💭 Starving people based on their ethnicity, covering up atrocities by disinformation and evading accountability have become acceptable norms and values in Ethiopia. I’m not sure we will ever recover from this.
💭 Ethnic Cleansing Documented in Western Tigray – Amnesty and HRW accused Amhara forces and officials of denying humanitarian aid to civilians in western Tigray
Ethiopian paramilitaries have carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Tigray, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes using threats, killings and sexual violence, according to a joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
The rights groups accuse officials and paramilitaries from the neighbouring Amhara region of war crimes and crimes against humanity in western Tigray, in northern Ethiopia.
“Since November 2020, Amhara officials and security forces have engaged in a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing to force Tigrayans in western Tigray from their homes,” said Kenneth Roth, director of HRW.
According to the report, militias from Amhara joined the Ethiopian armed forces and its allies to seize western Tigray in the first few weeks of the war, using indiscriminate shelling and execution to force people to leave.
The report said these forces also put up signs in towns demanding that people leave and made threats to kill civilians who wanted to stay.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said the level of abuse of civilians had not been taken seriously enough internationally. “The response of Ethiopia’s international and regional partners has failed to reflect the gravity of the crimes that continue to unfold in western Tigray,” she said.
“Concerned governments must help bring an end to the ethnic-cleansing campaign, ensure that Tigrayans are able to safely and voluntarily return home, and make a concerted effort to obtain justice for these heinous crimes.”
Amnesty and HRW also accused Amhara forces and officials of denying humanitarian aid to civilians in western Tigray, an issue the UN has raised concerns about in recent months.
💭 Abuses “amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes,” according to a report from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Widespread abuses against civilians in the western part of Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have charged in a new report.
The crimes were perpetrated by security officials and civilian authorities from the neighboring Amhara region, sometimes “with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopian federal forces,” the rights groups say in the report released Wednesday.
The abuses are “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Tigrayan civilian population that amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes,” the report says.
Two human rights groups have accused armed forces from Ethiopia’s Amhara region of waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayans. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accused Amhara officials and regional special forces and militias fighting in western Tigray of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. They also accuse Ethiopia’s military of complicity in those acts. For more on the report we are now joined via Zoom by Laetitia Bader, Expert and Senior Researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch.
💭 Abuses “amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes,” according to a report from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Widespread abuses against civilians in the western part of Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have charged in a new report.
The crimes were perpetrated by security officials and civilian authorities from the neighboring Amhara region, sometimes “with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopian federal forces,” the rights groups say in the report released Wednesday.
The abuses are “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Tigrayan civilian population that amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes,” the report says.
Ethiopian federal authorities strongly refute allegations they have deliberately targeted Tigrayans for violent attacks. They said at the outbreak of the war in Nov. 2020 that their objective was to disarm the rebellious leaders of Tigray.
Ethiopian officials in Addis Ababa, the federal capital, and in Amhara didn’t respond to requests for comment on the allegations in the rights groups’ report.
The report, the result of a months-long investigation including more than 400 interviews, charges that hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans have been forced to leave their homes in a violent campaign of unlawful killings, sexual assaults, mass arbitrary detentions, livestock pillaging, and the denial of humanitarian assistance.
Fighters loyal to the party of Tigray’s leaders — the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF — also have been accused of committing abuses as the war spread into neighboring regions. Fighters affiliated with the TPLF deliberately killed dozens of people, gang-raped dozens of women and pillaged property for a period of several weeks last year in Amhara region, Amnesty said in a report released in February.
The new report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International focuses on attacks targeting Tigrayans in western Tigray and describes them as “ethnic cleansing,” a term that refers to forcing a population from a region through expulsions and other violence, often including killings and rapes.
Publicly displayed signs in several towns across western Tigray urged Tigrayans to leave, and local officials in meetings discussed plans to remove Tigrayans, according to the report. Pamphlets appeared to give Tigrayans urgent ultimatums to leave or be killed, the report says.
“They kept saying every night, ‘We will kill you . Go out of the area,’” said one woman from the town of Baeker, speaking of threats she faced from an Amhara militia group, according to the report.
