💭 Germany’s National Public Television. ‘ZDF’ Africa correspondent, Timm Kröger, reports directly from Mekelle, Axum, and Shire. Clips from @ZDFheute news report shows a portion of mass graves from the Axum massacre and IDPs who are living in cramped and terrible conditions in Shire. He randomly interviews people in Axum who confirmed the massacre as as reported by Amnesty International.
A CNN investigation has uncovered evidence of the torture, mass detention and execution of residents in the the town of Humera in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. CNN’s Nima Elbagir reports.
💭 Selected Comments from CNN Channel:
➡ This is horrible. I can’t wrap my brain around the amount of violence human beings are willing to inflict on each other.
➡ The people who did this are nothing at all but rabid, cruel and most reprehensible monsters on the planet. They deserve the same fate and THEN some.
➡ People are capable of such horrific evil …. I don’t understand why, 😓, I hope there will be some justice. These people need help. International pressure must be placed on the Ethiopian govt. I have so much respect for those people in the Tigray region trying to help bury the dead and act as witnesses to the atrocities happening to their people. Such anguish and misery for these poor people.
➡ I am ashamed by the callously apathetic attitude of the comments below. These are our fellow human beings! Maybe we cannot save all of them but the absolute minimum owed them, as people, is to speak respectfully of them and their experiences until independent investigation finds evidence that torture and murder is NOT at work. You always assume the victim is telling the truth until evidence to the contrary is found.
➡ This is surely the tip of the iceberg! The world is just watching it with bare eyes…
➡ I worked in Atlanta at a Whole Foods about 15 years ago, and we had a huge population of east africans there. Ethiopians, Somalis and Yemenis. There was a huge amount of tension between one of our Ethiopian workers and the two Tigrayans, and one of the Tigrayan women told me about all sorts of hideous things she witnessed at the hands of the Ethiopian military. The oppression has been there for years, but it seems like it’s escalating
➡ The meek shall inherit the earth. May God rest their souls.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on August 6, 2021
After Ethiopia Trip, USAID Administrator Samantha Power Shares View Of Conflict.
Abiy Ahmed’s Brutal Campaign Against the People of Tigray Pushes Ethiopia to the brink.
Samantha Power Has Long Championed Humanitarian Intervention. Ethiopia’s Crisis Is Putting Her to The Test.
On the day Samantha Power landed in Ethiopia this week, its civil war — now escalating and spreading beyond the northern region of Tigray — entered its 10th month.
Amid allegations that Ethiopian troops and their allies have committed war crimes and ethnic cleansing and have driven parts of Tigray into famine, the United States has already withheld security assistance and effectively banned travel for top officials.
But Power, who is in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, holds the biggest American lever of influence over Addis Ababa: more than $1 billion in annual aid ranging from health and education support to food and emergency humanitarian response, which makes the United States the largest aid donor to Ethiopia.
It’s a moment seemingly made for Power, the former U.N. ambassador under President Barack Obama who came to prominence in 2002 with her book “A Problem From Hell,” which excoriated American inaction during mass killings in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, Europe during World War II and the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
“Samantha Power is a world-renowned voice of conscience and moral clarity — challenging and rallying the international community to stand up for the dignity and humanity of all people,” President Biden said in a statement when he appointed her.
Her work inspired a generation of humanitarian activists and helped popularize the notion that Washington bore a unique responsibility to protect the world’s most vulnerable populations, including with military force if necessary.
Power’s one-day trip Wednesday to Ethiopia, which didn’t include a meeting with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, was a test of whether she can restore faith in America’s role in preventing mass atrocities beyond its borders. So far, the U.S. measures curtailing security assistance and sanctioning officials have had little effect beyond turning Ethiopian sentiment against Washington.
“The United States has been working in Ethiopia for 60 years. USAID has spent a billion dollars in the last year in this country, including several hundred million dollars in development assistance. We’re delivering tomorrow 1.4 million vaccines,” Power said in a phone interview from the airport in Addis Ababa as she wrapped up her visit.
“There is so much we want to do together, but this is an own-goal,” she added, referring to the government’s increasingly antagonistic attitude to humanitarian aid groups, journalists and allies in the West.
