😈The Gala-Oromos have committed a crime against Ethiopians that has not yet been heard or talked about.
Even after all this heinous crime, you may still deceive this weak and lazy generation. But you can never deceive The Almighty Egziabher God. Because He videotaped the whole thing, all the time.
The bastardized Emperor Menlik the 2nd , who has the identity and essence of the flesh, reigned after overthrowing the great Christian emperor Emperor Yohannes lV in Ethiopia – with the help of the Europeans – the dark and evil witchcraft, blood-Sucking spirit of ‘Waqeyo-Allah-Lucifer’ thrived in Ethiopia.
In the last hundred and thirty years, the Gala-Oromos and their allies managed to kill up to sixty million Orthodox Christian Zionists of Ethiopia by the sword and gun, by starvation and disease. Let’s remember this.
Even today, the Gala-Oromos and their descendants are making The Almighty Egziabher God very angry again. The times show us that even the modern-day Amalekites, who came to Ethiopia with the spirit of death and slavery, are beasts who should not even be present in East Africa, not to mention rule Ethiopia and reign over its people.
The “Ethiopian” who fails to realize this may as surely go down to the bottomless pit vía the gateway of Hell; Woe! Woe! Woe, to them!.
💭 The West Is Ignoring the Nightmarish War in Ethiopia
The war in Ethiopia has largely been ignored by the outside world, and information has been hard to come by. But what we know about the conflict is horrific: at least 500,000 civilians have been killed, and 5 million have been displaced.
The miserably bloody war in Ethiopia has been going on for the last couple of years, largely out of view of the outside world. It’s the latest chapter in decades of factional and ethnic conflict in that country.
In this latest round, which began in November 2020
The West should pay attention to the Horn of Africa. We should be compelled to fear for this kind of starvation, unspeakable violence, rape, torture, and displacement that the war has brought.
It’s a real tragedy to me that the Western media on the whole has not at least attempted to witness the atrocities there.
💭 The Orthodox Christians were killed in attacks on a church in southern Ethiopia on Saturday, according to reports by a religious media outlet.
The violence erupted against a backdrop of tensions in the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church after rebel bishops created their own synod in Oromia, the country’s most populous region.
Abune Henok, Archbishop of Addis Ababa Diocese, described the incidents in the Oromia city of Shashamene as “shameful and heartwrenching”, according to the Church-affiliated Tewahedo Media Center (TMC).
The TMC said two Orthodox Christian youths had been killed, and another four people injured, when Oromia special forces attacked the church in Shashamene, which lies about 250 kilometres (150 miles) south of Addis Ababa.
It later said there had been sniper fire on the church from nearby high-rise buildings that had killed a woman and injured others.
Abune Henok called on the authorities in Oromia, also the largest geographic region in Ethiopia, to stop the “persecution” of Orthodox Christians, according to the TMC.
A statement issued by the Holy Synod later urged clergy and the faithful to wear black in protest, and called for peaceful demonstrations at churches at home and abroad on February 12.
The deadliest killings occurred at the Mirab Abaya prison camp, where current and retired Tigrayan soldiers were detained.
The scent of coffee and cigarettes hung in the hot afternoon air in a makeshift Ethiopian prison camp, prisoners said, as detained Tigrayan soldiers celebrated the holy day of Saint Michael in November 2021. Some joked with friends outside the corrugated iron buildings. Others quietly prayed to be reunited with families they had not seen in a year, when conflict erupted in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.
Then the killings began.
By sunset the next day, around 83 prisoners were dead and another score missing, according to six survivors. Some were shot by their guards, others hacked to death by villagers who taunted the soldiers about their Tigrayan ethnicity, prisoners said. Bodies were dumped in a mass grave by the prison gate, according to seven witnesses.
“They were stacked on top of each other like wood,” recounted one detainee who said he saw the aftermath of the slaughter.
The massacre at the camp near Mirab Abaya, which was covered up and has not been previously reported, was the deadliest killing of imprisoned soldiers since the war started, but not the only one. Guards have killed imprisoned soldiers in at least seven other locations, according to witnesses, who were among more than two dozen people interviewed for this story. None of these incidents have been previously reported either.
The dead were all Tigrayans, members of an ethnic group that dominated the Ethiopian government and military for nearly three decades. That changed after Abiy Ahmed was appointed prime minister of Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most-populous nation, in 2018. Relations between Abiy and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) quickly nosedived. War broke out in 2020 after Tigrayan soldiers in the Ethiopian army and other Tigrayan forces seized military bases across the Tigray region.
Fearing further attacks, the government detained thousands of Tigrayan soldiers serving elsewhere in the country. They have been held in prison camps for nearly two years with no access to their families, phones or human rights monitors. Other Tigrayan soldiers were disarmed when war broke out but continued working in office jobs. Many of them were detained in November 2021 as Tigrayan forces advanced toward the capital, Addis Ababa.
Most of the killings, including the massacre at Mirab Abaya, happened then. Prisoners speculated the attacks might have been triggered by fear or revenge. None of the soldiers killed had been combatants fighting against the Ethiopians and thus prisoners of war.
In some prisons, senior Ethiopian military officers either ordered the killings or were present when they occurred, prisoners said. Elsewhere, imprisoned soldiers said they continue to be guarded — and beaten — by those who killed their comrades.
While there is little sign that the killings were centrally coordinated, there is evidence of widespread impunity. Only in Mirab Abaya did officers intervene to stop the killing.
These newly revealed details come as both sides in the conflict are hammering out details of a cease-fire, announced last month, that has been met with suspicion among the population over a range of issues, including whether there will be accountability for war crimes and other atrocities. How the government responds to the revelations of prison killings could suggest how it will treat other abuses allegedly committed by security forces.
