🏁 Amanal Petros after his record race: “I dedicate my successes to the people of Tigray”
Amanal Petros broke a German age-old record in Valencia on Sunday: In the half marathon, the runner of the TV Wattenscheid increased to 60:09 minutes, undercutting the mark of Carsten Eich, who had run 60:34 in Berlin in 1993.
The 26-year-old, who fled Eritrea to Germany about ten years ago, became the first German runner to hold the national men’s records in the half marathon and marathon at the same time. In December 2020, he had also screwed the German marathon best time at 2:07:18 hours in Valencia.
Amanal Petros gave this interview after his half marathon race:
You have achieved a novelty with your half marathon record, because never before did a German runner hold the records in the half marathon and marathon.
Amanal Petros: Yes, that’s true and I’m really very proud of that. Because I always think about where I came from and how I started. I’ll never forget that. It’s madness, I’m super happy that I’ve done all this. And I also know: I can achieve much more.
They have repeatedly pointed out the devastating situation in the Ethiopian Tigray region, where conditions of war continue to prevail. Your mother lives there with your two sisters. Do you now have contact again and what is the current situation?
Amanal Petros: It is still very difficult and currently I have no contact with my family. In the meantime, I had indirectly received a few messages via third parties. This is very bad and sad for me. For a year, people have been living there in war, children and families are dying. But no one seems to be interested in what really happens. Unfortunately, the situation is hardly reported in the media. I am constantly thinking of the people of Tigray and dedicating my successes to those who are threatened there.
🏁 Amanal Petros nach seinem Rekordrennen: „Ich widme meine Erfolge den Menschen in Tigray“
Amanal Petros hat am Sonntag in Valencia einen deutschen Uralt-Rekord gebrochen: Im Halbmarathon steigerte sich der Läufer des TV Wattenscheid auf 60:09 Minuten und unterbot damit die Marke von Carsten Eich, der 1993 in Berlin 60:34 gelaufen war.
Der 26-Jährige, der vor rund zehn Jahren aus Eritrea nach Deutschland geflüchtet war, avancierte somit zum ersten deutschen Läufer, der die nationalen Männer-Rekorde im Halbmarathon und Marathon zeitgleich hält. Im Dezember 2020 hatte er ebenfalls in Valencia die deutsche Marathon-Bestzeit auf 2:07:18 Stunden geschraubt.
Amanal Petros gab nach seinem Halbmarathon-Rennen dieses Interview:
Sie haben mit Ihrem Halbmarathon-Rekord ein Novum erreicht, denn noch nie hielt ein deutscher Läufer zeitgleich die Rekorde im Halbmarathon und Marathon.
Amanal Petros: Ja, das stimmt und darauf bin ich wirklich sehr stolz. Denn ich denke dabei auch immer daran, wo ich hergekommen bin und wie ich angefangen habe. Das werde ich nie vergessen. Es ist der Wahnsinn, ich bin super happy, dass ich das alles so geschafft habe. Und ich weiß auch: ich kann noch viel mehr erreichen.
Sie haben immer wieder auf die verheerende Situation in der äthiopischen Tigray-Region hingewiesen, in der weiterhin kriegerische Zustände herrschen. Dort lebt Ihre Mutter mit Ihren beiden Schwestern. Haben Sie inzwischen wieder Kontakt und wie ist die aktuelle Situation?
Amanal Petros: Es ist nach wie vor sehr schwierig und zurzeit habe ich gar keinen Kontakt zu meiner Familie. Zwischenzeitlich hatte ich über Dritte indirekt ein paar Nachrichten bekommen. Das ist sehr schlimm und stimmt mich traurig. Seit einem Jahr leben die Menschen dort im Krieg, Kinder und Familien sterben. Es scheint aber niemanden mehr zu interessieren, was wirklich passiert. In den Medien wird leider kaum noch über die Situation berichtet. Ich denke ständig an die Menschen in Tigray und widme meine Erfolge jenen, die dort bedroht sind.
💭 LETESENBET GIDEY PULVERIZA EL RECORD MUNDIAL DE MEDIA MARATÓN. RESUMEN MEDIA MARATÓN DE VALENCIA 2021
💭 Ethiopia’s Gidey smashes women’s half-marathon world record
Letesenbet Gidey pulverised the women’s half-marathon world record Sunday, slicing more than a minute off the previous mark when she won in Valencia.
