ERITREA

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FP – The U.N. Must End the Horrors of Ethiopia’s Tigray War

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Foreign Policy | Recent human rights investigations confirm the atrocities that journalists reported in November. A strong multilateral push can force an Eritrean withdrawal and put the region on the path to peace.

In November 2020, as war broke out in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, the scale of the suffering was already apparent to anyone on the Ethiopian-Sudanese border. As the Ethiopian National Defense Force and allied Amhara militias and Eritrean soldiers swept through the region in a pincer movement, Tigrayans began to flee en masse, walking for days without water to get to safety in neighboring Sudan.

Hundreds of refugees made an almost biblical sight as they traversed the Hamdayet River crossing that separates the two countries. Small boats laden with men, women, and children pushed against the current, ferrying people to safety every few minutes.

On the Sudanese side, middle-class Tigrayan women stood shaded under brightly colored umbrellas, desperately peering into every boat to look for their loved ones they had lost on the other side.

One woman’s anxiety was palpable. She had stood at the river in the beating sun with her baby strapped to her back for several days waiting for her family—and fearing the worst. “Please, help us,” she said. “Take their names and write about them.”

The refugees’ testimonies all pointed to indiscriminate artillery fire on civilian areas, massive looting, machete-wielding ethnic militiamen, and summary executions. 

At one point, dozens of refugees fresh from the desert march and fearful of disclosing their identities started to shout out names of people they’d seen killed. One of us, reporting at the border, wrote down six names before the cacophony became overwhelming.

The refugees’ testimonies all pointed to indiscriminate artillery fire on civilian areas, massive looting, machete-wielding ethnic militiamen, and summary executions.

Around 50,000 people from bordering Tigrayan towns made it into Sudan before the Ethiopian army began stationing men in federal army uniforms at intervals along the border, sealing it off.

Some refugees said they had been threatened with death if they kept going. “They threatened to cut our heads off if we kept trying to leave Tigray,” one mother of five said in late November.

Online trolls and officials in Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa then launched a systematic campaign to discredit refugees’ accounts, claiming that agents of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) had infiltrated the Sudanese camps to spread disinformation about atrocities.

Over the last four months, Tigray’s continued communications blackout has made it incredibly difficult to confirm accusations of potential war crimes committed by forces on both sides. Amnesty International says Eritrean troops systematically killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in the northern city of Axum last November.

Yet information has slowly slipped out from behind the curtain. In December 2020, a news team from Belgium’s VRT News gained rare access to Tigray. They found medical centers ransacked for medication and saw patients, including a small girl, covered in debilitating infections from bullet and shrapnel wounds.

About two dozen photos—far too graphic to publish—sent to journalists by a resident of the regional capital Mekele who escaped Tigray show the bodies of children and adolescents blown to pieces by the government’s artillery barrage of the city.

The United Nations special advisor on the prevention of genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, said she has received reports of extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, looting of property, mass executions, and impeded humanitarian access. Nderitu warned that without taking urgent measures, the risk of atrocity crimes “remains high and likely to get worse.”

In February, the Telegraph was sent four-minute-long video of fighters in Ethiopian federal army uniforms walking past dozens of dead men and boys. The clip is the first video evidence to emerge from Tigray, implicating the Ethiopian army in war crimes.

In the clip, which has been geolocated to a village on the outskirts of the 14th-century Debre Abbay monastery in central Tigray and verified as undoctored by the newspaper, soldiers taunt the few Tigrinya-speaking survivors in Ethiopia’s lingua franca, Amharic.

When one adolescent lying on the ground pleads with the soldiers in Tigrinya, one man shouts at him: “Keep talking, I’ll fuck your mother. Keep talking, you son of a bitch.”

With no action, the dire situation in Tigray will only get worse. Humanitarian agencies have been consistently blocked from working in the region and have issued dire statements saying that tens of thousands of people are now facing starvation. Refugees are reportedly turning up to aid centers emaciated. People are reportedly eating leaves to survive, drinking polluted water, and dying of hunger in their sleep.

“There is an extreme urgent need—I don’t know what more words in English to use—to rapidly scale up the humanitarian response, because the population is dying every day as we speak,” Mari Carmen Vinoles, head of the emergency unit for Doctors Without Borders, told the Associated Press in January.

Aid workers have been consistently obstructed from providing emergency relief, however. Even the Ethiopian Red Cross, which has relatively good access compared to other organizations, said earlier this month that it could only reach 20 percent of the people in need in Tigray.

Hard questions need to be asked: Why is the blackout still largely in place, and why are so few aid workers being allowed in? Does Addis Ababa not want people looking into allegations of massive human rights abuses by federal troops? Or is it trying to hide the true extent to which Eritrea is involved in the conflict? Or maybe the federal government simply cannot allow access because it is not in control of vast stretches of the region? The Ethiopian government declined to reply to specific questions from Foreign Policy.

The conflict has a profound impact on Ethiopian public discourse, civil society, and social cohesion. For many non-Tigrayans, it has been a justifiable—even popular—military operation. There is very little love lost for the minority Tigrayans and their past domination of political and economic life in Ethiopia.

While the TPLF’s reign coincided with stunningly high rates of economic growth, the party and its coalition partners ruled with an iron fist. It arrested opposition leaders on trumped-up charges of corruption and erected an extensive network of citizen-spies, who, in a system known as “one to five,” were each responsible for keeping tabs on five other people.