The witness accounts also illuminate how the ethnic divisions tearing at Ethiopia’s society are also eroding its military, once widely respected as one of the region’s most professional and still often relied upon by Ethiopia’s neighbors to help keep the peace. Many of those killed in the prisons were among the thousands of Ethiopian troops who have served in international peacekeeping missions under the United Nations or African Union.
This article’s account of the bloodletting is based on 26 interviews with prisoners, medical personnel, officials, local residents and relatives, and on a review of satellite imagery, social media posts and medical records. Two lists of the dead were provided separately to The Washington Post, and both included the same 83 names. The identities of 16 victims were verified during interviews with detainees. All witnesses spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
When asked about these accounts, Col. Getnet Adane, a spokesman for the Ethiopian military, said he was too busy to comment. A government spokesman and the prime minister’s spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment. The state-appointed head of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Daniel Bekele, said the panel was aware of the incident and had been investigating it.
Bullets and machetes
About 2,000 to 2,500 serving or retired Tigrayan soldiers, both men and women, were being held at the new prison camp about half an hour’s walk north of the town of Mirab Abaya, in a sparsely populated area dotted with banana plantations and near a large, crocodile-infested lake. Some buildings were so new they didn’t even have doors. But the camp had guard towers and demarcated boundaries. Guards told prisoners they would be shot if they crossed the line.
In mid-November 2021, a new prisoner — a just-married major who worked in the military’s defense construction division — was badly injured by guards when he went outside his cell at night to urinate, six other detainees said. He was beaten badly. Some said he was shot in the stomach. Guards later told prisoners that he died on the way to the hospital.
Over the following days, tensions continued to mount with reports — later confirmed by rights activists — that Tigrayan fighters in Ethiopia’s northern Amhara region were killing and raping as they advanced toward the capital.
But on Nov. 21, the Mirab Abaya camp seemed calm, prisoners said. Many had been basking in the late afternoon sun when between 16 and 18 guards opened fire.
One prisoner said that he had been near two women when they were shot in the toilet.
“One woman died immediately, and the other was calling out, ‘My son, my son!’ Then they fired another bullet, and she died,” he said. “They [the guards] wanted to kill everyone there.”
One of the women was a major in the Ethiopian ground forces. She was around 50, had served as a peacekeeper in Sudan and had a son and a daughter, according to the witness. Other detainees said the second woman had worked in the Ministry of Defense.
A senior Tigrayan officer said he was inside his cell when he heard gunshots. He stuffed clothes and belongings into a bag. He decided to run if he could.
“I was thinking: ‘Will I ever see my kids? See them succeed in school and have the good things of life?’ ” he said. If he couldn’t run, he would fight, he said. He and his cellmates looked for a stick or anything else to use as a weapon.
A third prisoner said he began to pray.
Not all guards took part in the killing. A fourth prisoner described one guard taking up a position outside the cells and telling the attackers he would shoot them if they came for the detainees inside. That guard was crying, the prisoner said, and was inconsolable for days afterward. Another prisoner said some guards had tried to disarm the attackers.
Yet another prisoner said he was having coffee outside when shots rang out. Like many others, he ran into the surrounding bush. Ethiopian soldiers pursued his small group, he said. After running more than an hour, he said, they saw some locals. The prisoners blurted out that they’d been shot at and begged for help.
“They said … ‘We will show you what you deserve.’ And then they attacked us,” he said.
A crowd of about 150 to 200 people hacked and bludgeoned the escapees with machetes, sticks and stones, he recalled. Most were killed as they begged for mercy, he said, adding that he was hurt badly and left for dead. During the attack, he said, he saw other prisoners run into the lake to escape the mobs.
Other detainees confirmed that there had been machete attacks on those who escaped the prison. They said residents screamed abuse at the escapees and had incorrectly been told they were prisoners of war and to blame for the deaths of local men in the military. Two prisoners said the attacks continued into the next day.
The shooting at the prison stopped an hour or two after it began when Col. Girma Ayele of the Southern Command arrived. By then, prisoners said, the camp was littered with the bodies of the dead and the earth slick with blood. Girma could not be reached for comment.
The Dejen division
The massacre inside the prison was committed by about 18 guards, including a woman, said the six prisoners at Mirab Abaya who were interviewed. These guards and just over a third of the victims came from the same unit: the Dejen army division, formerly known as the 17th Division. It’s stationed in Addis Ababa.
Many Tigrayan soldiers speculated during interviews that the attack was motivated by revenge. Most of the guards who did the killing were from the Amhara region, which Tigrayan forces had invaded as they pushed toward the capital.
Girma told the prisoners these guards were not under his direct control and had been arrested, detainees said. The guards’ status could not be confirmed. The prisoners never saw them again.
A day after the killing, an excavator dug a mass grave just outside the main watchtower at the entrance gate, perhaps 200 meters from the road, according to the six prisoners.
Among those buried was Maj. Meles Belay Gidey, an engineer passionate about his teaching job at the Defense Engineering College. When Meles was serving as a U.N. peacekeeper in Abyei, a disputed area between Sudan and South Sudan, he video-called his two teenage sons and his stepdaughter every evening to talk to them about school, a relative said.
A local resident traveling past the prison camp the next day said the military warned passersby not to take pictures of the grave.
In Mirab Abaya town, officials used loudspeakers mounted on cars to warn the local population that escapees should be killed. The local resident said he saw three or four people attacked near a banana grove and about a dozen bodies bleeding in the streets, some scattered near the church of St. Gabriel. Ethiopian soldiers nearby did not intervene, he said.
The resident also said he saw a man in his mid-20s being beaten by a mob. Both of his hands had been cut off, and his legs were bleeding. The man begged to be killed as he was dragged up and down the street, the resident said. The attackers told the man they would kill him as slowly as possible. Eventually, he was dragged to the camp gate and shot. Another body was being dragged behind a motorbike, the resident said.
“I couldn’t do anything because I feared for my life,” he said.
