Turkmenistan’s president has ordered the extinguishing of the country’s “Gateway to Hell”, a fire that has been burning for decades in a huge desert gas crater.
Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov wants it put out for environmental and health reasons, as well as part of efforts to increase gas exports.
Mystery surrounds the Darvaza crater’s creation in the Karakum Desert.
Many believe it formed when a Soviet drilling operation went wrong in 1971.
But Canadian explorer George Kourounis examined the crater’s depths in 2013 and discovered that no-one actually knows how it started.
According to local Turkmen geologists, the huge crater formed in the 1960s but was only lit in the 1980s.
The crater is one of Turkmenistan’s most popular tourist attractions.
“We are losing valuable natural resources for which we could get significant profits and use them for improving the well-being of our people,” the president said in televised remarks.
He instructed officials to “find a solution to extinguish the fire”.
There have been numerous attempts to end the fire, including in 2010 when Mr Berdymukhamedov also ordered experts to find a way to put out the flames.
In 2018, the president officially renamed it the Shining of Karakum.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 8, 2022
🔥 The Erta Ale volcano which is one of the most amazing natural sites on the planet and the world’s oldest active lava lake remains active.
The recent field observation of expedition leader and guide from Volcano Discovery Ethiopia, Enku Mulugaeta, confirmed that the volcano’s south crater went through little morphological changes before the current eruption started.
A part of NE crater wall (1-2 m) collapsed two times – the first time in the evening between 31 December 2021 and 1 January and the second time in the morning of 1 January, 2022.
The south crater, located in the central part of the caldera, is occupied by the lava lake that has undergone some changes. The intense activity of the lake was accompanied by rapid movements of the lava from the north to the south and small lava fountains, about 1 meter tall.
The terraces on the northern side of the crater appear to have been swamped by the lava after which the lava lake level decreased.
the lava lake is occupying the summit crater now and is back after 5 years of inactivity! The estimated depth of the lake is about 35 meters from the rim with a crater diameter of 200 meters. On 31 December, two big collapses have been observed, meaning that the lake got wider.
As to what exactly caused the eruption and whether it fed new flows from its main outlet channel or whether it was an independent batch of lava that burst out from a flank fissure, is not clear yet.
Erta Ale is the site of the largest of only five known lava lakes in the world. Temperatures inside the cauldron are said to reach around 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,000 °F). The volcano is known locally as “Smoking Mountain” and “Gateway To Hell.”
Erta Ale is said to be one of the very few Actual ‘gateways to hell’ right here on earth.
Hell—a concept we have heard about in almost every culture’s mythology and popularized by the Greeks. A ‘Door to Hell’ is a passage that leads into the underworld, where the creatures of the dead prevail, under the supervision of the God of Hell. Of course, depending on the culture, this so-called God of Hell is known by various names—from Hades to Lucifer.
🔥 Erta Ale was featured in the 2010 movie Clash of The Titans as an entrance to Hell.
🔥 Erta Ale Volcano (Danakil Depression, Ethiopia): Lava Lake Returned to Crater
💭 Visual observations from Seifegebreil Shifferaw confirm that the lava lake is occupying the summit crater now and is back after 5 years of inactivity!
The estimated depth of the lake is about 35 meters from the rim with a crater diameter of 200 meters.
On 31 December, two big collapses have been observed, meaning that the lake got wider.
As to what exactly caused the eruption and whether it fed new flows from its main outlet channel or whether it was an independent batch of lava that burst out from a flank fissure, is not clear yet.
💭 “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 20, 2021
💭 UPDATE:
Fresh Ethiopia Air Raids Target Civilians In #Tigray Today, the #Ethiopia|n Air Force has conducted multiple drone and air strikes in Maychew, Korem and, the regional capital, Mekelle. So far eighteen civilians have been reported killed and eleven more injured.
💭 The Tragic drama continues: The Fascist Oromo Army’s Airstrike in Mekelle, today December 20, 2021
❖ [Jeremiah 6:14]❖
“All they ever offer to my deeply wounded people are empty hopes for peace.”
❖ [Ezekiel 13:10]❖
“Because, indeed, because they have seduced My people, saying, ‘Peace!’ when there is no peace—and one builds a wall, and they plaster it with untempered mortar.„
💭 Ethiopia’s Tigray forces announce retreat with view to possible ceasefire
Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) said the decision could be a ‘decisive opening for peace’
Tigrayan forces fighting the Ethiopian government have announced their withdrawal from two key regions in the north of the country, a step towards a possible ceasefire after 13 months of brutal war.
“We trust that our bold act of withdrawal will be a decisive opening for peace,” wrote Debretsion Gebremichael, the head of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the political party controlling most of the northern region of Tigray.
His letter on Monday to the United Nations called for a no-fly zone for hostile aircraft over Tigray, imposing arms embargos on Ethiopia and its ally Eritrea, and a UN mechanism to verify that external armed forces had withdrawn from Tigray.
Mr Debretsion said he hoped the Tigrayan withdrawal, from the regions of Afar and Amhara, would force the international community to ensure that food aid could enter Tigray. The UN has previously accused the government of operating a de facto blockade – a charge the government has denied.
“We hope that by (us) withdrawing, the international community will do something about the situation in Tigray as they can no longer use as an excuse that our forces are invading Amhara and Afar,” TPLF spokesman Getachew Reda told Reuters.
“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?!
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