“The reason I did this was to get evidence that the regime is oppressing the youth and the people and to show that the Eritrean people suffer a lot of abuses,”
“There are people who have been jailed for 20 years just for speaking out. So, me, I could have been executed.”
Tewodros Tefera is one of more than 60,000 people who have fled ethnic violence in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, crossing the border into a remote corner of Sudan. Horrified by what he saw when the fighting between Ethiopian and Tigray forces began six months ago, and by the tales of new arrivals, the 44-year-old chronicles the pain even as he treats it.
“”It is definitely genocide,” he says. “If someone is being attacked for their identity, if they’re threatened to be vanished because of their identity, there is no other explanation for this.”
Six months after the conflict began, governments need to be doing more to help those affected by the fighting
In any given humanitarian crisis, anywhere in the world, it is always the most marginalised, the most vulnerable groups that suffer the most. It is no surprise then that women and children are so often the bearers of the brunt of war.
Sexual violence is being used as a “weapon of war and humiliation” in Tigray, Ethiopia, according to a USAID-funded report. Many are saying this violence against women and children is rooted in ethnic cleansing. NBC News Foreign Correspondent Matt Bradley reports on the ongoing conflict. Warning: This report contains graphic accounts of sexual assault and may be disturbing.
Can the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia keep it together? Change has become increasingly bloody it The internet is routinely cut off in Ethiopia, CPJ has noted, including a nationwide shutdown in June 2020. The internet has been disrupted in Tigray since November 2020, when conflict broke out in the regional state, according to media reports. Officials have blamed the ousted Tigray leadership for the disconnection and Ethio Telecom, the state-owned telecommunications monopoly, said in December that it was making repairs. In an email to CPJ in mid-April 2021, Billene Seyoum Woldeyes, a spokesperson for the Ethiopian prime minister’s office, said that the authorities did not cause the disruption and did not respond to a follow up question about why it had not been fixed. Ethio Telecom did not respond to CPJ’s social media message requesting comment about the ongoing problems.
Can the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia keep it together? Change has become increasingly bloody it seems since the 2012 death of longtime leader Meles Zenawi, a Tigrean whose home region is now in open revolt against the central government. There, conventional fighting is morphing into guerrilla warfare with reprisals against civilians fuelling a vicious circle. Elsewhere, regional and ethnic tensions are also on the rise.
Victims have told investigators that when Ethiopian federal regular soldiers and militia inflict infertility on Tigrayan women with burning metal rods, after gang-raping them, they tell the women that this is to stop them having ‘Woyene’ children (the Amharans’ derogatory term for ‘Tigrayans’).
Ethiopia registered 322 new COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 258,384 as of Sunday evening, the country’s Ministry of Health said.
Meanwhile, 17 new deaths from COVID-19 were reported during the same period, bringing the national death toll to 3,726, the ministry said.
Sudan’s Irrigation Minister Yasser Abbas said that Khartoum will bear great losses if Ethiopia insists on conducting the second filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam [GERD] without reaching an agreement.
Abbas said in a press conference that his country will store a billion cubic meters of water behind Roseires Dam as a precautionary measure against the second filling of GERD, planned in the next rain season in June.
Between late February and early-April 2021, as the crisis continued in Tigray, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) conducted a Rapid Gender Analysis (RGA) with 186 clients and stakeholders across 6 refugee camps and sites for internally displaced persons (IDPs). The RGA is a critical step in the IRC’s efforts to ensure that emergency programming in Tigray is responsive to the needs of women and girls, who have been impacted differently by the crisis than men and boys. This document focuses primarily on the findings around gender-based violence, and the sexual exploitation of women and girls in exchange for cash to buy food. A more comprehensive report will be released in mid-May 2021, with more detailed findings on women’s needs, and how these are shaped by changing gender and social norms, within the camp setting.
