💭 An accelerating wave of Ethiopian air strikes in Tigray region has killed a reported 108 civilians, jeopardizing fragile peace talks and further damaging an emergency aid effort that is already on the verge of ending because of blocked supplies.
Western leaders, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have been pushing for humanitarian aid and peace negotiations to end the 14-month-old war in northern Ethiopia that has killed tens of thousands of people. But the latest volley of air strikes and the rising civilian death toll have angered Tigrayan leaders and hampered the aid effort.
The United Nations human rights office, in a statement on Friday, said the air strikes could constitute a war crime if the perpetrators had not verified whether the targets were military objectives.
“We are alarmed by the multiple, deeply disturbing reports we continue to receive of civilian casualties and destruction of civilian objects resulting from air strikes in Ethiopia’s Tigray region,” said Liz Throssell, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
She cited reports that the air strikes have killed 108 civilians and injured 75 in the past two weeks. The air strikes have reportedly hit a refugee camp, a training institute, a flour mill, an airport, a private minibus and a camp for internally displaced people.
The deadliest strike was last Friday at the Dedebit camp for displaced people, killing at least 59 people and injuring dozens of others. Another strike, on Monday, caused devastation at a mill where farmers had gathered to grind their grains into flour. The air strikes are believed to be inflicted by Turkish, Chinese and Iranian drones, imported by Ethiopia’s military in recent months.
Fisseha Tekle, an Ethiopia researcher for Amnesty International, told The Globe and Mail that the warring parties must “stop indiscriminate attacks” that hit civilians and civilian infrastructure. He called on the Ethiopian government to allow access for international and independent investigations of the air strikes.
Last week, as Ethiopia celebrated Orthodox Christmas, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced the release of several imprisoned opposition leaders, including some from the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). He called for an “all-inclusive national dialogue” and a peaceful solution to Ethiopia’s problems.
But the air strikes have undermined the prospects for peace. A spokesman for the TPLF, Getachew Reda, tweeted last week that the Prime Minister’s rhetoric about peace was contradicted by “his daily routine of denying medication to helpless children and sending drones targeting civilians.”
This week, Mr. Getachew noted that a drone strike had hit Tigray just minutes after the departure of the African Union’s diplomatic envoy, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, who had been discussing peace measures with Tigrayan leaders in the regional capital Mekelle.
Mr. Trudeau, in a quiet diplomatic campaign, has held repeated telephone talks with Mr. Abiy and other leaders in the Horn of Africa in recent weeks, including a conversation with Mr. Obasanjo on Thursday. His office said he had welcomed the envoy’s efforts, but “expressed concern over challenges in ensuring unhindered access to and delivery of humanitarian assistance for those affected by the conflict.”
The drone strikes are another obstacle to the desperately needed supply of aid in Tigray, where the UN estimates that 90 per cent of the population needs emergency assistance. Some aid agencies have already been forced to suspend operations in the area where the air strike hit the displaced people’s camp, because of the continuing threat of further drone attacks, the UN says.
Many humanitarian workers have been killed since the beginning of the Tigray conflict in November 2020. One aid agency, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), says it is still trying to understand how three of its staff workers were killed in an apparent execution in Tigray last June. The three bodies were found within 400 metres of their well-marked MSF car and “their injuries showed that each suffered multiple close-range gunshot wounds,” the agency said in a statement this week.
This shows that the attack was an intentional killing, MSF said. It said it has asked the Ethiopian and Tigrayan authorities to provide information about the presence of their armed forces in the area at the time, but it is still awaiting answers.
A major UN agency, the World Food Programme, warned on Friday that its food assistance in northern Tigray is “about to grind to a halt” because intense fighting has blocked the transport of fuel and food.
No convoys of WFP aid have reached Mekelle since mid-December, the agency said. Stocks of nutritionally fortified food for malnourished children and women are now exhausted, and the last of its cereals, pulses and oil will be distributed next week, it said.
“We’re now having to choose who goes hungry to prevent another from starving,” said WFP Eastern Africa director Michael Dunford in a statement. “We’re on the edge of a humanitarian disaster.”