Ethiopian soldiers take strategic city in Tigray amid civilian exodus
Wounded Tigrayans were taken to three hospitals, survivors said: Arba Minch General Hospital, Soddo Christian Hospital and another hospital in Soddo. Two medical professionals at Arba Minch General Hospital described an influx of patients around 9 p.m. on Nov. 21. One worker shared medical records showing that 19 patients were admitted with bullet wounds and that 15 were discharged the next day. Two died in the hospital and four were dead on arrival, the two medical workers said.
Most of the patients were kept for only a few hours despite life-threatening wounds, the two said. The patients were kept under police guard, both medical professionals said, and they described nurses and other medical staff taunting the wounded about their ethnicity.
Killings in other prisons
Mirab Abaya was not the only prison where imprisoned soldiers were killed. Current and former prisoners said in interviews that they had witnessed guards killing prisoners at Garbassa training center and the headquarters of the 13th Division in the eastern city of Jigjiga; in prisons in Wondotika and toggaa near the southern city of Hawassa; in the southern area of Didessa; and at the Bilate training center in the south. Many of the victims had served as peacekeepers in U.N. missions in Sudan, Abyei or South Sudan or as part of an African Union force in Somalia.
At Wondotika, a detainee said guards had killed five prisoners at facility that holds hundreds of soldiers who are mostly special forces or commandos. The victims included Gebremariam Estifanos, a veteran of a peacekeeping mission in Abyei and an African Union mission in Somalia, who was beaten to death Nov. 8, 2021, in the presence of a colonel and lieutenant colonel from the 103rd Division, a prisoner said. Gebremariam’s biggest wish had been to buy his family a house and his father an ox, the prisoner said. Two other detainees confirmed the account, saying guards often taunted the prisoners about the incident.
Both said that guards had often forced prisoners to dig their own graves, telling them they would soon be killed. The four other soldiers were killed later in November, shot so many times that their bodies were torn to pieces by bullets, the first prisoner said.
“We are beaten and threatened. We have served our country with honor and dignity,” that prisoner said. “I regret my service.”
In toggaa prison, guards beat and then shot two Tigrayan soldiers on Nov. 4, a detainee there said. A second prisoner held at toggaa, a former peacekeeper who served in Somalia, confirmed two killings. In Garbassa, two prisoners said six detainees had been killed and others injured so badly they had lost the use of limbs and eyes.
“I have seen the bodies being dragged from their rooms,” said a detainee there.
Three prisoners — one from the presidential guard and two from the Agazi commandos — were killed in July 2021 in Bilate training center after guards accused them of attempting to escape, said a witness previously held there. He described soldiers shooting at their bodies long after they were dead and throwing the corpses outside for the hyenas. And in a detention center near Didessa, near Nekemte town, at least five soldiers were killed and 30 others taken away and never seen again, a prisoner previously held there said.
He broke down as he listed the names he could remember. “I’m so sorry, they were my friends,” he said.
Two imprisoned soldiers, accused of having mobile phones, were also killed by guards at a detention center in eastern Ethiopia between Harar and Dire Dawa, a witness said.
The imprisoned Tigrayan soldiers interviewed by The Post say none of them have had access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Until a few days ago, their families had no idea what had become of them. At the end of October, the families of some soldiers killed in Mirab Abaya were informed about their deaths. Several relatives were told their loved ones had died honorable deaths in the line of duty. No other details were given.
Some of the survivors of the Mirab Abaya massacre who are still held there said they fear another outbreak of violence.
“I have a prayer book,” one prisoner there said. “Every day I pray to Mary to see my family again.”
😈 Look how Satan worship leads to the cold blooded murder and massacre.
Oromo Ritual human sacrifice: Over 54 Christians massacred
💭 Two days before the fascist Galla-Oromo regime and its allies started an all-out Jihad against ancient Christians of Northern Ethiopia ( 3-4 November, 2020), at least 54 Christians were massacred on the 1st of November, 2020 by the Oromos in in an area of western Ethiopia known as Wollega. Victims mostly Christian Amhara women and children and elderly people. The Christians were dragged from their homes and taken to a school, where they were brutally massacred. Drunk with the blood of the Christians, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, the Satan-worshiping Oromos went on slaughtering over a million Orthodox Christians across Tigray, historical northern Ethiopia.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 23, 2022
The United Nations is failing to support hundreds of ethnic Tigrayan members of a U.N. peacekeeping force as they fear returning home to Ethiopia and facing potential detention amid the country´s Tigray conflict, peacekeepers tell The Associated Press.
Their accounts highlight the concerns among Tigrayans after thousands of them, both military personnel and civilians, were detained throughout Ethiopia after the country´s war erupted in November 2020 between Ethiopian forces and fighters from the Tigray region. An unknown number have been released in recent weeks after much of the fighting eased, and Ethiopia this week lifted a state of emergency.
Two Tigrayan peacekeepers told the AP that they and hundreds of colleagues have ended their U.N. peacekeeping stint in Abyei, a region contested by Sudan and South Sudan, and are now expected to return to Ethiopia. They asserted that their peacekeeping camp is under Ethiopian control and U.N. personnel are not allowed access.
Sgt. Angesom Gebru, who slipped away from the camp with a few dozen others, said the remaining Tigrayan peacekeepers can only walk away safely once they are taken to a local airport for flights back to Ethiopia, which began this week. But as Tigrayans refuse to board them, he said, there are fears that those still in the peacekeeping camp could face retaliation.
Dozens of the Tigrayan peacekeepers held a protest against the war in Ethiopia this week. A photo taken and shared by Angesom shows the men and women, with their blue U.N. passes around their necks, standing with a handwritten sign reading “Stop genocide in Tigray.”
The Tigray region of some 6 million people has been largely blockaded by Ethiopia´s government since June of last year as authorities claim that humanitarian aid or other supplies could be used in support of the Tigray forces.
