Satellite Images Support Survivors’ Accounts: Ethiopian Forces Held Thousands, Including Children, in Brutal Camps
In the Tigray region of Ethiopia, beginning in November 2020, children who should have been laughing with friends and studying in school were instead locked up, crying, starving and abused in concentration camps, according to multiple eyewitness reports that have been corroborated by satellite imagery and analysis, as well as cell phone video footage smuggled out by an escapee.
Ethiopian federal forces, abetted by special forces, paramilitary groups, militia and police acting under the authority of the Amharan regional government, locked up in multiple locations hundreds of children of all ages — and even pregnant women, infants and toddlers — along with thousands of Tigrayan adults and senior citizens. These people appear to have been held in harsh conditions, systematically starved and beaten because of their ethnicity and with no judicial process or valid legal pretext. That is the definition of a concentration camp. This is a previously unreported part of an ongoinggenocidal campaign led by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — ironically enough, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate — against various ethnic groups, including Tigrayans, Kimant, Gumuz, Ogaden (Somalis), Agew, Irob, Afar and Sidama.
This report is based on eyewitness accounts by dozens of people from five ethnic groups, including 11 former prisoners who were interviewed in four different refugee camps in eastern Sudan. Doctors have recounted their treatment of another seven former prisoners, including young children. Satellite imagery from Maxar (a space technology company based in Westminster, Colorado) and Planet Labs (an Earth imaging company based in San Francisco) corroborates these eyewitness reports. So does video footage which one former prisoner shot on his cell phone before he escaped a previously unreported concentration camp in western Tigray, located in the notorious Abbadi warehouse compound in Mai Kadra.
The cell phone footage admittedly does not conform to classic notions of what a concentration camp looks like, as in World War II films.There are no bars, guard towers, German Shepherds, barracks, searchlights or coils of razor wire. In the videos, prisoners can be seen eating popcorn, drinking coffee, teasing each other and making jokes in Tigrigna, the language of the Tigray people.
“Young children who were imprisoned and abused”
“We are seeing a generation of Tigrayan refugee children, many of whom are growing up with a sense of hopelessness,” said Dr. Mebrahtom Yehdago, 37, from Humera. He is a Tigrayan doctor and refugee in Tenedba refugee camp in eastern Sudan. “As a doctor, I feel so disturbed, sad, and angry to see these kinds of situations. These children are innocent. These are young children who were imprisoned and abused. How can we get the world to pay attention and do more to help the children?”
Dr. Mebrahtom outlines the cases of former child prisoners in concentration camps whom he has treated: four boys, ages 2, 9, 13 and 15. The two-year-old was imprisoned with his mother in the Mai Kadra concentration camp – which satellite imagery shows is in the Abbadi warehouse compound, a bit north and across the street from the police station, just as eyewitnesses reported. They were imprisoned from Nov. 14 to Nov. 27, 2020, until the mother paid their captors — the Fanu, the Amhara militia and the Amharan Regional Police — a ransom of 50,000 Ethiopian birr (about USD $1,086) for their release.
The toddler presented with physical complications, Dr. Mebrahtom said, including recurrent diarrhea, dehydration, malnutrition and pneumonia, as well as psychological issues. For example, when the boy sees a large group of people, he starts shouting and crying. His mother says he is remembering their hardship in captivity.
Their captors provided no food or water. About twice a week, according to former prisoners who escaped, Doctors Without Borders (or MSF, its French acronym) workers from Abdelrafe would distribute packets of digestive biscuits and fill two large water tanks. MSF repaired one water tank and installed another, without which the prisoners would have had only a few sinks in the bathrooms, where toilets and floors were overflowing with feces. MSF also built a new bathroom. The prisoners in Mai Kadra, like those in other concentration camps in western Tigray, survived by pilfering and roasting sesame seeds stored in the warehouses where they were held captive. This meager sustenance came from bags of seeds that the Amharan forces had looted from Tigrayan farmers and hauled to the warehouses on trailers pulled by tractors. The tractors in Mai Kadra were stolen from the Abbadis, a wealthy Tigrayan family who had owned the warehouse compound.
Satellite imagery shows tractors hooked to trailers near the compound garage. Some prisoners who had Amharan relatives or friends, and who could get money brought to them, paid bribes to Amharan militia guards. In exchange, the guards would allow two or three small boys, around eight years old, to run to the market and return with a kind of flat bread called injera, which the prisoners would distribute.
