Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on March 3, 2022
👉 The Ukraine war shows us:
😈 United by their Illuminist-Luciferian-Masonic-Satanist agendas The following Edomite-Ishmaelite entities and bodies are helping the genocidal fascist Oromo regime of evil Abiy Ahmed Ali:
☆ The United Nations
☆ The European Union
☆ The African Union
☆ The United States, Canada & Cuba
☆ Russia
☆ Ukraine
☆ China
☆ Israel
☆ Arab States
☆ Southern Ethiopians
☆ Amharas
☆ Eritrea
☆ Djibouti
☆ Kenya
☆ Sudan
☆ Somalia
☆ Egypt
☆ Iran
☆ Pakistan
☆ India
☆ Azerbaijan
☆ Amnesty International
☆ Human Rights Watch
☆ World Food Program (2020 Nobel Peace Laureate)
☆ The Nobel Prize Committee
☆ The Atheists and Animists
☆ The Muslims
☆ The Protestants
☆ The Sodomites
☆ TPLF?
💭 Even those nations that are one another enemies, like: ‘Israel vs Iran’, ‘Russia + China vs Ukraine + The West’, ‘Egypt + Sudan vs Iran + Turkey’, ‘India vs Pakistan’ have now become friends – as they are all united in the anti-Christian, anti-Zionist-Ethiopia-Conspiracy. This has never ever happened before it is a very curios phenomenon – a strange unique appearance in world history.
✞ With the Zionist Tigray-Ethiopians are:
❖ The Almighty Egziabher God & His Saints
❖ St. Mary of Zion
❖ The Ark of The Covenant
💭 Due to the leftist and atheistic nature of the TPLF, because of its tiresome, foreign and satanic ideological games of: „Unitarianism vs Multiculturalism“, the Supernatural Force that always stood/stands with the Northern Ethiopian Christians is blocked – and These Celestial Powers are not yet being ‘activated’. Even the the above Edomite and Ishmaelite entities and bodies who in the beginning tried to help them have gradually abandoned them
✞✞✞[Isaiah 33:1]✞✞✞
“Woe to you, O destroyer, While you were not destroyed; And he who is treacherous, while others did not deal treacherously with him. As soon as you finish destroying, you will be destroyed; As soon as you cease to deal treacherously, others will deal treacherously with you.”
🛑 The ethnic cleansing is openly and clandestinely coordinated by:
😈 The Fascist Oromo Regime of Abiy Ahmed Ali
😈 The Fascist Arab stooge Iaias Afewerki in Eritrea
😈 The Fascist Amhara Fano Militia
😈 The Marxist TPLF
😈 The United Nations
😈 The Biden-Harris Administration of The U.S
😈 The European Union
Roughly a year ago, on Mar 10, 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described violence in Ethiopia’s Tigray region as “ethnic cleansing”. What has been done since then? Nothing! In fact, they continue encouraging and indirectly supporting those perpetrators of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes.
🔥 Imagine the reaction around the world if the site of this horrific ethnic cleansing was in Ukraine!
This year marks 99 years since the Catastrophe of Smyrna, the modern-day city of Izmir on the Turkish coast of the Aegean Sea, when Greeks were forced to flee the city due to a fire set by Turkish forces.
It was a cataclysmic event of such enormous importance for modern Greek history that it shaped generation upon generation after 1922, adding yet another unforgettable —and unutterably tragic — milestone to Greece’s long history.
Great Fire cause the Catastrophe of Smyrna
A terrifying blaze, called the Great Fire, destroyed much of the city, causing the majority of Greeks in Asia Minor to flee their homes and seek shelter primarily in Greece, but also in other countries.
Historians of the time period, taking countless eye witness and written accounts of the event, have agreed that Turkish mobs set the Greek section of the city on fire.
Together, they constituted the Christian community of the city, which lived peacefully side by side with the Muslim and the Jewish communities for centuries.
However, politics, and the competing interests of the main global powers, alongside the rising tide of nationalism and the outbreak of the First World War, were the factors that determined the fate of Smyrna and its citizens for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.
As part of the Greco-Turkish War, which raged from 1919 to 1922, Greece’s armed forces went to Smyrna on May 15, 1919.
After major military and political errors made by the Greek government, the Turkish army regained control of the city on September 9, 1922.
Christian populations in Asia Minor in dangerous position
The future for the Christian population of Greeks and Armenians was perilous.