“Fuel, cash and supplies available for humanitarian partners in Tigray are at near-exhaustion level,” the U.N. humanitarian agency said last week.
A spokesman for Ethiopia’s military and government did not respond to questions about the Tigrayan peacekeepers with the U.N. mission. Ethiopia’s government has sought to portray a return to normal at home after the Tigray forces withdrew into their region in December under a drone-supported military offensive.
The two peacekeepers told the AP that Ethiopian authorities at the camp told the Tigrayans they would not be harmed if they returned home. But they said they weren´t reassured, and they and colleagues who left the camp are sheltering with newly arrived peacekeepers from Ghana.
The Tigrayans described themselves as stranded in a remote region on the border between two of the world´s most troubled countries, Sudan and South Sudan.
Officials with the U.N. peacekeeping mission and the U.N. refugee agency did not respond to questions about why the Tigrayans say the U.N. is not allowed to access the Ethiopians´ peacekeeping camp or what help the U.N. is giving the Tigrayans.
It is not clear how many Tigrayan peacekeepers have refused to board the flights home.
Ethiopia is one of the top five troop contributing countries to U.N, peacekeeping missions, and the nation’s war has turned the homecoming of Ethiopian peacekeepers into sometimes fraught, or even physical, affairs.
In February 2021, more than a dozen Tigrayan members of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan refused to board a flight home when their stay ended. And in April, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said a number of Ethiopians in the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Sudan´s Darfur region sought “international protection” as several hundred troops were being repatriated.
Ethiopia´s government has sought to restrict reporting on the war and detained some journalists under the recent state of emergency. Those still held include a video freelancer accredited to the AP, Amir Aman Kiyaro.
😈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
☆ TPLF?
💭 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 Tigray an-Ethiopians are:
❖ The Almighty Egziabher God & His Saints
❖ St. Mary of Zion
❖ The Ark of The Covenant
💭 Due to the leftist and atheistic nature of the TPLF, because of its tiresome, foreign and satanic ideological games of: „Unitarianism vs Multiculturalism“, the Supernatural Force that always stood/stands with the Northern Ethiopian Christians is blocked – and These Celestial Powers are not yet being ‘activated’. Even the the above Edomite and Ishmaelite entities and bodies who in the beginning tried to help them have gradually abandoned them
✞✞✞[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.”
US Congress Advances Bill to Sanction Those Fueling War in Ethiopia
“The war in Ethiopia has created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, and all the combatants, along with their foreign backers, are responsible for horrific abuses of basic human rights.”
“Today, Congress is coming together to say that the conflict must end, and to hold accountable all those responsible for perpetuating it.”
One of the issues of ongoing concern to Congress is also the mass detention of Tigrayan civilians in several cities across Ethiopia, including the capital, Addis Ababa. Rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, say ethnic Tigrayans have been targeted since the start of the conflict in November 2020, citing reports of forced disappearances and arbitrary arrests among other human rights violations.
The mass detention of Tigrayan civilians in unlivable conditions is a human rights violation so outrageous that it demands a forceful U.S. response. I’m pleased that H.R. 6600 passed @HouseForeign with my amendment to respond to this atrocity.
“The mass detention of Tigrayan civilians in unlivable conditions is a human rights violation so outrageous that it demands a forceful U.S. response,” tweeted Congressman Brad Sherman of California, calling for action on what he called an atrocity.
The bill calls on the State Department to determine whether war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide has been perpetrated by any party to the conflict. It also asks State to report on the role of foreign governments including those of China, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey in fueling the conflict.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 10, 2022
“Prisoners were getting two pieces of bread to eat a day. Other detainees [who didn’t pay for water] were eating this without ever washing their hands, even after toilet use.”
The mass detention of Tigrayan civilians in unlivable conditions is a human rights violation so outrageous that it demands a forceful U.S. response
Civilians held without charge accuse Ethiopian security officers of systematic extortion and increasing abuse.
Ethiopian security officers have been systematically extorting and abusing Tigrayan civilians held without charge, including minors and the elderly, since a wave of nationwide mass arrests began last year, according to alleged victims and their families.
Estimates say thousands of civilians have been rounded up since the conflict between rebels from the country’s northern Tigray region and Ethiopia’s national army began 15 months ago.
At least 1,000 Tigrayans – including United Nations staff – were arrested in two weeks in November 2021 in the capital Addis Ababa, according to the UN.
The Ethiopian government says it only targets those suspected of supporting the rebels. But as profiling and detentions increased, so did the extortion of detainees by police and prison wardens, according to victims and relatives of victims who spoke to Al Jazeera over the past month.
“We have become a commodity in prison,” said Kirubel*, who spent up to seven months detained in an Addis Ababa facility until his family paid for his release. “They slap a price on you. Then your loved ones have to find the money and buy your freedom.”
Prison wardens, government prosecutors and officials from the local attorney general’s offices are among those alleged to have demanded exorbitant bribes for release. Detainees also told Al Jazeera that payments are often required to secure medicine, and in some cases to use toilets and showers throughout their indefinite detentions.
Segen*, also in Addis Ababa, told Al Jazeera that the police phoned to demand a 2,500 birr ($50) payment to cover cleaning and drinking water for his imprisoned brother.
“Prisoners were getting two pieces of bread to eat a day. Other detainees [who didn’t pay for water] were eating this without ever washing their hands, even after toilet use.”
Some relatives of prisoners described being asked to deliver as much as 500,000 Ethiopian birr ($10,000) in ransom payments.
But in Ethiopia, where the average annual income is less than $1,000, the majority of detainees have languished behind bars, with their impoverished families unable to afford the release price.
Haimanot* said she was asked to pay the equivalent of $1,200 for the release of her 17-year-old son held in Addis Ababa. He had been in detention for more than a month.
“I don’t have that kind of money,” she said, sobbing over the phone.