“We are here to kill you”
Dr. Mebrahtom described the case of a 15-year-old boy, imprisoned in the same place in Mai Kadra. He is an insulin-dependent diabetic. When he asked for permission to buy insulin from a local pharmacy, his captors said, “We are not here to treat you; we are here to kill you. We are gathering the Tigrayan refugees here to kill them.” …..
Dr. Mebrahtom explains that the abuse of Tigrayan children in Mai Kadra was not unique. It was part of a pattern which the doctor has seen, and which other eyewitnesses confirmed in interviews, which also involved children locked up in various sites in the regional capital of western Tigray, Humera. For example, the doctor has treated a 9-year-old boy who had been imprisoned for four days in the old police station in Humera.
Eyewitnesses who had been incarcerated in the old police station, and who were subsequently transferred to the Yitbarak warehouse in Humera, from which they escaped, reported that the only food and water available in the station (administered by the Amhara Regional Police) was whatever the prisoners could buy and have brought in from outside. And in the Yitbarak warehouse (sometimes called the Tabarak warehouse), prisoners subsisted by pilfering sesame seeds from bags looted by the Amhara and stored in the warehouse. So this young child, like hundreds of other children and adults imprisoned in multiple locations, had to survive on handfuls of seeds and a little water, with an occasional supplement of a piece of injera or a few digestive biscuits. I asked the doctor who had arrested the 9-year-old boy, and why.
💭 Five paths to freedom
There were five paths to freedom from the Mai Kadra concentration camp:
the Amharan regional government released some who paid a ransom — an illegal act of extortion which confirms that there was no valid legal purpose for holding the prisoners;
they released some who claimed Amharan ancestry, which confirms that the Ethiopian government was arresting Tigrayans because of their ethnicity;
after several weeks, they released some old people, sick people, pregnant women and women with young children, although one witness among the released prisoners — a woman who returned to Mai Kadra — reported that the Amharans released these Tigrayans into a deadly ambush by Eritrean soldiers allied with Ethiopia’s federal government;
more than 150 Tigrayans escaped Mai Kadra over a four-day period; and
some died of starvation and disease due to lack of adequate nutrition or sufficient medical care in captivity.
Tigrayans Being Sent to Concentration Camps in Addis Ababa | ትግራዋዮች በአዲስ አበባ ወደ ማጎሪያ ካምፖች ሲወሰዱ
💭 My Note: They say, there is war in Oromia too – so, why don’t they do the same to the Oromos in Addis? The Answer is because it’s the Oromos who are the perpetrators. It’s all lies, there is no war in Oromia – there ain’t no such thing as “Eritrean soldiers in Oromia” – Evil Abiy Ahmed’s fascist regime is an Oromo one – and it’s the Oromos + the Amharas who are responsible for the #TigrayGenocide. Will the Addis Ababa residents now have a desire to show solidarity with Tigrayans against this sort of barbarity? No, they won’t! Unless the T.D.F advance towards Addis Ababa, I smell Auschwitz!
Thousands of Ethnic-Tigrayan Residents of Addis Ababa Being Marched to Mass Detention Centers.
Turning Point in Tigray | Bring This Uniquely Monstrous War Criminal to Justice
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 14, 2021
After months of fear in a city occupied by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers who pursued the Tigray regional leaders, crowds of Mekele residents rushed to see thousands of Ethiopian government soldiers paraded by their captors. (July 14)
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 7, 2021
💭 Allan Rock is President Emeritus of the University of Ottawa, and a Professor in its Faculty of Law, where he teaches International Humanitarian Law and Armed Conflict in International Law.
He practised in civil, administrative and commercial litigation for 20 years (1973-93) with a national law firm in Toronto, appearing as counsel in a wide variety of cases before courts at all levels, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He was inducted in 1988 as a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He is a former Treasurer (President) of the Law Society of Ontario.
Allan Rock was elected to the Canadian Parliament in 1993, and re-elected in 1997 and 2000. He served for that decade as a senior minister in the government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, in both social and economic portfolios. He was Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada (1993-97), Minister of Health (1997-2002) and Minister of Industry and Infrastructure (2002-03).
