ethiopia in the year 1522. But their advances were checked by the Ethiopians. Only after 10 years of destructive wars between Adal and Ethiopia, which weakened both nations, were the Oromos able to move deeper into Ethiopia and Adal unopposed. Some may not know this, but the reason that the Adals built the wall of Harrer, which still stands today, was to defend the capital from the advances of the Oromo. A very interesting point that I would like to make here is that, it was because of Gragn that the Oromos got what is now largely perceived as a derogatory name – Galla. From my understanding, when Gran realized that the Ethiopians were turning the tides of war against him, he needed allies quickly and approached the Oromo Gada that had settled closest to Adal, seeking a military alliance.
💭 The Gallas had little to contribute to the Semitized civilization of Ethiopia; they possessed no significant material or intellectual culture, and their social organization differed considerably from that of the population among whom they settled. They were not only the cause of the depressed state into which the country now sank, but they helped to prolong a situation fromwhich even a physically and spiritually exhausted Ethiopia might otherwise have been able to recover far more quickly.
➡ Edward Ullendorff – “The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People.” Oxford University Press, 1960
💭 It has now been over a decade since Syria erupted into civil war. The uprising was spontaneous and spread like wildfire. Within weeks, President Bashar Assad had lost control over huge swaths of Syrian territory. The Assad family’s demise appeared inevitable. Rather than flee, however, Assad increased the brutality.
Neither fighting nor atrocities in Syria were random. Both sides fought for control over Homs, a small city literally at the crossroads of the country: Whichever faction controlled Homs could control commerce across Syria. Meanwhile, both Assad and the radicalized opposition sought to cleanse regions along sectarian or ethnic lines. The Syrian air force focused its assaults on Sunni population centers in order to change the demography of the Sunni heartland. Turkish-backed forces pursued a similar strategy of demographic transformation as they sought to pursue an ethnic cleansing in Syrian districts along the Turkish frontier of their native Kurdish populations.
While Russia, Iran, and Lebanese Hezbollah came to Assad’s defense and Turkey supported the radical Sunni opposition, moderate forces found no patron, especially as the Obama administration chose to sit on the sidelines. There was some support for the Syrian Kurds as they struggled against the Islamic State, but it was little, late, and undercut by former President Donald Trump.
Today, Assad has largely reestablished control over Syria. Moving forward, even if the United States follows the Arab lead to normalize relations with Assad, U.S. leverage over the Syrian dictator will be minimal. Assad now associates survival with intransigence and feels mass murder and ethnic cleansing pay off.
Today, Ethiopia is rapidly becoming the new Syria.
In November 2020, Tigrayan leadership rejected Ethiopian Premier Abiy Ahmed’s order to postpone elections. They feared that he sought to follow the path of self-described reformers who consolidate dictatorship . Abiy reacted with fury, sought to decapitate the Tigrayan military leadership, and then dispatched the Ethiopian army to Mekelle, the capital of the Tigray state. While Ethiopian officials insisted Abiy’s battle was just with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the army not only denied food to the entire Tigray Region but also closed Tigrayan businesses in Addis Ababa and rounded up ethnic Tigrayans in internment camps. To be a Tigrayan in Abiy’s Ethiopia is to be a dead man walking.
Initially, however, Abiy’s military assaults failed.
Last June, the Tigray Defense Forces recaptured Mekelle, and subsequently, they and other regional groups began to march on Addis Ababa. Just as the Syrian opposition sought to capture Homs, Tigrayan forces sought to cut off the Chinese-built railroad and highway between Addis Ababa and Djibouti, whose port is a lifeline for Ethiopian trade. Over the past week, the United Nations and various embassies began to evacuate their staff. Abiy’s fall appeared inevitable. It has not come yet.
Instead, the Ethiopian military has regained towns in northern Ethiopia that it previously lost. Tigrayan commanders said they made a tactical withdrawal to reconsolidate their lines. Given the press blackout, it is hard to know what is true. What is certain, however, is that while Washington has remained on the sidelines, other states, including Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and China, have provided Abiy drones and other technologies to use against the rebels and control the population.
They took a gamble. If Abiy remains, their stock will rise while America’s influence will be zero. Meanwhile, refugee flows will accelerate, and ethnic minorities will radicalize. Abiy is a Nobel laureate, and it is possible that with foreign assistance, he can outlast the opposition. But like Assad, he will then rule over a husk of a country whose potential he has largely destroyed.
There is no magic formula to resolve conflicts, but sitting on the sidelines and acting only as a diplomatic scold will never work. It is time for the U.S. to do what it refused to do in Syria: offer meaningful support to those resisting a murderous dictator.
