Tag Archive for: Tigray War

France – Official statement on the situation in Ethiopia

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Situation in Tigray

(29 January 2021)

France is extremely concerned by the gravity of the humanitarian and food crisis in Tigray and reiterates its call to the Ethiopian government to facilitate access to the region – including the Hitsats and Shimelba refugee camps – by the UN and humanitarian organizations.

Repeated and consistent allegations of serious human rights violations in the Tigray region cannot be ignored. France urges the Ethiopian authorities to facilitate independent investigations and to take the legal actions they had announced.

France applauds the strong commitment on the part of the United Nations as reflected by current missions in Ethiopia led by David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, and Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It hopes these missions will help accelerate the delivery of humanitarian aid to the people of Tigray and the many displaced persons and refugees there. It welcomes EU efforts in Ethiopia and the mission led by Finnish Minister for Foreign Affairs Pekka Haavisto.

France is also concerned by tensions on the border between Ethiopia and Sudan and calls on the two neighboring countries to avoid any military escalation and resolve this dispute through dialogue.

Attack On Civilians In The Benishangul-Gumuz Region

(23 December 2020)

France condemns in the strongest possible terms the attack in the Benishangul-Gumuz region in western Ethiopia that took the lives of more than a hundred civilians, according to the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission.

The perpetrators of these crimes must be prosecuted and brought to justice.

France expresses its solidarity and offers its sincere condolences to the victims’ families. It calls for a return to peaceful coexistence and the rule of law, the only way to break the cycle of violence in Ethiopia.

Meeting between Mr Jean-Yves Le Drian and Mr Demeke Mekonnen, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia

(26 November 2020)

Mr Jean-Yves Le Drian, Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, had a meeting today with Mr Demeke Mekonnen, Ethiopia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The Minister took the opportunity presented by the meeting to express our deep concern about the escalation of violence in the Tigray region and the worsening humanitarian situation in Ethiopia and Sudan.

The Minister reiterated our condemnation of the ethnically-motivated violence and our call for measures to be put in place as swiftly as possible to protect civilians.

He supported the United Nations’ calls for humanitarian access to be allowed to the areas affected by the conflict, and expressed France’s support for the African Union chair’s initiative to find a political solution to the crisis.

Situation in the Tigray region

(23 November 2020)

France is concerned by the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Ethiopia, the Tigray region and Sudan.

It condemns the ethnic violence and calls for the swift institution of measures to protect civilian populations.

France supports the UN’s requests for humanitarian access.

France backs the approach taken by the UN Secretary-General and the initiatives taken by South Africa as Chair of the African Union to resolve the conflict.

The People of Irob Mourns The Massacre Of Their Loved Ones – Irob Advocacy Group

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“It is with great sorrow & grief that we share here the incomplete list of Irob civilians killed by Eritrean soldiers during the mass killing campaign in about just 2 weeks of late December 2020 to early January 2021,” the Irob Advocacy Association said in a Tweet on Saturday.

“These civilians [see list of victims here & here] did not take part in combat mission. They were simply civilian farmers – primarily young male adults & teenagers,” the Association said, adding “We cry for justice!”

On January 24, 2001, the Belgian based Europe External Programme with Africa (EEPA) reported that Eritrean soldiers, controlling many districts in Irob land, killed many Tigrayan young men: “We hear Eritrean soldiers told the local elders and parents that, they have orders to kill all male youth older than 15.”

Eritrean soldiers were also seen distributing Eritrean I.D. cards to citizens in Irob, Tigray. Many people had to fled to the mountains and hide in caves, according to EEPA.

The Irob people are an ethnic minority group who are situated in the traditional Agamä Awrajja, Tigray Region, bordered with Afar region of Ethiopia to the East and  Saho of Eritrea to the North. They speak the Saho language, the same language spoken by the Saho people of Eritrea.

The Saho people of Eritrea are indigenous people in Eritrea marginalized by the Eritrean Geovernment who refuses to admit the existence of any indigenous people.

The Irob people were most affected by the outbreak of Ethiopian-Eritrean war of 1998-2000. Next to Badime, Irob became the prime target of Eritrean invasion and the consequent destructive high-tech warfare.

Since Eritrea joined the military offensive against the Tigray regional government launched by the unelected Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, Eritrean forces have been accused of summary execution, rape, looting and burning private and public properties, including refugee camps.

U.S. State Department officials told The Associated Press that they have directly “pressed senior levels” of Eritrea’s government to immediately withdraw from the embattled region. There were no details on how officials in Eritrea, one of the world’s most secretive countries, responded to the Biden administration demand.

The Ethiopia Government, however, has privately told Biden administration that the embattled Tigray region has “returned to normalcy” to which witnesses strongly disagree.

Ethiopia says Tigray back to ‘normalcy;’ witnesses disagree.

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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP | Cara Anna) — Ethiopia’s government has privately told Biden administration staffers its embattled Tigray region has “returned to normalcy,” but new witness accounts describe terrified Tigray residents hiding in bullet-marked homes and a vast rural area where effects of the fighting and food shortages are yet unknown.

The conflict that began in November between Ethiopian forces and those of the Tigray region who dominated the government for nearly three decades continues largely in shadow. Some communications links are severed, residents are scared to give details by phone and almost all journalists are blocked. Thousands of people have died.

Ethiopia’s deputy prime minister, Demeke Mekonnen, and colleagues briefed a private gathering hosted by the Atlantic Council think tank on Friday. They said nearly 1.5 million people in Tigray have been reached with humanitarian aid, and they expressed unease at “false and politically motivated allegations” of mistreatment of refugees from neighboring Eritrea, the state-affiliated Fana Broadcasting Corporate reported. It said Biden administration staffers attended the meeting.

The refugees have been targeted by soldiers from Eritrea, who are fighting alongside Ethiopian troops against the Tigray forces. The Biden administration has pressed Eritrea to “immediately” withdraw them, citing credible accounts of looting, sexual assault and other abuses.

Despite Ethiopia’s latest assertions, its recently appointed administrators in Tigray have estimated that more than 4.5 million people, or close to the region’s entire population, need emergency food aid and some people have begun dying of starvation. That’s according to leaked documents from a crisis meeting of government and aid workers in early January.

And a new account by a Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator in Tigray, Albert Vinas, says “we are very concerned about what may be happening in rural areas,” with many places inaccessible because of fighting or difficulties in obtaining permission.

“But we know, because community elders and traditional authorities have told us, that the situation in these places is very bad,” he said in the account posted online Friday.

He described Tigray residents handing his colleagues pieces of paper with phone numbers and asking for help in reaching their families, whom they hadn’t heard from for weeks.

“We saw a population locked in their homes and living in great fear,” he wrote after visiting the city of Adigrat and the towns of Axum and Adwa starting in late December.

In Adigrat, one of Tigray’s largest cities, “the situation was very tense and its hospital was in a terrible condition,” Vinas added, with “no food, no water and no money. Some patients who had been admitted with traumatic injuries were malnourished.” One woman had been in labor for a week.

Beyond hospitals, up to 90% of health centers between the Tigray capital, Mekele, and Axum to the north toward Eritrea were not functioning, he said. “There is a large population suffering, surely with fatal consequences. … There have been no vaccinations in almost three months, so we fear there will be epidemics soon.”

In a separate account posted by the World Peace Foundation on Friday, former senior Ethiopian official Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe in a phone interview from rural Tigray told director Alex de Waal that “hunger among peasantry is crippling” in areas bordering Eritrea after Eritrean forces burned or looted crops just before the harvest.

“Soon, we might see a massive humanitarian crisis,” Mulugeta said.

Eritrean officials have not responded to questions nor confirmed their soldiers’ involvement, and Ethiopia has denied their presence despite witness accounts.

The food situation in Tigray was already “extremely bad” before the fighting began because of a locust outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Oxfam country director in Ethiopia, Gezahegn Kebede Gebrehana, has told The Associated Press.

“When the fighting took place, a lot of people fled into the bush. But when they came back, most found their houses destroyed or all belongings looted,” he said after an assessment in southern Tigray, by some accounts the most accessible part of the region. “Food is a very, very prominent necessity, from what we saw.”

International pressure continues on Ethiopia to allow unrestricted humanitarian access to Tigray, now a complicated patchwork of local authorities, but Gezahegn warned against suspending aid to the government as the European Union recently did.

“The donor community might think they will push the Ethiopian government, but the Ethiopian government will never surrender,” he said. He acknowledged the “good intentions” but said “it’s the people who suffer.”

