Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 6, 2022
💭A Nobel Peace Prize should not shield the prime minister from sanctions for war crimes and rights abuses.
👉 Courtesy: Bloomberg
Could Joe Biden become the first American president to sanction a Nobel Peace Prize winner for war crimes and human-rights abuses? As the U.S. steps up efforts to end Ethiopia’s bloody civil war, it must reckon with credible reports that the government of the 2019 laureate Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed instigated the conflict and covered up gross abuses.
Biden’s envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, arrives in Addis Ababa today to advocate peace talks between the Ethiopian government and rebels in the northern region of Tigray. Now in its second year, the war has claimed thousands of lives and displaced millions. It is in a stalemate, with Abiy at a slight advantage: His federal forces have regained territory lost in early November but are unable to make headway into Tigray. The rebel leadership claims to have made a strategic retreat and has indicated a willingness to hold peace talks.
Abiy has ramped up air strikes, using drones acquired from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which have killed scores of Tigrayans. A land offensive would be much bloodier, for both sides. But the prime minister will likely want a thrust deep into Tigray before agreeing to any meaningful parleys. For one thing, this would give him the upper hand in any negotiations. For another, having portrayed himself as a military leader — in the time-honored fashion, he visited the frontlines dressed in fatigues — he needs something that at least looks like a victory.
Feltman’s first order of business should be to restrain Abiy. The prime minister has thus far been immune to persuasion and to punitive economic measures, such as the suspension of European aid and the blocking of duty-free access to the U.S. market. But these, in effect, punish all Ethiopians for the actions of their leaders.
More targeted measures are called for. Biden has threatened to use sanctions to end the fighting, but has only imposed them on the third party to the conflict — the government of neighboring Eritrea, which entered the civil war on Abiy’s side. It is time to call out and sanction Ethiopians, on both the Tigrayan and government sides, who have enabled or committed crimes and abuses.
Despite the hurdles put up by the government, human rights agencies and humanitarian groups have been tabulating offenses by all combatants. Even as officials in Addis Ababa talk up war crimes ascribed to the rebels, they have suppressed information of wrongdoing — including mass rape and the recruitment of child fighters — by government forces and allied militias. Fislan Abdi, the minister Abiy tasked to document abuses, told the Washington Post last week that she was told to sweep inconvenient facts under the carpet. She resigned.
That brings up the question of Abiy’s culpability. His government claims the rebels sparked the civil war when they attacked a military base, but it is now becoming clear that the prime minister had been preparing an assault on the northern region long before then. As the New York Times has reported, Abiy plotted with the Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki against the Tigrayans even as the two leaders negotiated an end to decades of enmity between their countries in 2018 — the deal that won Abiy his Nobel.
The prime minister was apparently counting on the Peace Prize to draw attention away from the preparations that he and Isais were making for war against their common enemy: the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Although the Tigrayans are a minority in multiethnic Ethiopia, the TPLF ran the government for the best part of three decades before Abiy’s accession to power. The Eritreans blame the TPLF for the war between the countries. Abiy is from the Oromo, the largest ethnic group, which was long denied a fair share of power by the Tigrayans.
Since he became prime minister, Abiy has systematically marginalized Tigrayans in the central government. The civil war has provided cover for crimes by government officials and forces. In the most recent example, says Human Rights Watch, thousands of Tigrayans repatriated from Saudi Arabia have been subjected to abuses ranging from arbitrary detention to forcible disappearance.
Abiy is hardly the first Nobel laureate to have brought dishonor to the prize. But, for obvious reasons, American presidents are leery about deploying sanctions against those who have been ennobled as peacemakers.
George W. Bush considered sanctioning Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, joint winner in 1994, but eventually thought better of it. For all his recklessness, Donald Trump could not bring himself to sanction Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, winner in 1991, for her government’s gruesome treatment of the Rohingya minority, and targeted only the country’s military commanders. (Ironically, those same commanders would go on to overthrow the civilian government and imprison Suu Kyi.)
Biden might do well to follow Trump’s example and target senior Ethiopian officials while giving Abiy a Nobel pass. Still, if the prime minister doesn’t take heed, he may well find himself in an ignoble category all of his own.
💭 “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.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 9, 2021
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni is reportedly not happy after he was told that Ethiopia’s Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was retreating, two months after advancing on the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa which sparked concerns among the international community.