After a series of catastrophic events, the majority of them would end up dead as part of the Greek Genocide, which actually began with a series of confrontations in 1914 and would last until 1923.
Eyewitness reports state that the great fire of Smyrna began on September 13, 1922, and lasted for approximately nine full days, until September 22.
The fire’s results were catastrophic — the entire Greek and Armenian quarters of the city were completely wiped off the map.
Churches, ornate villas, and mansions of great architectural importance, as well as schools and entire market areas, were gone forever, without a trace.
Catastrophe of Smyrna has lasting impact
Official data about the number of the victims of the Smyrna Catastrophe and Greek genocide does not exist.
Experts believe that the number of victims lands somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000, while the number of refugees who were forced to leave Asia Minor numbered in the millions.
The city suffered such enormous damage to its infrastructure that much of it literally had to be rebuilt from the ashes.
But the Greek neighborhoods, which had the most beautiful homes, churches and other buildings — the entire 40 hectares of what was once the most elegant part of the city, and then became a hellish inferno — has no buildings whatsoever on it.
Today the area is an enormous park, known as Kültürpark in Turkish, which serves as Turkey’s largest open-air exhibition center.
There are no reminders there of the glory which once was Smyrna.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 18, 2021
💭 UN approves independent investigation into suspected war crimes in Tigray conflict.
Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed promised the conflict in Tigray would be resolved quickly.
However, 13 months later, the fighting has intensified amid multiple reports of torture, rape and other atrocities taking place in Tigray.
The conflict has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The UN’s Human Rights Council has voted to set up an independent investigation into war crimes.
Ethiopia’s government says it will not cooperate with investigators and has accused the council of being used as “an instrument of political pressure”.
Why are international efforts to stop the war failing?
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 18, 2021
Proliferation of hate speech on social media has the capacity to cause real-world harm amidst an increasingly violent civil war.
Disclaimer: this article contains examples of hate speech.
In response to a recent proliferation of hate speech on social media platforms, Twitter announced on November 5, 2021 that it had disabled its trends list for Ethiopia to “reduce the risks of coordination that could incite violence or cause harm.” Facebook, meanwhile, published an update of its security protocols for protecting people in-country and curbing the spread of hate speech on November 9. This came in the wake of Facebook removing a post by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for violating the platform’s policies against inciting violence. The post called on citizens to take up arms and “organise and march through [any] legal manner with every weapon and power… to prevent, reverse and bury the terrorist TPLF.”
According to Facebook’s current policies regarding violence and incitement, the platform removes content containing language that “incites or facilitates serious violence.” Additionally, users are not permitted to post “threats that could lead to death (and other forms of high-severity violence) targeting people or places.” This includes “aspirational or conditional statements to commit high-severity violence.”
Despite these policies, Facebook has received repeated criticism for failing to take down violent posts in local Ethiopian languages, including Tigrinya and Amharic, as noted in Washington Post coverage of internal Facebook documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen. Information from the leaked document suggested that Facebook teams had flagged a network of accounts promoting disinformation about the conflict and inciting people to take up arms. The network was linked with the Amhara militia Fano group, which has been accused of human rights abuses during the current conflict.
Facebook ultimately de-platformed Fano-linked assets in early December for violating its Violent Non-State Actor (VNSA) policy. According to a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company:
The designation of any organization as a VNSA will result in a removal of content that supports or represents the organization or its members as well as the removal of their presence from our family of apps. Under this policy, praise for the group will be allowed except for content that praises violence, which will be considered violating.
Meanwhile, on December 14, the Oversight Board ruled on a post that was automatically flagged by Facebook’s Amharic language systems. The post, which made unverified claims that the TPLF and Tigrayan citizens committed atrocities in an Amhara village, was restored despite being labeled as hate speech by two of the company’s Amharic-language content moderators. The Board ruled that Facebook should remove the post again, saying “rumors alleging that an ethnic group is complicit in mass atrocities, as found in this post, are dangerous and significantly increase the risk of imminent violence.” According to the ruling, the user who created the post did not “even provide circumstantial evidence to support his allegations.”
This is not the first time Facebook in particular has come under fire for allowing hate speech to fester; in 2020, a dedicated disinformation campaign was used to vilify prominent Ethiopian musician Hachalu Hundessa, who was later assassinated. Following his death, rampant hate speech and incitement to violence sparked mobs that led to hundreds of deaths. Since then, Facebook has released community standards guidelines in both Oromo and Amharic.