The horrors of the Tigray war: Eyewitness accounts

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Eritrea Hub | This is a slightly shortened article by Alem Berhe

When the war broke out, I was in the beautiful capital of Tigray – Mekelle, visiting immediate family. On November 3, I sat down for dinner at GG Hotel in the Adi Shumduhun area, where I made dramatic arguments to a group of friends about why our regional government had not yet installed a 4G network. The irony was to be played out the next day, as I woke up in a full-fledged warzone, to a complete communications blackout. My life, and the lives of everyone around me, would never be the same. After being stuck in the fire for over two months, I recently and luckily made it out alive to Addis Ababa. Here are my firsthand accounts of what I have seen and heard. Please note only first names of witnesses have been used for safety.

PART I: ERITREAN FORCES, SADISM AND NECROPHILIA:

“You are all an ungrateful bunch of lice. If we followed orders, all of you above the age of 7 would be dead. That is the mission we were given. We were told to exterminate you – all of you. If you don’t stop crying – we will kill the children too.” This is the prevalent line of argument from the Isaias-led Eritrean troops in the areas they de facto occupy in Tigray and openly punish (parts of Eastern, Central and South Western zone). And this, they do with the blessing of the Ethiopian government, which claims it is “simply freeing Tigrayans.” Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group: and this, the Eritrean forces explicitly claim as their mission in the war.

HAWZEN: On January 20, I spoke to Assefa, a Hawzen resident, who had fled to Mekelle fearing door to door killings. Here are his accounts.

“There are corpses all over the road in Hawzen; the stench is overwhelming. They have turned Tigray into a slaughterhouse. They will kill you for no reason. You walk in front of them, they kill you asking “who gave you the authority to walk before us like Generals?” They find you at church or in a mosque, you are dead. If they especially see that you have come back from attending a funeral, they go on a shooting spree yelling “who gave you the right to bury anyone?” If you identify a family member amidst the line of corpses and you cry, they kill you. You can’t shed one tear – mourning is a crime.” He recounts to me the story of an elderly woman about 60 years old who was shot dead by an Eritrean soldier following her discovery of a dead teenage boy in front of a garage and crying out “My son! My dear son! (wedeye! wedey mearey!)” The teenager was in fact not her son, he tells me, and this is just a common term of endearment in Tigrigna. “They also shot another woman after she placed a netella (a traditional, white scarf) over a corpse she found on the road as a sign of respect. She died immediately.”

“Many of the corpses are unidentified. If you notice a family member amidst the bodies, you hold back your tears and beg the Ethiopian and Eritrean forces to transport them. If you are lucky, they make you pay money and you wait a few days before you can take your relative’s body – or what’s left of it anyway. Some of the townsmen have been taking the risk of transporting these bodies incognito via traditional carriages when the forces are not around. Since the banks are closed and the little money and property we own has been massively looted, most of us cannot pay for our loved ones’ corpses.”

When I inquire into what has been looted, he snorts: “Why don’t you ask me what they haven’t looted? When they had finished looting and pillaging all our infrastructure and shops, they marched one house to another killing people and taking our clothes and shoes, our bed-sheets and blankets from our beds, our wedding rings, even pissing into our cooking pots. They spared us nothing. You will not find a piece of plate in my house. Not even my wife’s trinket earrings for 2birr. And when they looted, they exclaimed “you guys are living like the Americans, you don’t deserve this.”

I then ask him to give me names of civilians recently killed. He hesitates and his relatives assure him that I am a friend just trying to get word out to the world. He mentions he will only tell me a few. “You should first of all know that pretty much all of the youth in town have already fled the town and scattered everywhere; youth are actively being searched and killed. You will only find women and the elderly in most towns. It is no use if they run though – they are hunting them down everywhere like animals.”

“On January 18, two days before I came to Mekelle, they went on another round of door to door killings – well, what’s left of us anyway. They saw an elderly man named Kidane Abadi, a known tailor in town, who is disabled on his right leg and limps due to a longstanding illness. When they noticed he was limping, they grabbed him right away saying “you are a soldier!” He told them he was a tailor and that everyone in town knew so. They still shot him dead; they said he is a returned soldier injured in the war. But everyone in town knows he has been a disabled man for a long time.” He emphasizes to me how dangerous this is, because on top of the hunt for Tigrayan youth, the disabled population at large is now issued a free death stamp under the guise that they could potentially be “injured rebel soldiers.”

“They also killed Memhir Hagos Girmay on the same day– they killed him in his house because he is a “teacher.”” When I ask if he could explain further, he says “I would, if I understood why being a teacher is a good reason to die. I don’t know what else to tell you: our youth are being exterminated, the disabled are being finished off, they are raping our women – including nuns in convents, they have pillaged our towns, they have ransacked and shelled our churches and mosques, and whoever is left, is just waiting to starve to death.”

“Every time we say we have seen enough, we hear even more appalling stories. I don’t remember the exact date, but the Eritrean forces ran into a dozen monks from a nearby monastery in Hawzen last week. They halted them and forced them to either dance or be shot dead. Many of them refused as part of their religious obligations and were therefore shot at the scene. They are sadists – they will kill them anyway but they always look for ways to make the killing pleasurable. They have been actively killing civilians in churches – in Abune Teklehaymanot, Medhanealem, St. Mary – you mention all the saints. If they are rock hewn churches on the mountain (as are many in Tigray), they deliberately shell them with artillery. If they are built on the ground, they do walk-ins and shoot inside. They know we will not stop going to church. Everyone says, if we die, we might as well die martyrs in the church. And they know this – it’s the place where they can kill many at once. This is what they are calling a law and order operation.”

When I ask him which forces are now operating in Hawzen, he says both the Ethiopian and Eritrean forces were present, with the former warning to “call Eritrean forces [on us] if we fail to do what they ask of us – including not complaining about the rampant rape on our women by both forces.” The story of Hawzen is perhaps the ‘kindest of atrocities’ – to use an oxymoron – as compared to all other Eritrean-occupied areas as well as those areas where Eritrean forces are generally present, such as Irob and Zalambesa.

ADIGRAT: In Adigrat, the second most populous city in Tigray, the stories are similar. I received the following account from a priest, Abba (Father) G/Medhin, arrived to Mekelle from Adigrat on 19 January. “On 20 November (11 Hidar EC) – the whole city was consistently and arbitrarily shelled with heavy artillery from 2–6:30pm. Dozens of civilians were killed, including a whole family of five in their home.” I should note here that most, if not all, towns and cities in Tigray were heavily and indiscriminately shelled using tanks and heavy artillery by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces: this war-criminal tactic was thoroughly implemented because the Ethiopian government believed it would render the easy capture of towns without having to do much fighting with rebel forces on the ground. “On 21 November (12 Hidar EC), the Eritreans arrived and indiscriminately killed everyone they found on the streets – I saw 17 dead near my home. When they noticed there weren’t many people on the streets, they went on a door to door killing spree. For instance, they killed a family of three in the area known as 06 and another family of four in Bihere Tsigie. They looted everything. What’s more, they forcefully took youth to round up and carry what they stole – shooting them afterwards.”

“When they were ransacking the Addis Pharmaceutical Company in Adigrat – they took a dozen people to help them load the equipment to their craters and tanks. Once they finished, they shot them dead on the spot. They also killed six of the company guards and threw them in a ditch – the seventh was found alive and he was the one who told the story. This is the same everywhere – in the nearby Goda Adigrat Bottle and Glass Manufacturing Plant – they forced 23 young men to transport and load what the Eritrean forces looted from the factory. All 23 were shot dead afterwards, three being from the same family. Around the area called Commission, they shot dead three civilians on the road – and their bodies remained there for over a month! The Eritrean forces banned any of us from transporting or burying them. They were to serve as “signs of what awaited all Tigrayans.””

Since he is a priest, I also inquire into the targeting and ransacking of holy sites and artifacts in Adigrat. “Churches and holy sites are active targets; they are ruining churches and mosques with a history of over 1000 years. They shelled the historic Meskel Kirstos Church for example (recently established by Aba (Father) Ze Wengel) with 50 projectiles; it is now destructed. We also know that they killed civilians in neighboring churches after they ran away from Adigrat and surrounding areas for fear of dying in the continued shelling. On 30 November (21 Hidar EC), during the Feast of Our Lady of Zion, they came in and shot dead 150 civilians in Mariam Dengolat Church, including a known investor in Adigrat by the name of Esayas Asgedom and his family. They deliberately went to that church because it was an Annual Feast day and they were sure to find “civilians gathered in great numbers.” They also killed 27 civilians in Medhanealem Church in Gulomikhada during the Feast day of the Lord our Savior. They made sure to go during Mass (Divine Liturgy) because they knew that many devotees would gather there early. Out of the murdered, 12 were priests. There was a brave elderly woman who screamed out to them saying “how could you do such a vile thing in the House of God?” The Eritrean soldiers were extremely surprised at this with one Eritrean soldier exclaiming to another “what are you waiting for, pop her dead (Ta’ii abila).” But another replied and said “I am not going to waste my bullet on an old Tigrayan” and cracked her head with a nearby rock, making them all laugh. She didn’t die, but they left her bleeding on the Church floor. The Ammanuel Church in Wuqhro is also destructed – I saw it on my way here. You have already heard about the Al-Nejashi mosque, I am sure.”