Western Tigray has long been contested territory. Amhara authorities say the area was under their control until the 1990s when the TPLF-led federal government redrew internal boundaries that put the territory within Tigray’s borders. Amhara officials moved swiftly to take over the region when the war broke out.
The outbreak of the war “brought these longstanding and unaddressed grievances to the fore: Amhara regional forces, along with Ethiopian federal forces, seized these territories and displaced Tigrayan civilians in a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign,” the report says.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted in March 2021 that ethnic cleansing had taken place in western Tigray, marking the first time a top official in the international community openly described the situation as such. That allegation was dismissed by Ethiopian authorities as “a completely unfounded and spurious verdict against the Ethiopian government.”
The new report corroborates reporting by The Associated Press on atrocities in the war, which affects 6 million people in Tigray alone.
In June Ethiopia’s government cut off almost all access to food aid, medical supplies, cash and fuel in Tigray. The war has spilled into Amhara and Afar regions, with Tigrayan leaders saying they are fighting to ease the blockade and to protect themselves from further attacks.
Facing growing international pressure, Ethiopian authorities on March 24 announced a humanitarian truce for Tigray, saying the action was necessary to allow unimpeded relief supplies into the area. Trucks bearing food supplies have since arrived in the region.
The AP last year confirmed the first starvation deaths under the blockade along with the government’s ban on humanitarian workers bringing medicines into Tigray.
Estimated tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war. But there is little hope for peace talks as Ethiopian authorities have outlawed the TPLF, effectively making its leaders fugitives on the run.
Among their recommendations, the rights groups call for a “neutral protection force” in western Tigray, possibly with the deployment of an African Union-backed peacekeeping mission, “with a robust civilian protection mandate.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 21, 2022
❖ ጽላተ ሙሴ ❖ ንግሥት መከዳ ❖ አክሱም ❖ የመን
💭 More than 200 people were killed or wounded in an air strike on a prison and at least three children died in a separate bombardment as Yemen’s long-running conflict suffered a dramatic escalation of violence on Friday.
The Houthi rebels released gruesome video footage showing bodies in the rubble and mangled corpses from the prison attack, which levelled buildings at the jail in their northern heartland of Saada.
Further south in the port town of Hodeida, the children died when air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition hit a telecommunications facility as they played nearby, Save the Children said. Yemen also suffered a country-wide internet blackout.
“The children were reportedly playing on a nearby football field when missiles struck,” Save the Children said.
The attacks come after the Houthis took the seven-year war into a new phase by claiming a drone-and-missile attack on Abu Dhabi that killed three people on Monday.
The United Arab Emirates, part of the Saudi-led coalition fighting the rebels, threatened reprisals.
Aid workers said hospitals were overwhelmed in Saada after the prison attack, with one receiving 70 dead and 138 wounded, according to Doctors Without Borders.
Two other hospitals have received “many wounded” and as night fell, the rubble was still being searched, the aid agency said.
‘Horrific act’
Ahmed Mahat, Doctors Without Borders’ head of mission in Yemen, said: “There are many bodies still at the scene of the air strike, many missing people.”
“It is impossible to know how many people have been killed. It seems to have been a horrific act of violence.”
The UN Security Council, meeting Friday at the request of non-permanent member the United Arab Emirates, unanimously condemned what it called the Houthis’ “heinous terrorist attacks in Abu Dhabi… as well as in other sites in Saudi Arabia”.
The UAE is part of the Saudi-led coalition that has been fighting the rebels since 2015, in an intractable conflict that has displaced millions of Yemenis and left them on the brink of famine.
The coalition claimed the attack in Hodeida, a lifeline port for the shattered country, but did not say it had carried out any strikes on Saada.
Saudi Arabia’s state news agency said the coalition carried out “precision air strikes… to destroy the capabilities of the Houthi militia in Hodeida”.
