💭 Turkish embassy in Ethiopia forced to move to Kenya over insecurity
Turkey’s embassy in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa has been moved to neighboring Kenya due to threats after the deployment of Turkish drones by the Abiy Ahmed regime to suppress the Tigray rebellion, the T24 news website reported.
Although the Turkish government hadn’t made an official statement regarding the sale of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to the Ethiopian government, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had visited the country and met with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan twice in the past six months, adding to the widespread belief that drones bought from Turkey, in addition to Iran and the United Arab Emirates, had changed the course of the civil war in Ethiopia, journalist Barçın Yinanç wrote in an article on the T24 news website on Monday.
“Turkey’s embassy in Addis Ababa cannot operate from the capital due to threats it has received. The ambassador and several embassy staff are serving from [neighboring] Kenya. There was no statement from the [Turkish] Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the matter,” the journalist said.
The conflict that has been going on for over a year in Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than 2 million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.
Forces under Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian military, ethnic militias, and troops from neighboring Eritrea, are fighting to oust the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or T.P.L.F., from its stronghold in the northern region of Tigray.
In early November, the government teetered when fighters from Tigray surged south toward Addis Ababa, forcing the prime minister to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.
But weeks later Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.
He succeeded partly by mobilizing ordinary citizens to take up arms to block the Tigrayan advance. However, his fortunes were greatly boosted by a fleet of armed drones, recently imported from the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iran, that pummeled the Tigrayan forces, according to a report by The New York Times last week.
A drone strike on a flour mill in May Tsebri, a town in the northwest of Ethiopia (Tigray region), reportedly killed 17 people on Monday January 10 and injured dozens more, according to eyewitnesses.
The January 10 bombings came just days after a similar attack on a camp for displaced persons in Dedebit killed 59 and injured nearly 140 on Friday January 7.
Irish Foreign Minister Coveney says Ethiopia has blocked his planned visit as he highlights government forces’ human rights abuses.
Ethiopia is kicking out most of Ireland’s diplomatic staff in retaliation for Irish criticism of human rights abuses committed by government forces fighting Tigray rebels, Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said Wednesday.
Coveney made his announcement as many Western nations, including the U.K., France and Ireland, called on their citizens still living and working in Ethiopia to leave the country quickly as Tigray rebels edge closer to the capital, Addis Ababa.
In London, Minister for Africa Vicky Ford said Ethiopia’s security was “deteriorating quickly” and could force the Addis Ababa airport to shut.
“I am urging all British nationals — whatever their circumstance — to leave immediately while commercial flights are readily available,” Ford said, adding that those who choose to stay should prepare “to shelter in a place of safety over the coming weeks.”
Coveney agreed that the approximately 80 Irish citizens in Ethiopia — Ireland’s largest recipient of foreign aid — should leave before flights “become a problem.”
He said Ethiopia’s embattled government “has decided to target Ireland” because it led the push for the United Nations Security Council’s November 5 statement seeking a ceasefire in Ethiopia. Ireland has a seat on the 15-member council until the end of 2022.
Four of the Irish embassy’s six staff have been ordered to leave Addis Ababa and Ireland is complying, he said.
Irish Ambassador Nicola Brennan and one other staffer would stay in Ethiopia for now to aid Irish citizens’ own exits, Coveney said, but the Irish government already has plans in place for both “to leave quickly should they need to.”
Coveney said he had hoped to visit Addis Ababa in early December to appeal directly to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for his government “to focus on dialogue rather than war.” He said Ethiopia also had rejected his proposed trip.
He said Ireland would continue to use its Security Council seat to press Abiy “to guarantee humanitarian access to parts of Ethiopia that desperately need it.” He said Ireland was determined “to expose the human rights abuses happening there, in particular the use of sexual violence as a tool of conflict, essentially mass rape.”
Something is going wrong in Africa. Nigeria and Ethiopia, the two most populous countries on the continent, are both stumbling towards disintegration. There are now 54 sovereign African countries, which really ought to be enough, but in a few years there could be 60.
Ethiopia is closer to the brink, so close that it could actually go over this month. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s attempt to force the northern state of Tigray into obedience began well in late 2019, when federal government troops occupied it against only minor resistance, but the Tigrayans were just biding their time.
The military occupation of Tigray didn’t last. The Tigray Defence Force (TDF) came down from the hills last June and cleared federal troops out of the state practically overnight. Then it pushed south into the neighbouring state of Amhara along Highway One, which links Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, with the only port accessible to the landlocked country, Djibouti.