The DFRLab identified 27 examples of possible hate speech and incitement to violence and shared them with Facebook. After an internal assessment, Facebook removed 15 of them for violating policies on inciting violence. According to a statement released to the DFRLab by Meta:
A number of the posts that were flagged by DFRLab and included as examples in the article had already been actioned, and removed by Meta over the last few months. We have taken additional steps and will continue to leverage our proactive tools to find any duplicates of violating content which we will remove. Of the separate 27 pieces of content shared by DFRLab and reviewed by Meta, 15 were actioned and deleted for Violence & Incitement violations. The remaining 12 were found to be non violating as some were shared in condemnation or in an awareness raising context, whilst others either targeted institutions and/or had no obvious threat. Our Community Standards make clear what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook, and as soon as we become aware of violating content, we will remove it.
Additionally, Meta noted some of the actions it has recently taken in response to the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia and in the lead-up to the general election last June. These include expanding its capacity to review content in Amharic, Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya; developing technology to automatically identify hate speech and ethnic slurs, resulting in more than 92,000 pieces of content being taken down between May and October 2021; removing coordinated inauthentic behavior in Ethiopia; releasing political transparency tools; and running a media literacy billboard campaign across 43 locations in Addis Ababa, “the first of its kind for Facebook across Africa.”
Online violence in Ethiopia
In March 2020, Ethiopia enacted the Hate Speech and Disinformation Prevention and Suppression Proclamation, which gave the government recourse to fine and imprison citizens for comments made on social media. Civil society groups, including Human Rights Watch, criticized the proclamation for its violation of the freedom of speech and its broad-sweeping definition of hate speech. Under the legislation, if the offense of hate speech or disinformation offense has been committed through a social media account having more than 5,000 followers or through a broadcast service or print media, the person responsible for the act could be punished with imprisonment not exceeding three years or a fine up to 100,000 birr (approximately USD $2,120).
However, the DFRLab has identified multiple accounts on both Twitter and Facebook with over 5,000 followers that recently posted hate speech without repercussion from the government. Some of these accounts are themselves operated by government employees or are government-aligned organizations. It is unknown whether the lack of prosecution of these accounts is a sign of selective enforcement or a general lack of resources to pursue those in violation.
A post that received severe backlash online was created by pro-government activist Dejene Assefa, whose Facebook account has over 121,000 followers and whose posts regularly receive thousands of likes and hundreds of shares. In late October 2021, Dejene published a Facebook post stating, “the war is with those you grew up with, your neighbor,” and calling on people to act against the “traitors” even if they do not want to do it.
The post was called out by social media users, including by algorithmic bias expert Timnit Gebru, and subsequently removed by Facebook. However, the DFRLab identified an additional ten pages, with a combined following of over 382,000 followers, that had reposted copied version of the text. According to Facebook, the company is working to remove duplicates and prevent further sharing.
Example of tweet demanding that Facebook remove a post by Dejene Assefa. The post was subsequently removed. (Source: sirarwa/archive)
In another post that was shared nearly 1,400 times, Dejene stated there was still time to cut the necks of the “traitors” and sing victory songs on their graves. The post was flagged by the DFRLab and removed by Facebook for inciting violence.
Violent rhetoric has also been documented from TPLF leaders and supporters. On November 12, Getachew Reda, advisor to TPLF leader Debretsion Gebremichael, tweeted an official press statement from the Tigray regional government on “nefarious foreign actors.” The post referred to Abiy’s government as “parasitic” and “predatory,” language similar to Abiy’s July 2021 claims that the TPLF were a “cancer” and an invasive “weed.” The press release also said, “The Government of Tigray and Tigray Armed Forces are not liable for any harm that foreign citizens knee-deep in Abiy Ahmed’s criminal enterprise suffer as we exercise our legitimate right of self-defense by taking proportional measures to ensure our people’s safety and security.” At the time of writing, the original tweet remained active on the platform.
On Facebook, Getachew, who has almost 174,000 followers, regularly posts updates corresponding to the Tigray defense forces capturing of different cities. These posts often contain demands for opposing forces to give up or face retribution.
Calls to arms
Posts similar to Prime Minister Abiy’s November 2021 call to arms, which Facebook removed for inciting violence, have appeared on the platform. Many of these posts, however, were less overtly violent. While Abiy called for citizens to arm themselves in order to “bury” the TPLF, other prominent users were more subtle in their calls to arms.
