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.
The “turbulence and crisis” in Ethiopia’s Tigray region risks leaving a vacuum for extremist groups to spread unless the world works together to resolve it, the EU’s special envoy to the conflict said on Tuesday.
Hundreds of thousands were displaced inside Ethiopia and across the border into Sudan as the government launched an offensive in November.
The United States is looking into reports of human rights abuses and atrocities in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, the U.S. State Department said on Monday.
Department spokesman Ned Price told a news briefing that the United States is “gravely concerned” about accounts last week by CNN and the BBC of a massacre in the region by Ethiopian forces.
“We are, of course, looking into these reports. We have taken close note of them and we’ll continue to pay close attention,” Price said.
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.
The Biden administration has been pressuring the Ethiopian government to end its military offensive and for Eritrea to withdraw its forces. Biden recently sent Senator Chris Coons to meet with the Ethiopian prime minister, who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.
Rape has also been used as a weapon of war in the Tigray region by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. CNN’s Nima Elbagir recently spoke to one Ethiopian woman who fled to Sudan after being raped.
The dire humanitarian situation continues to escalate in Tigray, putting 4.5m people on the brink of starvation. In order to tackle the enormous humanitarian needs, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded a cessation of hostilities and the immediate withdrawal of both Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) and Amhara regional forces from Tigray.
Increasing the pressure on Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, President Biden subsequently dispatched Senator Coons to Ethiopia to express deepening concern about ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in Tigray.
“New reports and footage emerging from Tigray of extrajudicial killings, murders of civilians, sexual and gender-based violence, and forced displacement are deeply disturbing,” Coons, a Delaware Democrat, tweeted Saturday.
His comments come after a CNN investigation found that men wearing Ethiopian army uniforms executed unarmed men in Tigray. A BBC-led investigation also published Thursday corroborated the same massacre near Mahibere Dego, a mountainous area of central Tigray.
A gruesome video allegedly filmed by a whistleblower in the Ethiopian Army shows what appears to be Ethiopian troops executing an estimated 34 unarmed men in the Tigray region in January, the US-based Tigrai Media House reported.
An analysis of the video published by CNN in collaboration with Amnesty International seemed to corroborate the video, finding that it had indeed featured soldiers in Ethiopian Army uniforms, with the surrounding landscape seeming to line up with an area of central Tigray which had recently reported a massacre.
The mass killing near Mahibere Dego is one of several to have been reported over the course of Ethiopia’s five-month-old conflict during which thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed, raped and abused. But with independent access to journalists severely restricted until recently and telephone and internet services often blocked, it has been challenging to verify accounts of atrocities in Tigray. Amid the effective communications blackout, few videos have emerged from the fighting and those that have are difficult to authenticate.
Through a forensic frame-by-frame investigation of the video footage — corroborated by analysis from Amnesty International’s digital verification and modeling experts — as well as interviews with 10 family members and local residents, CNN has established that men wearing Ethiopian army uniforms executed a group of at least 11 unarmed men before disposing of their bodies near Mahibere Dego.
The G7 group of leading nations on Friday called for the “swift” withdrawal of Eritrean troops from Ethiopia’s conflict-hit northern Tigray region, as the International Crisis Group (ICG) warned of a prolonged stalemate.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced last week that Eritrean forces would leave the region, just three days after finally acknowledging their presence amid mounting reports of massacres and widespread sexual violence.