In July the TDF stopped at Weldia, still in Amhara state and about 250 miles from Addis Ababa, to await the great Ethiopian counter attack – which didn’t start until about Oct. 10. It takes time to organise tens of thousands of half-trained volunteers, which was about all Abiy had left after the June-July debacle.
The battle raged for two weeks, with the attacks of Amhara militia and volunteers from elsewhere failing against the trained, experienced Tigrayan troops. About a week ago the Ethiopian troops broke and started fleeing south, although you probably didn’t hear about that because Abiy began bombing the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle, to distract your attention.
The TDF has already captured Dessie and is advancing on Kombolcha, which is halfway from Mekelle to Addis Ababa. Will the Tigrayans actually go for Addis itself? It’s not impossible. They’re arrogant enough, and they may be strong enough.
Nigeria is not that close to the edge, but the signs are bad. The huge gap in income, education and simple literacy between the very poor Muslim north and the mostly Christian south is a major irritant. The desperate lack of jobs for the young is destabilising even the south, as last year’s failed youth rebellion clearly demonstrated.
In the north east, the jihadist Boko Haram has become the local authority in some places, collecting taxes and digging wells. In the north west, banditry is out of control, with dozens or even hundreds of schoolchildren being kidnapped for ransom almost every week. The region is awash with arms, and one gang recently shot down a military jet.
In the ‘middle belt’ of states, farmers and herders are often at war, and in the southeast Igbo secessionists are raising the call for an independent Biafra again. Along the coast piracy is flourishing, and the oil multinational Shell is offloading its onshore Nigerian oil assets in the face of insecurity, theft and sabotage.
“This is an exposure that doesn’t fit with our risk appetite anymore,” said Shell CEO Ben van Beurden, and most major investors, whether foreign or Nigerian, feel the same way. Nigeria, like Ethiopia, is full of clever, ambitious young people with the education and skills to transform the country if only it was politically stable, but that is asking for the moon.
It would be a catastrophe if these two countries, containing a quarter of Africa’s total population, were to be Balkanised, but that may be coming. If the Serbs and the Croats can’t live together happily, why should we expect the Igbo and the Hausa, or the Tigrayans and the Amharas, to do so?
The old Organisation of African Unity rule said the former colonial borders must never be changed, no matter how arbitrary they were, because otherwise there would be a generation of war and chaos. That’s why for a long time there were fifty African states and no more, but recently the rule has begun to fray. Somaliland, Eritrea, South Sudan…who’s next?
Will the dam burst if Ethiopia breaks up into three or four different countries? Nobody knows, but it would be preferable if we don’t have to find out. Better the borders you know than the borders you don’t.
Over the past 11 months, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has killed, raped and tortured ethnic-minority Tigrayans en masse. Will the Biden administration label these acts a genocide and impose appropriate consequences? If not, the United States will effectively greenlight genocide for any leader ruthless enough to follow Abiy’s playbook of secrecy, sexual violence and starvation as weapons of war.
The case against Abiy’s administration is straightforward: His government’s actions, as described by countless international monitors, fit the United Nations’ definition of genocide.
The United Nations defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” and calls out five specific acts of genocide. The Ethiopian government has been documented as committing four of these five acts: “killing members of the group,” “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”
In the face of mounting international condemnation, Abiy infamously told the Ethiopian parliament last November that not one civilian had died in Tigray.
But in Ethiopia we have a proverb, “The rod of truth may bend, but it will never break.” Journalists and aid workers risked their lives to share harrowing accounts of war crimes across Tigray by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces: hundreds of civilians slaughtered outside a church in Ethiopia’s holy city of Axum, their rotting carcasses reportedly left for hyenas; dozens of civilians bombed by Ethiopian warplanes at a crowded marketplace in Togoga; mass murders across Western Tigray that Secretary of State Antony Blinken later referred to as acts of “ethnic cleansing.”
And then the world learned of new, unimaginable atrocities. Health clinics reported barbaric sexual violence against women and girls across Tigray. Shocked doctors treated helpless women whose vaginas had been burned, and others whose vaginas had been pummeled, then stuffed with nails and stones. Other women had been gang-raped by soldiers who told them that their Tigrayan wombs must never again bear children. In August, Amnesty International summarized this systematic gender-based violence in a report titled, “I Don’t Know if They Realized I Was a Person.”
Throughout all this, Abiy maintained a constant response to accusations of war crimes: Deny, deny, deny. Deflect and blame Tigray.
Just this past week, Abiy shocked the world by expelling U.N. officials who could help relieve the famine, including the country head of UNICEF. White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted, “We’re deeply concerned that this action continues a pattern by the Ethiopian government of obstructing the delivery of food, medicine and other lifesaving supplies to those most in need.”