Since the war erupted, triggered by a TPLF strike on the Ethiopian military’s northern command, there has been a deluge of misinformation from online accounts on both sides. In the melee, moderate voices have been squeezed from both sides. If an Ethiopian or international partner has pressed for peace and dialogue, the federal government has denounced them as Tigrayan sympathizers and enemies of the state.

When some have defended Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s response, they have been castigated as warmongers and accused of unwittingly doing Eritrea’s bidding. In this vortex of irreconcilable political differences, ethnic animosities, and regional rivalries, all sides have been accused of perpetrating atrocities.

Ethiopian journalists who dare to report details of the conflict that do not fit the government narrative have been subject to intimidation, hacking attempts, and death threats.

Reporters have been hit hard by the extraordinary outpouring of hatred. Ethiopian journalists who dare to report details of the conflict that do not fit the government narrative have been subject to intimidation, hacking attempts, and death threats.

In recent weeks, Ethiopia granted access to a select few outlets to cover Tigray. But almost immediately, translators and fixers for the Financial Times, Agence France-Presse, the New York Times, as well as the BBC’s Mekele reporter, were arrested. (They have since been released.)

Since the conflict began, several journalists have been arrested and one killed. In February, the freelance journalist Lucy Kassa’s house was raided by unknown attackers, most probably for reporting on allegations of mass rapes in Tigray.

Under the massive pressure, much of the Addis Ababa press corps has quietly moved whatever operations they can to Nairobi. “Tough times for us all … the fire and courage is not there anymore,” one journalist told us.

While Ethiopia’s federal forces are tied down in Tigray, other deep-seated problems are rearing their heads across the nation of 110 million people. Indeed, the civil war in Tigray is a symptom and only the most severe manifestation of Ethiopia’s troubles.

Abiy’s ascent and pledge to address long-standing grievances paradoxically reignited tensions between communities about identities, regional borders, and political representation. While the prior regime had locked communities into ethnically defined regions ruled by pliant leaders who only answered to federal authorities, Abiy promised to free Ethiopians from this rigid and repressive system. He permitted the Sidama zone to secede from the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples region, and stood by as communities formed militias and fought to redraw subnational borders.

His vision for a new Ethiopia, which he couldn’t deliver on fast enough, exposed him to withering critiques and turned adoring crowds into angry mobs. Abiy gradually revealed himself to be as intolerant of dissent as his predecessors, and he lashed out at his former allies-turned-rivals. Government forces surrounded the home of Oromo leader Jawar Mohammed and later arrested him.

A prominent protest singer, Hachalu Hundessa, was murdered over the summer, spurring public demonstrations. Before and since the outbreak of hostilities in Tigray, there have been pockets of violence across the country, including ethnic militias in Benishangul-Gumuz, friction on the Somali-Afar and Oromo-Somali borders, and rebel attacks in Oromia.

The country is rapidly unraveling under the stress of Abiy’s reforms and the strain of his rule. The current trajectory does not just promise more deaths and dislocations—it also imperils prospects for a free and fair election now scheduled for June 2021.

Abiy won plaudits from the Norwegian Nobel Committee and others for granting amnesty to political prisoners and legalizing outlawed parties, but he has been unwilling to extend the same olive branch to his opponents. Several parties, including the Oromo Federalist Congress from Abiy’s home region, have questioned whether they can participate in this year’s planned poll.

The conflict is as much a regional threat as it is a domestic one. The fighting in Tigray has engulfed the rest of the Horn of Africa. Abiy’s alliance with Eritrean leader Isaias Afwerki brought Eritrean troops into Tigray to bring the TPLF to heel. Isaias has harbored ill will toward the TPLF since the late 1990s when they fell out and fought a horrific border war, which was never fully resolved until Abiy’s rise to power. With Eritrea entering the fray, the TPLF fired rockets repeatedly into the neighboring country, in part to inflict some pain on Asmara and in part to rally Tigrayan support against a common enemy.

Ethiopia also has stumbled into a series of border skirmishes with another neighbor: Sudan. The two countries have long disputed their shared border in the Fashqa region, but they previously operated under a compromise of a “soft border.” Clashes first flared up late last year, and tensions have continued to escalate. On Feb. 14, the Sudanese government said Ethiopian forces crossed the border in an act of “aggression.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent call with Abiy is a start, but so far, the international response has been tepid. While most governments have expressed alarm at developments, very few have truly stepped up to stop the unfolding tragedy. Only the European Union has suspended direct budgetary support—some $107 million—until humanitarian agencies are granted access.

While the United States and EU have urged Eritrea to withdraw its troops, the international community has failed to speak in one voice and has ignored some overarching challenges, including the threat to Ethiopia’s nascent democracy. The U.N. Security Council is finally set to discuss Ethiopia on March 11 following four months of relegating Ethiopia to “Any Other Business” rather than as a formal agenda item.

If the international community wants to prevent further atrocities and salvage Abiy’s initial vision of an inclusive Ethiopia, it should take the following steps.

First, there should be no wavering on the issue of delivering life-saving assistance. So far, the Ethiopian government has granted authorization for 84 international staff with 53 applications still pending as of late February. It has been too little too late, and it only applies to government-controlled areas.