On September 15, 2021, Taye Bogale Arega, an historian who has been vocal in his support of the Ethiopian government, called for the TPLF and supporters to be “eradicated.” The following day, he posted two images of himself holding a rifle. While his post on eradicating TPLF supporters has been removed, the images of him posing with a rifle remain on Facebook at the time of publishing. Taye has over 263,000 followers on the platform.
Screencap of photos posted by historian Taye Bogale Arega of himself holding a rifle a day after calling for the “eradication” of the TPLF. (Source: Taye Bogale Arega/archive)
Another profile posted a blurry image of Amhara militants on November 2 asking for supporters from abroad to donate weapons, saying “give us at least one weapon.” The post, which Facebook has now deleted, was created the same day Abiy announced a six-month state of emergency and authorities in Addis Ababa called on citizens to ready themselves to defend the capital by registering their own firearms. The state of emergency requires citizens to carry identification at all times, allows for random raids by security forces, and gives police the ability to detain without a warrant anyone suspected to have connections to the “terrorist group” — i.e., the TPLF.
A post flagged by the DFRLab and deleted by Facebook called for foreign nationals to donate weapons to Amhara fighters. (Source: Facebook)
Following the implementation of the state of emergency, Addis Ababa Mayor Adanech Abiebie congratulated residents of the capital for taking the initiative to patrol the streets. She said the “Junta” would be buried as a result and encouraged citizens to continue acting as police and peace guards.”
Screencap of photos posted by the mayor of Addis Ababa alongside text encouraging citizens to patrol the streets after the implementation of a state of emergency that allows for arrests without warrants. (Source: Adanech Abiebie- አዳነች አቤቤ/archive)
Since the state of emergency was announced, the BBC reported that thousands of Tigrayans in Addis Ababa have been arrested under “suspicion” of supporting the TPLF, raising concerns among human rights groups.
Influence from abroad
The DFRLab also found significant amounts of online hate speech originating in diaspora communities located outside of Ethiopia.
Zehabesha, an influential Minnesota-based broadcasting company with over 1.5 million Facebook followers, posted an image of a devil and the Tigray flag alongside text calling the TPLF derogatory names. The post remained active at the time of publishing. In early November, Zehabesha also published a video interview with a Fano leader that called for all Tigrayans to be placed in concentration camps. Facebook removed the videos, though copies of it shared in the context of condemning the remarks remain on the platform.
Tweet referencing concentration camp remarks by a Fano militia leader as hate speech. (Source: TranslateET/archive)
Ethiopian Satellite Television (ESAT), based in Washington, DC, has also been accused of spreading hate speech against Tigrayans as far back as 2016. In late October, digital rights activist Berhan Taye reported a Facebook post by ESAT broadcaster Mesay Mekonen that also called for all Tigrayans to be placed in concentration camps. Facebook initially told Taye that the content did not violate its community standards policy. The post was eventually taken down, although it had been shared over 6,000 times and the same text has been copy and pasted elsewhere on the platform. (Source: btayeg/archive)
Multiple videos posted by Mekonnen Kebede, a US citizen with 69,000 followers on Facebook, were removed for hate speech and inciting violence after being flagged by the DFRLab. In one video, Mekonnen, who has close links with the Fano militia and has posted photos and videos from the front lines, called for the death of 7 million Tigrayans. Before being removed, the video had received over 182,000 views. Another now-deleted video promoting the removal of the Oromia region from Ethiopia’s map and inciting violence against members of the Oromo ethnic group was viewed more than 91,000 times. A video used to raise funds prior to Mekonnen joining the war effort was also removed, although it is unknown whether the requested funds were directed specifically to the Fano militia.
On November 2, the verified Twitter account for Kenyan writer Dikembe Disembe, which has over 330,000 followers, tweeted in English, “Ethiopia must annihilate Tigray just like Rwanda humbled the Hutus.” The post was reported and quickly removed, to which Disembe tweeted the response, “TPLF bots. TPLF is a terror group Ethiopia must rid.”