Unable to control Tigray, Ethiopia isolates region already beset by famine and war
Ethiopia’s government accuses those allies of failing to back its military offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a group the government has designated as terrorists but whom the West dealt with over three decades when the TPLF controlled the country before Abiy’s rise.
Top Ethiopian officials have also accused some international aid groups of not just siding with the TPLF but also helping smuggle arms to it, and they have alleged that Western governments and media have overplayed atrocities linked to Ethiopian government forces while overlooking those allegedly committed by the TPLF.
Addis Ababa has responded defensively to allegations that it has committed crimes against civilians and hindered aid. The government puts nearly all the blame on the TPLF.
Inside the Biden administration, the option of using military force to stop the bloodshed in Tigray is seen as a non-starter. But withdrawing substantial amounts of aid is also seen as a poor option, because it is unlikely to change the Ethiopian government’s war strategy and instead deepen what is already one of the world’s most dire humanitarian crises.
Pressed on how and when punitive measures on aid might come into play, Power said she was still in wait-and-see mode. As for what she achieved at her meetings in Addis Ababa, she said she only got more commitments.
“It’s not the kind of track record that would give one confidence yet that those commitments are imminently to be met,” she said. Her requests were in line with the State Department’s recent public statements: that humanitarian aid be unhindered in delivery and that government-aligned troops from neighboring Eritrea as well as militias from the country’s Amhara region withdraw beyond Tigray’s prewar borders.
The State Department has also called on Tigrayan forces to withdraw from the Amhara and Afar regions, where they have recently gone on the offensive, displacing around a quarter of a million civilians.
“If we do not see progress in these domains, I think the administration made clear that we will not be left with much of a choice,” she said. The European Union has already withdrawn most of its financial support for aid programs in Ethiopia.
The outlook in Ethiopia is decidedly grim. The government initially pushed the TPLF out of Tigray’s main towns, but the TPLF retook most of the region last month in an offensive that analysts say resulted in a large portion of the Ethiopian army being killed or captured.
The TPLF has since moved into neighboring regions with the stated objective of obliterating what’s left of the government and its allies’ military capacity. On Thursday, Reuters reported that the TPLF had taken control of Lalibela, a sizable town within the Amhara region and home to Ethiopia’s famed 12th-century rock-hewed churches.
The Ethiopian government has in turn sought to recruit widely from regional militias, drawing in fighters from parts of the country previously uninvolved in the conflict.
Asked at a news conference in Addis Ababa about Abiy’s recent use of words like “weeds,” “cancer” and “disease” to refer to the TPLF, Power cautioned that “there are many, many people out there who hear rhetoric, hateful rhetoric or dehumanizing rhetoric and take measures into their own hands.”
Power’s past advocacy for humanitarian intervention, including with U.S. military force, has fallen out of favor in recent years as public confidence in Washington’s ability to reshape distant lands wanes. U.S. forces will conclude a 20-year occupation in Afghanistan in September, and the military will formally end combat operations in Iraq by the end of the year, Biden said last week. The two missions have cost thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and fallen far short of U.S. ambitions to bring about stability, democracy or prosperity. The protracted chaos and bloodshed in Libya following the ouster of Moammar Gaddafi in a NATO-led military operation in 2011 also dampened the appeal of humanitarian interventions.
Defenders of the administration say its lack of bold action in confronting the Ethiopian crisis does not indicate a lack of concern.
“There is a false narrative that the Biden administration does not care about mass atrocities, fueled by its decision to risk mass violence in Afghanistan,” said Richard Gowan, a U.N. analyst at the International Crisis Group. “But if you look at Washington’s approach to Ethiopia in particular, you see that the new administration does still have strong humanitarian instincts.”
Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield and the U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, “have all thrown themselves into efforts to halt the Tigrayan war, which hardly seemed to register with the outgoing Trump team,” Gowan said.
Thomas-Greenfield took to Twitter on Wednesday to denounce the Ethiopian government’s decision this week to revoke the operating licenses of Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council, two humanitarian organizations known for their work in war zones.
“This suspension is unacceptable. I know the work of MSF and NRC well, and they are internationally respected,” she wrote, using the French abbreviation for Doctors Without Borders. “Ethiopia must reconsider this decision.”