In response to queries from Al Jazeera about allegations of extortion, an official from Ethiopia’s Ministry of Justice conceded that he was aware of cases of “bribery” but denied that the problem was systematic and said action was being taken to stamp out the practice.
“Several federal and municipal police commission members have been charged with bribery,” said Awel Sultan, communications head at the justice ministry. “But they don’t represent the majority of our committed and ethical police force.”
But alleged victims told Al Jazeera of pervasive extortion and increasing abuse.
State of emergency
Conflict erupted in Ethiopia in November 2020 when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered a military incursion into Tigray after Tigrayan forces attacked federal military bases in the region. Abiy’s government took the regional capital, Mekelle, within three weeks and declared victory.
But the conflict has dragged on, killing tens of thousands of people, displacing millions, and leaving nearly 40 percent of the 6 million people living in the Tigray region facing extreme food shortages, according to the latest report from the World Food Programme.
The government declared a state of emergency in early November 2021 after Tigrayan forces had regained territory and threatened to march on Addis Ababa. Thousands of Tigrayans were rounded up in the Ethiopian capital and sent to detention centres that month.
“Government security forces have subjected Tigrayans from all walks of life and ages to sweeping ethnically based arrests, enforced disappearances since the beginning of the conflict, in Ethiopia’s capital and beyond. Thousands have been lingering in detention for months,” Laetitia Bader, Human Rights Watch director for the Horn of Africa, told Al Jazeera by email.
“Releases seem to be as arbitrary as the arrests, with many detainees never seeing a day in court or having a chance to plead their cause.”
Family members describe receiving phone calls from mysterious middlemen who instruct them on how to transfer the sums of money demanded to a specific bank account.
Al Jazeera is aware of one case where a detainee was allegedly allowed to call his relatives to arrange his own ransom payment.
Wardens are said to take particular care to ensure that there are food shortages and enough beatings to induce regular payments.
Kidane* was released in December after spending four months at a police holding centre and another two months at a larger detention facility.
He and the other five were held at a police station in the town of Bishoftu in July, half an hour’s drive outside of Addis Ababa, where he recalls being beaten on three different occasions by the guards.
“The first time was because they wanted money. They had implied and even asked nicely but I didn’t give them [money] because I didn’t have any, so one of the wardens, there are good ones and bad ones, just beat me up.”
Other times, Kidane says, he and others were simply beaten for being Tigrayans.
Kidane, who says he is a civilian with no link to the rebels, said he was taken to court five times in those first four months in police detention but not charged.
He was later moved to another detention facility within Bishoftu, he said, as the cells at the police stations could not manage the sudden influx of detainees after the federal government declared the state of emergency in November.
He said the larger detention centre was severely overcrowded, with 500-600 people in one large hall that was not designed for more than 150.
“In the detention centres, there were men as old as 88. I would estimate there were as many as 50 minors, if you are referring to anyone under eighteen,” he said. “Even the sickly elderly were denied medical assistance. The place was overcrowded, hot and they didn’t turn the lights off because they wanted to keep an eye on us the whole time.”
In January, Human Rights Watch accused the Ethiopian government of arbitrarily detaining, mistreating and forcibly disappearing Tigrayan migrants deported from Saudi Arabia.
The rights group’s findings corroborate testimony shared with Al Jazeera by detainees including Kidane, who said deportees from Saudi Arabia were being sent to detention centres in droves.
“The guards assume that returnees from the Middle East have money, so they would beat them. They would take four or five out at night and beat them up to be an example for the rest of us to cooperate,” Kidane said.
Kidane estimates he paid more than 50,000 birr (just over $1,000) to prison guards to shower, use the toilet, and be allowed to visit a clinic for typhoid and bronchitis he says he contracted while behind bars.
Justice ministry spokesman Awel admitted that he was aware of reports of mistreatment of prisoners and arrests of minors, but said the erosion and suspension of civil rights are to be expected under a national state of emergency.
“The detention of minors in juvenile facilities isn’t guaranteed either. There could be many reasons why young offenders are detained with adults. It could be space limitations or perhaps police may not be sure of their ages,” Awel added.
“As the number of people detained is higher (than usual), it’s difficult to permit them to exercise all of their rights. We are working to prevent crime and sustain the country,” Awel said.
“The target of the state of emergency is to limit the rights of a few people in order to protect the rights of the entire nation.”
‘A very valuable hostage’
Federal forces have regained territory in recent months, forcing the Tigrayan rebels to retreat to the northern region in December.
But despite the Tigrayan losses and Awel’s claims that many corrupt security officers have been reined in, there are no obvious signs of a slowing in the extortion racket for current prisoners. Nevertheless, there does appear to be a decline in indiscriminate arrests of Tigrayans.
During January, when Ethiopian Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas and Timket, a holy day commemorating the baptism of Christ, detainees say that there was an upscale in ransom payments, with police and middlemen taking advantage of the desperation of families to be reunited with their loved ones for the holidays.
Middlemen are also said to have preyed on detainees with family members abroad.
Kidist*, who lives in the United States, told Al Jazeera she was asked to pay 500,000 birr ($10,000) to free her brother and an elderly uncle who is on medication. They had been held at an Addis Ababa centre for over a month.
Meanwhile, Meseret* said she sent large sums of money from the UK to free her younger brothers.
“If they think they can get euros and dollars for you, you become a very valuable hostage.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 28, 2021
Alex de Waal
Under the banner of national sovereignty, Ethiopia is subverting Africa’s hard-won norms, principles and institutions.
Ethiopia is bringing Africa into disrepute and Africans should be outraged.
Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers are killing and raping civilians in Tigray. Millions are facing starvation while the authorities choke off essential relief supplies. The European Union and the United States called for an end to the atrocities and access for humanitarian agencies. Addis Ababa’s defence is that national sovereignty protects its right to do these things.