“Everyone is scattered. We don’t know if those who left are alive or dead somewhere. If you are lucky, someone finds an ID on a corpse and they try and spread word so families will know that they have a dead family member. I also know that many Tigrayans have been respectfully removing shoes and shirts of dead bodies and placing it on top of them so families will be able to recognize them via their clothing if the corpse remains unidentified for a longer period.”

When I ask him about sexual based violence and harassment, he mentions “It’s not just the rape – it’s the way this is done. I know of a father who was tied up to a chair with a rope between his lips, forced to watch as five Eritrean soldiers took turns to rape his 12 year old daughter. They are even forcing fathers, brothers and uncles to rape their own children and relatives, and killing them for refusing – what Tigrayan will rape his own family member?! They rape pregnant women. We are also hearing accounts of Eritrean forces killing women and raping their corpses after. It’s difficult to find one-time rape victims; even those who have been raped have been raped again. I know these are unconscionable and horrifying to the human mind; I am telling you as a priest – but this is what they are doing. To them, this is law.”

PART II: SECURITY CHECK-POINT ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ETHIOPIAN MILITARY:

The night before the government’s delighted announcement on national television that they would the-next-day indiscriminately shell Mekelle, the capital city of Tigray, many residents had scattered to neighboring rural towns for fear of being stuck amidst the heavy artillery fire. The announcement said, “Tigrayans – no mercy!” On national TV! I stayed – partly because I naively believed the government was bluffing, and partly because rights organizations and high-level leaders like Susan Rice had warned that doing so would account to war crimes. I am an idiot of course – they had already shelled all the towns on their way to the capital and Mekelle was no exception. On 28 November, I woke up to deafening sounds of shells being fired n’importe ou, with around 40 people being killed as a result – including a 15year old girl in my neighborhood and a whole family of five around Ayder Hospital, five minutes from my home.

Recently, I met two close friends, Frehiwot and Birrkhti, who had made the dangerous trip back to Mekelle from the rural areas of Adet and Yechila respectively, where they had escaped to before the Mekelle shelling. I asked them to recount to me their specific encounters with the Ethiopian military on their way to the city.

Frehiwot mentions to me that she and her friends were forced to strip naked as part of the security searches on their way to Mekelle. “I did this three times at various check points and when I got to the third checkpoint around Gijet, I decided to speak up. I told the security officer that we had been stripping naked in all the other checkpoints and that we had been searched so many times already. The security officer then yelled at me. She said to me “it’s better to trust the devil himself than a Tigrayan – even the females. Those are our orders. Just take off your pants.” She also mentions she was scared for her life for carrying an Addis Ababa issued identity card. This meant she had to respond to scrupulous questions like ‘What are you doing in Tigray if you have an Addis Ababa ID?’ “It was such an absurd question and I didn’t really know how to answer it,” Frehiwot tells me. “Not because the freedom of movement is my constitutional right – no. Simply because Tigray was my home and they were threateningly asking me, “why are you home?” How do you respond to that? Is the fact that one is in Tigray a crime by itself? I told them the truth: that I had come to visit family and got stuck in the fire. I also told them that I live and work in Addis Ababa. They yelled at me and called me a liar. They said I was an “undercover junta agent” who had come to Tigray to support the war on the side of the rebels. After much pleading, they let me go but they warned me and said “we are nice, but make sure you don’t fall into the hands of the “other soldiers” because they might not be as kind to someone with an Addis Ababa ID.” She said she did not know whether they were referring to the Ethiopian forces or the Eritrean forces. “Too many of them want to kill us – it’s hard to say whom you will encounter where.”

I ask the other woman, Birrikhti, who took a similar route when she had fled the capital city of Mekelle. She was born and raised in Addis Ababa and had arrived in Mekelle a few months before the war to open an internet café. I ask if she encountered similar problems.

“They are sort of similar. I mean, the questions they ask you at the security checkpoints are quite peculiar. When we were also around Gijet, we were stopped by security officers and told to come off the minibus taxi taking us to Mekelle. We thought they were going to take the taxi and either shoot us dead or leave us stranded, as had been the case with many other vehicles in Tigray. But we were lucky. When the security officers noticed that I didn’t have a Tigrigna accent, they engaged me in further conversation. They asked me whose side I was on and if I knew Debretsion. They asked me if I considered myself Ethiopian or Tigrayan. When I remained quiet, they pointed at everyone and yelled “you are all rats anyway – all of you are hiding Debretsion” Much to my surprise however, she recites the following distressing dialogue with one of the security officers at the checkpoint:

Officer: “Do you know Axum?” (Eshy Brikiti, Axumen tawkiyatalesh?)

Birrikhti: “Yes” (Awo.)

Officer: “It’s a beautifully historic town, isn’t it?” (Mechem konjo tarikawi ketema nech aydel?)

Birrikhti: “Yes.” (Awo)

Officer: “Well guess what – it isn’t anymore.” (Ahun gin aydelechim, atifetenatal)

 

Officer: “And what about Wukro? Do you know Wukro?”

Birrikhti: “Yes.”

Officer: “It’s a very pretty, vibrant town, isn’t it?”

Birrikhti: “Yes.”

Officer: “Not anymore. We have destroyed it.”

She recounts her astonishment. “Not only were the officers declaring that they were deliberately working with the Eritreans to destroy towns and cultural sites, but also that they were proud of this destruction – like it was a goal to be achieved. I kept quiet and looked down to the ground because I knew he was waiting for a reaction.” By the end of the security check, she adds that the security officers singled out the only five men (youth) from the minibus taxi. When they asked why they were being sidelined, they were told “your faces look familiar – we think you are juntas.”

“They took all five with them; everyone knew they would shoot them dead. And for what? For “looking familiar?” We are only grateful we made it back alive.” She recounts that she also met other soldiers on the way who mentioned that they were there “to free the people of Tigray and that no harm will come to us.” “Freedom is slavery,” Orwell would have sneered.

PART III: ADDIS ABABA – THE TIGRAYAN PURGE:

Is this where I was raised? Is this the city that I once called home? These are questions I ask myself a few days following my arrival to Addis from Mekelle. Most people here that I have talked to – with the exception of some Oromos – justify to me why the genocide was necessary. They speak to me in loud voices about why my people deserved this and about how we brought the rampant massacres and rape and starvation unto ourselves. Some who know how outspoken I am carefully warn me: “You should be careful – this is not your home anymore. No one will defend you.”

Tigrayans I know have been summarily dismissed from all governmental and civil organizations, including those who have sacrificed their whole lives to the welfare and development of the Ethiopian state. Some of those I have talked to state that they were not even given notice letters –their names had just been posted outside their respective organizations and guards were warned against allowing them entry. Most surprising to me were my conversations with cleaners who were dismissed in the area known as Kibeb Cafe around the Signal Apartments, including a relative of mine. When I ask her why, she darkly smiles and tries to make a joke: “I do not know. I guess if you have the wrong identity, may be you clean wrongly. What do you want me to tell you?!”

The stories are unending as they are harrowing. Another friend, Kibrom, tells me of his arrest and his consequent two nights in jail (with two of his friends) for speaking Tigrigna in a public taxi, a week after the declaration of war. When I ask how he could potentially be arrested inside public transport, he says a few people in the taxi called them “junta supporters” and “daytime hyenas” and forcefully transported them to the nearest precinct as “suspects.” It should be noted that the derogatory term “daytime hyenas” is a term coined and popularized by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed himself, in a speech he gave on national TV. This is the same Prime Minister who has called African Americans “lazy” in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

“The funny thing is,” my friend continues “the police actually thanked them for bringing us in and carrying out their civic duties, actively encouraging them to keep doing the same to other Tigrayans. All of that – just for speaking our language.” He also confesses his belief that “such rampant ethnic profiling and purging definitely received further green light following a speech by Adanech Ababe, the new mayor of Addis Ababa, at the start of the war, in which she had bluntly asked citizens “to help the government as it cleans up dirt from the city (kosashan inatsada).”I am sure the larger population translated dirt to be the Tigrayan population at large.”