The U.N. should insist that its humanitarian agencies be given unfettered access, including in areas controlled by the TPLF. It is indefensible that Ethiopian soldiers and the Amhara militias are blocking access, and that Eritrean and Ethiopian forces have targeted refugee camps filled with Eritreans.

The international community has to do more than sit on the sidelines regarding human rights violations and mass atrocities.

Second, the international community has to do more than sit on the sidelines regarding human rights violations and mass atrocities. Blinken in late February reiterated U.S. support for investigations into human rights violations and abuses, as well as full accountability. The U.N. should start issuing unilateral and multilateral sanctions, as well as consider additional steps to isolate Ethiopia and Eritrea if the governments are determined to be culpable.

Third, there is an urgent need to evict the Eritrean forces and deescalate the border tensions between Ethiopia and Sudan. The United States, which holds the Security Council presidency, plans to address conflict-induced starvation and hunger in Ethiopia in mid-March. It should similarly raise these pressing regional conflicts related to the Ethiopian crisis.

The African Union leadership, including the recently elected chairman, Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi, and incoming Political Affairs, Peace, and Security Commissioner Bankole Adeoye should do the same at the AU. This is also an opportunity to tap the Gulf States, which have influence with all three countries and have no interest in a regional conflagration near their doorstep.

Fourth, the prime minister should reopen a dialogue with the country’s regional administration, political parties, and disparate ethnic communities to recommit to an inclusive and tolerant Ethiopia. While the crisis in Tigray requires urgent attention, the root of the problem is considerably deeper and affects all of Ethiopia. A two-sided conversation between Abiy’s government and the TPLF is insufficient.

Fifth, it is imperative to link the aforementioned dialogue to the election process. The dispute between the federal government and Tigray intensified following the region’s decision to hold unilateral local elections. If the prime minister follows through with his plan to hold an election in June, the vote is unlikely to be credible or free and fair when there is fighting in Tigray, millions of people are displaced, and top opposition leaders are under arrest.

The international community should be wary of pressing for and funding an election without renewed support from key actors and access to the ballot box across the country.

Ethiopia’s descent into violence is a stain on the world’s conscience. The international community must not applaud Ethiopia for its promise and recoil when urgent action is required to prevent its implosion. This is Washington’s chance to show that the last four years of isolationism and callous indifference to conflicts abroad was an aberration. It will not be easy to salve what ails Ethiopia, but it will be catastrophic if global powers and regional leaders do not try.

 

FP – From Pariah to Kingmaker

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Foreign Policy | Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki is fueling bloodshed in Tigray—and offering other regional leaders lessons in authoritarianism.

BY Alex de Waal  | March 3, 2021

After months of bloodshed in Tigray, a region of Ethiopia claiming the right of self-determination, the United States is ramping up pressure to end hostilities, protect civilians, facilitate an independent investigation of atrocities, and permit humanitarian access to starving populations. In a call to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali on March 2, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeated his call for the immediate withdrawal of all Eritrean troops from Tigray that are operating there as part of the Ethiopian effort to quash the rebellion. This last point is emerging as a central demand, since most of the crimes in Tigray documented by journalists and human rights groups were carried out by Eritrean forces.

These atrocities are ongoing. On March 1, leading Tigrayan scholar Mulugeta Gebrehiwot, in a rare phone call from the mountains, described how Eritrean troops had razed villages, cut down mango orchards, destroyed irrigation systems, and slaughtered dozens of people from young children to grandparents in the town of Samre and the villages of Gijet, Adeba, and Tseada Sare in recent days. “Famine is coming,” he said. We should heed Mulugeta’s warning: Action now is essential to stop further crimes and a vast humanitarian catastrophe.

Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki rules a tiny nation of 3.5 million people, with a GDP of $2 billion as of 2018. But the country’s military is vast; its army has an astonishing 200,000 people, most of them enrolled in compulsory and indefinite national service on reaching eleventh grade. Eritrea doesn’t publish a budget, but an estimated 20 percent of the country’s GDP is spent on the military as well as an undisclosed sum on Isaias’s much-feared national security and intelligence services.

Several recent reports make clear just what Eritrean security and military forces are capable of. Over the last week, three different reports attributed atrocity crimes in the war in Tigray to Eritrean forces. Amnesty International documented a November 2020 massacre in a cathedral in Axum, where hundreds of civilians were slaughtered. CNN compiled and cross-checked reports of a mass killing at a monastery called Maryam Dengelat, where more than 100 people died. And VICE World News matched satellite photos of destroyed villages with eyewitness accounts to detail other atrocities.

And the fighting, burning, and forced starvations continue. Last week, satellite imagery showed at least 508 buildings burning in and around the town of Gijet in southern Tigray. This is close to the area where Tigray’s defense forces destroyed an Ethiopian armored division two weeks earlier, and in phone calls to me from the area, Tigrayans reported five Eritrean divisions—about 10,000 soldiers with tanks backed by both Ethiopian and Eritrean combat aircraft—converging on the area conducting what they called a “scorched earth” operation.