According to the BBC, posts written in local languages other than Amharic, the most widely spoken language in Ethiopia, “are less vulnerable to being reported and blocked.” This has allowed social media users across the board to demonize war refugees and call for genocide against ethnic minorities. Although recent media attention has focused on Amharic content, violent rhetoric has persisted on social media since the war broke out in 2020, and continues to spread across multiple platforms.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 17, 2021
😠😠😠 😢😢😢
✞ Alamata Massacre /የአለማጣ እልቂት ✞
✞ Togoga Massacre, June 2021/ የቶጎጋ እልቂት፤ ሰኔ ፳፻፲፫ ✞
‘Like a hell’: Survivors recall massacre
Ethiopia’s air force has killed at least 28 civilians in an airstrike on a town in the troubled region of Tigray, according to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. A total of 76 others were wounded in the attack on the market in the town of Alamata, regional Tigray TV reported in the evening. Both military aircraft and drones were involved in the attack. TPLF spokesperson Getachew Reda confirmed on Twitter that the victims were all civilians. The central government in Addis Ababa did not comment at first. Human Rights Watch had earlier said Tigrayan forces battling the Ethiopian government executed civilians in two towns located in the country’s Amhara region earlier this year. In a report released Thursday, the rights group said the killings took place between Aug. 31 and Sept. 9.
💭 My Note: Of course, this barbaric strike comes ahead of a U.N. Human Rights Council session Friday on Ethiopia. Is CIA agent-war-criminal Abiy Ahmed Ali paving the way for this?::
👉 ‘EVERY OPTION IS ON THE TABLE’: US PREPPING FOR LIBYA-STYLE INTERVENTION IN ETHIOPIA
While many in the Horn of Africa clearly need help, the Biden administration’s idea of “help” might not be exactly what they had in mind.
Amid a bloody civil conflict and increasing great-power competition between the United States and China, there are a number of alarming signs that Ethiopia will become the next Libya—an African nation where the US intervenes militarily under the pretext of stopping an impending genocide.
A considerable military buildup is now underway. Last week, the US military announced it was sending over 1,000 National Guard members to nearby Djibouti. This is on top of the special operations forces already sent in November. Perhaps most notably, a government official toldCNN that the aircraft carrier USS Essex—along with two other large amphibious vehicles—was steaming towards the Horn of Africa and standing by for further orders.
For weeks, the drums of war have been growing louder in our nation’s media. “Ethiopia’s civil war is a problem US troops can help solve,” Admiral James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of NATO, wrote in Bloomberg and The Washington Post. “Sending peacekeepers to the pivotal nation of East Africa wouldn’t be popular domestically, but may be the only way to stop the conflict,” he added. Meanwhile, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer argued that the West should establish a “no fly zone” across Ethiopia—a country of 115 million people and twice the size of France.
When it comes to Ethiopia, said head of USAID Samantha Power, one of the architects of the US intervention in Libya, “every option is on the table”—using a phrase that has long been understood to be a threat of war. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also refused to rule out sending troops into Ethiopia when directly asked.
Given its bloody record, the talk of a “humanitarian” invasion has many Ethiopians worried. “The US is looking for a pretext for military intervention in Ethiopia. The play books of interventions in Iraq, Syria, Yugoslavia, and Libya are being referred to,” Dr. Berhanu Taye, an Ethiopian physician and member of the Global Ethiopian Advocacy Nexus, told MintPress.
The military buildup comes on the back of economic actions already taken. In September, President Joe Biden labeled Ethiopia a national security threat as he imposed sanctions upon government officials. Last month, the US also placed sanctions on Eritrea, whose troops are also heavily involved in the fight against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
The White House is currently withholding over a quarter-billion dollars of aid from Ethiopia and has ended the country’s special trade status under US law, which had allowed it to export goods freely to the United States. Critics say that this could have the effect of crashing the already shaky economy, threatening over a million jobs.
Last week, a number of Western governments (including the US) signed a statement condemning the Ethiopian government for its human rights violations while fighting the TPLF, which they did not censure. The State Department is reportedly considering labeling the actions in Ethiopia a “genocide,” a word that would have considerable implications, given NATO’s self-declared “right to protect” doctrine, whereby it claims it has the right to intervene anywhere in the world to stop ethnic cleansing.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on September 5, 2021
The ghostly outlines of limbs emerge through the mist along the Setit River in eastern Sudan. As the river’s path narrows, the drifting bodies become wedged on the silty clay bank and their forms appear more clearly; men, women, teenagers and even children.
The marks of torture are easily visible on some, their arms held tightly behind their backs.
On a trip to Wad El Hilou, a Sudanese town near the border with Ethiopia, a CNN team counted three bodies in one day. Witnesses and local authorities in Sudan confirmed that in the days after the team’s departure, 11 more bodies arrived downstream.