At least a dozen aid workers have been killed since November, when Abiy sent troops to Tigray to fight the TPLF after the group allegedly staged an attack on a military base.
The United Nations says the war has left 400,000 people facing famine, while UNICEF estimated last week that more than 100,000 children in Tigray could suffer from life-threatening acute malnutrition in the next 12 months — 10 times the annual average.
Meanwhile, “supplies are just running out,” Power said.
👉 The handwriting is there on the wall for anyone who will see it.
It happened 500 years ago with the 1st Jihad campaign of Ahmed (Gragn) ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi and Ottoman Turkey, it’s happening now courtesy of Abiy Ahmed (Gragn) Ali. We won’t be surprised if the whole the massacre was planned and carried out with the help of Mohammed ‘Farmajo’ (Somali) + Mustafa Mohammed Omar (President of the Somali Regional State in Ethiopia, who is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and brother-in-Jihad to evil Abiy Ahmed) + Minnesotan Somali Jihadi Ilhan Omar who went to see cruel Isaias Afewerki in Eritrea, two years ago. She even visited the St. Mary Church of Asmara. Wow!
❖ It’s Jihad against Ethiopia’s Holy of the Hollies St. Mary of Zion Church:
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 15, 2021
For the last six months, communications blackouts and appalling access for human rights researchers and journalists alike have shrouded a conflict raging across the Tigray Region.
But as tens of thousands of Eritrean and Ethiopian national army troops have battled forces loyal to the regional government of Tigray, information has slowly and surely leaked out.
Continuing Atrocities and Denial of Humanitarian Access in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region
US Department of State PRESS STATEMENT
The United States is gravely concerned by the increasing number of confirmed cases of military forces blocking humanitarian access to parts of the Tigray region. This unacceptable behavior places the 5.2 million people in the region in immediate need of humanitarian assistance at even greater risk. The United States unequivocally calls upon the Governments of Eritrea and Ethiopia to take all necessary steps to ensure that their forces in Tigray cease and desist this reprehensible conduct. We also again call on all parties to comply with obligations under international humanitarian law, including those relevant to the protection of civilians, and to cease immediately all hostilities and allow relief to reach those suffering and in greatest need of assistance. The Ethiopian government should lead in this regard and immediately facilitate full and unhindered access for humanitarian actors to all parts of the Tigray region.
There are many credible reports of armed forces in Tigray committing acts of violence against civilians, including gender-based violence and other human rights abuses and atrocities. The conduct of the Eritrean Defense Forces and Amhara regional forces have been particularly egregious. The continued presence of Eritrean forces in Tigray further undermines Ethiopia’s stability and national unity. We again call upon the Government of Eritrea to remove its forces from Tigray. Both Eritrean and Ethiopian authorities have repeatedly promised such a withdrawal, but we have seen no movement towards implementation. We equally urge the Government of Ethiopia to withdraw Amhara regional forces from the Tigray region and ensure that effective control of western Tigray is returned to the Transitional Government of Tigray. Prime Minister Abiy and President Isais must hold all those responsible for atrocities accountable.
👉“There is evidence of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Western Tigray. If carried out with the intent of eliminating Tigrayans, it may be classified as genocide,” says Helen Clark, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand.
👉“Taken all together, the serious crimes being committed against Tigrayans, including massacres of civilians of all ages, may meet the definition of genocide,” Ms Clark added.
🔥 #TigrayGenocide: A ‘pathetic’ international reaction:
„The silence from key international actors has been deafening”
🔥‘አሳዛኝ’ ዓለም አቀፍ ምላሽለትግራኝ ጭፍጨፋ፤
“ቁልፍ ከሆኑ ዓለም አቀፍ ተዋንያን ዝምታው ያደንቁራል“
👉 Imagine The Outrage if The 150,000 Dead Tigrayan Ethiopians Had Actually Been Palestinian, and The Aggressors Israeli Troops. We’re observing this right now! Watch how the world reacts to the current escalated Fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants.
Six months into northern Ethiopia’s shadow war, its atrocities are becoming harder to hide
When the first American bombs crashed into Baghdad in January 1991, the nature of war fundamentally changed.
Images of the First Gulf War were bounced off satellites and broadcast live to tens of millions of homes around the world.
