The United Nations says a third safe passage operation is under way to evacuate civilians from the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was addressing a meeting of the Security Council.
💭 Look how the UN is engaged intensively and at the highest level in Ukraine – and compare it to the 18 month-old inhumane Tigray blockade, starvation, massacres and genocide. When it comes to Ethiopia, the world doesn’t seem to care much to move beyond such repetitive monotonous blabla words as; „We are alarmed, deeply disturbed, it’s unacceptable etc” to action. What a wicked and ignorant world!.
Well,
❖❖❖[1 John 5:19]❖❖❖
“We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 8, 2021
No Favours For Nobel Peace Laureate Mass Murderer
Rep. Michael McCaul is the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs committee. He calls for a bipartisan response to possible war crimes in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia is Deliberately Starving its Own Citizens. The World Should Apply Whatever Pressure it Can to Force it to Stop
💭 My Note: Evil Abiy Ahmed Ali Seems increasingly paranoid and erratic. Yes! A leader of a country starving his citizens because they are not Oromos, Muslims or Pentecostals, rather Tigrayans and Orthodox Christians. And Orthodox Russia is embracing this evil monster! Mind-Boggling, very Sad! Isn’t it?!
➡ From The Economist
Abiy, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2019 for ending a long conflict with Eritrea, seems increasingly paranoid and erratic. But to do anything less would be to stand by as mass murder is taking place. To avert a calamity, Western governments must pull every lever they have.
It is almost a year since Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, launched a “law enforcement” operation against the government of the northern region of Tigray, which he accused of rebellion. Since the beginning, the ensuing conflict has been marked by war crimes. Late last year in the city of Accsoom, for instance, Eritrean troops fighting alongside Ethiopian forces murdered hundreds of civilians, mostly men and boys. Some were lined up and shot in the back. Others were gunned down as they came out of church or murdered while lying in bed in hospital. And the Tigrayans have been accused, among other atrocities, of raping and killing Eritrean refugees in un camps.
Horrifying as these crimes are, they are now being eclipsed by an even more heinous one: a deliberate attempt by the Ethiopian government to starve its own citizens. Since the fighting broke out Tigray has suffered an increasingly restrictive blockade by government forces. Since July it has received only a fraction of the food needed to keep its 6m inhabitants alive, hardly any fuel and no medical supplies at all. More than 5m people do not have enough to eat. Some 400,000 of those are facing what aid agencies call “catastrophic” hunger—the last step on the path to mass starvation. Aid workers compare the crisis to Ethiopia’s famine of the 1980s, when 400,000-700,000 died.
Ethiopia’s government insists it is doing all it can to help the hungry in Tigray and, in particular, that it is letting aid pass through its blockade. Data from the UN tell a different story.
Aid agencies reckon that 100 trucks of food and medicine must enter the state each day to avert famine. Only about a tenth of that is being let through by the government and its allies. Instead of asking international agencies for help to feed its citizens, the government is impeding their efforts. It has suspended the work of two of them, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Norwegian Refugee Council, and has also expelled seven senior un officials, accusing them of “meddling” in its internal affairs.
America and the European Union have taken a few steps to press Ethiopia and the Tigrayans to stop the war and end abuses, including halting the sale of weapons and withholding some bilateral aid. America has also threatened to impose financial sanctions on people implicated in war crimes or in fanning the conflict’s flames.
But the impact has been negligible. To replace arms previously supplied by France, Germany and Israel, Ethiopia has turned to Turkey and Iran, among others. To make up for the reduction in aid, it has asked the IMF for a bail-out and its creditors for forgiveness of some of its $30bn in external debt.
It would take an arms embargo by the UN to stop the government getting hold of deadly weapons. Yet China and Russia are preventing the UN Security Council, which on October 6th discussed the conflict in Tigray for the tenth time, from even condemning the expulsion of UN officials, much less imposing strict sanctions.
Fortunately, Western countries still have considerable leverage. The emergency loan that Ethiopia wants from the IMF and the forbearance it is seeking from creditors depend on the acquiescence of America and Europe. They should not yield until the blockade ends. Trade is another point of pressure. Ethiopia exports about $250m a year to America under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a duty-free scheme. Each country eligible to take part is reviewed by the American authorities every year. They should remove Ethiopia from the list unless Tigray is fed.
These steps may not work. Abiy, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2019 for ending a long conflict with Eritrea, seems increasingly paranoid and erratic. But to do anything less would be to stand by as mass murder is taking place. To avert a calamity, Western governments must pull every lever they have.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 7, 2021
💭 My Note: „could sanction?„ – Feels like they are all buying more time until all ancient Christians of Tigray are starved to death. Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis. Humanity is doomed! 😠😠😠 😢😢😢 But Judgment Day is upon us!