😈The following entities and bodies are helping the genocidal fascist Oromo regime of evil Abiy Ahmed Ali:
☆ The United Nations
☆ The European Union
☆ The African Union
☆ The United States, Canada & Cuba
☆ Russia
☆ China
☆ Israel
☆ Arab States
☆ Southern Ethiopians
☆ Amharas
☆ Eritrea
☆ Djibouti
☆ Kenya
☆ Sudan
☆ Somalia
☆ Egypt
☆ Iran
☆ Pakistan
☆ India
☆ Azerbaijan
☆ Amnesty International
☆ Human Rights Watch
☆ World Food Program (2020 Nobel Peace Laureate)
☆ The Nobel Prize Committee
☆ The Atheists and Animists
☆ The Muslims
☆ The Protestants
☆ The Sodomites
💭 Even those unlikely allies like: ‘Israel vs Iran’, ‘Russia + China vs Ukraine + The West’, ‘Egypt + Sudan vs Iran + Turkey’, ‘India vs Pakistan’ are all united now in the Anti Zionist-Ethiopia-Conspiracy. This has never ever happened before it is a very curios phenomenon unique appearance in world history.
✞ With the Zionist Tigrayan-Ethiopians are:
❖ The Almighty Egziabher God & His Saints
❖ St. Mary of Zion
❖ The Ark of The Covenant
😇 The Identity of the Queen of Sheba – Ethiopian-Yemeni Queen
The Queen of Sheba was a monarch called “Makeda,” who ruled the Axumite Empire based in northern Ethiopia.
Solomon and Sheba’s child, Emperor Menelik I, founded the Solomonid dynasty. Menelik also went to Jerusalem to meet his father, and received as a gift The Ark of the Covenant.
Archaeological evidence indicates that as early as the tenth century B.C.—about when the Queen of Sheba is said to have lived—Ethiopia and Yemen were ruled by a single dynasty, probably based in Yemen. Four centuries later, the two regions were both under the sway of the city of Axum. Since the political and cultural ties between ancient Yemen and Ethiopia seem to have been incredibly strong, it may be that each of these traditions is correct, in a sense. The Queen of Sheba reigned over both Ethiopia and Yemen.
✞✞✞[Isaiah 33:1]✞✞✞ “Woe to you, O destroyer, While you were not destroyed; And he who is treacherous, while others did not deal treacherously with him. As soon as you finish destroying, you will be destroyed; As soon as you cease to deal treacherously, others will deal treacherously with you.”
💭 “It’s just horrifying, Tigrayan deportees are being disappeared and detained back home. After suffering sometimes years of awful abuse, (in Saudi Arabia) they are now being persecuted by their own government, denied freedom of movement and any contact with their loved ones.” Nadia Hardman of HRW.
💭 “There are Tigrayans in Saudi Arabia who now fear deportation more than they do imprisonment in Saudi Arabia,”
“Many of our friends who were returned stop answering their phones after a few weeks in Ethiopia. We have no idea where they are, and we fear the worst.”
💭 Saudi Arabia Should Stop Deporting Tigrayan Migrants to Ethiopia
Thousands of ethnic Tigrayans deported from Saudi Arabia have been detained, abused or forcibly disappeared after arriving back home in Ethiopia, Human Rights Watch said in a new report Wednesday.
The ethnic profiling and mistreatment of returnees detailed by HRW took place as the federal government fought Tigrayan rebels in a grinding year-long war that has cost thousands of lives and pushed many more people into famine.
Tigrayans repatriated from Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians have migrated to seek work over the years, were singled out and held in Addis Ababa and elsewhere against their will upon returning, HRW said.
Others were prevented from returning to Tigray, the northernmost region of Ethiopia, after being identified at roadside checkpoints or airports and transferred to detention facilities, the report said.
“Ethiopian authorities are persecuting Tigrayans deported from Saudi Arabia by wrongfully detaining and forcibly disappearing them,” said Nadia Hardman, refugee and migrants rights researcher at HRW.
The rights watchdog interviewed Tigrayans deported from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia between December 2020 and September 2021, during which tens of thousands were repatriated under an agreement between the two countries.
Some of the Tigrayan deportees detained after arriving in Ethiopia reported suffering physical abuse, including beatings with rubber or wooden rods.
Others were accused of colluding with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which ran Tigray before the start of the war, and is now considered a terrorist group by Addis Ababa.
Two deportees told HRW they were taken with other men from migrants centres by police and bused to coffee farms, where they were put to work in terrible conditions for no pay and little food.
Many were denied contact with family, and feared their relatives thought they were still in Saudi Arabia.
