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.
Ethiopia is in turmoil. In November 2020, fighting in the Tigray region erupted between Ethiopian government troops and militias in Tigray known as the TPLF. The violence has been horrific.
Crimes reportedly include genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, rape and other sexual violence, and crimes against humanity. At least 2.2 million people have been displaced, many of them women and children, and an estimated 60,000 people have fled into neighboring Sudan. The need for food, water, shelter, and medical aid is at catastrophic levels, while access to those in need is either limited or nonexistent. U.N. watchdogs have been denied observation. The internet has been shut down since November, and journalists have been arrested.
Over the course of six days in November 2020, Ethiopian government forces and allies executed two hundred civilians in Adi Hageray, a town in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. Eyewitnesses report indiscriminate house-by-house killings, with victims ranging from children to ninety-year-olds.
Standing alone, this atrocity deserves international outrage – but in reality, the Adi Hageray massacre is just one tragedy within an ongoing war that has killed over 50,000 civilians and involved over 150 mass killings since November.
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.
Omna Tigray, a nonprofit founded by a collective of Tigrayan professionals recently launched a Twitter campaign and a petition campaign in hope of garnering protection for the Irob and Kunuma communities which have been ravaged by a genocidal war in the region in Ethiopia.
Since November 2020, these communities have faced atrocities at the hands of Ethiopian, Eritrean and Amhara forces. Through this campaign, the non-profit aims to draw attention to the human rights violations taking place and ask for the UN to uphold the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, waited the statutory two years before launching his genocidal war in Tigray last November.
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.