In July 2018, when Abiy flew to the Eritrean capital, Asmara, to sign a long-overdue peace agreement between the two countries, citizens of both countries hoped the occasion would push Isaias to at last begin to demobilize his army; redirect his national budget to spending on health, education, and development; and liberalize his politics. None of that happened. It’s now clear that Isaias saw the peace deal as a security pact with Ethiopia to eliminate the Tigray People’s Liberation Front’s (TPLF) leadership, which is leading the uprising in Ethiopia—and inflict such damage on the Tigrayan people that they could never again challenge either country.

Isaias’s animosity to the TPLF dates back to a dispute between him and TPLF leaders, then-Ethiopia’s leaders, which led to a border war in 1998 that he lost. The Ethiopian army under the TPLF didn’t march all the way to Asmara and impose regime change, but it might as well have.

In the wake of defeat, Eritreans themselves clamored for change: First, a group of democracy activists petitioned for reform, and then 15 of the most senior Eritrean politicians—known as the G-15—followed suit. In the brief “Asmara Spring” of 2001, an independent press flourished, and Eritreans demanded that all freedoms promised after the country’s independence eight years earlier—and contained in the new constitution finalized in 1997 but never adopted—should be realized.

The G-15 included Isaias’s oldest comrades-in-arms and all heroes of the war for independence, including former foreign ministers and defense ministers and some of the founders of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. Likely feeling encircled, Isaias’s response to demands for reform was to clamp down. On Sept. 18 and 19, 2001, he arrested 11 of the G-15 and consigned them to literal oblivion; they have not been seen or heard from since. Neither have Eritreans seen or heard of their cherished constitution and freedoms. Instead, all independent media were closed, journalists were imprisoned, and religious freedoms were circumscribed. Compulsory national service for all school leavers was introduced.

To divert attention from his own military adventurism and growing authoritarianism, Isaias tried to blame his nation’s ills on Ethiopia—and especially the TPLF. And he supported any opposition group ready to wage war against Ethiopia, including Somali jihadists. That last venture prompted a fierce U.S.-led backlash that included placing the country under sanctions in 2007 before lifting them in 2018.

In all this, Isaias did have one legitimate complaint. The peace deal that ended the 1998-2000 war between TPLF-led Ethiopia and Eritrea set up an independent boundary commission, and that commission awarded a small but symbolic piece of land—the village of Badme—to Eritrea. A dispute over Badme had been the spark for the war, but Ethiopians repeatedly stalled on implementing the decision. On that single grievance, Isaias kept his people in a state of emergency, mobilized against Ethiopia, and cultivated a national paranoia, schooling Eritreans in the view that both Ethiopia and the entire world were conspiring against them.

Young Eritreans fled abroad rather than endure military service or the hopelessness of life in a police state with a stagnating economy. The country is one of the world’s largest generators of refugees proportionate to its size. Only a (mostly illegal) tax on diaspora Eritreans plus royalties from cobalt, gold, and potash mining kept the country afloat—until the conflict in nearby Yemen offered a lifeline. Eritrea’s Red Sea coast suddenly became a strategic asset, and Isaias leased out the port and airbase at Assab to the United Arab Emirates to use as a forward base. That not only brought in much-needed cash but also a political opening to the Gulf states.

It’s notable that when Isaias and Abiy signed their peace deal in 2018, they didn’t attend the African Union summit—even though the continental organization was the official custodian of the treaty, signed under its auspices in Algiers. Instead, they flew to Abu Dhabi, UAE and then to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Eritrea was becoming a willing junior partner in the transactional politics of the Arabian peninsula, sidelining the African Union and its carefully crafted peace and security architecture.

More remarkable has been Isaias’s emergence as kingmaker in the Horn of Africa.

More remarkable has been Isaias’s emergence as kingmaker in the Horn of Africa.

He has been shrewdly offering two things to the region’s insecure rulers. One is practical advice on political survival against the odds—specifically, how to face international pressure to democratize. The other is a model of military training that transforms high school students into obedient fighting machines.

In this regard, Eritrea is now the senior partner in the Ethiopian war in Tigray. Eritrean troops are also reported to be stationed in al-Fashqa, the disputed border area between Ethiopia and Sudan—quietly exacerbating the conflict between those two countries. Isaias is confidante and supporter of Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi, commonly known as Farmaajo. In February, political crisis in Somalia intensified as Farmaajo’s presidential term expired without either an election or an agreement with the opposition on how to handle the interregnum. Farmaajo is determined to hang on, and on one occasion, his forces fired into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators. Worryingly, Somali special forces trained in Eritrea were flown back to Mogadishu last month.

Isaias is constructing a three-cornered axis of autocracy in the Horn of Africa with him as its leader and Abiy and Farmaajo as junior partners.

Isaias’s public relations strategy is simple. He says as little as possible. Four months after the war erupted in Tigray, he hasn’t told the Eritrean people that as much as half of the country’s army is currently conducting operations inside Ethiopia. In fact, he has made just one public statement: a long speech disguised as an interview in which he covered world affairs but said only that Eritrea was “fulfilling its responsibilities” with respect to Ethiopia. He has said nothing about his war aims, but decades of unremitting ruthlessness tell their own story.

