One Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Ethiopia and Eritrea could be planning to create “concentration camps” to isolate the local population from supporting the TPLF. “The consequence is to move Tigrayan civilians from their homes into IDP camps at the expense of the West. The political calculation is the Tigrayans will become politically irrelevant for years to come,” he said.
The bigger fear is the West could become complicit in this strategy of forced relocation by funding the IDP camps via U.N., U.S., or EU aid agencies, while hostile soldiers effectively control a vital region that straddles trade corridors connecting Ethiopia to Djibouti and Sudan.
Another European diplomat, who agreed this potential encampment tactic may be unfolding, said the situation in Tigray is now “terrible.”
Since the start of the war in Tigray, diplomats, NGOs, and academics have worried about the possible fragmentation of Ethiopia, a development that would not only lead to mass violence within the country but would also destabilize its neighborhood, where it has historically played a key stabilizing role. Yet diplomatic overtures so far have been ineffectual—and appear to be getting even worse.
The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, currently embroiled in a scandal for referring to the rest of the world as a “jungle,” has been an outspoken critic of the war, repeatedly denouncing the Ethiopian government. But this megaphone diplomacy from Brussels has irked EU officials on the ground, with many claiming it has derailed their efforts in Addis Ababa as perceived bias for the TPLF.
Merkeb Negash Yimesel, a Tigray government representative based in Brussels, described the renewed campaign as “genocide,” as government forces are violently evicting civilians and forcing them to shelter in camps for internally displaced people, or IDPs.
“Ethiopia and Eritrea didn’t really mince words as far as their genocidal intent to exterminate Tigrayans,” he said. “The goal of this latest offensive is to fundamentally degrade Tigray’s social base, that is the people. That’s where the plan of manufacturing as many as 3 million IDPs in Tigray comes in.”
Mehari Taddele Maru, an Ethiopian from Tigray now based at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, urged the U.N. Security Council to intervene, comparing the situation in Tigray with the 1994 Rwanda genocide against Tutsis.
“The plan is for accelerated depopulation. It is part of the extermination of the Tigrayan ethnicity, crime against humanity, war crimes,” he said. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, also Tigrayan, has also raised concerns of a looming genocide.
“The world is not paying enough attention. There is a very narrow window now to prevent genocide in Tigray,” he told reporters at the WHO headquarters in Geneva on Wednesday.
These claims were put to Billene Seyoum Woldeyes, Abiy’s press secretary, who did not immediately respond to messages.
One Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Ethiopia and Eritrea could be planning to create “concentration camps” to isolate the local population from supporting the TPLF. “The consequence is to move Tigrayan civilians from their homes into IDP camps at the expense of the West. The political calculation is the Tigrayans will become politically irrelevant for years to come,” he said.
The bigger fear is the West could become complicit in this strategy of forced relocation by funding the IDP camps via U.N., U.S., or EU aid agencies, while hostile soldiers effectively control a vital region that straddles trade corridors connecting Ethiopia to Djibouti and Sudan.
Another European diplomat, who agreed this potential encampment tactic may be unfolding, said the situation in Tigray is now “terrible.”
“It’s a total failure of U.S. and European Union diplomacy,” he said.
Alex de Waal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation, has also decried U.S., U.N., EU, and Africa Union diplomatic efforts as “betraying Tigray.”
Yimesel, the Tigrayan representative in Brussels, said the international community does not want to acknowledge what is happening, in order to skirt the responsibility of protecting millions of people facing a dire humanitarian crisis.
“At this point, I am not even sure it is a [Western diplomatic] failure at all or a tacit green-light to do this,” he said.
👉 My Note:
“The plan is for accelerated depopulation. It is part of the extermination of the Tigrayan ethnicity, crime against humanity, war crimes,”
Depopulation is exactly what’s happening – depopulation of ancient Christians / original humans who have the identity and essence of the spirit. The Luciferians have planned their satanic project a long time ago – and executing it accordingly. For now! Africa is the continent with the youngest population worldwide. As of 2021, around 40 percent of the population is aged 15 years and younger.
In 2021, there were around 207 million children aged 0-4 years in Africa. The population aged 17 years and younger amounted to approximately 650 million. In contrast, only approximately 48 million individuals were aged 65 years and older as of the same year.