He was appointed in 2003 as Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations in New York during a period that involved responding to several complex regional conflicts, including those in Sri Lanka, Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur. He led the successful Canadian effort in New York to secure, at the 2005 World Summit, the unanimous adoption by UN member states of The Responsibility to Protect populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing and other mass atrocities. He participated in the negotiation (in Abuja, Nigeria) of the Darfur Peace Agreement in May, 2006. He later served as a Special Envoy for the United Nations investigating the unlawful use of child soldiers in Sri Lanka during its civil war.
In 2008, Allan Rock became the 29th President and Vice Chancellor of the University of Ottawa, a comprehensive university of 50,000 students, faculty and staff. uOttawa is ranked among the Top Ten in Canada for research intensity, and is the largest bilingual university (French-English) in the world. He completed two terms as uOttawa President in 2016.
Allan Rock was subsequently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, associated with the Program on International Law and Armed Conflict.
“The massacre left the town’s inhabitants reeling. One man visited a relative who lost her children in the house-to-house killings: “They killed her children and locked the compound door behind them, so no one could get in at first. She was left alone with the bodies of her two dead children for a day and a half. She was numb, unresponsive by the time we saw her.”
“For about a week, the military forces pillaged. While several residents who spoke to Human Rights Watch saw Ethiopian forces participate, most said the soldiers just stood by and watched. “It was painful,” said one man. “I thought the Ethiopian military stood for Ethiopia and its people… but they did nothing as Eritrean forces looted and killed. They just kept silent.”
Eritrean armed forces massacred scores of civilians, including children as young as 13, in the historic town of Axum in Ethiopia’s Tigray region in November 2020, Human Rights Watch said today. The United Nations should urgently establish an independent inquiry into war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in the region to pave the way for accountability, and Ethiopian authorities should grant it full and immediate access.
On November 19, Ethiopian and Eritrean forces indiscriminately shelled Axum, killing and wounding civilians. For a week after taking control of the town, the forces shot civilians and pillaged and destroyed property, including healthcare facilities. After Tigray militia and Axum residents attacked Eritrean forces on November 28, Eritrean forces, in apparent retaliation, fatally shot and summarily executed several hundred residents, mostly men and boys, over a 24-hour period.
“Eritrean troops committed heinous killings in Axum with wanton disregard for civilian lives,” said Laetitia Bader, Horn of Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Ethiopian and Eritrean officials can no longer hide behind a curtain of denial, but should allow space for justice and redress, not add to the layers of trauma that survivors already face.”
The attacks in Axum followed weeks of fighting between the Ethiopian military and allied forces from the Amhara region and Eritrean troops against forces affiliated with the region’s former ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
Between December 2020 and February 2021, Human Rights Watch interviewed by phone 28 witnesses and victims of abuses and their relatives in Axum and examined videos of attacks and their aftermath.
Survivors consistently identified Eritrean troops by the vehicles bearing Eritrean license plates, their distinctive uniforms, the spoken dialect of Tigrinya, and their plastic “congo” shoes, worn by Eritrean forces since the liberation struggle.
On November 19, after Tigrayan forces and militia withdrew from Axum, Ethiopian and Eritrean forces began shelling the town around 4 p.m., continuing into the evening. The next day, witnesses saw Ethiopian and Eritrean forces indiscriminately shoot at civilians, including in the town’s Saint Mary’s hospital.
For about a week, the military forces pillaged. While several residents who spoke to Human Rights Watch saw Ethiopian forces participate, most said the soldiers just stood by and watched. “It was painful,” said one man. “I thought the Ethiopian military stood for Ethiopia and its people… but they did nothing as Eritrean forces looted and killed. They just kept silent.”
The abuses generated considerable anger in the town. On November 28, after 7 a.m., a group of Tigrayan militia and town residents attacked Eritrean forces, triggering fighting. That afternoon, Eritrean reinforcements entered Axum and went on a 24-hour killing spree.
Survivors described the horror of Eritrean soldiers moving through the town, going house to house, searching for young men and boys, and executing them. A student described watching helplessly as Eritrean soldiers led six neighbors, including a 17-year-old the witness knew as “Jambo” and another young man, outside. He said: “They made them take off their belts, then their shoes. They lined them up and walked behind them. The Eritrean soldiers fired their guns. The first three then fell. They fired other shots, and the other three fell.”
Eritrean troops shot other civilians on the street. “A group of soldiers killed a man and then forced a pregnant woman and two children that were with him to kneel on the asphalt street beside his body,” said one witness.