Alex de Waal is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation and a research professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Secretary Blinken’s Call with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy

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READOUT | OFFICE OF THE SPOKESPERSON | MARCH 2, 2021

The below is attributable to Spokesperson Ned Price:‎

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke today with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to emphasize the United States’ concern about the humanitarian and human rights crisis in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.  Noting the growing number of credible reports of atrocities and human rights violations and abuses, the Secretary urged the Ethiopian government to take immediate, concrete steps to protect civilians, including refugees, and to prevent further violence.  Secretary Blinken pressed for the immediate end to hostilities and the withdrawal of outside forces from Tigray, including Amhara regional security forces and Eritrean troops.  Secretary Blinken also asked that the Government of Ethiopia work with the international community to facilitate independent, international, and credible investigations into reported human rights abuses and violations and to hold those responsible accountable.  Secretary Blinken acknowledged Ethiopia’s recent announcement of full and unhindered humanitarian access in Tigray.  He stressed the need for the Government of Ethiopia to honor its commitments around access, reiterated that the United States remains ready to assist in resolving the conflict, and highlighted the United States’ commitment to provide life-saving humanitarian assistance to vulnerable populations throughout Ethiopia.

 

Finding a Path to Peace in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region War has devastated Ethiopia’s northernmost region.

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International Crisis Group | Pending comprehensive national dialogue, Addis Ababa should ease Tigray’s immediate predicament, engaging elements of the authorities it unseated to govern the area and ensure that aid reaches the millions in need.

What’s new? After weeks of fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, federal troops removed the regional government and declared victory. Yet thousands have died, hundreds of thousands are at risk of starvation and the conflict continues. Addis Ababa has established an interim administration, but ousted Tigrayan politicians say they will fight back.

Why did it happen? Relations between Addis Ababa and Mekelle tanked after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018 and Tigray’s leaders lost federal power. Tensions spiked when Tigray defied central authority by holding regional elections in September, culminating when Tigrayan forces captured the national military command in the region, triggering federal intervention.

Why does it matter? The conflict has poisoned relations between Tigrayan and other Ethiopian elites and inflamed public opinion in Tigray against the federal authorities, who may well struggle to administer a restive region. If Addis Ababa’s energies are drained by enforcing its rule on Tigray, other Ethiopian ethno-nationalist forces may be emboldened.

What should be done? To get Tigray’s public on side, Ababa Ababa should ensure that Eritrean and Amhara regional forces that participated in the intervention withdraw. It also should urgently allow aid to reach all Tigrayans who need it. Ultimately, inclusive dialogue is needed to address federal-Tigray disagreements and wider disputes over regional autonomy. Read more

EU Accuses Eritrean Forces of Fueling Conflict in Ethiopia

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Bloomberg | EU envoy scheduled to meet Ethiopian premier on Tuesday. UN says international staff given approval to travel to Tigray

The European Union accused Eritrean troops of fueling the months-long conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region and echoed a U.S. call for their withdrawal.

The presence of Eritrean forces is “exacerbating ethnic violence” in Tigray, the EU said in a statement Monday. Eritrea rejects the accusation and said the EU statement was “appalling,” according to comments posted by Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel on Twitter on Tuesday.

“The EU statement laments the ‘exacerbation of ethnic violence’ while conveniently forgetting the toxic policy of institutionalized ethnicity and polarization that the now defunct Tigray People’s Liberation Front clique pursued for decades,” Yemane said.

The U.S. said last month there were “credible reports” of Eritrean involvement in the violence in Tigray, which began on Nov. 4 when Ethiopian federal troops declared war on forces loyal to the dissident TPLF. The governments of both Ethiopia and Eritrea have previously denied Eritrean troops are involved in the fighting.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s spokeswoman, Billene Seyoum, didn’t respond to a requests for comment sent by text message.

Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto, who has been nominated as a special envoy to the region by EU member states, is scheduled to meet Abiy on Tuesday in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to discuss the crisis.

In December, the EU suspended almost 90 million euros ($109 million) of budgetary aid to Ethiopia because of the conflict, which the United Nations estimates has killed thousands of people, displaced about 2.2 million others and destroyed 80% of the region’s health centers.

Debt Restructuring

The war threatens to strain government finances already stretched by the Covid-19 pandemic. Last month, the Finance Ministry said it would seek to restructure its external debt under a Group of 20 program to address “pandemic-related financial constraints.” The nation’s $1 billion of 2024 Eurobonds plunged the most on record after the announcement.

Haavisto on Feb. 7 traveled to Sudan, where he held talks with government officials aimed at cooling tensions with Ethiopia after several deadly clashes between the two nations in al-Fashqa, an area of fertile farming land that straddles their border. Officials in Ethiopia’s ethnic Amhara region have pressed the government to seize land that Sudan claims ownership of based on colonial treaties dating back to 1902.

UN agencies on Monday received approval from the government for 25 of its international staff to move into Tigray to help deliver humanitarian aid to the region, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said in a statement.

“We remain deeply concerned about the significant escalation in humanitarian needs in Tigray where people have endured more than three months of conflict with extremely limited assistance,” Dujarric said. “We are also very concerned by reports of grave violations against civilians that we continue to receive.”

Though Ethiopia announced victory in the Tigray war on Nov. 28, the region’s former leader, Debretsion Gebremichael, has vowed to continue fighting.