On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced sanctions against Ethiopian officials held responsible for the violence and starvation. Thus far, these are just visa restrictions, alongside a suspension of most development and security assistance.
In response, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs put out a statement: “The attempt by the US administration to meddle in its [Ethiopia’s] internal affairs, is not only inappropriate but also completely unacceptable. Ethiopia should not be told how to run and manage its internal affairs.”
Some Africans appear to take at face value this appeal to African solidarity in the face of external diktat. That’s a mistake.
Under the banner of national sovereignty, Ethiopia is subverting Africa’s own hard-won norms, principles and institutions.
The same argument was trotted out in the 1970s and 1980s when African dictatorships used “sovereignty” as a shield behind which to oppress and exploit their people with impunity. At that time, the Organisation of African Unity stood up for untrammelled sovereign rights. Its reasoning was that the independence of African countries wasn’t secure: Apartheid South Africa, along with outgoing colonial powers and their mercenaries wanted to destabilise and divide African countries. That spelled African silence over Eritrea’s long struggle for independence – an inattention that undermined peace and stability in the region. There was also a growing chorus of dissent criticising the OAU’s whitewashing of military coups, massacres and man-made famines. It was “a trade union of heads of state,” in the words of Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere.
The refugee crisis was the biggest symptom of African governments’ loss of legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens: millions fled their misgoverned countries. Western nations paid the humanitarian aid bills and began to speak about intervening themselves – and actually did so in Somalia in 1992.
The turning point came in April 1994. That month saw the accomplishment of the OAU’s historic mission, when Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa following that country’s first ever democratic non-racial elections. It also saw the genocide in Rwanda, perpetrated without anything more than symbolic hand-wringing in Africa and globally. With the liberation of South Africa, the main justification for the deployment of unfettered sovereignty was gone, while Rwanda showed the bankruptcy of that doctrine.
Africans led the way in formulating new principles. The Sudanese scholar and diplomat Francis Deng developed the notion of “sovereignty as responsibility”: a government’s sovereign privileges extend only as far as it exercises its responsibility for the rights and welfare of its citizens. The OAU set up an International Panel of Eminent Personalities to examine the Rwanda crisis, which coined the “principle of non-indifference”: Africans should not stand by while one of their governments commits mass atrocities. In due course, this became enshrined in the Constitutive Act of the African Union, drafted in 2000 and adopted when the African Union formally took over from the OAU at a summit in Durban, South Africa, two years later. Article 4(h) provides for intervention in the case of “grave circumstances”, defined as war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
These African initiatives were forerunners of the “responsibility to protect”, or R2P, adopted at the United Nations in 2001. Over the years, especially after R2P was invoked by NATO countries for regime change in Libya, many Africans came to see it as imperialism in philanthropic disguise.
By contrast, the African doctrine of non-indifference was crafted in the spirit of pan-Africanism. The vision of Kwame Nkrumah, the Pan-Africanist who led Ghana to independence in 1957, was that Africans are a single people whose struggle for freedom is one and the same. Sovereignty resides with the people, and is shared across the continent.
African peacemaking practice developed the duty to offer good offices for conflict resolution – along with an obligation of the country in conflict to accept them. African diplomats are proactive in peacemaking. It is now standard for the AU and African regional economic communities to respond to a crisis within days. When civil war broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, the foreign ministers of neighbouring countries flew to Juba within a week to press for a ceasefire. Compare that to the first civil war in Sudan (1955-72) when it took 16 years for an international peace effort and the second civil war (1983-2005) when it took eight years.
These peace efforts don’t always work, but it’s surely better than the alternative of allowing conflicts to rage on and escalate. For example, when a border war broke out between South Sudan and Sudan in April 2012, prompt action by the AU Peace and Security Council set out a road map for resolving the conflict. At that time the UN Security Council was deadlocked on almost every issue, but the US, China and Russia all deferred to the African position and adopted the PSC’s formula, word-for-word, in a Security Council resolution.
By comparison, United Nations envoys to Syria and Yemen were frustrated by the absence of a regional mechanism that could have established principles to contain those wars.
Ethiopia’s war in Tigray is a typical civil war: a political dispute that turned violent and became internationalised with Eritrean intervention. The best chance of containing the war was at the beginning before it escalated out of control. African leaders knew this instinctively. Within weeks of the outbreak of fighting in early November, the AU dispatched a team of three former heads of state as special envoys.
But Ethiopia did not play by Africa’s rules. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed rebuffed the AU, making sure that the Peace and Security Council – where Ethiopia sits as a member – did not discuss his war. In fact, he insisted it was only a “law enforcement operation”.
Abiy appears to be following the playbook of his coalition partner in the war in Tigray, Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki, that there should be no constraint on power. Afwerki has defied Africa and the world for decades with a dictatorship without constitution or rule of law. And Eritrea is Africa’s largest generator of refugees relative to its size.
With the AU impotent, Ethiopia’s crisis has gone to the United Nations. But the three African non-permanent members of the UN Security Council – Kenya, Niger and Tunisia – have not spoken out against the war or atrocities. Even when Ireland raised the situation in Ethiopia under the relatively uncontroversial resolution 2417 on armed conflict and hunger, the African representatives wavered. This opened the door for China and Russia to threaten to veto any resolution.
That’s Abiy’s strategy: his government’s statements about “foreign meddling” and “US imperialism” are aimed at winning over China and Russia. Those countries may step in and support him – but for their own interests, not Africa’s. Abiy has shown no regard for Africa and its wisdom. On the opening day of the AU’s February summit, Abiy published an article entitled Towards a peaceful order in the Horn of Africa. He didn’t once mention the AU or Africa’s norms, principles and institutions for peace.
Abiy’s appeal to sovereign impunity is having the exact opposite of its stated goal. Ethiopia faces a catastrophic famine and national crisis – and becoming a cockpit for global rivalries.