In Summit Condominium, I go to visit an old family friend, Meseret, and to ensure her safety. She is in disbelief that I have made it out of Tigray alive although failing to recognize me at first due to my severe weight loss. Soon after, she lists to me the names of family friends that have been jailed or forcefully disappeared, herself being fired from a government hospital (which she asks me not to mention for fear of further retribution.) When I ask where our family friends have been jailed, she shakes her head, pointing to me that she doesn’t know. “We just know of detainment camps in Addis and other parts of the country where only ethnic Tigrayans are being held captive (or worse) en masse. The numbers are as large are 20,000. Some are calling them “Tigrayan concentration camps” and I think they are right. I only hope they are not torturing them. You know, when they searched my house, they even ransacked the flour and sugar rations in the kitchen, to see that I was not hiding anything inside food items. I am a nurse – I am not sure what they thought they would find here. They said they would be back – but I have done no wrong. I am not going anywhere.”

When I ask her to tell me elements she found shocking in the aftermath of the aggression on Tigray, she says: “It has been very difficult to see the other kids in the apartment avoiding my kids. We have lived here for seven years and people are acting as if they don’t know us. A few days after the Tigray shutdown, my daughter saw the 5-year old kid, Kidus, two doors down from our apartment and she went to hug and kiss him as she always did. He hesitated. When my daughter asked him what was wrong, he blurted out “Dad says to stay away from you guys; he says you are evil and conniving. He also says the big guys will kill me if they see me with you.” Imagine, we have been loving neighbors for seven years. We don’t know what awaits us tomorrow.” Don’t tell kids any secrets, am I right?

CONFIRMED POGROMS UNDER BLACKOUT:

  • Axum (Mary of Zion) Massacre: 750 ethnic Tigrayans mass murdered in the church square of the Church of Mary of Zion by Ethiopian National Defense Forces and Amhara militias; 15 December 2020
  • Mai Kadra Massacre: 600-1000 ethnic Tigrayans mass murdered by Amhara militia and youth group (known as Fano); 10 November 2020
  • Zalambesa Massacre: 400 ethnic Tigrayans mass murdered by Eritrean forces in door to door killings; 13 November 2020
  • Wuqhro Massacre: 200 ethnic Tigrayans mass murdered by Eritrean forces whilst defending the Saba Leather Factory from being looted

QUICK FACTS

  • 60,000+ refugees in Sudan; 2.2 million internally displaced; 4.5million in need of emergency food assistance

SHORT READINGS AND RESOURCES:

  1. Opinion: A Pogrom is happening in Ethiopia – The Globe and Mail
  2. ‘He’s planning to exterminate us all’: Ethiopians Speak of Ethnic Massacres – VICE
  3. ‘Choose – I kill you or rape you’: Abuse accusations surge in Ethiopia’s war – Reuters
  4. Who will call out Eritrea’s war crimes in Tigray? – World Peace Foundation
  5. Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict: ‘My wife died giving birth to twins while we hid’ – The BBC
  6. The war in Tigray: Abiy, Isaias, and the Amhara elite – The Africa Report
  7. Ethiopia’s government appears to be wielding hunger as a weapon – The Economist
  8. ‘I don’t know where my children are’: Ethiopian refugees recount horrors of war – VICE
  9. Extreme urgent need: Starvation haunts Ethiopia’s Tigray – Washington Post
  10. Ethiopia’s leader must answer for the high cost of hidden war in Tigray – The Guardian
  11. Witnesses: Eritrean Soldiers loot, kill in Ethiopia’s Tigray – The Associated Press
  12. US ‘directly’ presses Eritrea to withdraw forces in Tigray – The Associated Press
  13. 750 Christians die defending Ark of the Covenant – Persecution
  14. Opinion: Ethiopia’s leader won the Nobel peace Prize. Now he’s accused of war crimes – Washington Post
  15. War in Tigray destroys human lives and important world heritage – Martin Plaut
  16. Disturbing rape allegations in Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict: UN – Aljazeera
  17. WHO warns of diseases spreading in Tigray because of conflict – VOA News
  18. Tigray: Ethiopian army kills ex-Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin – Aljazeera
  19. UN warns of ‘serious’ rape charges in Ethiopia’s Tigray – The Associated Press
  20. Western concern mounts over Ethiopia Crisis – Financial Times
  21. Journalist shot dead in Ethiopia’s Tigray – aid worker, residents – Reuters
  22. Fabled ark could be among ancient treasures in danger in Ethiopia’s deadly war – The Guardian
  23. Dam down, water supplies failing in Ethiopia’s conflict-hit Tigray – Reuters
  24. In Somalia, mothers fear sons were sent to Ethiopia conflict – The Associated Press
  25. Anger in Somalia as sons secretly sent to serve in Eritrea military force – Reuters
  26. Starvation looms as aid groups seek urgent Tigray access – Aljazeera
  27. Ethiopia’s worsening crisis threatens regional, Middle East security – United States Institute for Peace
  28. Ethiopians dying, hungry and fearful in war-hit Tigray: agencies – Reuters

Background:

* On 4 November 2020, the Ethiopian government declared war on the small region of Tigray, one of the ten regional states in the country. It claimed the war to be a “law and order operation” to arrest “dissidents” of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the rightfully elected regional government of the Tigray region. Above, I recount accounts of a “law and order” operation turned rogue into a genocidal mission, involving various internal and external actors. Currently, the following actors, all with different aims and agendas, are active in Tigray: the Amhara militia, youth and special police; regional special police from all states in the federation; Eritrean forces (Sha’bia); Emirati drones; along with recently credible reports of Somalian soldiers also involved. Tigray is  home to around 6 million people – why the world is standing by as a whole nation, ethnic group, and region, is being conjointly exterminated by a myriad of actors under the guise of a “law and operation” is beyond me. As I write this, I am a “non-human being” and a stateless citizen in Ethiopia: one who has lost all her individual peculiarities and experiences, and collectively – with other fellow Tigrayans – is being defiled and purged as “louse/daytime hyena/dirt” – derogatory terms for our ethnic group. 

NB: I do not include here reports of genocidal atrocities committed by the Amhara militia, youth and special police because I have not encountered an eye witness fleeing areas neighboring the Amhara region. The below resources I have included have some reports on massacres carried out by Amhara forces – including the very first massacre in the region – the Mai Kadra Massacre. I will be writing more on that after I find eye witnesses, although ample has been done on this front by gathering stories from refugee camps in Sudan.

“They Have Destroyed Tigray, Literally”: Mulugeta Gebrehiwot speaks from the mountains of Tigray

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Transcript Call between Mulugeta Gebrehiwot and Alex de Waal 27 January 2021

Additional background information and audio are available on the WPF blog, “Reinventing Peace.” For more information: worldpeacefoundation.org

Listen to the interview

[The first minute of the call was not recorded. Mulugeta started by describing the onset of the war.]

Mulugeta: … and the damage it inflicted on the enemies, it’s difficult to express, it was a sort of miracle. Tigray only had 23 battalions, and 42 divisions of Eritrea and twelve divisions of Ethiopia, were all here. This is without including the special forces of the Amhara region, which is beyond, over 10,000, and also special forces of Oromia, Somalia, and other forces as well. The first month’s resistance was with this level of asymmetry.

And then the Emirates came. The Emirates effectively disarmed Tigray. They started killing tanks, then howitzers, then fuel, then ammunition. Then they started hunting small vehicles, targeting leaders, [indistinct] all over. This created [unclear: risk?] and sort of dislocation, and this is part of the weakness of the preparation. So many people moved out of the cities of Tigray towards the rural other areas following the army, some including their families.

So, we were caught in between, you know. Are we going to defend these people who flocked out of the cities with their families or are we going to fight, I mean the army was caught in between. So, the organization has to make a decision. You know, it prioritized continuing the resistance, and then it advised many of us who were not in active duty in the resistance to remain in some remote areas which finally resulted in the type of sad news you heard.

You know, the result became—they have destroyed Tigray, literally, all of them, EPLF, the Eritrean forces and the Ethiopian forces. They literally destroyed all the wealth that it had accumulated for thirty years, and burned schools, clinics, they have ransacked each house. They moved in. They have started looting the produce of the peasants, from all the villages beyond the black road that crosses Tigray towards Eritrea. And they kill whomever they find in whichever village they get in. In the village I was in yesterday—it’s a small village— they killed 21 people, out of which seven of them were priests of that small village.