Running in bright sunshine, it was the first half-marathon the 23-year-old Ethiopian had raced in and she added the record to her 5000m and 10,000m world records.
Gidey timed 1hr 02min 52sec to better the previous time of 1hr 04min 02sec set by Ruth Chepngetich of Kenya in April 2021.
Valencia was also the scene of Gidey’s 5000m record in October 2020.
“Gracias Valencia,” Gidey said at the finish line. “I’m so happy,” she said, holding a sign saying “First woman in history under 63 minutes”.
She ran the first 10km in 29min 45sec and then got even faster over the final section of the race.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 20, 2021
💭 A regional conflict is now becoming a national crisis which the country’s leaders seem unable to solve, and the lives of millions of Ethiopians are at stake.
➡ „Crow (Oromo) Making Two Cats (Northerners: Tigrayan & Ahmara & Afar) Fight„
💭 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 fromwhich even a physically and spiritually exhausted Ethiopia might otherwise have been able to recover far more quickly
➡ Edward Ullendorff – “The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People.” Oxford University Press, 1960
✈️New air strikes hit capital of Ethiopia’s Tigray region Mekelle.✈️
New air strikes have hit the capital of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, residents said Wednesday, as video showed injured people with bloodied faces being helped into ambulances and thick black smoke rising into the sky. Ethiopia’s government said it was targeting facilities to make and repair weapons, which a spokesman for the rival Tigray forces denied.
Meanwhile, the United Nations told The Associated Press it is slashing by more than half its Tigray presence as an Ethiopian government blockade halts humanitarian aid efforts and people die from lack of food.
The war in Africa’s second-most populous country has ground on for nearly a year between Ethiopian and allied forces and the Tigray ones who long dominated the national government before a falling-out with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
There were no immediate details of deaths from the new air strikes in Mekelle, reported by Kindeya Gebrehiwot of the Tigray external affairs office and confirmed by a resident and a humanitarian worker.
“Indeed there have been air strikes in Mekelle today,” Ethiopian government spokesperson Legesse Tulu told the AP, saying they targeted facilities at the Mesfin Industrial Engineering site that Tigray forces use to make and repair heavy weapons. Legesse said the air strikes had “no intended harm to civilians.”
“Not at all,” Kindeya with the Tigray forces told the AP, calling the site a garage “with many old tires. That is why it is still blazing.”
The attack came two days after Ethiopia’s air force confirmed air strikes in Mekelle that a witness said killed three children. The air force said communications towers and equipment were attacked. Mekelle hadn’t seen fighting since June, when Tigray forces retook much of the region in a dramatic turn in the war.
The air strikes have caused fresh panic in a city under siege, where doctors and others have described running out of medicines and other basic needs.
Despite pleas from the UN and others to allow basic services and humanitarian aid to Tigray’s 6 million people, Ethiopia’s government this week called those expectations “absurd” while the Tigray forces now fight in the neighbouring regions of Amhara and Afar. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced there, widening the deadly crisis.
“Although not all movements have yet taken place, there will probably be a reduction from nearly 530 to around 220 UN staff on the ground in Tigray,” UN humanitarian spokesman Saviano Abreu told the AP. The decision is “directly linked to the operation constraints we have been faced with over the last months” along with the volatile security situation, he said.
The lack of fuel and cash because of the government’s blockade on Tigray “has made it extremely challenging for humanitarians to sustain life-saving activities” at the time they’re needed most, Abreu added.
Some 1,200 humanitarian workers including the reduced UN presence will remain in Tigray, he said.
The AP in recent weeks has confirmed the first starvation deaths in Tigray under the government blockade.
You see, what I saw? The Gospel in Babylon UAE? Whaat!?
“The Garima Gospels” The World’s Earliest Known Gospel Book is in an Ethiopian Monastery. Have the Luciferians and their UAE marionettes stolen it from Tigray? In November 2020, ancient Monasteries & Churches Have Been Bombed by UAE Drones & Heavy weapons. Is it part of Luciferian March for One World religion. For that they have decided to annihilate ancient Christians of Tigray – keepers of The Ark of The Covenant and many other sacred Christian Treasures. They did that earlier in Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Armenia.