Across northern Ethiopia, the WFP estimates that 9.4 million people need humanitarian food assistance – the highest number recorded so far, and an increase of 2.7 million in the past four months.
The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is himself from Tigray, said this week that the Ethiopian government is denying food and medicine to its own people in the region.
“Nowhere in the world are we witnessing hell like in Tigray,” he told reporters. “Imagine a complete blockade of seven million people for more than a year. And there is no food. There is no medication, no medicine. No electricity. No telecom. No media.”
After his comments, the Ethiopian government said it had sent a letter of complaint to the WHO, accusing Dr. Tedros of “misconduct” and interference in Ethiopia’s internal affairs.
Other WHO officials, however, have made similar comments to those of Dr. Tedros. The agency’s director of emergencies, Michael Ryan, said this week that the lack of access to basic medicine in Tigray is “an insult to our humanity.” He warned of “catastrophic, imminent health consequences.”
💭 “At least 28 killed in Islamist attack on South Sudanese Christian community,”
At least 28 people were killed and 57 houses burned down in an attack by Islamist extremists against the Christian community of Yith Pabol, Aweil East county, South Sudan, in early January.
Bishop Joseph Mamer Manot said on 6 January that “massive displacement has happened, and the humanitarian situation is alarming as food and other property have been burned down into ashes, leaving survivors with no shelters, no food and no safe drinking water”.
The incident is the latest example of attacks against South Sudanese Christians by Arab Muslims from the Republic of Sudan, along the disputed border between the two countries.
A similar attack the same week in nearby Miodol village left at least four dead, with three others missing and several houses destroyed.
The state security adviser, Joseph Akook Aleu, said Monday that the state government decided to close the road to Sudan because of the ongoing attacks and killing of civilians.
South Sudan is about 60% Christian, mostly Roman Catholic and Anglican. By grace of God and the blessings of His Beatitude Theodore II, the Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa, Metropolitan Narkissos (Gammoh) of Nubia founded the first Orthodox Christian missionary center in South Sudan in 2015.
💭 Seis meses después del asesinato de nuestros compañeros María, Tedros y Yohannes, siguen sin estar claras las circunstancias y las responsabilidades.
El 24 de junio de 2021, María Hernández, de 35 años, nuestra coordinadora de emergencias; Yohannes Halefom Reda, de 32 años, nuestro coordinador adjunto; y Tedros Gebremariam, de 31 años, nuestro conductor, se dirigían por la región de Tigray, desde Abi Adi hacia el sur, para buscar y recoger a heridos en zonas afectadas por intensos combates entre la RDFE, sus aliados y el FLPT. El equipo de MSF en Abi Adi había recibido información previa referente a un gran número de heridos en Shoate Egum, una aldea cercana al lugar del incidente. A poco más de una hora de viaje el vehículo se detuvo.
El 25 de junio, localizamos su vehículo vacío y sus cuerpos fueron encontrados a una distancia de entre 100 y 400 metros del coche. Sus lesiones mostraban que los tres habían sufrido múltiples disparos a corta distancia. El tipo de heridas sufridas por nuestros compañeros no correspondían a las que hubieran resultado de un fuego cruzado, y confirman que fue un asesinato intencionado de tres trabajadores de ayuda humanitaria. Cada uno de ellos era claramente reconocible como civil y trabajador humanitario en el momento del incidente. El vehículo, claramente identificado con el logotipo de MSF y dos banderas de la organización, recibió numerosos disparos y fue incendiado.
Durante los últimos seis meses, hemos hecho todo lo posible por entender lo que les ocurrió, entablando un contacto continuo con las partes del conflicto. Nos hemos reunido en múltiples ocasiones con varios Ministerios de la República Democrática Federal de Etiopía (RDFE) para asegurarnos de que se investigan sus asesinatos y se nos comunican los resultados. Hemos hecho las mismas peticiones al Frente de Liberación del Pueblo de Tigray (FLPT).
