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.
Millions of people in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region are facing starvation. Until now, it’s been a crisis without pictures. Those wrenching images of emaciated children and mothers with dull-eyed gazes, so sadly familiar from famine zones, have yet to emerge. But that’s because journalists aren’t permitted to travel to the worst-hit areas of Tigray, where hunger is deepening by the day. When the media can finally get access, or when starving villagers abandon their homes and flee to towns, the pictures will surely remind viewers of drought victims from Ethiopia’s 1984 famine, which prompted the famous LiveAid benefit concert and a vast outpouring of charity.
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.
R&B singer The Weeknd has promised to donate $1m (£700,000) to Ethiopians caught up in the conflict in Tigray.
The star, born Abel Tesfaye in Canada, is the son of Ethiopian immigrants.
“My heart breaks for my people of Ethiopia as innocent civilians ranging from small children to the elderly are being senselessly murdered,” he said.
Fighting between the Ethiopian army and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) began in November and has left millions of people homeless.
Ethiopia’s military is fighting “on eight fronts” in hotspots including the northern Tigray region, where adversaries have adopted “guerrilla” tactics, according to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
His comments Saturday indicated that intense fighting continues in Tigray, where Abiy declared victory more than four months ago.
Ethiopian military forces are now fighting a “difficult and tiresome” guerrilla war in the northern Tigray region, prime minister Abiy Ahmed has admitted.
His comments mark a sharp break with previous insistence that military operations launched in November had been a rapid and decisive success.
“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.