Everyone saw how Iraq was systematically taken apart blow by blow. Since then, war has become more visible – its crimes ever harder to hide. But one conflict in the far north of Ethiopia has bucked the trend spectacularly, defying the information age.
For the last six months, communications blackouts and appalling access for human rights researchers and journalists alike have shrouded a conflict raging across the Tigray Region in shadows.
But as tens of thousands of Eritrean and Ethiopian national army troops have battled forces loyal to the regional government of Tigray, information has slowly and surely leaked out.
Humanitarian reports, grainy mobile phone videos, refugees accounts and journalistic dispatches all point the same way: dozens if not hundreds of mass killings, a systematic campaign of rape, ethnic cleansing and starvation being used as a weapon of war.
Last week, another bombshell hit. A video smuggled out of the country shows the head of Ethiopia’s Orthodox Church Abune Mathias saying the Ethiopian state is committing a ‘genocide’ on the ethnic Tigrayan people.
Several senior independent observers horrified by the tepid international response to the Tigray crisis broke ranks to tell the Telegraph what they thought was happening.
“It is crimes against humanity. It’s the crime of extermination. It’s the crime of mass starvation. It’s certainly a lot worse than Darfur,” says Alex du Waal, one of the foremost international experts on the Horn of Africa.
“There is evidence of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Western Tigray. If carried out with the intent of eliminating Tigrayans, it may be classified as genocide,” says Helen Clark, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand.
“Taken all together, the serious crimes being committed against Tigrayans, including massacres of civilians of all ages, may meet the definition of genocide,” Ms Clark added.
How did it come to this?
Tigray is populated mainly by ethnic Tigrayans who make up a small part of Ethiopia’s myriad of more than 80 ethnic groups.
Despite their small size, the ethnic group has played a huge role in the country’s modern history. In the 1980s, the Tigrayan’s People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) led a rebel coalition to oust the Derg, Ethiopia’s Marxist dictatorship.
For the next three decades, the TPLF dominated Africa’s second-most populous nation, with Tigrayans holding key positions in the country’s government, armed forces and economy. But major TPLF abuses led to widespread hatred for the ethnic group.
Ethiopia’s current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed swept to power on a wave of anger at the status quo in April 2018. Mr Abiy moved to sideline the old Tigrayan guard and tried to increase the federal government’s power over regional governments.
Tigray openly resisted and held regional elections. An escalating war of words turned into an open conflict in November 2020. Mr Abiy accused the TPLF of attacking a major federal government military base and launched a massive offensive to oust the group.
Mr Abiy enlisted the help of Eritrea, whose dictator Isaias Afwerki is a longtime foe of the TPLF and axe-wielding ethnic Amhara militias, to crush Tigray’s battle-hardened fighters in a three-pronged attack.
But any hopes of a quick blitzkrieg offensive have evaporated. Instead, the conflict has descended into a guerilla war with the Tigrayan Defence Forces, and a vast humanitarian catastrophe spread across the region of six million people.
An estimated 1.7 million people were displaced across the region at the end of March, while 4.5 million people are in need of emergency aid, according to the United Nations.
More than 60,000 refugees made it into eastern Sudan before Ethiopian forces sealed the border, preventing their very own Rohingya moment.
The situation is now so desperate that many women IDPs and refugees are selling sex for as little as £1, says the International Rescue Committee.
Breaking through the blackout
Only a handful of journalists have been granted limited access to Tigray. Their reports tell of horrifying suffering and abuses committed by all parties.
But most human rights analysts and reporters have had to investigate dozens of reported atrocities from a distance, calling up hundreds of survivors on encrypted lines to corroborate accounts and even trying to rent satellites to take pictures of mass graves.
Earlier this year, the Telegraph obtained the first video evidence of what appears to be a war crime carried out by the Ethiopian army. Around 40 bodies in civilian clothes can be seen in the video at Debre Abay in Central Tigray.
“You should have finished off the survivors,” the cameraman nonchalantly says as soldiers walk past a mortally injured man. One video analysed by CNN, the BBC, Amnesty and Bellingcat shows what appears to be Ethiopian soldiers killing dozens of men, then pushing their bodies off a cliff.