Africans should not stand for this. They must stand firm on Africa’s principles: sovereignty entails responsibility, unreserved condemnation of atrocities and starvation crimes, immediate negotiation among the belligerents for a political solution. Or Africa cannot complain if Europeans and Americans take those principles more seriously than they do.
Women who make it to the clinic for sex abuse survivors in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray usually struggle to describe their injuries. But when they can’t take a seat and quietly touch their bottoms, the nurses know it’s an unspeakable kind of suffering.
So it was one afternoon with a dazed, barely conscious 40-year-old woman wrapped in bloodied towels, who had been repeatedly gang-raped anally and vaginally over a week by 15 Eritrean soldiers. Bleeding profusely from her rectum, she collapsed in the street in her village of Azerber, and a group of priests put her on a bus to Mekele.
The woman recently broke down in tears as she recounted her ordeal in January at the hands of Eritrean troops, who have taken over parts of the war-torn region in neighboring Ethiopia. The Eritreans often sodomize their victims, according to the nursing staff, a practice that is deeply taboo in the Orthodox Christian religion of Tigray.
“They talked to each other. Some of them: ‘We kill her.’ Some of them: ‘No, no. Rape is enough for her,’” the woman recalled in Mekele, Tigray’s capital. She said one of the soldiers told her: “This season is our season, not your season. This is the time for us.”
Despite claims by both Ethiopia and Eritrea that they were leaving, Eritrean soldiers are in fact more firmly entrenched than ever in Tigray, where they are brutally gang-raping women, killing civilians, looting hospitals and blocking food and medical aid, The Associated Press has found. A reporter was stopped at five checkpoints manned by sometimes hostile Eritrean soldiers dressed in their beige camouflage uniforms, most armed, as gun shots rang out nearby. And the AP saw dozens of Eritrean troops lining the roads and milling around in at least two villages.
Multiple witnesses, survivors of rape, officials and aid workers said Eritrean soldiers have been spotted far from the border, deep in eastern and even southern Tigray, sometimes clad in faded Ethiopian army fatigues. Rather than leaving, witnesses say, the Eritrean soldiers now control key roads and access to some communities and have even turned away Ethiopian authorities at times. Their terrified victims identify the Eritreans by the tribal incisions on their cheeks or their accents when speaking Tigrinya, the language of the Tigrayan people.
Almost all Tigrayans interviewed by the AP insisted there can be no peace unless the Eritreans leave. They see the Eritreans’ menace everywhere: the sacked homes, the murdered sons, the violated daughters, even the dried turds deposited in everything from cooking utensils to the floor of an X-ray room in one vandalized hospital.
Yet the Eritreans show no signs of withdrawing, residents said. And after first tacitly allowing them in to fight a mutual enemy in the former leaders of Tigray, the Ethiopian government now appears incapable of enforcing discipline. Two sources with ties to the government told the AP that Eritrea is in charge in parts of Tigray, and there is fear that it is dealing directly with ethnic Amhara militias and bypassing federal authorities altogether.
“They are still here,” said Abebe Gebrehiwot, a Tigrayan who serves as the federally appointed deputy CEO of Tigray, sounding frustrated in his office.
The continuing presence of Eritrean soldiers “has brought more crisis to the region,” he warned. “The government is negotiating…. I am not happy.”
The violence has already sent families fleeing to places like the camp for the internally displaced in Mekele that Smret Kalayu shares with thousands of others, mostly women and children. The 25-year-old, who once owned a coffee stall in the town of Dengelat, reflected on her escape in April while Eritrean forces searched houses and “watched each other” raping women of all ages. They also peed in cooking materials, she said.
“If there are still Eritreans there, I don’t have a plan to go back home,” she said, her voice catching with rage. “What can I say? They are worse than beasts. I can’t say they are human beings.”
Ethiopia and Eritrea were deadly enemies for decades, with Tigray’s then-powerful rulers, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, taking leading roles in a divisive border conflict. That started to change in 2018, after Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office and made peace with Eritrea, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Abiy also marginalized the Tigrayan leaders, who fought back by questioning his authority. In early November the Ethiopian government accused Tigrayan troops of attacking federal ones. Tigrayan leaders later fired rockets into the Eritrean capital of Asmara, including some that appeared to target the airport there.
Abiy sent federal troops to Tigray to arrest its defiant leaders, and a war broke out that has dragged on for six months and displaced more than 2 million of the region’s 6 million people. United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken has referred to “ethnic cleansing” in western Tigray, a term for forcing a population from a region through violence, often including killings and rapes.
All sides have been accused of human rights abuses. But most of the atrocities are blamed on Ethiopian government forces, the Amhara militias allied with them and, notably, the shadowy fighters from Eritrea.
An Eritrean artillery bombardment lasting about 13 hours killed 150 people in Tirhas Fishaye’s village in the Zalambessa area in mid-November, she said. After that, she added, the Eritrean army moved in and started killing people in the streets.
“We hid in a cave for two months with 200 other people,” she said. “Then the Eritrean army found us and murdered 18 people.”
Tirhas, who is now displaced in Mekele, said the soldiers searched for young people, whom they shot as they ran away.
Another Tigrayan, Haileselassie Gebremariam, 75, was shot in front of a church in early January in his village in the Gulomakeda district. He said he counted the bodies of 38 people massacred by Eritrean troops inside the Medhane-Alem church during a religious festival. Several of his relatives were killed.
“When the Eritreans arrived, they shot everyone they found,” said Haileselassie, still nursing his ugly wound at Mekele’s Ayder Hospital. “They burnt our crops and took everything else.”