Those retrieving bodies for burial did not escape harm. Several residents said Eritrean forces shot at them while they tried to collect the dead on November 28 and 29.
The massacre left the town’s inhabitants reeling. One man visited a relative who lost her children in the house-to-house killings: “They killed her children and locked the compound door behind them, so no one could get in at first. She was left alone with the bodies of her two dead children for a day and a half. She was numb, unresponsive by the time we saw her.”
Human Rights Watch was unable to determine the number of civilian deaths resulting from the joint Ethiopian-Eritrean offensive on Axum and the ensuing massacre. However, based on interviews with elders, community members collecting identification cards of those killed, and those assisting the retrieval of the dead, Human Rights Watch estimates that over 200 civilians were most likely killed on November 28-29 alone. Human Rights Watch also received a list of 166 names of victims allegedly killed in Axum in November, 21 of which correspond to the names of those killed on November 28 and 29 given by witnesses interviewed.
International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, applicable to the armed conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians and attacks that are indiscriminate or cause disproportionate civilian harm. Indiscriminate attacks strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction, including those not directed at a specific military target. The laws of war also prohibit all violence against captured combatants and civilians, including murder and torture. Pillage and looting are also prohibited. Individuals who commit serious laws-of-war violations with criminal intent, including as a matter of command responsibility, are liable for war crimes.
Crimes against humanity include murder and other unlawful acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population.
The late November attacks were documented by media organizations, as well as by Amnesty International. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has also begun investigations. Human Rights Watch provided its findings to Ethiopian and Eritrean government officials on February 18 but received no response. On February 26, the Ethiopian government announced it would thoroughly investigate events in Axum and expressed “readiness to collaborate with international human rights experts.”
While the lack of access to conflict areas has hindered reporting on the conflict, Human Rights Watch and others have reported on other massacres, the indiscriminate shelling of towns, widespread pillaging, including destruction of crops, and the apparent extrajudicial executions by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces, as well as forces from the neighboring Amhara region.
Given the presence of multiple armed forces and groups and the poor track record of the warring parties in investigating grave abuses, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) should conduct an urgent, independent inquiry focused on establishing the facts, collecting forensic and other criminal evidence, and investigating war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in Axum and elsewhere is crucial, Human Rights Watch said.
“Condemnations are not enough to bring justice to the victims of grave abuses committed by both Ethiopian and Eritrean forces in Tigray,” Bader said. “Attention and action by UN member states is needed now to ensure those responsible for these grave abuses are held accountable. So far, reports of these chilling abuses have been met by shameful silence.”
Attack on Axum, November 19-20
Axum is in northern Tigray, home to an ancient civilization, and declared a World Heritage Site in 1980 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Following the outbreak of armed conflict in Tigray in early November, many residents fled the fighting in western Tigray by crossing into Sudan or by going east, including to Axum, where they hoped to find a safe haven given the town’s historical and religious significance.
Axum residents were already feeling shortages because of the conflict. Ethiopia’s federal government cut off access to Tigray at the war’s start and food was in short supply. “Electricity was shut,” one resident said. “We couldn’t grind the grains. People subsisted on crackers. After a week, there was nothing. This affected everyone.”
In mid-November, airstrikes hit an area near Axum’s airport.
On November 19, residents heard the distant sounds of artillery getting closer from the direction of Shire, a town 40 kilometers west that Ethiopian federal forces had captured two days before. Several residents then saw Tigray special forces and militia withdraw from the town. “People were scared because of the terror in Shire,” said a man who fled to Axum. “No one opened their shops or the market.”
At about 4 p.m., Ethiopian and Eritrean forces fired artillery into Axum that struck buildings, hit the town’s cobblestoned streets, and killed and injured civilians. Panicked residents sought cover from the shelling, some hiding in their homes, others fleeing to rural areas, following a pattern of attacks already documented by Human Rights Watch during the conflict.
Artillery hit the wall of a house in Kebele 02, killing four civilians inside. One young man said: “We were scared, this was our first experience with war. We didn’t know what they were targeting. A heavy weapon hit a home. The blast scattered the bodies of Kassa Enquay, Almaz Zeraya, Ammanuel Berhe, and a young woman who worked as a housekeeper.”
The shelling continued until evening. Residents then heard gunfire.
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 