As Prime Minister Abiy prepares what is possibly a final, bloody stand in the war he has wrought
There are similar efforts to scapegoat all Tigrayans, led personally through the prime minister’s statements and state media, though the rampant use of hateful and dehumanizing speech makes the case that the government may well be inciting genocide as part of its last-ditch defense effort to save itself.
As Ethiopia crosses the one-year mark since the start of its devastating war in the Tigray region, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is preparing the capital, Addis Ababa, for one final stand against a blitzkrieg attack at the hands of Tigrayan rebels, who months ago turned the tide of the war and who now stand poised to turn out the country’s Nobel prize-winning prime minister.
In the process, as international diplomats and Ethiopian-Americans scramble to leave the country, the risk of state-sponsored genocide, and even state collapse, remain frighteningly real scenarios that will have catastrophic consequences for the country, the region, and U.S. interests for years to come.
This was an unfathomable scenario at the start of the conflict. Abiy promised a limited “law-and-order operation” against a select number of Tigrayan leaders who challenged his rule through, in his mind, an unwavering commitment to an anachronistic ethnically-based system they put in place during their more than 20 years of autocratic rule.
In reality, Abiy likely never believed Tigrayans would “go along to get along” and so set about from the start of his time in office to weaken their ties to the state and ensure their future banishment from power. It was those efforts to treat Tigrayans as Tigrayans treated the majority of Ethiopia’s ethnic groups during their time in power that created the self-fulfilling prophecy Abiy is now struggling to survive.
But with the bulk of the Ethiopian army’s best fighters and tacticians hailing from Tigray, the government has slowly seen its overwhelming strategic advantage eroded on the battlefield against a rump force more adept at insurgency combat and clearly more motivated by a fight for its literal survival.
The government’s response to its own tactical shortcomings and sagging morale has been to wage an asymmetric battle against not just the Tigrayan Defense Forces but more broadly against the people of Tigray. A recent joint report from the United Nations and Ethiopia’s own human rights body points out the widespread use of sexual violence as central to the government’s war strategy.
An ongoing government humanitarian blockade of the region has for months put more than 900,000 civilians at risk of famine and forced Tigrayan fighters to expand their fight into neighboring Amhara and Afar regions in a bid to break the siege, expanding the death toll and humanitarian suffering.
There are similar efforts to scapegoat all Tigrayans, led personally through the prime minister’s statements and state media, though the rampant use of hateful and dehumanizing speech makes the case that the government may well be inciting genocide as part of its last-ditch defense effort to save itself.
Reports this past week of mass roundups of Tigrayans living in and around Addis Ababa, under a far-reaching state of emergency declaration “to ensure national security,” suggest a possible last-ditch effort to deter the oncoming onslaught by holding hostage an entire people.
As the situation deteriorates, and the vast human and economic implications begin to take shape for the region, Ethiopia’s neighbors have only just begun to respond. Forced by the possible fall of one of Africa’s most important cities and the continent’s diplomatic capital, after months of callously treating the devastating conflict as Ethiopia’s “internal affair,” Kenya, Uganda and the African Union itself are finally calling for a ceasefire and political talks.
While Washington and its European allies have been sustained in their condemnations of the violence and abuses, they have done little to force either side’s hand to relent. Importantly, a bipartisan Senate bill, introduced last week in the Foreign Relations Committee, makes use of the Biden administration’s own Executive Order sanctions regime — rolled out in September but never applied — by mandating “the imposition of targeted sanctions against individual actors … undermining efforts to resolve the conflict or profit from it.”
Coupled with a freeze of more than $200 million in trade preferences — which, again, the administration was forced to announce last week under congressional deadline — and efforts to impose costs on belligerents are only beginning to take shape after a year of fighting.
As Prime Minister Abiy prepares what is possibly a final, bloody stand in the war he has wrought, will last-minute calls for calm and pressure tactics be enough to change the calculations of the warring parties and avoid catastrophe in the Horn of Africa?
“During the first few decades of their migration, the Oromo moved across lands that were devastated and depopulated by the jihadist wars, the lands relatively empty of people either fled before them or were adopted and assimilated by them.”
„In the place conquer they slay all the men, cut off the privet parts of the boy, kill the old woman and keep the young for their use and service ” Richard Pankhurst, the Ethiopian borderland. (page 284)
5. Historical Geography of Ethiopia, School of African Studies.
6.The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People. Oxford University Press, 1960, Edward Ullendorff
The Gallas had little to contribute to the Semitized civilization of Ethiopia; they possessed no significant material or intellectual culture, and their social organization differed considerably from that of the population among whom they settled. They were not only the cause of the depressed state into which the country now sank, but they helped to prolong a situation from
which even a physically and spiritually exhausted Ethiopia might otherwise have been able to recover far more quickly
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 