And that’s what they do, wherever they go. So they literally destroyed the wealth we accumulated for thirty years in Tigray. And, no peasant is staying at home when these forces move around, and therefore we can consider the whole Tigrayan peasantry as dislocated.

It’s an effective destruction of Tigray but that’s not the only thing. It’s also an effective destruction of Ethiopian defense forces. Ethiopia has remained without an army now. Our evaluation initially reduced the Ethiopian army by [to?] about 85 percent. Seventeen percent of the army was immediately reduced by Abiy because 17 percent of them were Tigrayans.

They were torn out of their ranks, put in camps like Dedessa [etc.] under custody 17,000 Tigrayans. So, that was literally approximately 20 percent. And this is not only numbers, but its also critically—a critical part of the army, mid-level commanders, most of the technicians, and also, you know, skilled people who used to work in artillery, engineering, and all sorts of departments. And they literally lost something like 60 percent of [indistinct, call breaks] …they sent the commanders of the Eritrean forces, which they were just using as cannon fodders, you know, they send them first, and then once they’re finished, they start sending their army. So, Ethiopia is effectively without an army now. If the Eritrean forces left Tigray…

[BREAK IN CALL]

[The call resumed with Mulugeta saying that if the Eritrean forces left Tigray, the Ethiopian army would not be able to stay there, even for a few days. The recording resumes:]

Alex: Tell me, what is the condition of the people? Are you able to eat? Do you have any medical facilities? What are the essentials of life?

Mulugeta: Not much. You know, there has been this locust infestation, and the harvest also much interrupted because of the war. The crisis started at the beginning of the harvest period, and particularly, the Eritrean forces have deliberately burned crops while they are on the ground or before the harvesting is completed. So there is a reduction of produce as well. The [aid] logistics that was prepared initially by the government was disrupted, so there are drops, these problems of supplies, food, medicine, and so forth. Hunger, among peasantry, is crippling [indistinct] in those remote areas, bordering areas Eritrea. They are massively, massively ransacked by the Eritrean army. Whatever produce they have is taken by them. So, it’s tight. Soon, we might see a serious humanitarian crisis.

Alex: The government is saying it controls 85 percent of the access, and that it can provide humanitarian access to the great majority of people. Is that correct, do you think?

Mulugeta: The great majority of people. Even the government, even the humanitarian organizations, are estimating the people who need food to around 4.5 million. That’s even conservative.

Alex: And how many of those people can be accessed from the government’s side, and how many of them are in areas that are controlled by Tigray forces?

Mulugeta: Literally people on the towns of the main road. Because there is conflict all over. You know, a certain part of people, or the southern part of Tigray, around Maychew or Alamata… the rest of it is not accessible for humanitarian aid, unless some arrangement can be made. [Until] some sort of preliminary agreement to allow humanitarian assistance to [indistinct] has been reached, I don’t think a majority of Tigray is accessible to any humanitarian aid that comes through the government.

Alex: But we are not hearing anything—we have heard nothing from the TPLF leadership about what—

Mulugeta: I know, that’s a major problem we have. They’re just dislocated, and [sighs], that’s a critical impediment, we know that.

Alex: Because—as you might have heard today, well yesterday—the [U.S.] State Department demanded, first of all the withdrawal of Eritrean forces, but then also said there needed to be talks towards a political resolution. But how can any talks be conducted under the current circumstances?

Mulugeta: I think they’re in contact through telephone with some people there, but I don’t really understand why they shy away from coming public and talking publicly. I know there is a limitation of communication. They have lost their V-SATs, they only have these Thurayas, and they’ve really been without any radio transmitter. They brought a television station, which was not possible to run it without having a permanent base. I know that there is this limitation of communication, but the problem they have is more than that. I am telling them, people are telling them, we hope that they will soon come out and start being public. It’s even a problem here in Tigray.

Alex: Because also we are not hearing anything about any political demands. I mean, what is the agenda, what is the political program? I mean if there were to be negotiations, where would be the starting point? We don’t know any of this at the moment.

Mulugeta: Yeah. I know.

Alex: Anyway, just the news we get every day is so desperately sad. I think many people were shocked, especially by the news of the deaths of Seyoum and Abay and Asmalesh. I think that touched a lot of people around the world. As you may know, I wrote a tribute to Seyoum, which was widely circulated, but we still don’t know anything about the circumstances. Did you learn anything about that incident— ?

Mulugeta: They just found them in a village. They were staying in a village, and they didn’t have an army. They were just in a secluded area. They caught and killed them. It was the EPLF that killed them.

Alex: So, this story about a shootout, et cetera, is not—

Mulugeta: No, no, no. It’s completely rubbish. You know, they, the TPLF could have done so many things had they forecasted that level of violence which was not difficult to forecast. You know, it was very obvious that this war would be a war against Tigray, which Abiy is going to run alongside Isaias. And once you expect Isaias, you shouldn’t expect it to come less than any devastating force it could mobilize. Therefore, for those who will not have participated in active resistance in the field on the military side, there were lots of options. You know, moving them to Sudan or somewhere else. So many things could have been done, but there were no preparations at all.

Alex: It seems there was just a terrible miscalculation about this, and no political strategy, no communications strategy, no protection strategy.

Mulugeta: Not at all, yeah, not at all. Extremely poor. People were begging them. They didn’t have any [indistinct]. People were literally coming up with plans and asking them do this, do that. But they brought Tigray to their size anyway, what can we say.

Alex: The mood of the people now must be desperate, angry.

Mulugeta: Angry, angry, extremely angry, extremely angry. They are left with one option: just fighting. And the war is only beginning. It’s the same in the urban centers, and much worse in the rural areas. Wherever you go, you get dozens of youngsters asking you to be mobilized, to be trained and armed. The TPLF doesn’t have any shortage of manpower when it wants to mobilize. So it’s anger, and they’re left without option, with that option only, they don’t have an option.

They [i.e. Ethiopian and Eritrean forces] are not even [indistinct] they’re not trying to appease them, they’re not trying to get the buy-in of the people. They’re not attempting anything. They’re just out here, and it’s literally genocide by decree. Wherever they’re moving, whomever they find, they kill him or her. [It’s] an old man, a child, a nursing woman, or anything.

Alex: The stories we’ve been hearing most recently are especially that it’s the Eritreans. Is it everybody, or is particularly the Eritrean forces?

Mulugeta: It’s everybody, but the worst ones are the Eritrean forces.

Alex: So tell us, are you able to remain abreast of how this has been covered by the rest of the world? Are you able to pick up anything from the news, from the radio, from internet sites or anything?

Mulugeta: Yeah, I have an old radio transistor which I bought it from a militia [laughs]. That’s what connects me to the rest of the world.

Alex: It’s back to those old days.

Mulugeta: It’s extremely difficult. Sometimes the battery gets, you run out of battery and therefore run out of communication for two, three days. It’s difficult.

Alex: So, we have been doing our best to just draw attention to what’s been going on, because as you know, there was an attempt to have this war conducted in conditions of total secrecy, and even to pretend that it was not a war. There was the U.S. administration, the last one, was very much complicit in that. The African Union completely failed. But the news is now coming out.

Mulugeta: Everything is fine. But one thing is you could push more on this humanitarian intervention. There has to be either some sort of monitoring.

And the Eritrean forces will remain here. They had a meeting last week, it’s some information we got from them, among the senior commanders of the army. There was a request from some of the army commanders on how long they are going to stay in Tigray. The response they gave them was, “Once we leave Tigray, PP [Prosperity Party] will not stay for one week in Tigray, and therefore we will leave Tigray to Woyene [TPLF] again and it will revive. And therefore, we have to remain there up until PP can pick it up which might take several months to come back.” That’s the answer that they gave them.

And therefore, this declaration from State Department—it might even come later from the UN Security Council—might not force the Eritreans to leave Tigray, unless it is supported, either with some humanitarian intervention, as much as they did in Kosovo, some armed intervention that reinforces things, or at least some sort of monitoring on the ground.

Alex: What about the Emirates? You mentioned the Emirates. Presumably, you meant the drones?

Mulugeta: Yeah. Now we don’t have any targets. We don’t have tanks. We don’t have [indistinct]. We are not big targets. We are just human beings moving around. I think that’s the only thing that brought it [i.e. the recent decline in drone attacks]. Otherwise, they have been here in full force, in just full force. They deployed their drones with their operators, and they’re the ones who effectively disarmed us.