EU urges Eritrea to stop meddling in Ethiopia war

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EU Observer | The EU has urged Eritrea to withdraw troops from Ethiopia and for access to diplomats, aid workers, and journalists to war-torn regions. “The EU joins the United States’ call for the withdrawal of Eritrean troops from Ethiopia, which are fuelling the conflict in Tigray, reportedly committing atrocities, and exacerbating ethnic violence,” it said Monday. The Eritrean forces are fighting alongside Ethiopian government troops against local rulers in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.

New Footage Emerges of Possible War Crimes in Ethiopia

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The Washington Free Bacon | Two new videos have emerged showing what appear to be war crimes in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.

A video released Monday by a watchdog site shows the bodies of at least 20 men strewn across the road of a Tigrayan village. The watchdog site reports that Eritrean and Ethiopian troops killed the young men in a January massacre.

Additional footage allegedly shows Eritrean forces shelling a hilltop church, leaving the building in rubble. The church neighbors a famed mosque that occupying forces have also targeted in recent months.

Armed conflict broke out between Tigrayans and the Ethiopian government late last year after the Tigray Regional Government conducted local elections against Ethiopia’s orders. New reports indicate neighboring Eritrea has also sent troops into the region to support the Ethiopian government.

Dade Desta, the director of the Tigray Center for Information and Communication, said these actions amount to genocide and warrant U.S. action.

“They are trying to ruin the region by attacking the community’s identity and destroying it where they can. They destroyed the church for the sake of it,” Desta said of Ethiopian and Eritrean forces. “It’s happening everywhere in Tigray.”

Due to limited communications infrastructure and little on-the-ground reporting from the United States or United Nations, the full extent of war crimes in Tigray remains unknown. Both Tigrayan protesters and Republican lawmakers have urged the Biden administration to take action and pressure Ethiopia to end the violence.

The administration has thus far urged Eritrean forces to leave the region and asked for a ceasefire.

Desta said the Biden administration’s approach has been insufficient.

“Talking will never make them leave. You need action,” Desta said. “What we need today is a Kosovo-style intervention. People are dying in the thousands, it’s a genocide.”

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

Tigray Opposition Parties Assert 50,000-Plus Civilian Deaths

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Associated Press | Cara Anna — A trio of opposition parties in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region estimates that more than 50,000 civilians have been killed in the three-month conflict, and they urge the international community to intervene before a “humanitarian disaster of biblical proportion will become a gruesome reality.”

The statement posted Tuesday does not say where the estimate comes from, and the parties could not immediately be reached. Communication links remain challenging in much of the region, making it difficult to verify claims by any side.

No official death toll has emerged since the fighting began in early November between Ethiopian and allied forces and those of the Tigray region who dominated the government for almost three decades before Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018. Each side now views the other as illegitimate.

The opposition parties say the international community should ensure the immediate withdrawal of fighters including soldiers from neighboring Eritrea, who witnesses say are supporting Ethiopian forces. The parties also urge an independent investigation into the conflict, dialogue, more humanitarian aid and media access to “cover what is happening.”

Civilians throughout Tigray, a region of some 6 million people, have been dying from targeted attacks, crossfire, disease and lack of resources, according to witnesses. Even some of the new administrators appointed by Abiy’s government have warned that people are dying of starvation as vast areas beyond main roads and towns still cannot be reached.

The opposition parties assert that the hunger is man-made as cattle have been killed and raided, crops burned and homes looted and destroyed. The statement was signed by the Tigray Independence Party, the National Congress of Great Tigray and Salsay Weyane Tigray.

Their statement accuses Ethiopia’s government of “using hunger as a weapon to subdue Tigray since it has been obstructing international efforts for humanitarian assistance.” Ethiopia’s government, however, has asserted that aid is being delivered and nearly 1.5 million people have been reached.

The United Nations and others have pressed for more humanitarian access and a solution to a complicated system of clearances with a variety of authorities, including ones on the ground.

“In 40 years (as) a humanitarian, I’ve rarely seen an aid response so impeded,” the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, tweeted on Monday.

U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi after a visit to Tigray told reporters on Monday that the situation is “extremely grave.” He said his team had heard a “very strong appeal” from appointed authorities in Tigray and Ethiopian ministries for more international help, and he pointed out that the U.N. works in “northern Syria, in Yemen, in areas of high insecurity.”

The Tigray region hosted 96,000 refugees from Eritrea before the fighting, and Grandi said he had spoken to some who were caught in the crossfire and then resorted to “eating leaves” after being cut off from support for several weeks. Others were forcibly returned to Eritrea by Eritrean forces, he said. It was not clear how many.

Two of the refugees’ four camps remain inaccessible, and “most likely there is no refugee presence here anymore,” he said. Citing satellite imagery, the U.K.-based DX Open Network nonprofit this week reported further destruction at the Hitsats and Shimelba camps in recent weeks by unnamed armed groups, with humanitarian facilities among those targeted.

Up to 20,000 of the refugees have been “dispersed” into areas where humanitarian workers don’t have access, Grandi said.

The U.N. refugee chief also called for an independent, transparent investigation into alleged abuses. “The situation is very complex,” he said. “There has been a lot of crossfire, a lot of violations on all sides,” including Tigray-allied fighters.

Eritrean refugees caught in crossfire of Ethiopia’s Tigray war

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AFP | They have survived gun battles, attempted abductions, attacks by angry militiamen and days-long treks to safety with nothing to eat but moringa leaves.