👉 We see some manuscripts from “The Garima Gospels” in Babylon New York – at The New York Public Library
❖ Where Are The Garima Gospels? Some Fear The Worst
After having survived 1,500 years of history in a remote monastery, the Garima Gospels now face their most serious threat.
One of the greatest treasures in the Christian world, guarded for over 1,500 years in northern Ethiopia, may not have survived the latest threat.
You Garima Gospels, written in goatskin and dated between 330 and 650 AD, are in an area that has been under siege for months by the armies of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Religious sites near the Abba Garima monastery in Tigray were bombed and precious looted artifacts, so it is feared that the worst happened to this treasure.
“It is frightening for many of us to think that these Gospels and other ancient artifacts are on the road to danger,” said Suleyman Dost, a professor in the Department of Jewish and Near Eastern Studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, quoted by The Globe and Mail.
“The Garima Gospels are not only among the first complete texts of the Christian scriptures, but they also offer us a rare glimpse into the language, religion and history of ancient Ethiopia,” he added.
The online newspaper advances that the Garima Gospels, bound and illustrated copies of the Four New Testament Gospels written in the classic Ethiopian language Ge’ez, are one of the treasures of the ancient Axumite kingdom, whose heart is now engulfed by the war zone in Tigray.
“The war threatens countless priceless traces of this period, including inscriptions, religious buildings and manuscripts that have been diligently preserved in monasteries for centuries,” said Dost.
The Axumite kingdom, whose territories extended across the Red Sea to Yemen, was one of the great cultural and economic empires of that time and one of the first states to accept Christianity as an official religion, in the early fourth century, even before the Roman Empire.
The capital, Axum, is known as the home of Ark of the Covenant – another sacred relic whose fate is currently unknown.
The Garima Gospels are older than the most famous Western manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells, and are more closely linked to the original Greek Gospels.
To the morning man, Michael Gervers, a historian at the University of Toronto, explained that “they are of extreme importance for the Christian culture as a whole”. “Yours loss would be disastrous for the Judeo-Christian cultural heritage. ”
The war in Tigray destroyed much of Ethiopia’s religious and cultural heritage, even more than the invasions of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, who burned churches and manuscripts across the country in the 16th century.
The historian and his colleagues are attentive to the antique markets, if someone tries to sell the manuscripts. “It would be an offense against Christianity if the Garima Gospels ended up for sale,” he said, adding that there was still a possibility that soldiers had burned the manuscripts “out of spite”.
💭 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 fromwhich even a physically and spiritually exhausted Ethiopia might otherwise have been able to recover far more quickly
➡ Edward Ullendorff – “The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People.” Oxford University Press, 1960
The capital of Ethiopia’s war-torn Tigray region was hit by at least two airstrikes on Monday, an eyewitness and a spokesman for forces fighting the country’s central government told CNN.
The eyewitness in Mekelle told CNN she heard an explosion and saw smoke in the vicinity of Adi Haki Market, describing a scene of panic with people running around when she left her office following the blast.
One resident of the city told Reuters one strike hit close to a market, behind a hotel. An aid worker and a doctor in the region also said there had been an attack and a diplomat shared pictures with Reuters of what they said was the aftermath, including pools of blood and smashed windows.
A spokesman for the Tigray People’s Liberation Front accused Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of targeting civilians in an attack on a busy market day. Ethiopia’s federal government launched a military offensive to oust the TPLF last November and fighting has been ongoing since.
One of the targets of the airstrikes was the Planet Hotel where a “dozen or so humanitarian agencies used to have their employees,” TPLF spokesman Getachew Reda claimed. “Our people won’t be cowed into submission by a desperate move by a desperate regime teetering on the brink of collapse.”
Ethiopia’s head of government communications vehemently denied that it had carried out the airstrikes. The “government doesn’t have any plan to terrorize its own people. Why should it? It’s not true,” Leggese Tulu told CNN. “Those terrorists want to confuse the world by falsely claiming we are being attacked both by air and land to turn the world against Ethiopia.”
Government officials maintain focus of operations in region is suspected rebels allied with Tigrayan forces and not civilians.
Amare says he had two options.
“It was either leave home or be killed,” he told Al Jazeera from the safety of a United Nations-run refugee camp in the Basinga village in Sudan’s Gadarif state bordering Ethiopia.