Además, como parte de nuestra práctica interna habitual tras incidentes críticos de seguridad, hemos recopilado y analizado información que nos ha permitido reconstruir la ruta que siguió el coche de MSF, así como el lugar y la hora del incidente y algunas de las circunstancias materiales del asesinato.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 14, 2022
💭 “There’s a lot of areas we haven’t been able to access so we can’t assess what the humanitarian situation is.” 😠😠😠 😢😢😢
Steph Dujarric UN Spokesperson discusses the food, fuel and cash shortage that are adding to Tigray’s humanitarian crises.
“I’m looking at the clock right now. It’s just gone I think about 8:30 in the evening in Tigray. As we’re talking on this program. That means there are a lot of people, millions actually, who are likely going to bed hungry. It’s one thing not to be able to find food for yourself. It’s another thing altogether not to be able to find food for your children.” Zain Asher
In competition with among others Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson, Abiy Ahmed has been named the worst head of state in 2021 by a panel of professors and researchers, on behalf of the Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet.
An expert panel was put together by the newspaper to discuss and conclude: Who was the worst head of state in 2021?
👉 The final verdict: Abiy Ahmed. 😈
In 2019 he came to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for his “efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation.” Two years later, Ethiopia is marred by civil war.
The New York times recently described the situation as “a year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.”
A wasted opportunity
While dictactors in general, like North-Koreas Kim Jong-un, suppress their people as a natural part of their leadership, 2021 has been a very active year for Prime Minister Ahmed, Morgenbladet writes.
“Abiy has done nothing to downscale the ongoing civil war in his country, because he wants to secure his own alliances and his own position. He is perhaps the most disappointing head of state of the year,” professor Carl Henrik Knutsen says to the newspaper.
Knutsen served in the newspaper’s expert panel on the topic.
“With the Nobel Prize in his pocket and the recognition that comes with it from international alliances, a lot was in place for Abiy to develop his country in a positive direction. He wasted that opportunity and seems to have put his own concerns over that of his citizens,” he says.
The worst of the bad
The expert panel consisted of Carl Henrik Knutsen, professor of political science at the University of Oslo, Lise Rakner, professor of political science at the University of Bergen, Helle Malmvig, senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and Dan Smith, Director at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
“A truly bad head of state is an authoritarian and oppressive leader who undermines the political institutions in the country and concentrates all power in his own hands, at any cost,” according to Knutsen.
Discussions that included Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and the king of Saudi-Arabia, Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, finally narrowed down to a list of six nominees:
Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the UK
Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus
Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India
Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brasil
Michel Aoun, President of Lebanon
Abiy Ahmed, Prime Minister of Ethiopia
Watching people die during a pandemic
Questions that were discussed were whether the head of state has contributed to financial decline in their own country, supported or started a civil war and suppressed civil or political rights. Handling of the pandemic was also an important criterion.
“Leaders who are in denial, who with open eyes watch a large number of people dying during the pandemic and call information about this mortality “fake news” – I believe this is a form of genocide,” said Professor Lise Rakner.
On the more unusual suspect on the list, Boris Johson, Rakner has the following to say:
“The United Kingdom still have a free press, a stable legal system and an independent central bank, which means that Johnson cannot control things in any way he would like to. But if you had given Brasil to Johnson, a lot of things would have gone very wrong. What a clown.”
The violent solution
According to Dan Smith from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the most important criterion in deciding on the worst head of state in 2021 was starting an irresponsible war and using systematic violence. This is why Abiy ends up top, he says to Morgenbladet.
“Since the outbreak of the war, there have been obvious alternative ways of acting, but all of them have been rejected. Both sides have blocked a politically negotiated solution. Instead, Abiy has chosen the most violent solution,” he says.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the Nobel Peace Prize, said Thursday that Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who won the honour in 2019, bore special responsibility for ending the bloodshed in Tigray.
“As Prime Minister and winner of the Peace Prize, Abiy Ahmed has a special responsibility to end the conflict and contribute to peace,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the committee, said in a statement to AFP.
Northern Ethiopia has been beset by conflict since November 2020 when Abiy sent troops into Tigray after accusing the region’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), of attacks on federal army camps.
The fighting between forces loyal to Abiy and the TPLF and their allies has killed thousands of people and forced several million from their homes.
Spokeswoman Billene Seyoum responded to the committee’s comments, saying Abiy had already shouldered his responsibilities.