Speaking to Sudans Post this morning, a TPLF diplomat in Nebraska, United States said Museveni has told Debretsion Gebremichael that he has a ‘strong disapproval’ of the decision by TPLF forces to retreat after making gains against Ethiopian federal forces.
“What happened in Afar and Amhara regions was not only a defeat for the TPLF and its allies, but it is also a disappointment for the President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni who is not happy at all after all the gains and advances that we have made against the dictatorial regime of Abiy Ahmed,” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
“When he was told that the forces are retreating back towards Tigray, Museveni said in his own words, that ‘I am not happy and I have a strong disapproval for what your troops have done to please those forces’ and this is what he said, but it was something that was outside of our power,” the official added.
Museveni and his son are believed to be pro-Tigrayans in the ongoing Ethiopian conflict.
In November his son Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba who is also a senior army commander sent shivers down the spines of some people for openly backing the Tigrayan rebel forces currently fighting the elected government of PM Abiy Ahmed.
Gen. Muhoozi posted on his verified Twitter account saying: “Our great Tigrayan brothers and sisters cannot be defeated. They have an unconquerable spirit!”
Two days earlier, Gen. Muhoozi had openly stated that he supports the cause of the Tigrayan forces who are currently fighting the government of President Abiy Ahmed.
“I urge my great and brave brothers in the Tigrayan Defence Forces to listen to the words of General Yoweri Museveni! I am as angry as you and I support your cause. Those who raped our Tigrayan sisters and killed our brothers must be punished!”
‘We have to turn back’
In a statement, TPLF leader Debretsion said the decision by his leadership to retreat was necessary due to unforeseen circumstances has Ethiopian federal forces have deployed heavily along the areas recently occupied by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
“We evaluated the overall situation, both ours as well as that of the enemy, and arrived at the decision on our own. We have to turn back; we shouldn’t continue in the present [course]; we have to carry out additional tasks, additional adjustments’ – it was after we identified this that we arrived at the decision,” he said in the statement.
“It was a tough decision but one which had to be made. We have to understand that it was a correct decision. [The decision] wasn’t made because of diplomatic pressure or through discussions,” he added.
The rebel leader further pointed out that “We don’t make discussions which the people of Tigray are not aware of or diplomatic activities which the people of Tigray have not accepted… This is a time of fierce struggle.”
💭 Ethiopian businessman of Tigrayan origin, Samson Teklemichael gets kidnapped in a broad daylight in Nairobi.
They watched friends die in the mountains of Tigray. They survived imprisonment. They paid bribes and suffered from injuries as they fled the civil war devastating Ethiopia.
When the four Tigrayan asylum seekers made it to Nairobi this spring, at first they felt safe. Living in a one-room apartment more than 1,000 miles from the fighting, the friends — three medical workers and one journalist — said they were reassured to be in Kenya, a democracy and one of the region’s most stable countries.
But it was not long before their sense of security dissipated. Rumors abounded about intelligence officers surveilling Tigrayans on behalf of the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments.
Then, late last month, in an incident that sparked an outcry in Kenya and attracted international attention, two men dragged a prominent businessman of Tigrayan descent out of his Bentley and into a Subaru as he sat in Nairobi traffic. A traffic officer appeared in a widely shared video to be holding the door of Samson Teklemichael’s car open to assist his captors. Teklemichael could be heard pleading for bystanders to record his capture.
More than two weeks after Teklemichael was taken, it is not clear who was responsible or what their motivation was, said Kenya police spokesman Bruno Isohi Shioso. Police are still investigating, he said, and seeking tips from the public.
Mulugeta, one of the four Tigrayan friends living in Nairobi, was so shaken he did not leave the apartment for two days.
“I felt free,” he said. “But now my hope is lost.”
For more than a year, Ethiopia has been engulfed in a civil war that has claimed thousands of lives and put hundreds of thousands at risk of famine. The fighting between Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government forces and rebels led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) began as a political power struggle and is now increasingly driven by ethnic rivalries.
Human rights groups warn that Teklemichael’s disappearance is an ominous indicator of the long reach of Abiy, who just two years ago won the Nobel Peace Prize. He has referred to leaders of the TPLF, which dominated the country’s politics for three decades and is resented by many non-Tigrayan Ethiopians, as “cancer” and “weeds.”
Abiy’s spokeswoman Billene Seyoum declined to comment for this story. Another government spokesman, Legesse Tulu, did not respond to requests for comment.