Yet Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia fear their suffering may not be over, as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed strains to end a brutal conflict in the northern region of Tigray that has rendered them uniquely vulnerable.

Nearly 100,000 refugees from Eritrea, an oppressive, authoritarian nation bordering Ethiopia to the north, were registered in four camps in Tigray when fighting erupted in November between Abiy’s government and the regional ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

Two of those camps, Hitsats and Shimelba, were caught up in hostilities and remain inaccessible to the United Nations refugee agency and its Ethiopian counterpart, the Agency for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA).

The information vacuum has spurred dire speculation over the refugees’ fate.

The UN has sounded the alarm over reported targeted killings and abductions by Eritrean soldiers, whose role in the conflict is widely documented but officially denied by Addis Ababa and Asmara.

The US State Department last week cited “credible reports” of looting and sexual violence in the camps.

On his first trip to Ethiopia since the conflict began, UN refugees chief Filippo Grandi over the weekend visited Mai Aini, one of two camps in southern Tigray where the UN has regained access.

The camp is now home to hundreds of refugees from Hitsats, some of whom told AFP of the horrors they left behind.

“Most of the people, if you search this camp, they’ll start crying when they talk about what happened,” said Girmay, who like other refugees insisted on using only one name, fearing reprisals.

“Our friends could be alive or dead. We don’t know.”

– ‘They came and killed’-

The TPLF dominated Ethiopian politics for almost three decades — it was in power when Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a border war that killed tens of thousands between 1998 and 2000 and led to a two-decade stalemate.

After taking office in 2018, Abiy initiated a surprise rapprochement with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, a move that won him the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

Yet Isaias and the TPLF — whose region borders Eritrea — remain bitter enemies, heightening the risks for Eritrean refugees caught up in the conflict.

Once fighting reached Hitsats in late November, pro-TPLF militiamen targeted refugees in reprisal killings after suffering battlefield setbacks against Eritrean troops, several refugees told AFP.

On one morning the militiamen shot dead nine young Eritrean men outside a church, they said.

Pro-TPLF forces based themselves out of Hitsats for weeks, forbidding hungry residents from going out in search of food and shooting dead several who tried anyway.

“At first we couldn’t believe it because they speak the same language as us,” Girmay said of the pro-TPLF forces.

“Before we are friends… Suddenly they came and killed.”

Eritrean soldiers also committed abuses, the refugees said, arresting dozens of people, likely more, and whisking them to an unknown destination.

“The Eritrean soldiers caught some people and started asking them questions. I’ve counted 26 or 27,” one refugee said.

“The next day they took them somewhere else. We don’t know where they are.”

Many refugees fled Eritrea to avoid its notorious system of compulsory national service, which inspires descriptions of the nation as an “open-air prison”, and among their greatest fears is to be forced back.

Addressing reporters at the end of his visit Monday night, the UN’s Grandi said he had come away with “a more complex sense” of who committed abuses.

“There were very precise allegations regarding TPLF elements. There were very specific allegations regarding Eritrean forces present — possibly or surely present — in the region,” he said.

Ethiopia’s government is investigating abuses and will try to account for all of Hitsats’ pre-conflict population, which it estimates at around 11,000, said Tesfahun Gobezay, ARRA’s executive director.

“With regard to Eritrean soldiers taking Eritrean refugees, we don’t have any solid evidence yet,” Tesfahun told AFP.

-‘How can I feel safe?’-

Eritrean forces assumed control of Hitsats in early January and forced those remaining in the camp to evacuate, refugees said.

“They threatened to kill us and people were afraid,” said one refugee now in Addis Ababa, who asked that his name not be used.

Roughly 3,000 refugees from Hitsats and the other inaccessible northern camp, Shimelba, have since reached the two camps in southern Tigray, many travelling by foot with no water and only leaves for food.

In Mai Aini some new arrivals complained of poor access to clean water and of not having a place to sleep.

But their biggest concern, shared by some longtime residents, was for their security, with several worrying that pro-TPLF militias could attack the camp despite an extensive federal military presence nearby.

“How can I feel safe here?” said Natnael, who has lived in Mai Aini since he was a boy. “There are many militias around the camp.”

ARRA’s Tesfahun said the southern camps were safe and that progress had been made in re-establishing basic services.

Grandi, for his part, called for a more efficient system of distributing aid, saying the current situation in Tigray was “very grave” and that “without further action it will get worse.”

It remains to be seen what has become of the two camps in northern Tigray that are still out of contact.

Satellite imagery shows widespread damage to both, suggesting a campaign to destroy them, the British-based investigations firm DX Open Network said.

“There are clear and consistent patterns across both camps over a two-month period demonstrating that these refugee camps were systematically targeted despite their protected humanitarian status,” it said in a statement.

The brutal dictatorship the world keeps ignoring

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The Washingtonpost | Adam Taylor | June 12, 2015 |  >>> 

On Monday, the United Nations released the results of a year-long investigation into human rights in Eritrea. What it found was horrific. Detailing “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations,” the U.N. commission of inquiry argued that Eritrea was operating a totalitarian government with no accountability and no rule of law.

“The commission also finds that the violations in the areas of extrajudicial executions, torture (including sexual torture), national service and forced labor may constitute crimes against humanity,” the report said.

