Category: Monthly Report

March 4, 2022 marked 16 months since the beginning of Ethiopia and Eritrea’s genocidal war on Tigray. National forces from Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia and troops and militia from neighboring Afar and Amhara regions have used armaments supplied by Turkey, China, Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to carry out this genocidal war against the 7 million people of Tigray. Because of the communications and information blackout imposed on Tigray since November 2020, it is nearly impossible to get an accurate estimate of the devastation unleashed in the region in the last 16 months. However, the few reports made available from humanitarian agencies on the ground and eyewitness accounts provide a glimpse into the scale of the devastation, which has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and cases of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV), over 70,000 refugees in Sudan, over 2.2 million people internally displaced, and a man-made famine that threatens the lives of millions of people.

Additionally, the region’s road, water, education, and health infrastructure has been completely decimated, exacerbating the dire humanitarian catastrophe civilians in Tigray face. Immunization programs, treatment for TB, HIV, and malaria, as well as family planning supplies and essential supplies, have been completely depleted for over 6 months, resulting in a healthcare emergency in Tigray. The decimation of the healthcare system, combined with the ongoing siege on Tigray, not only threatens the lives of millions of people today, but will have devastating consequences for the next generation of Tigrayans.

In February 2022, Al Jazeera reported on a campaign of ethnic cleansing perpetrated against Tigrayans living in the town of Abala, in Tigray’s neighboring Afar region that took place in late December of 2021. During this campaign of ethnic cleansing, which involved massacres, looting, and sexual violence, Afar militiamen and Eritrean troops went door-to-door, identifying and killing Tigrayans throughout the town of Abala. Witnesses and survivors shared their accounts and footage of bodies in mass graves, showing hundreds of bodies dumped into craters in distant places. Entire families were killed in this days-long massacre, including 16 members from a single Tigrayan family.

The Ethiopian government’s continued dehumanization and incitement of hate speech against Tigrayans have fuelled these types of attacks, which have claimed the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of Tigrayans. Moreover, the ongoing involvement of Eritrean forces in the most egregious atrocities has become an alarmingly common phenomenon.

While the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments have repeatedly informed the international community that Eritrean forces have left Ethiopia, it is glaringly clear that Eritrean forces are still operating with complete impunity across Ethiopia and fueling and leading the genocidal campaign against Tigrayans.

In February 2022, the world saw some significant challenges to global order and security, with flagrant violations of the rules and norms governing international relations, as Russia launched a war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine. While this action has rightly been criticized by the international community, it is vital to remember that the erosion of the liberal international order is not happening in a vacuum but rather in a context in which such violations have previously been allowed to go unpunished. As human rights advocates across the world have warned, violations of the most
fundamental human rights going unanswered anywhere in the world emboldens those who seek to commit such violations themselves.

For over a year, the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments have been committing grave violations, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide against the 7 million people of Tigray, and the global response has been tepid at best. This sets a perilous precedent to other autocrats and dictators and further threatens existing mechanisms of global governance.

Given these developments, it is more important than ever for the international community to take swift and decisive action to stop the atrocities perpetrated by the combined forces of the Ethiopian and Eritrean states in collaboration with Amhara and Afar regional special forces.

It has been more than 450 days since a devastating genocidal war was declared on the 7 million people of Tigray. For over 14 months, this war has been waged on the ground by the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF), forces from the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions of Ethiopia, foreign troops from Eritrea and Somalia, and bolstered by drones and armaments supplied by a range of foreign actors including China, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran.

Since the declaration of war on November 4, 2020, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, over 70 thousand civilians have fled to neighboring Sudan, more than 2.2 million have been internally displaced, and tens of thousands of people have been subjected to weaponized Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV). Hunger has been a key tool of the genocidal regime in Ethiopia, which has created and weaponized famine to unleash collective punishment on millions of Tigrayans. The Ethiopian government’s blockade of lifesaving food and medical aid from entering Tigray has exacerbated the humanitarian disaster, caused thousands of preventable deaths, and placed hundreds of thousands at imminent risk of starvation-related death.