Alex: There was one thing that I didn’t quite catch earlier on. You said the Eritreans would stay until something had been achieved. What is the Eritrean war aim, as you see it?

Mulugeta: They don’t know when PP will stand on its foot to fight against Tigray. That’s what they’re saying. They’re saying we have to stay there until PP comes up in a position to fight against the Woyenes. That’s what they’re saying. They don’t know when it will happen. It will never happen, actually. They way I see it, it will not happen here. It might not even happen in the rest of Eritrea. We’re seeing them in the field. Wherever confronted…

You might have heard of a small operation that happened two weeks ago around Edaga Harbi. There was a full brigade, support brigade of the 33rd division, which was fully mechanized, a support brigade is a mechanized support to the rest of the division. It only took 15 minutes to destroy it. In 15 minutes, six 107mm rocket launchers were taken, six 120mm mortars were taken, four 122 howitzers were taken, several vehicles were taken, and 167 of them were taken prisoners, in just 15 minutes.

Alex: What is happening to these prisoners of war? Where are they being kept? How are they being kept?

Mulugeta: We sent them back. We can not carry them around. What we did was, we gave them a sort of political education for two, three days, and then we sent them back to Mekelle and Adigrat. It’s only the commanders—one colonel, one lieutenant colonel—who declined to return back. They said, “they will kill us, so we will remain with you.” We told them, “you cannot be our soldiers, and that’s not what you are asking us, and we shall not provide you shelter, but you can remain in the liberated areas.”

So, they are just moving around. So that’s where we are Alex.

Somali men ‘forced into Eritrean army’ under impression they were signing up for security jobs in Qatar

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The Telegraph | The men are thought to be being sent to Tigray to fight in Ethiopia’s civil war.

Anger is mounting in Somalia over allegations young men are being secretly recruited and sent to Eritrea to fight in Ethiopia’s civil war.

Three families told Reuters their young sons had officially been recruited by Somalia’s government to work in Qatar, only to later find out they had been sent to Eritrea and forced to serve as soldiers.

Ali Jamac Dhoodi, 48, told the news agency he thought his son was working as a security guard in Qatar to help prepare for next year’s football World Cup. But he said he was later told by Somalia’s National Intelligence Agency that his son had died in Eritrea.

“They showed me a picture from their WhatsApp and asked me, ‘do you know this picture and his full name?’ I said, ‘yes he is my son,'” Dhoodi, 48, said. “They said to me ‘your son died’. I cried.”

Others said their sons, who had originally been sent to Eritrea for military training, were sent to fight in the Ethiopian civil war. Mothers have led rare protests in the capital Mogadishu demanding to know where their children had been sent, and some lawmakers have written to Somali president Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo asking for information.

“I heard that our children who were sent to Eritrea for military training have been taken and their responsibility was turned over to [Ethiopian Prime Minister] Abiy Ahmed to fight for him,” Fatuma Moallim Abdulle, the mother of 20-year-old soldier Ahmed Ibrahim Jumaleh, told The Associated Press.

“According to the information I gathered, our children were taken straight to Mekele city,” the capital of the Tigray region, she said. “You may understand how I feel, I am a mother who carried her child for nine months in my belly, that’s my blood and flesh.”

Eritrea is accused of involvement in the conflict pitting its neighbour Ethiopia’s federal government against the rebellious leaders of the northern Tigray region. Witnesses have accused Eritrean forces of massacring civilians and pillaging villages in the embattled region.

The United States on Thursday said it had pressed Eritrea’s government to immediately withdraw its troops from Ethiopia.

Somalian and Ethiopian authorities have denied Somali troops are being deployed in Tigray. Ethiopia and Eritrea have consistently denied reports of Eritrean troops fighting in the conflict, despite extensive Telegraph reporting and the video of an Ethiopian general pointing to the contrary.

The Qatari government responded on Friday by saying it condemned any false recruitment initiatives and urging relevant governments to investigate any abuses.

“The State of Qatar reiterates that any genuine offers of employment in Qatar will always come through official channels and approved recruitment agencies or Qatar Visa Centres,” it said in a statement to The Telegraph.

“We urge all individuals seeking employment in Qatar to confirm any offers they receive with these official channels or the embassy, prior to acceptance.”

Were Orthodox Christians massacred in Ethiopia?

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American Magazine | The Jesuit Review | Kevin Clarke

With journalists, aid workers and U.N. officials largely cut off and local internet and mobile services blocked, much remains unknown about what has been happening in Ethiopia’s Tigray region over the last three months, but accounts emerging from farmers and villagers escaping the fighting between Tigrayan militia and central government forces are not encouraging.

U.N. officials have received multiple reports of sexual assaults and the executions of unarmed men and boys, and they report the discovery of at least 300 unaccompanied or separated children among the more than 57,000 people who have fled into neighboring Sudan. They believe hundreds more will be found among the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by fighting in the Tigray, Amhara and Afar regions.

John Shumlansky, the country representative for Catholic Relief Services, returned to Addis Ababa in mid-January after visiting the capital of Tigray, Mekele. He found thousands there who had fled the fighting with little more than what they could carry and the clothes on their backs, but he said some normalcy was at least returning to the city itself as banks and shops reopened.

Violence is continuing in Ethiopia’s Tigray state. Can Catholic Church officials bring their diplomatic skills to bear to promote a peaceful resolution to the conflict?

“But clearly people are a bit traumatized by what happened,” he said, “and they’re trying to get their lives back…living with host communities at the moment, trying to figure things out until they can feel safe to go back to their homes.

“A lot of the big needs now are food, making sure they have shelter and that there is clean, safe water for people, hygiene.” Complicating the immediate relief effort, he added, is “the Covid issue.”

“People are still separating and trying to socially distance,” but that “isn’t always possible in these kinds of situations.” Tigray, a largely agricultural region, was already a hunger hot spot before fighting broke out between government troops and Tigrayan militia in November. The region has been afflicted by the worst outbreak of locust swarms in more than two decades, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Officials worry that millions in Tigray now face food insecurity and hundreds of thousands could be at risk of starvation. C.R.S. will be part of a consortium of relief agencies charged with feeding as many as 1.5 million in Tigray over the coming months, Mr. Shumlansky reported.

There have been allegations of massacres of civilians by all sides in an escalating conflict that has included the Ethiopian and Eritrean forces joined against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Among the most shocking are still unconfirmed reports of a slaughter of as many as 750 to 1,000 people on the grounds of the Cathedral of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum.

Laurie Nathan, the director of the mediation program at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, describes the report of a massacre in Axum as credible, though unverified. Accounts of the killing of noncombatants on the compound around the cathedral were first reported by the Europe External Programme with Africa, a Belgium-based peace building and refugee protection advocacy, on Jan. 9. The reported attack took place on Dec. 15.

Our Lady Mary of Zion is an especially sacred site to Tigrayans. According to local tradition, its Chapel of the Tablet is believed to house the biblical Ark of the Covenant. Accounts from witnesses report that community members went to the compound concerned that an approaching armed group intended to loot the chapel and remove the ark. After a confrontation, scores of these unarmed people were fired on by that armed group, composed, according to survivors, of Ethiopian federal troops and Amhara militia.

“It really does look like there was an atrocity and a massacre, but precisely the motivation and the details, I think we need to suspend judgment at the moment,” Mr. Nathan said.

There have been allegations of massacres of civilians by all sides in an escalating conflict that has included the Ethiopian and Eritrean forces joined against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

“We’re not going to know” what happened in Axum, he said, “until it’s the United Nations or reputable human rights groups that are doing a proper investigation.”

Though other African states have experienced such violence as a result of tension between Christian and Muslim communal groups, Mr. Nathan believes the killings in Axum are the result not of interreligious strife but of the ethnic and political crisis that has engulfed Tigray.

Ethiopia is about 62 percent Christian, mostly members of the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church, and 33 percent Muslim, but “it’s not likely at all” that Our Lady Mary of Zion “was targeted because of its Christian orientation,” Mr. Nathan said. “What you’re seeing with this church massacre is a reflection of the armed conflict between the Ethiopian government and ruling party on the one hand and the people of Tigray and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on the other.”

C.R.S.: “A lot of the big needs now are food, making sure they have shelter and that there is clean, safe water for people, hygiene.” Complicating the immediate relief effort is “the Covid issue.”