However, it appears the report failed to produce any mainstream outrage. Unlike similar U.N. reports on alleged crimes against humanity in North Korea, or online criticism of human rights abuses in places such as Saudi Arabia or Qatar, the horrific accusations against Eritrea didn’t produce a viral outcry.

Why not? It certainly doesn’t seem to be because of the severity of the accusations. Crimes against humanity are pretty much as serious as you can get, and it’s hard to read the United Nations’ full report and not be shocked.

It’s hard to imagine now, but hopes were initially high for Eritrea in 1993 after it gained independence from Ethiopia after 30 years of civil war. Since then, however, President Isaias Afwerki has clamped down and allowed no room for an opposition. The U.N. report described a Stasi-like police state that leaves Eritreans in constant fear that they are being monitored.

“When I am in Eritrea, I feel that I cannot even think because I am afraid that people can read my thoughts and I am scared,” one witness told the U.N. inquiry.

The system leads to arbitrary arrests and detention, with torture and even enforced disappearances a part of life in Eritrea, the U.N. probe found, and even those who commit no perceived crime often end up in arduous and indefinite national service that may amount to forced labor. Escape is not a realistic option for many: Those who attempt to flee the country are considered “traitors,” and there is a shoot-to-kill policy on the border, the report said.

It’s also worth noting the significant effort and risk put into creating the report: The Eritrean government refused to allow the United Nations access to the country to investigate, so the U.N. team interviewed more than 550 witnesses in third countries and accepted 160 written submissions. Many approached by the United Nations declined to give testimony, even anonymously, citing a justifiable fear of reprisal.

Still, experts don’t seem too surprised at the lack of outrage generated by the report. “Clearly, Eritrea doesn’t capture the imagination, or rouse the conscience of Americans, much in the way North Korea does,” Jeffrey Smith, an advocacy officer at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, explained. “President Afwerki, while unquestionably a chronic human rights abuser and eccentric despot, isn’t portrayed by the American media in the same way that Kim Jong Un is.”

“North Korea also makes headlines for other reasons — namely its nuclear ambitions and the ongoing threat it poses to regional stability in East Asia,” he added. “Similarly, while Eritrea is certainly a police state similar to North Korea in many ways, it’s largely kept out of the headlines because Africa in general doesn’t feature highly on the agenda of policymakers here in the United States.”

The fact is, while the scope and authority of the U.N. report lent its allegations an added weight, academics and human rights researchers had long written similar things about the Eritrean state without a significant mainstream response in America or Europe.

In 2014, for instance Human Rights Watch called Eritrea “among the most closed countries in the world” and pointed to “indefinite military service, torture, arbitrary detention, and severe restrictions on freedoms of expression, association, and religion.” Reporters Without Borders has repeatedly ranked it as the worst country in the world for press freedom — worse even than North Korea.

“The U.N. report? We knew it already,” said Ismail Einashe, a Somali-British journalist who works with Eritrean migrants. “Too little, too late.”

Despite this, some reports on the country ignore this and focus on another aspect of Eritrea: Its unlikely tourism sector. International isolation, a history as an Italian colony and reported Qatari investment may have made Eritrea a unique if distasteful vacation destination: As one travel blogger put it last year, the capital of “Asmara felt much more like Naples than North Korea.”

Sara Dorman, an expert in African politics at Edinburgh University, doesn’t think much of either comparison.

“I don’t think it’s particularly helpful,” she said of the country’s reputation as the “North Korea of Africa.” At the same time, she stressed that Eritrea really does deserve to be seen as a special case. “As somebody who studies authoritarian regimes elsewhere in Africa, the Eritrean regime’s control over its population is qualitatively different than other African states,” Dorman said, before pointing to features such as the scale of Eritrea’s intelligence service and the practice of punishing entire families for the crimes of one member.

There are plenty of historical arguments for why the world should pay more attention to what’s happening in Eritrea. Former colonial rulers Italy and Britain have an obvious legacy there, and so does the United States, which allowed Ethiopia to incorporate Eritrea with the aim of keeping the U.S. Kagnew Station military base in the country. In addition, Eritrea has a difficult recent history with its East African neighbors: It’s currently under U.N. sanctions for supporting al-Shabab, the Somali Islamist group, and others in the region.

But one important reason to pay attention has become an unavoidable reality for Europe. Eritreans make up a large share of the migrants crossing the Mediterranean in flimsy boats to seek asylum in Europe: More than 22 percent of those who made the journey in 2014 were from the country, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, second only to Syrians. They flee not because of a civil war like that in Syria, but because of the immense restrictions the Eritrean state puts on their lives. As one escaped Eritrean put it, life there is a “psychological prison.”

Despite this, a number of European nations have recently tightened the restrictions on Eritrean migrants, many citing a Danish immigration report from last November that prompted criticism from human rights groups. The European Union is also considering increasing the amount of aid it sends to Eritrea via the European Development Fund. Experts like Dorman hope that the U.N. report may lead some in Europe to reconsider.

“If organizations don’t take note of this report, we really have to wonder about how they make these decisions,” she said.

Still, even if they don’t, the report does have one very vocal audience: The Eritrean government and pro-government media. In a statement published on Tuesday, Eritrea called the U.N. report a”cynical political travesty” that was an attack “not so much on the government, but on a civilized people and society who cherish human values and dignity.”