“The Ethiopian authorities’ detention of thousands of Tigrayan deportees from Saudi Arabia without informing their families of their arrest or whereabouts amounts to enforced disappearance, which also violates international law,” the report said.
In late 2021 the United States and its allies called on Ethiopia to stop unlawfully detaining its citizens on ethnic grounds under a wartime state of emergency declared in November.
Ethiopia’s own state-affiliated rights watchdog estimated that thousands had been caught up in sweeps that appears to target Tigrayans on their ethnicity alone.
“The global paralysis on Ethiopia’s armed conflict has emboldened human rights abusers to act with impunity,” Human Rights Watch’s Laetitia Bader said.
By The Associated Press
New witness accounts allege that thousands of ethnic Tigrayans have been forcibly expelled, detained or killed in one of the most inaccessible areas of Ethiopia’s yearlong war in the latest wave of abuses carried out with machetes, guns and knives.
It comes ahead of a U.N. Human Rights Council session Friday on Ethiopia, whose government objects to what it considers meddling by the West over the war that has killed tens of thousands of people.
Ethnic Tigrayans have been targeted throughout the conflict as Ethiopian and allied forces battle the Tigray fighters who long dominated the national government before Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office three years ago. Some of the worst abuses have been reported in the western Tigray region, which has been occupied by authorities and fighters from the neighboring Amhara region and soldiers from neighboring Eritrea.
The latest alleged abuses appear to be linked to the Tigray forces’ recent momentum, which Ethiopia’s government asserts has been blunted after the prime minister, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and former soldier, went to the battlefront himself. Witnesses told the AP that authorities in western Tigray warned in public meetings against supporting the Tigray fighters, who themselves have been accused of a growing number of abuses in the war.
The new joint statement by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International says Amhara security forces are responsible for the latest wave of expulsions, detentions and killings, and it warns that Tigrayans in detention are “at grave risk.” It says security forces systematically rounded up Tigrayans in the communities of Humera, Adebay and Rawyan, separating families and expelling women and children.
“They separated the old from the young, took their money and other possessions. … Older people, parents were loaded on big trucks (going) east. They let them go with nothing, while the young remained behind,” one witness in Rawyan told the human rights groups. In Humera, witnesses described seeing as many as 20 trucks carrying people away. It’s not often clear where they are taken.
A spokesman for the Amhara region, Gizachew Mulluneh, and Abiy spokeswoman Bellene Seyoum did not immediately comment.
The United Nations has estimated that 20,000 people were recently evicted from western Tigray, most of them women, children and the elderly. The U.N. has said more than 1 million have been displaced from there since the war began in November 2020.
But not all can leave. Witnesses have alleged that hundreds, if not thousands, of Tigrayans are held in makeshift, overcrowded detention centers in western Tigray, part of thousands being held elsewhere across Ethiopia amid suspicions fueled by hate speech by some senior government officials. The government has said it is targeting only the Tigray forces.
Witnesses told the AP, and the human rights groups, that some people trying to flee the roundups in Adebay were attacked and killed, with some Amhara fighters searching house-to-house with axes. “The whole town smelled” with dead bodies, one man said.
The human rights groups are calling on Ethiopian authorities to end the attacks on civilians and immediately grant access to western Tigray for aid groups. They also call on the U.N. Human Rights Council to establish an independent mechanism to investigate the war’s abuses, including by Tigray forces, and urge the U.N. Security Council to put Ethiopia on its formal agenda.
“The global paralysis on Ethiopia’s armed conflict has emboldened human rights abusers to act with impunity and left communities at risk of feeling abandoned,” Human Rights Watch’s Laetitia Bader said.
👉 „Failure on Ethiopia Sanctions ‘My Biggest Frustration’ This Year, Says EU’s Top Diplomat”
💭 My Note: In other words, Mr. Borrell is telling us: “As long as war criminals Abiy Ahmed Ali, Isaias Afewerki, the Oromo & Amhara special forces continue blocking Tigrayans (potential migrants to Europe heading for EU) from crossing the Ethio-Sudanese border in whatever possible form: By rounding them up, mutilating & dismembering — at the border within Africa – and throwing their dead bodies to the Tekeze river across the border, EU won’t issue sanctions against Abiy Ahmed, Isaias Afewerki and their partners in crime. The are doing a good job in preventing undesired ancient Christian Ethiopian migrants (We saw that when the UN The US and EU all blocked ancient Christians of Syria. Read this: No Christians Allowed: Muslim UN Officials Block Syrian Christian Refugees from Getting Help.