Violence broke out in Tigray in November, when government forces sought to suppress the T.P.L.F. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed moved against the militia and the governing class in Tigray after local officials there went ahead with a popular vote in contravention of the central government’s decision to postpone national elections because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The prime minister justified the incursion as a response to an alleged T.P.L.F. attack on an Ethiopian army installation. According to Mr. Nathan, the eruption between government forces and the T.P.L.F. is a reflection of growing tensions within Ethiopia between the central government and ethnic and regional power centers seeking greater autonomy. The T.P.L.F. is the military wing of a political bloc that had wielded considerable power in Ethiopia for decades, part of the reason Eritrea was eager to join forces with Mr. Abiy to take on its former adversaries in the border region.

Since Eritrea joined the offensive, its troops and associated militia have been accused of summary execution, rape and looting. Among the issues that remain to be sorted out when humanitarian access to the region is restored is the fate of thousands of Eritrean refugees in Tigray who were among the targets of the Eritrean incursion.

“It really does look like there was an atrocity and a massacre” in Tigray, “but precisely the motivation and the details, I think we need to suspend judgment at the moment.”

U.S. State Department officials told The Associated Press that they have directly “pressed senior levels” of Eritrea’s government to immediately withdraw from the embattled region. There were no details on how officials in Eritrea, one of the world’s most secretive countries, responded to the Biden administration demand.

If a massacre is confirmed at Our Lady Mary of Zion, Mr. Nathan believes that Ethiopian government forces remain the likeliest suspect. “The attackers want to destroy Tigrayan culture,” said Mr. Nathan, “and to pick on such a high-profile religious and spiritual target sends the message of terror, which is what was intended here.”

Based on his experience during similar armed conflicts, militias “don’t conduct themselves in this way without the consent of whoever provides [them] with weaponry.”

Mr. Nathan advises the United Nations on conflict resolution and previously worked as the director of the Centre for Mediation in Africa at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

“It’s possible that you have completely criminal bands that act as militia that have no motive other than pillage and profit, but that is not what’s going on in Tigray right now,” he said. “A militia that attacks a church in Tigray is doing so in alliance with the government or Ethiopian Defense Force.”

Ironies abound in the apparent eagerness of the prime minister to press the fight against the T.P.L.F. Mr. Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 because of his successful efforts to bring years of conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea to an end. By most accounts, he is a devout Christian, and he was awarded a doctorate by the Institute for Peace and Security Studies at Addis Ababa University.

But he seems to have forgotten whatever he learned about conflict resolution the closer he has come to achieving the goal of suppressing Tigrayan autonomy. The prime minister has brushed aside offers to negotiate an end to the fighting. The once imposing T.P.L.F. militia—with as many 250,000 members it had been considered one of Africa’s most formidable forces—has been dealt a serious blow by the central government’s campaign; and members of the region’s ruling class have been killed, arrested or thrown into flight, Mr. Nathan said.

“The attackers want to destroy Tigrayan culture and to pick on such a high-profile religious and spiritual target sends the message of terror, which is what was intended here.”

Despite those apparent government successes, Mr. Nathan worries the struggle in Tigray may be nearer to its beginning than to its end.

“The Ethiopian defense has prevailed; they have effectively suppressed the revolt. They have decimated the Tigrayan forces,” Mr. Nathan said. “But that’s not to say that they’ve won the peace because the people of Tigray supported what their political party was doing. I think their level of hatred now towards the Ethiopian government is vastly greater than it was previously.”

Even if the fighting can be quickly brought to a halt, he describes the conflict as “a manifestation of the deep crisis of the Ethiopian state,” a struggle to achieve a “balance between central control and regional autonomy [that] has not been resolved adequately.”

Now local and regional leaders call for a national dialogue to rethink the Ethiopian Constitution, according to Mr. Nathan, but “you can’t have a national dialogue in a situation of acute instability, and certainly you can’t in one of violence.”

“For a national dialogue to proceed,” he said, “individuals, groups, political parties need to be free to move, to assemble, to speak without fear of intimidation or repression or violence, and they’re not close to that.”

He worries that the violence in Tigray could be a harbinger of more to come.

Mr. Nathan suggested that as the international community presses for a cease-fire and the creation of humanitarian corridors to reach displaced Tigrayans and refugees, regional and international religious leaders should step up to take the lead in seeking a long-term solution. Even the Catholic Church, which has a small but vibrant footprint in Ethiopia, could make a stronger effort to promote peace beyond the usual issuing of appeals for calm and security, Mr. Nathan said.

He urged Vatican diplomats to reach out to contacts in the Orthodox Church and within the Eritrean and Ethiopian diplomatic corps. Christian groups have been historically perceived as dependably neutral in mediating such conflicts, and the Catholic Church in particular has had past successes in Africa, he said, noting its role in bringing an end to years of civil conflict in Mozambique.

“When a country is gripped in conflict and there are deep divisions, the church is one of the institutions that is capable of transcending those divisions,” Mr. Nathan said. “The church is always able to say, ‘We speak on behalf of all humankind, or at least all our constituents, regardless of their ethnicity.’”

As for immediate humanitarian aid, Mr. Shumlansky is confident that once the security conditions improve, C.R.S. will be able to tap into a reliable network of Catholic parishes and health services to distribute food and other emergency aid to help Tigrayans survive this catastrophe. “It’s really a good network of people that we can work through,” he said.

Violence in Tigray causes untold suffering

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MSF | Relief Web | Since early November, a military escalation in the Tigray region of Ethiopia has caused widespread violence and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Albert Viñas, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), provided the following account today:

Almost three months after the start of the conflict, I am struck by how difficult it has been—and continues to be—to access a community with such acute needs in such a densely populated area. Considering the means and capacity of international organizations and the UN, the fact that this is happening is a failure of the humanitarian world.

Supporting hospitals affected by the violence

After several attempts, I finally entered the capital of Tigray, Mekele, with the first MSF team on December 16, more than a month after the violence started. The city was quiet. There was electricity, but no basic supplies. The local hospital was running at 30 to 40 percent of its capacity, with very little medication [supplies]. Most significantly, there were almost no patients, which is always a very bad sign. We evaluated the hospital, with the idea of referring patients there as soon as possible from Adigrat, 120 kilometers to the north.

We arrived in Adigrat, the second most populous city in Tigray, on December 19. The situation was very tense, and the hospital was in terrible condition. Most of the health staff had left, and there were hardly any medicines. There was no food, no water, and no money. Some patients who had been admitted with traumatic injuries were malnourished.

We supplied the hospital with medicines and bought an emergency supply of food from the markets that were still open. Together with the remaining hospital staff, we cleaned the building and organized the collection of waste. Little by little, we rehabilitated the hospital so that it could function as a medical referral center.

On December 27 we entered the towns of Adwa and Axum, to the west of Adigrat, in central Tigray. There we found a similar situation: no electricity and no water. All the medicines had been stolen from Adwa general hospital, and the hospital furniture and equipment were broken. Fortunately, the Don Bosco institution in Adwa had converted its clinic into an emergency hospital with a small operating theater. In Axum, the 200-bed university hospital had not been attacked, but it was only operating at 10 percent capacity.

On roads where the security situation remained uncertain, we trucked food, medicine, and oxygen to these hospitals and began to support the most essential medical departments, such as the operating theaters, maternity units, and emergency rooms, and to refer critical patients.

Medical needs going unseen and unmet

Beyond the hospitals, around 80 or 90 percent of the health centers that we visited between Mekele and Axum were not functional, either due to a lack of staff or because they had suffered robberies. When primary care services do not exist, people can’t access or be referred to hospitals.

For example, before the crisis, [on average] two appendicitis operations were performed per day at Adigrat hospital. In the past two months, they haven’t done a single one. In every place, we saw patients arriving late. One woman had been in labor for seven days without being able to give birth. Her life was saved because we were able to transport her to Mekele. I saw people arrive at the hospital on bicycles carrying a patient from 30 kilometers away. And those were the ones who managed to get to the hospital.

If women with complicated deliveries, seriously ill patients, and people with appendicitis and trauma injuries can’t get to hospital, you can imagine the consequences. There is a large population suffering, surely with fatal consequences. Adigrat hospital serves an area with more than one million people, and the hospital in Axum serves an area with more than three million people. If these hospitals don’t function properly and can’t be accessed, then people die at home.

When the health system is broken, vaccinations, disease detection, and nutritional programs don’t function either. There have been no vaccinations in almost three months, so we fear there will be epidemics soon.

In recent weeks, our mobile medical teams have started visiting areas outside the main cities, and we are reopening some health centers. We believe our presence brings a certain feeling of protection. We have seen some health staff returning to work. Only five people attended the first meeting we organized in Adwa hospital, but the second was attended by 15, and more than 40 people came to the third. Beyond medical activities, you feel that you offer people some hope: the feeling that things can improve after two months without good news.

