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Category: Resource

Rape survivors describe slavery, mutilation in Tigray

Posted on by Eyasu Berhe

Ethiopian and Eritrean troops have raped hundreds of women and girls during the Tigray war, subjecting some to sexual slavery and mutilation, Amnesty International said in a report Wednesday.

Drawing from interviews with 63 survivors, the report sheds new light on a scourge already being investigated by Ethiopian law enforcement officials, with at least three soldiers convicted and 25 others charged.

Some survivors said they had been gang-raped while held captive for weeks on end. Others described being raped in front of their family members.

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Ethiopia’s War in Tigray Sees Ethnic Minority Group Targeted Across the Country

Posted on by Eyasu Berhe

Ethiopian authorities have launched reprisals against ethnic Tigrayans across the country, arresting hundreds and accusing members of the minority group of supporting rebels who have been locked in a bloody war with the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

Mr. Ahmed declared war on Tigray, a mountainous region that borders Sudan and Eritrea, in November, after his government said the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, had attacked an Ethiopian military base. The fighting followed months of rising tensions between the central government and the TPLF, which had dominated Ethiopia’s ruling party until Mr. Ahmed’s rise to power in 2018.

In recent weeks, the government has arbitrarily arrested hundreds of ethnic Tigrayans outside the dissident northern region, keeping some in military detention camps, rights groups and former detainees say.

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‘Like I wasn’t a person’: Ethiopian forces accused of systematic rape in Tigray

Posted on by Eyasu Berhe

Ethiopian government forces have been systematically raping and abusing hundreds of women and girls in the current conflict in Tigray, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

Adding to a growing body of evidence that rape is being used as a weapon of war in the northern region of Ethiopia, Amnesty’s research offers a snapshot of the extent of the crimes in an area where communications with the outside world have been deliberately restricted by federal authorities.

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Why Did Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Rebuff Samantha Power?

Posted on by Eyasu Berhe

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed last week rebuffed a request to meet face to face with a top Biden administration official to address the country’s civil war and worsening humanitarian crisis in the Tigray region, dealing a blow to U.S. efforts to tamp down a conflict that threatens to fuel famine and destabilize the wider Horn of Africa.

When Samantha Power, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), visited Ethiopia last week to seek greater access for humanitarian aid workers in Tigray, she was asked in a press conference why she hadn’t met with the Ethiopian prime minister.

“He was not in the capital today on my day here,” she said.

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Amnesty: Rape survivors describe slavery, mutilations in Tigray

Posted on by Eyasu Berhe

‘Severity and scale’ of sexual crimes committed by Ethiopian and Eritrean troops amount to war crimes, the rights group says.

Ethiopian and Eritrean troops have raped hundreds of women and girls during the Tigray war, subjecting some to sexual slavery and mutilation, human rights group Amnesty International has said in a 36-page report.

Drawing from interviews with 63 survivors, the report (PDF) published on Wednesday sheds new light on a scourge already being investigated by Ethiopian law enforcement officials, with at least three soldiers convicted and 25 others charged.

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Hunger Stalks Millions as Abiy Asks Ethiopians to Join Army

Posted on by Eyasu Berhe

Fighting in northern Ethiopia may intensify further after the nation’s Nobel-laureate leader urged citizens to join the army and militias, which may add to the misery caused by nine months of civil war between the federal government and dissidents in the Tigray region.

About 300,000 people are facing “emergency levels of hunger” in Ethiopia’s Amhara and Afar states, where Tigrayan forces began an offensive after regaining most of their territory from government troops in June, the World Food Programme said on Monday. That’s in addition to about 5.2 million people in Tigray who’ve been impacted by the conflict and desperately need food aid.

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Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Project and Political Conflict

Posted on by Eyasu Berhe

In 2011, Ethiopia started construction on a dam along the Blue Nile River that the government coined the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Project, GERD. Projections predict the dam’s cost around $5 billion, which was around 7% of Ethiopia’s GDP in 2016. Egypt and Sudan lodged formal complaints against GERD’s construction due to their concerns about the dam’s impact on the Nile River. The complaints they lodged revolved around two major concerns: the legitimacy of the benefits versus drawbacks outlined by the Ethiopian government and concerns about the dam’s impact on the water supply downriver. Since the benefits of the dam include necessary poverty alleviation, it is important to outline a clear view of GERD’s history, each country’s side and an outside expert’s viewpoint on the project.

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Ethiopia-Sudan tension rises over Tigray conflict

Posted on by Eyasu Berhe

Sudan recalled its ambassador to Ethiopia Aug. 8 for consultations after Ethiopian officials accused Khartoum of interfering in the Tigray crisis.

In a statement, the Sudanese Foreign Ministry rejected the Ethiopian accusations against Sudan of not staying neutral in mediating the conflict in Tigray. The statement said that a resolution of the Tigray conflict is part of Sudan’s commitment to peace and regional stability and the stabilization of Ethiopia.

Sudan pledged to continue to push for a solution to the conflict and said that it is seeking to mediate between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) with the aim of reaching a peaceful solution to the nine-month-old conflict.

Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has been in contact with the Ethiopian central government and the TPLF leaders, working to bring the two parties to the negotiating table to discuss a peaceful solution and allow the entry of humanitarian aid for civilians.

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At river where Tigrayan bodies floated, fears of ‘many more’

Posted on by Eyasu Berhe

From time to time, a body floating down the river separating Ethiopia’s troubled Tigray region from Sudan was a silent reminder of a war conducted in the shadows. But recently, the corpses became a flow.

Bloated, drained of color from their journey, the bodies were often mutilated: genitals severed, eyes gouged, a missing limb. The Sudanese fishermen who spotted them, and the refugees from Tigray who helped pull them to shore, found many corpses’ hands bound. Some of them had been shot.

The Associated Press reported dozens of bodies floating down the Tekeze River last week and saw six of the graves on Wednesday, marking the first time any reporters could reach the scene. Doctors who saw the bodies said one was tattooed with a common name in the Tigrinya language and others had the facial markings common among Tigrayans, raising fresh alarm about atrocities in the least-known area of the Tigray war.

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Main road for aid to embattled Ethiopian region ‘impassible’

Posted on by Eyasu Berhe

During a visit this week to Ethiopia, the Administrator of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) visited food warehouses outside the capital Addis Ababa run by the Catholic Relief Services, with the help of USAID.

Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, denounced the “dehumanizing rhetoric” surrounding Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict, which has devastated the area.

Wednesday’s visit to Ethiopia has been welcomed by CRS’s Ethiopia country representative, Lane Bunkers.

“The compound in Adama [about 60 miles southeast of the capital] has a long history and has been in use for four decades for the purpose of storing and staging food aid, including humanitarian distributions,” he told Crux.

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