A “dirty war” with no fronts that was causing suffering for “defenseless victims”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has told Congress that “ethnic cleansing” is unfolding in western Tigray, with Amharas driving out Tigrayans
“Further deterioration is expected as the conflict continues and disrupts the next planting season,” the UN said Tuesday.
Gunmen killed at least 20 people last week in western Ethiopia, a regional government official said on Thursday, in what he and two residents described as an attack on civilians from the Amhara ethnic group.
Ethiopia has swept up thousands of ethnic Tigrayans into detention centers across the country on accusations that they are traitors, often holding them for months and without charges, the AP has found.
Dozens of Tigrayan priests and deacons were detained in the capital, most for a month, according to Lisanewerk Desta, who leads the library and museum department of the Ethiopia Orthodox Church. He also said he has spoken with a detainee at a center near Harar who estimated that more than 2,000 military personnel were held there.
Ethiopia has swept up thousands of ethnic Tigrayans into detention centers across the country on accusations that they are traitors, often holding them for months and without charges, the AP has found.
Dozens of Tigrayan priests and deacons were detained in the capital, most for a month, according to Lisanewerk Desta, who leads the library and museum department of the Ethiopia Orthodox Church. He also said he has spoken with a detainee at a center near Harar who estimated that more than 2,000 military personnel were held there.
A new prime minister was met with overwhelming optimism that he would help stem the country’s long-standing tensions. But military violence in the Tigray region dispels any hope of a unified republic.
“By using Amhara militias to attack Tigray, the government has tried to ensure further animosity between Amharas and Tigrayans. By involving Eritrea in this war and allowing its military to commit atrocities and wanton destruction of Tigray, the Prime Minister has deliberately tried to increase enmity between ordinary Tigrayans and Eritreans.
In 1994, as 800,000 mostly Tutsi people were beaten, hacked to death or shot dead in a 100-day bloodbath in Rwanda, the United States hesitated to call it genocide, eventually using the watered-down phrase “acts of genocide.”
The United States has instead spoken of “ethnic cleansing” in Myanmar, and more recently in Ethiopia’s Tigray region
Eritrean soldiers are blocking and looting food aid in Ethiopia’s war-hit Tigray region, according to government documents obtained by AFP, stoking fears of starvation deaths as fighting nears the six-month mark.
Eritrean soldiers have also started showing up at food distribution points in Tigray, looting the supplies after “our beneficiaries became frightened and (ran) away.
The world must step in now and call the assaults what they are: a war crime.
In recent weeks, women in Tigray, Ethiopia, have started coming forward with the most painful stories imaginable about how they have been sexually violated and tortured by soldiers of the Ethiopian and Eritrean armies.
Rape and sexual violence are being used to pursue political and military goals in Ethiopia’s crisis-hit Tigray region, UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock said Tuesday.
“That is also what we have seen in the last six months in northern Ethiopia. The rapes there have not stopped,”
Jeffrey Feltman, the new American envoy to the Horn of Africa, faces a cascade of overlapping challenges in the region.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday formally named Feltman to the post, where he will become Washington’s lead troubleshooter for a deadly conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia that has sparked a massive humanitarian crisis and widespread allegations of war crimes.