The Biden administration has described a CNN report that Ethiopian Airlines shuttled weapons to Eritrea as “incredibly grave” and warned that it was prepared to impose sanctions on Ethiopia and any other parties who prolonged the conflict in Tigray.
On Wednesday CNN revealed that Ethiopia’s government used its state-owned commercial carrier to move weapons to and from neighboring Eritrea during the first weeks of the conflict. It is the first time this weapons trade between the former foes has been documented during the nearly year-long war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.
Reacting to the investigation, a senior US administration official said: “These allegations are incredibly grave; not only could they constitute a potential violation of the Chicago Convention [on international civil aviation]. The use of civilian aircraft to ferry military hardware upends norms and endangers passenger craft around the world.”
The official added that the US would not hold back from using all the tools at its disposal to put an end to a conflict that has triggered famine and left millions in desperate need of aid — including the sanctioning of officials responsible for drawing out the conflict.
“We have the ability to impose sanctions and are prepared to use them and other tools at our disposal against those prolonging the tragedy in Tigray,” the official said.
A separate senior administration official told CNN that the White House was looking into the allegations detailed in its report. “If true, they would be deeply concerning, as Ethiopia is seriously risking the reputation of its national airline by enlisting it in military operations that have unleashed one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises,” the source said.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 7, 2021
➡ Courtesy: Democracy Now!
Amid the mounting humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian government has been using the commercial airline Ethiopia Airlines to shuttle weapons and military vehicles from neighboring country Eritrea since the beginning of their civil war, according to a new CNN investigation. This comes as the United Nations estimates more than 5 million people in the country’s Tigray region are now in need of humanitarian assistance in order to survive, but U.N. officials say Ethiopia’s government is blocking the movement of medicine, food and fuel into Tigray. In response, Ethiopian officials expelled seven senior U.N. officials from Ethiopia last week, giving them just 72 hours to leave the country. We look at the latest developments with Nima Elbagir, award-winning senior international correspondent for CNN, and also air her full report documenting ethnic cleansing.
Over the past 11 months, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has killed, raped and tortured ethnic-minority Tigrayans en masse. Will the Biden administration label these acts a genocide and impose appropriate consequences? If not, the United States will effectively greenlight genocide for any leader ruthless enough to follow Abiy’s playbook of secrecy, sexual violence and starvation as weapons of war.
The case against Abiy’s administration is straightforward: His government’s actions, as described by countless international monitors, fit the United Nations’ definition of genocide.
The United Nations defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” and calls out five specific acts of genocide. The Ethiopian government has been documented as committing four of these five acts: “killing members of the group,” “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”
In the face of mounting international condemnation, Abiy infamously told the Ethiopian parliament last November that not one civilian had died in Tigray.
But in Ethiopia we have a proverb, “The rod of truth may bend, but it will never break.” Journalists and aid workers risked their lives to share harrowing accounts of war crimes across Tigray by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces: hundreds of civilians slaughtered outside a church in Ethiopia’s holy city of Axum, their rotting carcasses reportedly left for hyenas; dozens of civilians bombed by Ethiopian warplanes at a crowded marketplace in Togoga; mass murders across Western Tigray that Secretary of State Antony Blinken later referred to as acts of “ethnic cleansing.”
And then the world learned of new, unimaginable atrocities. Health clinics reported barbaric sexual violence against women and girls across Tigray. Shocked doctors treated helpless women whose vaginas had been burned, and others whose vaginas had been pummeled, then stuffed with nails and stones. Other women had been gang-raped by soldiers who told them that their Tigrayan wombs must never again bear children. In August, Amnesty International summarized this systematic gender-based violence in a report titled, “I Don’t Know if They Realized I Was a Person.”
Throughout all this, Abiy maintained a constant response to accusations of war crimes: Deny, deny, deny. Deflect and blame Tigray.
Just this past week, Abiy shocked the world by expelling U.N. officials who could help relieve the famine, including the country head of UNICEF. White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted, “We’re deeply concerned that this action continues a pattern by the Ethiopian government of obstructing the delivery of food, medicine and other lifesaving supplies to those most in need.”
With his administration increasingly facing sanctions and economic repercussions, Abiy has warned the world to not meddle in Ethiopia. He and his government claim that any actions to force humanitarian aid into the region — or force his government to negotiate with Tigray’s elected leaders — would violate Ethiopia’s sovereignty.