Evidence indicates the dead are Tigrayans. Witnesses on the ground say the bodies tell a dark story of mass detentions and mass executions across the border in Humera, a town in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
CNN has spoken with dozens of witnesses collecting the bodies in Sudan, as well as international and local forensic experts and people trapped and hiding in Humera, to reveal what appears to be a new phase of ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia’s war.
Humera is one of many towns involved in the conflict that has ravaged the 112 million-strong east African country since the Ethiopian government launched an offensive in the country’s northern Tigray region in November 2020. Despite Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s initial declaration of victory in late November, the region is still wracked by fighting and CNN has previously reported on the many atrocities including torture, extrajudicial killings, and the use of rape as a weapon of war.
At the end of June this year, the balance of power shifted suddenly as Tigrayan forces recaptured the regional capital, Mekelle, and the Ethiopian government began withdrawing troops from the region. The fighting continued, however. In mid-July, Tigrayan forces announced a new offensive to recapture areas taken by the Ethiopian government.
This new offensive, witnesses told CNN, was what prompted the government forces and militia groups holding the northern town of Humera, close to the border with Eritrea and Sudan, to launch a new phase of mass incarcerations of resident Tigrayans.
CNN’s investigations indicate that the ethnic profiling, detention and killing of Tigrayans bears the hallmarks of genocide as defined by international law.
‘We’re told to look out for the bodies’
In recent weeks, a community of Tigrayans living in the Sudanese town of Wad El Hilou, 65 kilometers (40 miles) downstream from Humera, has assumed the role of excavators and grave diggers for the bodies drifting down the river known in Sudan as the Setit and in Ethiopia as the Tekeze.
It is arduous and distressing work. The stench from the bodies fills the air as they first extract each corpse from the riverbed and then dig new graves for them, before performing the burial rites.
Tigrayan community leader Gebretensae Gebrekristos, also known as Gerri, helps coordinate and document the recovery of the bodies in Sudan.
Tigrayan community leader Gebretensae Gebrekristos, also known as Gerri, helps coordinate and document the recovery of the bodies in Sudan.
Gebretensae Gebrekristos, known as “Gerri,” is one of the community’s leaders; he helps coordinate the grim task with a solemn determination. In total the community estimates at least 60 bodies have been found so far. He explained how the group is certain the bodies are Tigrayans from Humera.
“We get calls from people in Humera that witnesses — often escaped detainees — saw people marched down to the river in one of the facilities and heard gunshots, or that a number of people were taken by soldiers from the detention facilities and never returned. We’re told to look out for their bodies coming down the river.”
The bodies first appeared in Sudan in July when the river was at its highest volume due to the rainy season. Sudanese water engineers told CNN the speed of its flow then would enable the bodies to drift from Humera to Wad El Hilou in approximately two to three hours. Wad El Hilou is a natural pinch-point in the river’s path — and so, when the bodies arrived, they floated towards the banks.
According to Gerri, his community usually finds the exact number of bodies it has been told to expect.
Sixteen-year-old Natay and 17-year-old Gebrey, whose names have been changed for their safety, are among the Tigrayans who said they fled prison camps in Humera. Now in Wad El Hilou, they confirmed to CNN that they heard reports of men, with their hands tied, being marched in single file towards the Humera riverfront, to the area between St. Mary’s and St. Michael’s Church. The boys both say they heard shots ring out and the men did not return.
Natay said he remembered feeling paralyzed: “I was so fearful, thinking that they would kill me and throw me [in] too.”
Sudanese authorities in Wad El Hilou have filed police and coroner reports for each body found in their territory, documenting evidence of the extensive torture and “execution-style” bullet entry wounds found on many of the bodies, the authorities told CNN. Both local Sudanese authorities and forensic experts say all the bodies retrieved so far were likely dead before they hit the water.
In a statement issued via US public relations firm Mercury, the Ethiopian government said it was investigating the allegations. “In light of several inconsistencies in the allegations, we are working with the relevant authorities to gather evidence and will prosecute any individuals found to have committed crimes to the fullest extent of the law,” a spokesperson said.
“The government is keen to reiterate our desire to ensure a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Tigray and is actively working to secure a ceasefire.”
‘Everyone was sick’
For so many of the Tigrayans in Sudan, these bodies could have been people they knew. Many have fled from Humera and still have families there.