The Eritreans are acting out of a deep-rooted animosity against Tigrayan leaders after the border war, even though the people share a similar culture, according to Berhane Kidanemariam, an Ethiopian diplomat and Tigrayan who resigned his post earlier this year in protest. Eritrea’s longtime president, Isaias Afwerki, seeks a buffer zone along the border to foil any attempts by Tigray’s now-fugitive leaders to make a comeback, especially by resupplying their arsenal through Sudan, Berhane said.
“The mastermind of the situation in Ethiopia is Isaias,” Berhane said by phone from Washington, where until March he served as the deputy chief of Ethiopia’s mission. “Basically, Abiy is the poorer one in this. The head is Isaias…. The war, at the moment, is life or death for Isaias.”
For months, both Ethiopia and Eritrea denied the presence of Eritrean soldiers in Tigray. But evidence of Eritrea’s involvement grew, with the AP reporting the first detailed witness accounts in January, sparking a U.S. call for their withdrawal.
Abiy acknowledged in March that Eritrean troops were “causing damages to our people.” In early April Ethiopia’s foreign ministry reported that Eritrean troops had “started to evacuate.”
But the U.S. has said it still sees no sign of that happening, and has demanded a verifiable exit of Eritrean soldiers from Tigray. The U.S. this week announced sanctions, including visa restrictions, against Eritrean or Ethiopian officials blocking a resolution in Tigray, which the Ethiopian government called “misguided” and “regrettable.” The government has repeatedly warned of outside attempts to meddle in the country’s internal affairs.
Much of Tigray is still cut off from access, with no communications, leaving the displaced to describe what is happening. Tedros Abadi, a 38-year-old shopkeeper from Samre now in Mekele, said Eritrean troops arrived in his village as recently as April. After being ambushed by Tigrayan guerrillas, they gunned down priests walking home after service on a Sunday afternoon and burned about 20 houses, he said.
“Nothing is left there,” said Tedros, who does not know where his family is. “I left home because they were targeting all civilians, not only priests.”
He said dead bodies lay in the village for days afterward, eaten by vultures, because those who remained were too afraid to bury them. He added that Eritrean soldiers told Tigrayan elders that this was revenge for the border war.
Yonas Hailu, a 37-year-old tour guide in Mekele, is glad his father, a retired army lieutenant, died of natural causes before the Eritreans invaded. He sees no signs of the war ending.
“They will never give up fighting,” he said. “The Ethiopian troops – they would never stay here for three days without the Eritreans.”
Representatives of the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments did not respond to requests for comment.
The Eritreans seem bent on doing as much damage as they can, inserting sand into water pumps to disable them and even ferreting away such apparently useless items as old mattresses, witnesses said.
“You can literally see nothing left in the houses,” said one humanitarian worker with access to some remote areas of Tigray. She recalled seeing Eritrean soldiers smiling for selfies by a lorry with looted items near the town of Samre.
She requested anonymity to protect her organization from retaliation.
The Eritrean soldiers also have destroyed hospitals and sometimes set up camp in them. At the Hawzen Primary Hospital, walls were smeared with the blood of the chickens the Eritreans had slaughtered in the corridors. Soiled patient files were strewn on the ground, and the intensive care nursery for babies was trashed, with missing incubators and toppled little beds.
They have also looted and burned sacks of grain and killed livestock, witnesses told the AP.
Gebremeskel Hagos, a mournful-looking man in a Mekele camp for the displaced, recalled how Eritrean and Ethiopian troops sang as they entered the ancestral home of a former Tigrayan leader in a village near Adigrat in January. The soldiers fired rounds into the air and sent young and old scampering for safety. They killed people and livestock, and one referred to revenge for the border war.
“I don’t have hope,” said Gebremeskel, a 52-year-old farmer who is separated from five of his seven children. “They want to destroy us. I don’t think they will leave us.”
For all the damage the Eritreans have done, the gang rapes are among the worst.
The Mekele clinic for rape survivors is full to overflowing with women, sometimes raped by Ethiopian soldiers but often by Eritreans, according to Mulu Mesfin, the head nurse. Some women were held in camps by the Eritreans and gang-raped by dozens of soldiers for weeks, she said.
Her clinic has looked after about 400 survivors since November. Between 100 and 150 were sodomized, she said. She described survivors of anal rape who can’t sit down for the pain and are so ashamed that they simply lack words.
“They say, something, something,” recounted Mulu, a slender, wiry woman whose voice fell when she talked of the sodomy. “The victims are psychologically disturbed.”
In further humiliation, Mulu said, some survivors reported being sodomized because their attackers wanted to avoid any contact “with their TPLF husbands.”
She cried when she heard what had happened to the woman from Azerber, who was barely able to walk when she arrived. At first, Mulu recalled, she muttered to herself as if she was still in the presence of the Eritrean soldiers.
“She was saying, ‘Eritreans, go back. Close the door. You are a soldier. Don’t touch me,’” Mulu said.
The AP doesn’t name people who have been sexually abused, but an AP team looked at the notes in the woman’s medical file.
The woman said she was detained for a week at the Eritreans’ camp, where she saw about 10 more girls and women, including a 70-year-old. The soldiers mocked her when she asked them to let her go.
The attackers sometimes raised their guns and hit the back of her head. As they raped her, she said, one told her, “You are crying for a long period of time. This is not enough for you?” They also said they wanted to infect her with HIV.
The woman won her freedom one day when the Eritreans had to relocate. She now lives in a safe house for rape survivors at Mekele’s Ayder Hospital, along with about 40 others. She isn’t certain if her two children, ages 6 and 11, are still alive somewhere in northern Tigray because the phone network there is disabled.
Another woman from the town of Wukro was raped anally, and an Eritrean soldier inserted his arm in her vagina, according to Yeheyis Berhane, a researcher with the Tigray Institute of Policy Studies. He was furious that his team had been stopped from going into the remote areas north of Mekele to investigate sex and other crimes.
“They killed women, men, children,” he said. “But they don’t want us to go there because we are going to expose to them to the public.”
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