By this rationale, any genocidal leader can murder millions of his own people, or wipe out an entire ethnic group, as long he does it within his own borders.
If the Biden administration fails to apply the genocide designation to Tigray, the message will be clear to any future war criminal: We will look the other way no matter what you do. You can gang rape girls, starve your people, murder masses of civilians, and in response we will share only toothless statements of concern.
For the sake of my people in Tigray, and people across the world, the United States must immediately call the Ethiopian government’s actions in Tigray a genocide.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 7, 2021
➡ Courtesy: PBS
Wednesday in the United Nations Security Council, the secretary general criticized the Ethiopian government for recently kicking out UN aid workers. He urged the government to allow aid to flow into the northern region of Tigray, where for nearly the last year, Ethiopia and its allies have been fighting an ethnic, regional force.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 6, 2021
By Mark Lowcock
Here’s an easy five-point plan for the leadership of a country which has emerged from civil war and dire poverty over recent decades and now wants to destroy itself.
First, pick a fight with a corner of your territory run by a previously powerful minority ethnic group. Cut off their resources. Provoke them into a response. Send in the army. Invite a neighbouring army in to rape and kill civilians and destroy their crops, businesses, schools, and clinics. Persuade the victims they are about to be subject to a genocide and promote hate speech about them among the rest of the population.
Second, divert resources from other parts of your country with a history of ethnic tensions. That will stir up things there too.
Third, tank the economy. Print money, order weapons you can’t afford from abroad, aggravate inflation and, especially if you are landlocked and dependent on imports, incite attacks on your supply lines.
Fourth, alienate your most important international supporters, particularly those you rely on for finance. Public attacks on their leaders work quite well for this, as does whipping up antipathy towards them among your own population. Buying weapons from their enemies is good too.
Fifth, antagonise a few of your immediate neighbours. Inflaming arguments over disputed land is one option; giving them reason to think you plan a grab on shared water resources is another.
I don’t think Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and other leaders in Ethiopia actually want to destroy their country. But an intelligent observer from outer space with an insight into the human condition might, having watched what has happened in the last 12 months, easily conclude that they do. Let’s run through the list to see how the five-point plan has been executed.
It was foolish to send Ethiopian Federal troops to Tigray last November in an attempt to resolve what was essentially a political argument. It was beyond reckless to invite the Eritrean army in to help. And it was criminal to abet and incite the campaign of mass rape, killings, and destruction of property that followed. It was also counterproductive: the population of Tigray concluded they faced a genocide and reacted to defend and protect themselves accordingly.
Ethnic tensions have been high across much of Ethiopia in recent years. It is said that years ago, Nelson Mandela tried to persuade then Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi that he should be trying to create a country in which people from the many tribes and groups that make up the country see themselves as Ethiopians first, and members of their ethnic group a distant second. The examples of Tanzania under Nyerere and (more controversially) Rwanda under Kagame were cited. For whatever reason, it did not happen. This has proved Ethiopia’s Achilles heel. Meles was, with difficulty, able to keep the lid on. But things crumbled after his death in 2012. In early 2018 I met people from towns along the border between the Oromia and Somali regions in south-eastern Ethiopia who had just been displaced by fighting over resources and political power. In January 2019, in the south of the country, I met some of the nearly one million people forced to flee violence over access to land around Gedeo and West Guji. There are many other conflict areas, especially in the western half of the country. Federal forces deployed to maintain order have since been diverted to Tigray. Watching what is happening, groups elsewhere have armed their own militias ready to defend their interests. Hardliners have gained influence all over.
Notwithstanding the huge economic progress Ethiopia has made over the last 30 years, which I recalled in The Washington Post nearly a year ago, the macroeconomic position has always been a juggling act between maximising growth and avoiding over-heating. Inflation, foreign exchange, and fiscal risks, already growing because of the pandemic, are now acute.
Meanwhile, the reaction of the international community to events in Tigray has evolved from concern and alarm to threats and sanctions as the crisis has grown and Abiy has continued to throw fuel on the flames. Western countries are (whether they should be or not) proud of the contribution they have made to progress in Ethiopia in recent decades, especially what their development aid has helped achieve. Using the national propaganda machine to whip up popular feeling against them, as the authorities in Addis Ababa have done in recent months, is a provocation. If the calculation is that others, like China, will compensate for lost resources from western countries and international institutions, it is quickly going to be proved wrong. The World Bank alone has been giving Ethiopia more than a billion dollars a year in grants and very cheap loans in recent years, most of it financed by taxpayers in North America and Europe. No-one will replace that if it dries up. Even worse, widely circulating rumours that Abiy has bought attack drones from Iran make it look like western money is subsidising the Iranian defence industry.