💭“አዲሱን የዓለም ሥርዓት ለማስጠበቅ ልዩ ቀውስ ያስፈልጋል።…አዲሱን የዓለም ሥርዓት ለመጠበቅ የመንግስት ያልሆኑ ተዋናዮችን እና ስልጣን የተሰጣቸውን ግለሰቦችን ማስወገድ ግድ ነው”። “Extraordinary Crisis Needed to Preserve New World Order….The elimination of non-state actors and empowered individuals “must be done” in order to preserve the new world order.
💭 The Washington Post has analyzed photos of shrapnel and satellite imagery and cross-referenced video to confirm that Ethiopia used a Turkish drone in January in an attack that killed at least 59 civilians sheltering in a school in Tigray, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported, citing an analysis by the paper published on Monday.
On January 7, a school was struck by a drone-delivered bomb, killing at least 59 people and gravely injuring dozens more, according to aid workers whose organizations worked at the camp for internally displaced people in Dedebit, located in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray.
According to The Washington Post, more than 300 civilians have been killed by drone and air strikes since September, including more than 100 since the start of this year.
Weapon remnants recovered from the site of the strike by aid workers showed internal components and screw configurations that matched images of Turkish-made MAM-L munitions released by the weapons manufacturer. The MAM-L pairs exclusively with the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 drone.
Military experts from the Dutch nongovernmental organization PAX and Amnesty International also identified the weapon used as a MAM-L bomb that is fitted to a TB2 drone, Politico earlier reported.
The attacks have drawn criticism from US President Joe Biden and a warning from the United Nations that they may constitute a grave violation of international law, Politico said.
Drones are rapidly turning into the decisive weapon of the conflict and have helped Ethiopian government forces turn the tide against rebels from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which governed the country for nearly three decades before 2018.
Turkey has exported Bayraktar armed drones manufactured by defense contractor Baykar Makina Sanayi ve Ticaret Anonim Şirketi (Baykar), which is run by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law Selçuk Bayraktar. Ukraine, Poland, Qatar, Libya, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia and Azerbaijan have all taken delivery of the armed drones.
According to Turkey’s 2021 export figures announced by the Turkish Exporters Assembly in early December, Turkey’s arms sales reached a record level, with the biggest increase to African countries.
In the first 11 months of 2021, Turkey exported $2.793 billion worth of defense products, an increase of 39.7 percent compared to the same period of the previous year. The Turkish defense industry, which set an export record of $2.7 billion in 2019, is preparing to set a new record by closing this year with exports of more than $3 billion. For the first time the defense sector had a 1.8 percent share of Turkey’s total exports in November 2021.
“All sides to the year-long conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region have committed violations that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 9, 2022
💭 Another callous drone attack by evil Abiy Ahmed in an IDP [internally displaced persons] camp in Dedebit, Tigray has claimed the lives of 56 Christians so far. The drones are supplied and operated by Turkish, Iranian, UAE and China Mercenaries – and with the permission of the USA, Russia and Europe.
At least 56 people have been killed in an air strike at a camp for internally displaced people in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray, according to Reuters.
There were at least 30 others injured, two aid workers told the news agency, citing local authorities and eyewitness accounts.
The workers sent Reuters pictures of people wounded in hospital, including many children,
The government has been accused of targeting civilians in the 14-month conflict with rebellious Tigrayan forces – which it has previously denied.
Military spokesman Colonel Getnet Adane and government spokesman Legesse Tulu did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The aid workers, who asked not to be named because they did not have permission to speak to the press, said the number of casualties was confirmed by local authorities.
The camp that was hit by the strike is in the town of Daedaebeet in the northwest of the region, near the border with Eritrea, they said.
As Prime Minister Abiy prepares what is possibly a final, bloody stand in the war he has wrought
There are similar efforts to scapegoat all Tigrayans, led personally through the prime minister’s statements and state media, though the rampant use of hateful and dehumanizing speech makes the case that the government may well be inciting genocide as part of its last-ditch defense effort to save itself.
As Ethiopia crosses the one-year mark since the start of its devastating war in the Tigray region, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is preparing the capital, Addis Ababa, for one final stand against a blitzkrieg attack at the hands of Tigrayan rebels, who months ago turned the tide of the war and who now stand poised to turn out the country’s Nobel prize-winning prime minister.