Temesgen, 24, and Yonas, 25, say they escaped together from a warehouse in Humera, called Enda Yitbarek, which they describe as being used as a makeshift mass detention camp for thousands of Tigrayans. CNN has changed their names for their safety. They were both imprisoned for just over two weeks.
“I was playing around my house, then they collected me and took me because I am Tigrayan,” Temesgen recalled. “We didn’t do anything, they just collected me and detained me.”
Ethiopia is at war with itself. Here’s what you need to know about the conflict
Inside the warehouse, people were crammed together on the floor without rooms or partitions to create privacy, he said.
“They weren’t providing us food and we didn’t even have access to the toilet,” Yonas said. “Some people were toileting inside the warehouse.”
For Temesgen the real horror was the lack of medical assistance. “Everyone was sick with flu and not getting medical help. They weren’t sending us to hospital,” he said.
Former detainees described to CNN prisoners of all ages squeezed tightly together — from mothers with young children to teenagers to men in their 70s.
Temesgen and Yonas say they escaped while on a rare toilet break permitted by the guards, and made the journey to Sudan. They both talked of multiple prison camps dotted around the city of Humera.
CNN spoke to dozens of other escapees from these camps and, based on their accounts, estimates there are up to nine locations where it is thought thousands of Tigrayans are being detained.
Ethnic profiling
Tigrayans still inside Humera told CNN that they live in constant fear of being detained or killed. They spoke of brazen ethnic profiling whereby residents of Tigrayan ethnicity are targeted and those of other ethnicities are safe, particularly those of the Amhara ethnicity; militia from Amhara have fought alongside Ethiopian government forces in Tigray.
People of mixed ethnicity face an uncertain fate; residents told CNN that an Amhara ID card can suffice but to be seen socializing with Tigrayans will put someone at risk nonetheless.
Alem, whose name has also been changed for security reasons, is half-Tigrayan but has a non-Tigrayan ID card and has been helping Tigrayans hide in his home in Humera while the arrests continue. Relatives abroad have urged him to flee, but he insists it’s his duty to stay and help those who are targeted.
Rahel, not her real name, is also Tigrayan but has a non-Tigrayan ID card and says she has been visiting friends and relatives in the prison camps despite the questions posed by guards. She is horrified by the conditions for those detained.
“They can’t move, they are not getting enough sanitation, no food, no water and no medicine. If they feel sick and die, no one cares. They are hungry and thirsty. How could they feel good thinking it’s their turn the next day, knowing their friends were killed yesterday? The guards don’t care about life,” she said.
People in Humera who spoke to CNN repeatedly mentioned the disappearances of members of the Tigrayan community. Those still free assumed they were detained in the camps, but those who escaped from the prisons told CNN that people were frequently summoned by guards and would never return. Others spoke of rare sightings of bodies being dumped into the river.
Across the water in Sudan, Yonas recalled the disappearances from the Enda Yitbarek warehouse.
“They weren’t torturing us but they were taking prisoners often at night and they never came back,” Yonas said. “We don’t know whether they killed them or not, but after they took them they never came back, and their families reported their disappearances.”
Residents of Humera with whom CNN spoke firmly believe the bodies arriving in Wad El Hilou are from their town. Several are in regular touch with those who escaped across the border to Sudan and when the bodies began arriving, news spread fast.
One man has been identified locally as Misganawu, a well-known barber in Humera. ”He had two nicknames, Totit and Gundi,” Alem recalled. “I knew Totit very well when he was working in Humera in that hairdressing shop. He was born and raised in Humera.”
Signs of torture
Ongoing independent investigations by international and local forensic experts found no evidence that the victims had drowned. The experts, who asked not to be identified due to security concerns, told CNN that the bodies had all been exposed to some form of chemical agent after death, leading to a process which had effectively preserved them before entering the water.
The fact all the bodies were in a similar state indicated they had been stored in a similar environment, possibly a storage facility or a mass grave, before being dumped into the river, the experts said.
This state of preservation makes it easier to identify the marks on the bodies and what could have caused them, the experts said.
Some of those found had their arms bound tightly behind their backs, in keeping with a torture technique called “tabay.” Several had their hands tied with small gauge yellow electrical wire and bone breakages and dislocations further indicate additional pressure was placed on their bodies before death.
