Some women were held captive for extended periods, days or weeks at a time, said Dr Fasika Amdeselassie, the top public health official for the government-appointed interim administration in Tigray.
“Women are being kept in sexual slavery,” Fasika told Reuters. “The perpetrators have to be investigated.
“They put a gun in my mouth,” he adds, before stabbing him and leaving him for dead in the street.
Abiy himself conceded recently that the war had dragged on much longer than he expected. TPLF fighters, he said, had dispersed “like flour in the winds”. He added that the federal army was fighting a guerrilla war on at least eight separate fronts across the country.
Almost six months in, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s war in Tigray has turned into a protracted disaster. As reports of atrocities keep coming, are there levers for peace and accountability?
The conflict turned violent in November. Tigrayan forces attacked an Ethiopian army base in the region, and the government retaliated with a major military offensive. Neighboring Eritrea, with whom Mr. Abiy had recently reconciled, joined on the side of the Ethiopian army. Militias from Ethiopia’s Amhara region have also joined in against Tigray. Six months later, massacres, rapes, and massive displacements of civilians have become weapons of war, with both sides accused of atrocities.
A new report issued this week by the World Peace Foundation (WPF) exposes the use of starvation as a war weapon in the Ethiopian region of Tigray and speaks of an emergency situation that will worsen through September if the conflict is not resolved.
The 66-page report published by WPF, an affiliate of Tufts University in Massachusetts, calls for urgent humanitarian attention to the crisis in Tigray.
Late last month, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed finally admitted the worst-kept secret in Africa: that soldiers from neighboring Eritrea are fighting alongside Ethiopia’s military in the Tigray region of the country. For the last five months, Abiy’s government has waged a military offensive there against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which once dominated Ethiopia’s government and regarded Eritrea as an enemy. Numerous eyewitness and media reports had documented Eritrean involvement in the war, which erupted less than a year after Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize for his historic rapprochement with Eritrea. Yet the Ethiopian prime minister had been reluctant to acknowledge Eritrea’s role, both because it would open him up to accusations of compromising Ethiopian sovereignty and because he has gone to great lengths to portray the conflict as a necessary, proportional, and swiftly resolved military action against a recalcitrant regional government.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan expressed U.S. concerns over the crisis in the Tigray region in a call with Ethopia’s deputy prime minister, Demeke Mekonnen, the White House said on Thursday.
The two “discussed critical steps to address the crisis, including expanded humanitarian access, cessation of hostilities, departure of foreign troops, and independent investigations into atrocities and human rights violations,” in their phone call on Wednesday, the White House said.
Allegations of ethnic cleansing that began last fall amid a military crackdown in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region now threaten to engulf the surrounding areas and permanently tarnish the reputation of the country’s nobel prize-winning prime minister. Thousands are dead, tens of thousands have been displaced, and the Ethiopian government is on the defensive. Coletta Wanjohi reports.
After months of heavy fightings between Ethiopian forces and Tigrayan leaders, people who thought they fled the most horrible nightmare in their lives have found another one.
The atrocities have been seared into the skin and minds of Tigrayans, who shelter by the thousands within sight of the homeland they fled in northern Ethiopia. They arrive in heat that soars above 38 degrees Celcius (100 degrees Fahrenheit), carrying the pain of gunshot wounds, welts on beaten backs. Less visible are the memories: Dozens of bodies strewn on riverbanks. Fighters raping a woman one by one for speaking her own language. A child, weakened by hunger, left behind.
In an exclusive investigation, witnesses tell of 182 civilians killed in cold blood as reports of human rights abuses in the region escalate
Mr Abiy sided with forces from Eritrea and ethnic militias from Tigray’s neighbouring Amhara region to crush forces loyal to the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in a three-pronged attack.
Now a deluge of credible reports pointing towards a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, rape and man-made starvation are emerging.
This is one of the largest massacres to have been reported so far. In February, AP and Amnesty published accounts of several hundred people being killed by Eritrean soldiers in Tigray’s holy city of Axum.
Eritrean armed forces massacred scores of civilians, including children as young as 13, in the historic town of Axum in Ethiopia’s Tigray region in November 2020, Human Rights Watch said today. The United Nations should urgently establish an independent inquiry into war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in the region to pave the way for accountability, and Ethiopian authorities should grant it full and immediate access.