The 20-year-old student, a member of Ethiopia’s Qemant minority ethnic group, fled to the camp to escape what he says was a raid by Ethiopian soldiers on Shinfa, a town in Ethiopia’s Amhara region some 10km (six miles) from the Sudanese border, on June 13.
“They shot at anyone who moved, including the elderly. I’m lucky to be alive,” he said in a phone interview from the camp. “They want to cleanse the Amhara region of the Qemant,” he added. “They’re trying to finish us off.”
Amare is among a growing number of Qemant to level such accusations against Ethiopian troops and allied militias affiliated with the country’s Amhara regional government.
Government officials maintain that civilians are not being targeted by their offensive in Amhara, which they say is linked to the country’s 11-month war that initially pitted forces loyal to the TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front) – the governing party of nearby Tigray region – against the national armies of Ethiopia and neighbouring Eritrea. The fighting in Tigray has killed thousands, displaced millions and has led to a humanitarian crisis that has left hundreds of thousands facing famine-like conditions. In June, Tigrayan forces launched a counterattack that saw them retake much of their region and expand fighting into the neighbouring Amhara and Afar regions.
But in the fog of the war, military operations and mob violence in disputed territories in the northwest of the Amhara region have also led to the displacement of thousands of ethnic Qemant civilians from their homes.
The Qemant live in the Amhara region and are physically and linguistically indistinguishable from the ethnic Amhara, Ethiopia’s second-largest ethnic group who account for nearly a quarter of Ethiopia’s 112 million people.
The Qemant have long complained of marginalisation, struggling even for recognition – in 2007, they were completely omitted from Ethiopia’s census, and today there are no confirmed population figures for the Qemant, who are believed to number many more than the 172,000 last counted in 1994. Meanwhile, requests for regional autonomy by Qemant rights groups have had them at odds with the ethnic Amhara with whom they share a region.
At a news conference in April, the former Amhara regional President Agegnehu Teshager, whose term ended this week, alleged that Qemant “extremists” had formed militias allied with the Tigrayans, although he did not present evidence to support his claim.
“We are fighting a war against Qemant extremists who trained in Sudan and are armed by the TPLF,” he said. “They have already fired on our forces.”
Refugees in Sudan told Al Jazeera that a number of Qemant youths have taken up arms in response to constant raids on their communities. Al Jazeera could not independently verify this, and there is little to no data on the formal founding of a Qemant force or its capacity.
Ethiopia’s government maintains that its forces are in the area to search for suspected Qemant rebels and secure the country’s border from possible infiltrators from Sudan.
But satellite imagery analysis, witness accounts and photographic evidence gathered by Al Jazeera point instead to the involvement of the Ethiopian military and allied militias in the destruction of Qemant communities. Residents have also accused Ethiopian troops of watching idly as allied militias carry out often macabre killings against civilians.
“They have dragged people from homes and butchered them in the streets,” said a man who fled to Gondar following a raid on his hometown. Requesting anonymity due to fears for his security, he accused members of a local Amhara militia known as the Fano of killing more than a dozen Qemant civilians in this manner during a murderous rampage that took place in the town of Aykel between September 1 and 2.
“They kill, steal what they want and leave. This has been happening for months,” he said on the phone
UK-based non-profit research organisation Vigil Monitor, which has been documenting atrocities across Ethiopia since the breakout of war in November of last year, worked in tandem with Al Jazeera and studied satellite imagery provided by Planet Labs, a private satellite operator, of areas identified by at least a dozen displaced people as having been heavily affected by military operations. The imagery revealed widespread destruction of some 557 civilian structures spanning from May 2021 until the present, largely corroborating witness accounts.
“Over 500 structures have been destroyed deliberately in the Shinfa river area across four settlements,” the organisation said in a written assessment of the imagery. “Affected areas with damage observed in satellite imagery have suffered worsening episodes of violence.”
Vigil Monitor added that different settlements suffered varying degrees and means of violence consistent with time periods and accounts given by witnesses.
“It appears that attacks in the Chilga and Shinfa areas began at least in April,” the organisation said. “We’ve noted significant escalations since then including the mobilisation of Amhara regional forces and the Ethiopian army, the employment of artillery and widespread burning of civilian areas.”
Al Jazeera reached out to Ethiopia’s Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Peace for a response to the allegations but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
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