People fleeing violence, living in fear

In eastern and central Tigray, we did not see large settlements of displaced people. Instead, most have taken refuge with relatives and friends, so many homes now have 20 or 25 people living together. The impact of the violence is visible in the buildings and in the cars with bullet holes.

Especially at the beginning, we saw a population locked in their homes and living in great fear. Everyone gave us pieces of paper with phone numbers written on them and asked us to convey messages to their families. People don’t even know if their relatives and loved ones are okay, because in many places there are still no telephones or telecommunications.

When we arrived in Adigrat, we saw lines of 500 people next to a water truck waiting to get 20 liters of water per family at most. The telephone line was restored in Adigrat just a few days ago. The situation is improving little by little, but as we moved westward to new places we found the same scenario: fewer services, less transport.

We are very concerned about what may be happening in rural areas. We still haven’t been able to go to many places, either because of insecurity or because it is hard to obtain authorization. But we know, because community elders and traditional authorities have told us, that the situation in these places is very bad.

Large areas of Tigray have very mountainous terrain, with winding roads that climb from 2,000 meters above sea level to 3,000 meters. Cities like Adwa and Axum are built on the fertile highlands, but a large part of the population lives in the mountains. We have heard that there are people who have fled to these more remote areas because of the violence.

Logistical challenges, late response

The efforts of our teams have been enormous at all levels—medical, financial, logistical, and human resources. It’s an incredible challenge without telephone or internet. At first there were no flights to Mekele and we had to move everything nearly 1,000 kilometers by road from the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. You couldn’t make money transfers because the banks were all closed. Yet we managed to start our operations.

Now other aid organizations are beginning to appear, little by little, in some areas. We still don’t know the real impact of this crisis, but we have to keep working to find out as soon as possible.

Other MSF teams are currently delivering medical care in different areas of central, south, and northwestern Tigray. MSF teams are also responding to the health needs of displaced people at the border of the Amhara region and in Sudan.

A pogrom is happening in Ethiopia

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The Globe & Mail | Robert Rotberg 

Ethiopia is killing its own citizens, wantonly. That is chilling, but true: By attempting to extirpate Ethiopians of Tigrayan ethnicity and heritage, Ethiopia’s military and government stands accused of purposeful ethnic cleansing, a precursor to all-out genocide, as outlawed by the UN convention against genocide.

Upholders of world order, such as Canada, should immediately refer the atrocities in the Tigrayan region of Ethiopia to the International Criminal Court so that its investigators can examine the massacres and prepare prosecutions. Additionally, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm, championed by a Canadian-instigated commission and adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005 to end a slaughter of the innocents, should now be invoked.

Late last year, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed decided that leaders from the Tigray region – and apparently, by extension, all Tigrayans – had undermined his authority by defying the central government and holding a vote for its local legislative assembly. As punishment, Mr. Abiy sent the military to invade the small northern region of Tigray.

Only 6 per cent of Ethiopians are Tigrayans, but Mr. Abiy – whose Oromo ethnic group is the largest in the country, comprising 34 per cent of the population – had seemingly decided that their very existence threatened his control of 110 million Ethiopians.

Mr. Abiy promised that the campaign would be short and surgical, but that’s not how events have played out. Because telephone service and the internet have been mostly cut off since November in Tigray, no one really knows how many Tigrayans have been maimed or killed by the Ethiopian army and how much of Tigray has been destroyed. However, smuggled reports indicate that thousands have died in combat and collaterally; despite Mr. Abiy’s claims to the contrary, doctors in the main hospital in Mekelle, Tigray’s provincial capital, have said that indiscriminate shelling has killed civilians. At least 50,000 Tigrayans have fled across the Sudanese border into squalid refugee camps. About 4.5 million of Tigray’s six million inhabitants desperately need emergency food aid, and some will soon starve.

Two weeks ago, the military executed Seyoum Mesfin, Ethiopia’s former long-time foreign minister; at least 47 of 167 prominent Tigrayans on a most-wanted list have also been killed or captured. About 750 civilians huddling in a cathedral in the historic town of Aksum were reportedly massacred. Widespread raping is alleged, especially in Mekelle. Troops are still scouring the jagged Tembien mountains for remaining Tigrayan leaders, taking no prisoners.

Tigrayans, who were once mainstays of the country’s army, air force, sections of the civil service and Ethiopian Airlines (which was headed by a Tigrayan who has since been refused permission to fly), have been marginalized even beyond Tigray’s borders. It has the appearance of a pogrom.

The underlying cause of Mr. Abiy’s sudden hostility to Tigrayans stems from the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 by a Marxist military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, a vicious dictator who drove Ethiopian deeper into poverty than ever before with a Stalinist-inspired agricultural program.

Meles Zenawi, a charismatic Tigrayan, created a revolutionary guerrilla force in the Sudan and, in 1991, led the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) to a series of striking military victories against Mr. Mengistu’s army. After Mr. Mengistu eventually fled to Zimbabwe, Mr. Meles and a cabal mostly made up of Tigrayans ruled Ethiopia in a quasi-democratic fashion, rigging elections (especially in 2005) but also gradually uplifting the lives of many Ethiopians, including those who are Oromo and Amhara, the largest two ethnic groups in the country.

The Oromo and other ethnic groups felt discriminated against by Tigrayans under Mr. Meles. After he died unexpectedly in 2012, he was succeeded by Hailemariam Desalegn, an Ethiopian from the southern Wolayta ethnic group. He ruled on behalf of the Tigrayans who had assisted Mr. Meles.

After protests by Oromo erupted in 2017, Mr. Hailemariam transferred power in 2018 to Mr. Abiy, an Oromo who had fought with Mr. Meles and the EPRDF against Mr. Mengistu and who was a trusted ally in the Tigrayan-led government. Now, he has abruptly turned against Tigray.

In 2019, Mr. Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the country’s 19-year diplomatic standoff with Eritrea and for releasing political prisoners and adopting liberal governance within Ethiopia. Mr. Abiy was lauded across Africa, Europe and the Americas as a welcome new democratic leader. Now he has exposed his true colours, besmirching the very name and ideals behind the Nobel Peace Prize.

It is past time to stop the slaughter in Tigray and to bring Mr. Abiy to justice.

US ‘Directly’ Presses Eritrea to Withdraw Forces From Tigray

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Associated Press — The United States says it has directly “pressed senior levels” of Eritrea’s government to immediately withdraw its troops from neighboring Ethiopia, where witnesses have described them looting and hunting down civilians in the embattled Tigray region.

A State Department spokesperson in an email to The Associated Press on Thursday said Washington has conveyed “grave” concerns about credible reports of abuses. There were no details on how officials with Eritrea, one of the world’s most secretive countries, responded.

Eritrea has said little publicly about the conflict in Tigray as Ethiopian soldiers fight forces loyal to the now-fugitive Tigray regional leaders who once dominated Ethiopia’s government for nearly three decades. The Tigray leaders were marginalized after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018, and each side regards the other as illegitimate.

Ethiopia has repeatedly denied the presence of Eritrean soldiers, who some witnesses have estimated in the thousands. Now concerns are growing that the Eritrean forces refuse to leave. Eritrea remains an enemy of the fugitive Tigray leaders after a two-decade border war that ended under Abiy.

Eritrea’s information ministry on Thursday published a statement by the country’s embassy in the U.S. responding to an open letter this week by former U.S. ambassadors to Ethiopia that expressed concern about the Tigray conflict and Eritrea’s involvement.

“The allusion by these ambassadors to potential territorial war between Eritrea and Ethiopia can only be disingenuous in content and vicious in intent,” Eritrea’s statement said, expressing “profound dismay at their provocative and ill-intentioned swipe.”

The Tigray region remains largely cut off from the outside world and Ethiopia has blocked almost all journalists from entering, complicating efforts to verify assertions by the warring sides.

Meanwhile, humanitarian workers have had limited access to the estimated 6 million people in Tigray as food and other supplies run short and concerns about starvation grow.

The situation is “deteriorating every day, every minute,” the president of the Ethiopian Red Cross Society, Ato Abera Tola, told reporters on Thursday as Red Cross entities appealed for more financial support. “There is no area which is not affected by this conflict … the conflict is everywhere.”

The Ethiopia head of delegation for the International Committee for the Red Cross, Katia Sorin, said they still had not been able to reach rural areas of Tigray, a largely agricultural region. The ICRC is one of the few international organizations to maintain its operations in Tigray after fighting began.

“We’re helping, but it’s a drop in the ocean of need,” Sorin said.