With his administration increasingly facing sanctions and economic repercussions, Abiy has warned the world to not meddle in Ethiopia. He and his government claim that any actions to force humanitarian aid into the region — or force his government to negotiate with Tigray’s elected leaders — would violate Ethiopia’s sovereignty.
By this rationale, any genocidal leader can murder millions of his own people, or wipe out an entire ethnic group, as long he does it within his own borders.
If the Biden administration fails to apply the genocide designation to Tigray, the message will be clear to any future war criminal: We will look the other way no matter what you do. You can gang rape girls, starve your people, murder masses of civilians, and in response we will share only toothless statements of concern.
For the sake of my people in Tigray, and people across the world, the United States must immediately call the Ethiopian government’s actions in Tigray a genocide.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on September 5, 2021
Sources said that after a series of victories by Tigrayan Defence Forces, the occupying forces in Humera started to purge ethnic Tigrayans.
Courtesy: The Tlegraph
By Lucy Kassa
Forces occupying a major city in Ethiopia are throwing thousands of men, women and children into makeshift “concentration camps”, cutting off limbs and dumping mutilated bodies into mass graves as part of an orchestrated ethnic purge, a dozen separate witnesses told The Telegraph.
Ethnic Amhara forces have been going “door-to-door” to round up anyone who is ethnic Tigrayan in the latest harrowing evidence of population cleansing in Ethiopia’s blood-drenched civil war.
“Feven Berhe was an innocent resident who owned a small shop. They took her to Tekeze river and shot her,” said one resident, who knew the 40-year-old victim well.
“Before they killed her, they removed her eyes and cut off her legs. They did not let anyone pick her body up and bury her.”
Humera is a city of about 50,000 near Ethiopia’s border with Eritrea and Sudan. Because of its strategic location, it was one of the first places to be attacked when Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrea’s dictator launched a devastating pincer attack to crush Tigray’s regional government in November.
For the last year, ethnic Amhara forces, who hail from a neighbouring region and are allied to the Nobel laureate, have controlled the city, along with swathes of western Tigray.
Sources said that after a stunning series of victories by the Tigrayan Defence Forces in late June, the occupying forces in Humera started to purge ethnic Tigrayans in the city.
The Telegraph understands that on 15 July, Amhara forces held a public meeting in the main municipality hall in Humera to decide the fate of Tigrayans in the areas they controlled.
“They said this; ‘We should exterminate all Tigrayan residents in the city. We must cleanse them all,” said one man who claims he attended the public meeting.
Multiple residents said that a massive campaign of arrests started soon after the meeting.
“They have been going from house to house arresting everyone. No Tigrayan is left except those who fled to Sudan or found a hiding place in the city. They have a list of Tigrayan residents from the administrative offices,” said another man.
“If it is written in your identity card that you are Tigrayan, there is no mercy,” said another.
Children displaced by fighting in northern Ethiopia play among sacks of clothes at the Addis Fana School where they are temporarily sheltered,
At the beginning of August, 43 bloated and bloodied bodies were found floating down the Tekeze River, which separates the region from Sudan.
The Telegraph understands that these were some of the original victims of the purge. Residents say that when the floating bodies attracted huge international attention, Amhara forces started dumping bodies elsewhere.
Elderly people, children and pregnant women have all been taken to several detention centres and three different warehouses across the city, which have been turned into makeshift “concentration camps”, survivors said.
The Telegraph could not confirm these accounts because of major reporting restrictions in Tigray.
However, imagery analysis by Vigil Monitor (previously DX Open Network), an atrocity early warning and detection research organisation based in the UK, shows that ethnic Amhara forces and allied Ethiopian troops have been stationed at ‘numerous’ centres for the past few months.
One man the Telegraph spoke to called Gizau claimed that he had escaped one of the centres by convincing militiamen he was not fully ethnic Tigrayan.
“We were 250 detainees. The Amhara forces take detainees every night and bring new ones. The ones they take never come back,” he said.
Gizau and ten other witnesses said that people were being killed and dumped in pits around the three warehouses and in craters outside the city.
Satellite imagery partially corroborates the sources. It shows a pit roughly the size of a swimming pool outside one of the warehouses, which has been gradually filled up since mid-July.
There is a similar pattern of suspicious pits being filled up slowly over the same time period at the other locations.
“There are very suspicious holes in the ground next to the camps, in an area where no other hole gets filled with earth,” say analysts at Vigil Monitor.
The state president for Ethiopia’s Amhara region Agegnuh Teshager and the Ethiopian Prime Minister’s Office were both approached for comment on The Telegraph’s findings bit neither responded.
*Names have been changed in this article to protect identities.
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