U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman said during a news conference that he would look into the alleged abduction, adding that reports of police in Addis Ababa going door-to-door arresting Tigrayans were alarming. The United States, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom on Tuesday condemned reports of mass detentions of Tigrayans by the Ethiopian government, saying arrests without charges “likely constitute violations of international law and must cease immediately.”
“The brazen daylight abduction of Mr. Teklemichael on a busy Nairobi street has left many people shaken,” said Irũngũ Houghton, executive director for Amnesty International Kenya. “The collapse of the rule of law that we have seen in Addis Ababa, with thousands of Tigrayans being arrested on the streets, that chaos, that lawlessness, must not be allowed to show up in Kenya.”
Teklemichael’s wife, Milen Haleform Mezgebo, said in an interview that she had not heard from her husband since he was taken. Fearing for the safety of their three children, she pulled them out of school.
Mulugeta and his three friends limit their interactions with new people. When they see other Ethiopians on the street, they wonder if they are spies. Citing security concerns, they spoke on the condition that they be identified only by their second names.
The men are part of what analysts say is likely a large network of Tigrayans living illegally in Nairobi, unrecognized by the Kenyan government or UNHCR, the United Nation’s refugee agency. There were only 168 refugees from Tigray officially registered in Kenya in 2020 and 2021, said UNHCR spokeswoman Eujin Byun, and they have been transferred to Kakuma, one of Kenya’s refugee camps, per the government’s policy. The pandemic has contributed to a backlog of processing requests, Byun said.
Ethiopian asylum seekers must come through Kakuma to complete the refugee registration process, said Joseph Kotolo, Kenya’s head of refugee status determination. But the men in Nairobi said they worry about their health and safety at Kakuma, where nearly 200,000 people live in often bleak conditions. They believe the thousands of Ethiopians living there could pose a threat, although spokespeople for UNHCR and Kenya’s refugee agency said they had not heard reports of any attacks targeting Tigrayans at Kakuma.
The four men acknowledged, though, that their legal limbo contributes to their fear. They have repeatedly called the U.N. hotline, trying to secure status as legal refugees.
Teklemichael was “a businessman and a legal person who had been living in Kenya for a long time,” Mulugeta said. “I am not a businessperson. I am not a legal person. I have no money. … If he was abducted, what about us?”
Getting out
After fighting broke out last November in Ethiopia’s mountainous north, each of the men experienced a different version of the terror that forced them to leave.
Mulugeta, who was in Addis Ababa, said he was repeatedly punched by a police officer and dragged to a makeshift prison where he was detained for 40 days.
Hailay and Khasay, who worked together in the Tigray region’s health department, said they watched bombs kill two pharmacist colleagues in the hills of Abiy Addi in December. Hailay, 28, and Khasay, 26, tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the men, who had been walking dozens of feet ahead of them. There was no time to bury the bodies, they said, because more bombs were coming. They alleged the bombs were dropped by the Ethiopian government.
Teklemariam, 27, a childhood friend of Hailay, said he ran from Eritrean soldiers who repeatedly shot at him after taking control of his hometown, Enticho. Soldiers looted his family’s farm, he said, taking grain, shoes, clothes and cooking supplies.
When he traveled to Tigray’s capital last winter to pick up his paycheck, he called Hailay. With Khasay, they devised a plan.
“The only choice,” Teklemariam said, “was to escape from that horror.”
The deterioration of Africa’s second-most-populous country has been staggering. Once heralded for pursing democratic reforms and brokering peace deals in the region, Prime Minister Abiy is leading the battle on the front lines. The United Nations predicts hundreds of thousands of refugees will flee.
Traveling by bus through Ethiopia, Hailay, Khasay and Teklemariam were stopped near the border by an official at a checkpoint. He asked for their identification cards and demanded to know where they were coming from, they said. Not wanting to lie, they told him Tigray’s capital. Then he brought them to a small, bug-infested house where they estimated about 50 men were being held as prisoners.
For four days, the men said they were beaten by guards who demanded money they did not have.
Eventually, Hailay reached a friend who convinced the officials to release them.
With money gathered from friends, they paid smugglers to get them to Nairobi. The nearly 500-mile journey took a week by foot, motorbike and van. They ate only a handful of times, drank water from the river; and traveled mostly at night to avoid detection. At one point, the smugglers insisted they cross a crocodile-infested river.
Mulugeta, who they met on the journey, became like an older brother.