“The Prime Minister has indeed taken up this ‘special responsibility’ of ending the conflict waged on the state by TPLF and has been engaged in putting an end not only to the past year’s conflict but the destabilising activities of the TPLF, designated a terrorist organisation by parliament,” Billen told AFP.
Tigray is under what the United Nations calls a de facto blockade that is preventing life-saving medicine and food from reaching millions, including hundreds of thousands in famine-like conditions.
Millions of people have fled their homes since the conflict in Tigray erupted in November 2020
“The humanitarian situation is very serious and it is not acceptable that humanitarian aid does not get through sufficiently,” Reiss-Andersen said.
Speaking at a press conference, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth appealed for countries to press Abiy to allow aid to get through.
“The big threat there is the Ethiopian government’s blockade of humanitarian assistance that is desperately needed by millions of people in the region,” Roth told reporters.
“This is a classic case of collective punishment. This is not punishing Tigrayan military forces. It is punishing the people… in Tigray,” he added.
The conflict in Tigray has sparked calls to strip Abiy of the Nobel, but this is not possible under the award’s statutes.
The Norwegian committee said it could not comment on what factors were emphasised when the prize was awarded to Abiy beyond “the reasons given in connection with the award,” as the panel’s discussions are confidential.
In November 2020, Abiy’s government allowed Eritrean forces into Tigray as they together pursued the Tigray leaders after political tensions erupted into war. Some tens of thousands of people have been killed, and hundreds of thousands now face famine as Ethiopia’s government has kept almost all food and medical aid from Tigray since late June.
“Since the autumn of 2020, developments in Ethiopia have escalated to a comprehensive armed conflict,” the statement said. “The humanitarian situation is very serious, and it is not acceptable that humanitarian aid does not emerge to a sufficient degree.”
The conflict entered a new phase in late December when Tigray forces retreated into their region amid a new military offensive and Ethiopian forces said they would not advance further there.
💭 On Day Biden Calls Ethiopia’s Leader to Urge Peace, a Drone Strike Kills 17
The attack came days after over 50 people were killed in a strike on a refugee camp, highlighting the growing role of armed drones in a destructive war.
On the same day that President Biden spoke with his Ethiopian counterpart, Abiy Ahmed, about a possible window for peace in the long-running war in Tigray, at least 17 people, including women and children, were killed in an airstrike, aid workers said.
The strike on Monday came days after dozens more were killed after a drone opened fire on a refugee camp in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray and highlighted the increasingly deadly role of armed drones, some supplied by American allies, in a conflict that has badly destabilized Africa’s second most populous country.
Video from the aftermath of the strike on Friday, provided by aid workers, showed the charred bodies of women and children laid out on blue plastic sheeting bearing the United Nations logo. On Monday the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said he was “deeply concerned” about the attack, which occurred hours after the Ethiopian government issued a call for “national reconciliation.” At least 50 people had been killed, he said.
Prime Minister Abiy stoked hopes for a cease-fire on Friday with the release of prominent political prisoners, including a founding member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or T.P.L.F., which Mr. Abiy’s government has been fighting since November 2020.
On Monday, in their first direct conversation as leaders, Mr. Biden called Mr. Abiy, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, to urge him to “accelerate progress toward a negotiated ceasefire” and open up humanitarian access across the country, the White House said in a statement.
The prisoner releases, and Mr. Abiy’s calls for a national dialogue, present “a moment of opportunity, if the parties are willing and able to seize it,” a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity told reporters in a briefing about the conversation. Mr. Biden also expressed his concern about civilian deaths from airstrikes.
But hours later, news filtered through of another attack.
Missiles slammed into a flour mill in Mai Tsebri, in the Tigray region, on Monday afternoon, killing at least 17 people and wounding dozens, aid workers with two organizations and local officials said. Witnesses reported seeing drones in the skies before the strike, they said.
Most of the dead were women who had gone to the mill to grind cereals, according to an internal United Nations report cited by one aid worker.
The aid workers spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals from Ethiopia, which expelled several U.N. and international aid officials last year, and has detained numerous journalists including a video journalist accredited to the Associated Press arrested last month.