Mr. Borrell said it clearly, albeit concerning Belarus and Ukraine: “We cut the flowing of migrants to Europe…for me this is a source of satisfaction”
May be now The EU is giving money to the dictators of Ethiopia and Eritrea as a reward, instead of sanctioning them?!
After all, EU countries have awarded and honored to those evil monsters with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, and just two months ago, one of the enablers of the #TigrayGenocide, Daniel Bekele with the German Africa Prize. Just unbelievably cruel – the world upside down, isn’t it?!
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 11, 2021
UN Says 350,000 People in Tigray Starving, Millions More at Risk
G7 leaders meeting this week should galvanize an immediate global response to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
Yesterday, the United Nations and other aid agencies warned that some 350,000 people are already experiencing famine-like conditions in Tigray. Millions of others there are at risk of famine too, unless assistance is promptly provided. The UN children’s agency, UNICEF, says that some 33,000 severely malnourished children “are at high risk of death.”
That the Ethiopian government disputes these findings only underscores the urgency of international involvement. G7 leaders should demand from Ethiopia and its allies the resumption of basic services, unimpeded aid delivery and access, and make clear that any official who blocks assistance faces immediate sanctions.
The millions facing famine in Tigray cannot be explained away as a by-product of the seven-month armed conflict. Human Rights Watch research shows that warring parties have directly contributed to this man-made disaster. Government restrictions on aid access to the region and to basic services in the early months of the fighting pushed many people over the edge. Ethiopian, Eritrean and Amhara forces have also looted property, burned crops, and attacked factories, hospitals, and other infrastructure key to people’s survival.
While humanitarian access in some areas has reportedly improved, warring parties are still denying aid workers’ movement, intimidating and attacking them, and confiscating supplies. Mark Lowcock, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, said that in May alone, Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Amhara forces were responsible for 130 out of 131 access violations.
Attacks on civilians, including large-scale massacres and executions of men and boys, arbitrary detentions, and numerous horrific acts of sexual violence against women and girls, are also impeding people’s ability to reach help.
Tigray has been here before. Human Rights Watch documented that Ethiopia’s military dictatorship under the Derg in the mid-1980s, plunged millions in Tigray and other areas into famine by destroying crops, bombing marketplaces, restricting movement, and deliberately targeting food distribution efforts.
While different eras and realities, the parallels in the warring parties’ tactics are chilling.
Iconic images of starving people from a BBC report during the 1984 famine justifiably sparked international outcry. They also became an image Ethiopia has long tried to escape. This time around, the alarm bells have been ringing for months. It’s an enduring shame that the African Union has largely remained silent, and Russian and Chinese objections mean the UN Security Council has been unable to hold a single public meeting on the crisis. G7 leaders should act now.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 11, 2021
Your Excellency,
We, the undersigned human rights non-governmental organizations, strongly urge the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) to adopt a resolution at its upcoming 47thsession (HRC47) on the ongoing human rights crisis in Tigray, Ethiopia.
Over the last seven months an overwhelming number of reports have emerged of abuses and violations of international humanitarian and human rights law (IHL/IHRL) during the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region. Reports by civil society organizations have detailed widespread massacres, violence against civilians and indiscriminate attacks across Tigray while preliminary analysis by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) indicates that all warring parties have committed abuses that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. There is now ample evidence that atrocities continue to be committed, notably by the Ethiopian National Defense Forces, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, Eritrean Defense Forces, and Amhara regional special police and affiliated Fano militias. These include indiscriminateattacks and direct attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, widespread and mass extrajudicial executions, rape and other sexual violence, forced displacement, arbitrary detentions, including of displaced persons, widespread destruction and pillage of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, factories and businesses, and the destruction of refugee camps, crops and livestock.
The Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) on Sexual Violence in Conflict has repeatedly expressed alarm over the widespread and systematic commission of rape and sexual violence in Tigray. On 21 April she stated that women and girls in Tigray are being subjected to sexual violence “with a cruelty that is beyond comprehension,” including gang rape by men in uniform, targeted sexual attacks on young girls and pregnant women, and family members forced to witness these horrific abuses. The SRSG also stated that these reports, coupled with assessments by healthcare providers in the region, indicate that sexual violence is being used as a weapon of war.
Thousands of civilians are estimated to have been killed, while the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs believes at least 1.7 million people remain displaced. On top of ethnic targeting and massacres within Tigray, there have been reports of government discrimination, demonization and hate speech directed at Tigrayans in other parts of Ethiopia. A number of UN officials, from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to UNICEF’s Executive Director and the UN Special Advisers on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect, have publicly called for urgent action to end the abuses in Tigray and alleviate the conflict’s devastating impact on the region’s civilian population.
The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator has also warned that famine is imminent in Tigray and that without a drastic upscaling of funding and access, hundreds of thousands of people could starve. Despite this looming risk, humanitarian workers have also been targeted throughout the conflict, with nine aid workers killed since November, the most recent on 29 May.
On 25 March, OHCHR and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission announced the launch of a joint investigation into the ongoing reports of atrocity crimes in Tigray. On 12 May, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) adopted an important resolution establishing a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) to investigate violations of IHL and IHRL and identify perpetrators. Unfortunately, the HRC has so far remained largely silent on Tigray, aside from a welcome joint statement delivered by Germany on behalf of 42 states on 26 February 2021.
A robust, dedicated and coordinated approach to this human rights crisis by the international community is both critical and urgent, given the gravity of ongoing crimes, the complex nature of the situation, and the involvement of various parties. After seven months of serious violations and abuses, the HRC can no longer stay silent. It should take urgent action to address the crisis and fulfil its mandate to address and prevent violations of human rights, including gross and systematic violations and abuses, and to respond promptly to emergencies. We therefore respectfully urge your Mission to work towards the adoption of a resolution at HRC47 that:
· Recognizes the serious concerns expressed by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, SRSG on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Special Advisers on the Prevention of Genocide and Responsibility to Protect, and other senior UN officials regarding possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Tigray;
· Requests the High Commissioner to report on her investigations, findings and recommendations to date regarding the human rights situation in Tigray, Ethiopia, and possible violations of IHL and IHRL at the HRC’s 48th session in the context of an enhanced interactive dialogue;
· Also invites the ACHPR’s CoI to brief the HRC on its investigation at the enhanced interactive dialogue at the 48th session;
· Emphasizes the important role of the HRC’s prevention mandate, as outlined in Resolution 45/31, and requests the High Commissioner to brief UN member states intersessionally and on an ad-hoc basis to update the HRC on the situation in Tigray.
The adoption of such a resolution would provide a concrete foundation for the HRC to decide on the action needed to prevent further human rights violations and abuses in Tigray and ensure accountability.
Excellencies, please accept the assurances of our highest consideration,
Where’s the UN Security Council’s formal Meeting on Tigray?
At a high-level U.S. and EU event on the ongoing crisis in Ethiopia’s Tigray region yesterday, USAID Administrator Samantha Power expressed frustration that the U.N. — the body in which she used to represent U.S. interests — hasn’t been able to act to stop atrocities.
The meeting came as U.N. agencies warned of “looming famine” in Tigray, where over 350,000 people are already facing catastrophic food insecurity.
“I’ve lived through great frustration on the Security Council,” Power said, referencing being unable to secure “a tough resolution on an issue of grave concern.” On Tigray: “Not even to have a formal meeting on something of this enormity — it’s shocking, truly, and will go down in history … as a very shameful period.”
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield called the Security Council’s failure to act “unacceptable.” “Do African lives not matter?” she asked. The Irish Mission to the U.N. has asked the Security Council to meet on Tigray, and expects it to happen next Tuesday.
The U.S. and EU released a joint statement following the meeting, calling for a cease-fire, adherence to international humanitarian law, immediate and unimpeded humanitarian access, withdrawal of Eritrean forces from Ethiopia, and a scale-up of international support.
_______
______
______
________
_________
_________
__________
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 