And closer to home, Abiy’s need for support from the Amhara population complicates the scope for de-escalating the border dispute with Sudan over Al-Fashaga, an area covering 600,000 acres of fertile land and river systems in western Ethiopia. Most of the Ethiopians living there are Amhara. Likewise, the completion and full operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, one of the world’s great current infrastructure projects, which I visited in 2016, is now at risk. The project, to which many Ethiopians have contributed their own money from the little they have, is a national totem. It is designed to be the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa, and the sixth largest in the world, relieving the country’s acute energy shortage. Regulating the flow of the Nile more consistently through the year, as the dam could do, would help both Sudan and Egypt. But concern over the rate at which it is filled and fear that water might be diverted for agriculture in Ethiopia have put the Egyptians on red alert. A previously unknown armed group has become active in the local area. This should all be soluble. But the febrile atmosphere has heightened tensions.
All this threatens the stability of the whole country, but the immediate priority must be averting imminent catastrophe in Tigray. In June, in my last few days working for the UN, I made clear I believed there was then famine in northern Ethiopia. I said a re-run of 1984, when a million Ethiopians died in what may have been the world’s worst famine of the last 50 years and the regime responsible for it was subsequently deposed, was not fanciful. A cessation of hostilities and access for humanitarian agencies could prevent that. But time was running out.
African sentiment has recently swung against Abiy. In a carefully crafted statement in late August on behalf of all the African countries on the UN Security Council, the Kenyans, who had been among those previously biting their tongues, called on him to accept offers of mediation. They urged the government to scale back ethnic attacks and remove barriers to a political dialogue. They warned of an uncontrollable spread of violence and bloodshed. They urged that Tigrayan forces, which had surprised many by their success in defending themselves, pull back too. They called for unfettered humanitarian access and a resumption of basic services to the people of Tigray. They urged the west to provide humanitarian assistance and, once a mediation effort was properly underway, offer economic support too. And, importantly, they explicitly rebuffed those in Ethiopia calling for war to be given a chance.
But the penny hasn’t dropped. The screws on Tigray have been turned further in recent weeks. Fresh recruits to the Ethiopian military, summoned by mass mobilisation campaigns praying on their patriotism, have been deployed in human wave attacks against Tigrayan defensive lines. This has so far failed: the main result is tragic piles of corpses of young men and boys. But the Tigrayan population of 6 million face mass starvation now. Their farms, businesses, and schools were destroyed, and their access to banks, electricity, water, and health services cut off, in the early months of the crisis. The government claims to be willing to let aid in, but its flunkies harass aid workers crossing lines and intimidate truck drivers in UN convoys, so many are now too terrified to show up for work. Barely ten per cent of the food needed is getting through. Recent eyewitness reports from aid workers describe people eating nothing but green leaves for days, exponential increases in starvation in both rural and urban areas, and even the children of the staff of the main hospital in Mekelle, the regional capital, showing signs of malnutrition. Humanitarian workers managing to get seats on the rare flights to the region have, as the Associated Press recently reported, been told they cannot bring dental floss, multi-vitamins, personal medicines or things, like flash drives, that could have a use in documenting what is going on.
All this reveals – or confirms – that Abiy has two objectives in Tigray. The first is to starve the population either into subjugation or out of existence. The second is to do that without attracting the global opprobrium that would still, even in today’s fractured geopolitical environment, arise from deliberately causing a massive famine taking millions of lives. It is also clear that the second objective is less important than the first. That is the message to be taken from the threatened expulsion last week of UN humanitarian leaders from Ethiopia. Abiy would rather take the criticism for that than allow them to see what he is trying to do.
The irony, well-informed experts privately say, is that Abiy’s game plan cannot work. If he tries and fails to destroy Tigray, he will be destroyed himself. If he succeeds, he will never survive the backlash that will follow. His only out is to take up the African Union’s call for dialogue. But does he see that?
Scenario planners in leading countries and institutions now think Ethiopia may disintegrate. They assess the consequences to be very bad. For everyone. Not just in Ethiopia, but further afield too. Is it still possible to pull back from the brink?
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on September 30, 2021
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., September 29, 2021.
The United States condemns Ethiopia’s expulsion of United Nations officials and will not hesitate to use sanctions against those who obstruct humanitarian efforts in the country, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday.
Earlier on Thursday, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was expelling seven senior U.N. officials, two days after the U.N. aid chief warned hundreds of thousands of people in the northern region of Tigray were likely experiencing famine due to a government blockade of aid.
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