Col. Getnet Adane, a spokesman for the Ethiopian military, referred questions about the airstrikes to the Ethiopian government spokesman, who did not respond.
A mediator appointed by the African Union, Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president of Nigeria, flew into the Tigrayan capital Mekelle on Tuesday morning, two Western diplomats said. Hours later, gunfire rang out across the city as Tigrayan antiaircraft guns opened fire, apparently in reaction to drones circling overhead, an aid official in the city said.
The United States has repeatedly called on Eritrea, whose troops are fighting in Tigray in support of Mr. Abiy, to withdraw their forces — a call reiterated by the senior American official who briefed reporters on Monday.
But the official declined to comment on the role of other countries accused of fueling the fighting, including the United Arab Emirates — a major American ally.
Powerful Chinese-built drones supplied by the U.A.E. to Ethiopia, as well as less powerful models supplied by Turkey, played a major role in a string of dramatic battlefield victories by Mr. Abiy’s forces in December, Western officials and analysts said.
Understand the Conflict in Ethiopia
A year of war. On Nov. 4, 2020, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed began a military campaign in the country’s northern Tigray region, hoping to vanquish the Tigray People’s Liberation Front — his most troublesome political foe.
Rebels turned the tide. Despite Mr. Abiy’s promise of a swift campaign, the Ethiopian military suffered a major defeat in June when it was forced to withdraw from Tigray. The fighting subsequently moved south.
Tigrayan forces close in. In late October, Tigrayan rebels captured two towns near Addis Ababa, the nation’s capital. The government declared a state of emergency and called on citizens to arm themselves.
Drones tip the balance. A string of victories at the end of 2021 signaled that the Ethiopian government was regaining its footing on the battlefield. A fleet of combat drones acquired from allies in the Persian Gulf region was a decisive factor in the reversal.
Atrocities on both sides. A United Nations report in November offered evidence that all sides involved in the conflict had committed atrocities. Since the start of the war, the Ethiopian and Tigrayan forces have since been accused of carrying out transgressions including extrajudicial killings.
Since August, Ethiopia has also acquired drones from Iran. Websites that track international flights have detected cargo flights into Ethiopia from Chengdu, the Chinese city where the powerful Wing Loong drone is manufactured.
It is unclear which armed drones carried out the latest deadly strikes in Tigray, but supplies of military equipment are increasingly becoming a focus of international efforts to halt the fighting.
The United States pressured the U.A.E. to stop an earlier round of drone strikes in the opening weeks of the war, foreign diplomats say. Last week the White House appointed a new special envoy to the Horn of Africa, David Satterfield, to replace Jeffrey Feltman.
Mr. Satterfield is currently the American ambassador to Turkey and has raised the issue of recent sales of armed drones to Ethiopia with Turkish officials, officials say.
The drone war comes against the backdrop of a soaring humanitarian crisis. At least 9.4 million people in northern Ethiopia urgently need help, the U.N. says, but a government blockade has prevented vital supplies of food and medicine from reaching Tigray, where the majority live.
Less than 12 percent of required supplies got through between July and December, according to the U.N., and last week doctors at Tigray’s main hospital issued a desperate appeal for basic supplies including antibiotics, surgical gloves and medicine to treat cancer.
“We are just counting deaths that happen due to totally preventable causes,” Mussie Tesfay, administrator of the Ayder Referral Hospital, said in an email. “It is just so heartbreaking to see our beloved patients die one by one.”
💭 A drone strike hit a flour mill in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region on Monday, killing at least 17 people, mostly women and wounded dozens in the town of Mai Tsebri, two aid workers told Reuters, citing local authorities and eyewitnesses.
This followed an air strike that killed 56 people and injured 30, including children, in a camp for displaced people in Tigray on Friday, Orthodox Christmas Day. U.S. President Joe Biden raised concerns with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Monday about civilian casualties and suffering caused by air strikes.
Ethiopian military spokesperson Colonel Getnet Adane and government spokesperson Legesse Tulu did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Mai Tsebri strike.
The government has previously denied targeting civilians in the 14-month conflict, which pits Abiy’s federal forces and their regional allies, backed by Eritrea, against rebellious forces of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
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