More recently, this paper published testimony from more than a dozen witnesses alleging that Ethiopian and Eritrean troops went from house to house in the Temben region of central Tigray, killing 182 people in the second week of February.
“I saw dead bodies scattered, bodies half-eaten by dogs. The soldiers did not allow anyone to get close to the corpses,” one 26-year-old man told reporters by phone at the time.
Almost every atrocity investigation has been hotly contested or flat out denied as fake news by the Ethiopian government in Addis Ababa. One Ethiopian ambassador has even insinuated journalists at this paper were paid up TPLF agents.
Yet observers say such abuses are probably just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. One team of researchers at the University of Ghent has documented almost 500 events where people were allegedly executed or massacred, mainly by Eritrean, Ethiopian national troops or militiamen.
After reporting extensively on the conflict for the last six months, Tsedale Lemma, the founder of the influential Addis Standard, believes ‘genocidal acts’ are being committed.
“Many people argue that because the number of people massacred may not be in its hundreds of thousands, it doesn’t qualify as genocide. What this argument misses is intent.”
“Intent, not just numbers, qualify acts of massacres as genocide. There are objectively corroborated reports of, for example, young men of fighting age being intentionally targeted and massacred.”
There are also reports of Tigrayans being forced to eat leaves to survive, displaced people turning up emaciated at ransacked healthcare centres and dying in their sleep of hunger.
One survey by a cluster of humanitarian groups found that half of all women surveyed were acutely malnourished. Experts have raised the alarm saying that starvation is being used as a weapon of war in the conflict.
The World Peace Foundation based in Boston released a report in April stating that food supplies were being destroyed and that the region’s elaborate food security system was being dismantled.
“There is a campaign that has been started to prevent farming. Regrettably, this campaign is being done by some of those tasked with law enforcement,” Abebe Gebrehiwot, deputy head of Tigray’s interim government, told Ethiopian state media on Monday.
A ‘pathetic’ international reaction
The silence from key international actors has been deafening. Over the last six months, the UN chief Antonio Guterres, the UN Security Council and the African Union have all refused to take any firm stance on the atrocities in Tigray.
Instead, they have spoken in muted tones about the need to get humanitarian access to the region. Part of the reason for this is Ethiopia’s considerable diplomatic heft — the African Union has its headquarters in Addis Ababa.
China and Russia have also blocked any serious attempt by Western nations in the Security Council to condemn the atrocities. Multiple critics said that part of the reason for Mr Guterres’ relative silence on Tigray was that he is up for reelection in January 2022 and needs African votes.
“UN Secretary-General António Guterres has abjectly abandoned his responsibilities. History will not judge him kindly even if he wins enough votes for reelection,” said Mr Waal.
Mr Guterres’ office said he was fully engaged in seeking an end to the conflict and “continues to call for all perpetrators of such violations to be held accountable and face justice.”
For Dr Mukesh Kapila, a former top UN official who raised the alarm about the ongoing genocide in Darfur in 2003, the situation is clear. “If you look at the pattern of killings and other incidents including sexual violence, use of starvation – there is a pattern of genocidal events. They’re taking place in close juxtaposition to each other. That points to a degree of orchestration.
“The fact that these genocidal acts are taking place in repeated places – points towards an organisation, it points towards a strategy. That is why I think of what is going on in Tigray as a set of genocidal acts, which taken together point towards an overall genocide,” Dr Kapila says.
“People are talking about this privately. But it hasn’t caught on publicly because it’s a huge, huge business to accuse a state of genocide. If you declare genocide convention, you are obliged to act,” Dr Kapila claims.
The US is beginning to wake up to the crisis. The US special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, issued a stark warning saying that if the violence from Tigray spread across the nation of 110m it would make Syria look like “child’s play”.
Billene Seyoum, the spokesperson for the Ethiopian Prime Minister, hit back against the allegations of atrocities in Tigray.
“Whether from leading Ethiopian or international observers, such allegations need to be procedurally and thoroughly investigated on the ground and the results made public, which international and national human rights entities are doing,” she said in a statement.
“Anecdotal and unsubstantiated testimonies cannot count as fact and only serve to perpetuate a skewed narrative of a country. Ethiopia is making and realising commitment towards ensuring investigations take place.”
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 