In the process, as international diplomats and Ethiopian-Americans scramble to leave the country, the risk of state-sponsored genocide, and even state collapse, remain frighteningly real scenarios that will have catastrophic consequences for the country, the region, and U.S. interests for years to come.
This was an unfathomable scenario at the start of the conflict. Abiy promised a limited “law-and-order operation” against a select number of Tigrayan leaders who challenged his rule through, in his mind, an unwavering commitment to an anachronistic ethnically-based system they put in place during their more than 20 years of autocratic rule.
In reality, Abiy likely never believed Tigrayans would “go along to get along” and so set about from the start of his time in office to weaken their ties to the state and ensure their future banishment from power. It was those efforts to treat Tigrayans as Tigrayans treated the majority of Ethiopia’s ethnic groups during their time in power that created the self-fulfilling prophecy Abiy is now struggling to survive.
But with the bulk of the Ethiopian army’s best fighters and tacticians hailing from Tigray, the government has slowly seen its overwhelming strategic advantage eroded on the battlefield against a rump force more adept at insurgency combat and clearly more motivated by a fight for its literal survival.
The government’s response to its own tactical shortcomings and sagging morale has been to wage an asymmetric battle against not just the Tigrayan Defense Forces but more broadly against the people of Tigray. A recent joint report from the United Nations and Ethiopia’s own human rights body points out the widespread use of sexual violence as central to the government’s war strategy.
An ongoing government humanitarian blockade of the region has for months put more than 900,000 civilians at risk of famine and forced Tigrayan fighters to expand their fight into neighboring Amhara and Afar regions in a bid to break the siege, expanding the death toll and humanitarian suffering.
There are similar efforts to scapegoat all Tigrayans, led personally through the prime minister’s statements and state media, though the rampant use of hateful and dehumanizing speech makes the case that the government may well be inciting genocide as part of its last-ditch defense effort to save itself.
Reports this past week of mass roundups of Tigrayans living in and around Addis Ababa, under a far-reaching state of emergency declaration “to ensure national security,” suggest a possible last-ditch effort to deter the oncoming onslaught by holding hostage an entire people.
As the situation deteriorates, and the vast human and economic implications begin to take shape for the region, Ethiopia’s neighbors have only just begun to respond. Forced by the possible fall of one of Africa’s most important cities and the continent’s diplomatic capital, after months of callously treating the devastating conflict as Ethiopia’s “internal affair,” Kenya, Uganda and the African Union itself are finally calling for a ceasefire and political talks.
While Washington and its European allies have been sustained in their condemnations of the violence and abuses, they have done little to force either side’s hand to relent. Importantly, a bipartisan Senate bill, introduced last week in the Foreign Relations Committee, makes use of the Biden administration’s own Executive Order sanctions regime — rolled out in September but never applied — by mandating “the imposition of targeted sanctions against individual actors … undermining efforts to resolve the conflict or profit from it.”
Coupled with a freeze of more than $200 million in trade preferences — which, again, the administration was forced to announce last week under congressional deadline — and efforts to impose costs on belligerents are only beginning to take shape after a year of fighting.
As Prime Minister Abiy prepares what is possibly a final, bloody stand in the war he has wrought, will last-minute calls for calm and pressure tactics be enough to change the calculations of the warring parties and avoid catastrophe in the Horn of Africa?
“During the first few decades of their migration, the Oromo moved across lands that were devastated and depopulated by the jihadist wars, the lands relatively empty of people either fled before them or were adopted and assimilated by them.”
„In the place conquer they slay all the men, cut off the privet parts of the boy, kill the old woman and keep the young for their use and service ” Richard Pankhurst, the Ethiopian borderland. (page 284)
5. Historical Geography of Ethiopia, School of African Studies.
6.The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People. Oxford University Press, 1960, Edward Ullendorff
The Gallas had little to contribute to the Semitized civilization of Ethiopia; they possessed no significant material or intellectual culture, and their social organization differed considerably from that of the population among whom they settled. They were not only the cause of the depressed state into which the country now sank, but they helped to prolong a situation from
which even a physically and spiritually exhausted Ethiopia might otherwise have been able to recover far more quickly