The experts say they are in a race against time to preserve evidence, in case it is needed for potential war crimes prosecutions in the future. They also confirmed the signs of torture apparent to the group in Sudan who’ve been collecting the corpses.
While investigators in Sudan continue to examine the bodies, Tigrayans and those helping them in Humera face a daily struggle to remain free from arrest and abuse.
And Tigrayans like Gerri, on the other side of the border, mourn and dig shallow graves for the bodies that drift downstream.
Speaking by the first riverside grave he dug, marked with a makeshift wooden cross, Gerri said it pained him to be unable to give them a proper burial.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on September 5, 2021
Sources said that after a series of victories by Tigrayan Defence Forces, the occupying forces in Humera started to purge ethnic Tigrayans.
Courtesy: The Tlegraph
By Lucy Kassa
Forces occupying a major city in Ethiopia are throwing thousands of men, women and children into makeshift “concentration camps”, cutting off limbs and dumping mutilated bodies into mass graves as part of an orchestrated ethnic purge, a dozen separate witnesses told The Telegraph.
Ethnic Amhara forces have been going “door-to-door” to round up anyone who is ethnic Tigrayan in the latest harrowing evidence of population cleansing in Ethiopia’s blood-drenched civil war.
“Feven Berhe was an innocent resident who owned a small shop. They took her to Tekeze river and shot her,” said one resident, who knew the 40-year-old victim well.
“Before they killed her, they removed her eyes and cut off her legs. They did not let anyone pick her body up and bury her.”
Humera is a city of about 50,000 near Ethiopia’s border with Eritrea and Sudan. Because of its strategic location, it was one of the first places to be attacked when Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrea’s dictator launched a devastating pincer attack to crush Tigray’s regional government in November.
For the last year, ethnic Amhara forces, who hail from a neighbouring region and are allied to the Nobel laureate, have controlled the city, along with swathes of western Tigray.
Sources said that after a stunning series of victories by the Tigrayan Defence Forces in late June, the occupying forces in Humera started to purge ethnic Tigrayans in the city.
The Telegraph understands that on 15 July, Amhara forces held a public meeting in the main municipality hall in Humera to decide the fate of Tigrayans in the areas they controlled.
“They said this; ‘We should exterminate all Tigrayan residents in the city. We must cleanse them all,” said one man who claims he attended the public meeting.
Multiple residents said that a massive campaign of arrests started soon after the meeting.
“They have been going from house to house arresting everyone. No Tigrayan is left except those who fled to Sudan or found a hiding place in the city. They have a list of Tigrayan residents from the administrative offices,” said another man.
“If it is written in your identity card that you are Tigrayan, there is no mercy,” said another.
Children displaced by fighting in northern Ethiopia play among sacks of clothes at the Addis Fana School where they are temporarily sheltered,
At the beginning of August, 43 bloated and bloodied bodies were found floating down the Tekeze River, which separates the region from Sudan.
The Telegraph understands that these were some of the original victims of the purge. Residents say that when the floating bodies attracted huge international attention, Amhara forces started dumping bodies elsewhere.
Elderly people, children and pregnant women have all been taken to several detention centres and three different warehouses across the city, which have been turned into makeshift “concentration camps”, survivors said.
The Telegraph could not confirm these accounts because of major reporting restrictions in Tigray.
However, imagery analysis by Vigil Monitor (previously DX Open Network), an atrocity early warning and detection research organisation based in the UK, shows that ethnic Amhara forces and allied Ethiopian troops have been stationed at ‘numerous’ centres for the past few months.
One man the Telegraph spoke to called Gizau claimed that he had escaped one of the centres by convincing militiamen he was not fully ethnic Tigrayan.
“We were 250 detainees. The Amhara forces take detainees every night and bring new ones. The ones they take never come back,” he said.
Gizau and ten other witnesses said that people were being killed and dumped in pits around the three warehouses and in craters outside the city.
Satellite imagery partially corroborates the sources. It shows a pit roughly the size of a swimming pool outside one of the warehouses, which has been gradually filled up since mid-July.
There is a similar pattern of suspicious pits being filled up slowly over the same time period at the other locations.
“There are very suspicious holes in the ground next to the camps, in an area where no other hole gets filled with earth,” say analysts at Vigil Monitor.
The state president for Ethiopia’s Amhara region Agegnuh Teshager and the Ethiopian Prime Minister’s Office were both approached for comment on The Telegraph’s findings bit neither responded.
*Names have been changed in this article to protect identities.
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)
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