When Mulugeta, 35, fainted in the heat at one point and badly burned his leg while falling off a motorbike at another, they helped care for him. And when Mulugeta learned his friends in Nairobi had offered to pay for a one-room apartment, he offered to share it.
‘We are not secure here’
Teklemariam walked through Nairobi’s bustling streets one October evening, collecting the ingredients needed for dinner. He bought cow meat from the butcher around the corner and injera — a spongy bread that is a staple of Ethiopian cooking — from a woman who enveloped him in a hug.
He fist-bumped a gaggle of children on the way out.
“Nice Ethiopians,” he said, explaining that the family that owned the store was from the Amhara region, which has long had tense relations with Tigray. But they had welcomed him and his friends.
Back in the room, the other three men were carefully weaving around each other in the corner that served as a kitchen, chopping onions and chile peppers, starting the gas burner on which the meat stew would be cooked and arranging stools and sleeping pads around the makeshift table.
Since arriving in March, each has had their own struggles.
When the TPLF advanced in November, Teklemariam cheered. But rounds of government airstrikes in Tigray that were reported to have killed civilians muted his excitement. He guessed that any TPLF gains would be followed by retaliatory strikes. He feared for his family, from whom he had not heard in months because of a government communications blackout.
“Many Tigrayans are in a blue mood at this moment,” said Teklemariam, who said he was too traumatized to watch footage of the strikes. “Many people have become silent.”
The current situation, the men said, is not sustainable. Unable to work, they rely on the generosity of Nairobi’s Tigrayan community. They eat only two meals a day and have started buying pasta and ugali, a stiff flour porridge, because it is cheaper than injera.
Their six-month passes acknowledging them as asylum seekers expired in October. They said their calls to the U.N. hotline have been brushed off.
Teklemariam emerged from an interview with Kenya’s refugee agency in November in tears. An official told him, he said, to report to Kakuma or go back to his country.
Friends have said the only other way to get the paperwork needed to be in Nairobi legally is to pay bribes. But they do not have the money.
They now hope to get even further away, maybe to the United States or Europe.
What they know for now, Teklemariam said, is this: “We are not secure here.”
“The poor souls who died in the Channel deserve the dignity of being described as who they were. Human beings. Men, women, children. Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons. They loved and were loved. In other words they were just like us. An unconscionable tragedy.””
Instead, they are speaking Amharic — Ethiopia’s administrative language and the native tongue of the Amhara people. Gundarta, who produced a translation of the speech in the videos, stated that the soldiers’ accents indicate that they are mostly native Amharic speakers from the Amhara Region, though some may be second language speakers from the Oromia Region.
CHANNEL TRAGEDY At least 33 migrants drown in deadliest ever incident on the Channel after inflatable dinghy flips over during crossing
A massive rescue operation is currently underway in French waters after the boat sank off the northern port of Calais, with at least three helicopters and three boats deployed to take part in the search.
Tonight, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin confirmed 33 people died in the deadliest single disaster on the intensively-used route.
The French authorities said patrol vessels found corpses and people unconscious in the water after a fisherman sounded the alarm about the incident.
Following the sinking, Dunkirk prosecutors opened a criminal investigation for “manslaughter” and “assistance with illegal immigration in an organised gang”.
Mr Darmanin said four suspected traffickers “directly linked” to the tragedy have been arrested.
He told reporters: “1,500 people have been arrested since the start of January, and four of them today. We suspect that they were directly linked to this particular crossing.”
It follows claims that people smugglers had organised the passage of the overcrowded boat, charging thousands to those on board to get to Britain.
“Ethiopia´s government says it is “thankful” to Saudi Arabia for accepting Ethiopian migrants entering the country”
The statement Thursday is Ethiopia´s first public comment after a report in a British newspaper, The Sunday Telegraph, sparked outrage among some governments and human rights groups. The report, with photos showing dozens of African migrants sprawled close together in the desert heat, said hundreds are locked up. Most are Ethiopian men, it said.
“Ethiopia´s government says it is “thankful” to Saudi Arabia for accepting Ethiopian migrants entering the country”
The statement Thursday is Ethiopia´s first public comment after a report in a British newspaper, The Sunday Telegraph, sparked outrage among some governments and human rights groups. The report, with photos showing dozens of African migrants sprawled close together in the desert heat, said hundreds are locked up. Most are Ethiopian men, it said.
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