In December 2021, Tigrayan forces withdrew from neighboring regions to facilitate a ceasefire and end hostilities. However, instead of seizing this opportunity to end the instability, the Ethiopian government intensified its siege and aerial attacks against Tigrayan civilians. In addition to the already significant Eritrean military and intelligence presence in Ethiopia, there have been renewed deployments of Eritrean forces and attempts to reinvade liberated areas of Tigray, despite the Ethiopian government’s repeated declarations that Eritrean forces would no longer be involved in the genocidal war.

The intensifying aerial attacks are worsening an already dire humanitarian situation in Tigray, brought about by more than a year of genocidal warfare and an 8-month siege orchestrated by the Ethiopian government. On January 20, 2022, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reported that in the first week of January 2022, Tigray received the lowest food distribution it has ever gotten since the onset of the war. This report highlighted that while hundreds of thousands of people in the neighboring Afar and Amhara regions have been reached with food assistance in January, a staggeringly low 10,500 people (~0.4% of need) were reached in Tigray during the same period. UNOCHA further underscored that food and fuel supplies are almost entirely exhausted in besieged Tigray.

Emboldened by the international community’s inaction, which seems intent on taking the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government at its word despite countless instances where it has misrepresented the facts or outright lied, the Ethiopian government and its regional and international allies have continued blocking the delivery of desperately needed lifesaving aid into Tigray. Having adopted a strategy of deliberate misrepresentation, the Abiy regime makes empty pledges to the international community to allow humanitarian assistance into Tigray while actively preventing this on the ground. For instance, on January 23, 2022, the Tigray regional government reported that a 27-truck World Food Program (WFP) convoy from the Afar region was blocked from entering Tigray. This indicates that either the Abiy government is making false promises to the international community and openly going back on its word, or the regional government in Afar is defying the orders of the federal government—raising questions about the level of control the federal government has over the regional governments and their forces in various parts of the country.

The international community is rightly concerned about regional order and stability in the geopolitically important Horn of Africa. As such, it is incumbent on global actors to recognize that the largest threat to regional stability stems from the Ethiopian federal government, the Eritrean government, and their alliance. The Ethiopian government has neither the ability nor willingness to facilitate an all-inclusive national dialogue and peace process to resolve the myriad of political crises that plague the Ethiopian state. Given the vested international interests that the United States (US), European Union (EU), China, and Gulf countries have in the East Africa region, it is vital that the international community recognize the immense risk to regional peace Ethiopia’s Abiy and Eritrea’s dictator Isaias Afewerki pose.

Upon the 14th month of the Tigray genocide orchestrated by the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments, which has included extrajudicial killings, massacres, weaponized sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), detention, torture and execution, and wholesale destruction, the humanitarian crisis in Tigray continues unabated. The region remains isolated and under siege, leaving survivors of these atrocities without the medical and psychological support they need. Civilians continue to die daily from starvation and lack of access to medical services and life-sustaining medicines. The humanitarian response remains stalled, with the United Nations (UN) food distribution operating at 10%, while most other operations are suspended.

Inaccessibility to the region has hindered more accurate estimates of food insecurity figures. Estimates of 900,000 Tigrayans in famine and 1.8 million on the brink of famine have not been updated since July 2021 despite a continued
humanitarian blockade. Malnutrition rates established by the Tigray government are illustrative of the dire food insecurity. In November 2021, 28,000 children under five were screened for malnutrition and 2.8% were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) while 20% were diagnosed with moderate acute malnutrition (MAM). Among 18,800 pregnant and lactating mothers, 69% were diagnosed with malnutrition.

As Tigrayan civilians, especially children, starve to death, they also have to worry about airstrikes conducted by the Ethiopian government with the assistance of foreign military equipment and personnel. In an effort to bring peace, the President of Tigray, Dr. Debretsion Gebremichael ordered the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF) to withdraw from the Amhara and Afar regions of Ethiopia. Yet the Tigray government’s overtures were rebuffed and the Ethiopian government responded by aerially bombarding Tigray. As the TDF were making progress in their march to Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa to lift the total siege that Tigray has been under since the end of June 2021, the Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s administration was making arms deals with Turkey, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, and Iran. The Ethiopian government receiving drones from the aforementioned countries has consistently targeted schools, marketplaces, residential areas, and public infrastructures, causing dozens of civilian casualties and further disrupting the limited power the region had.

Despite the Ethiopian government reportedly calling on its forces not to enter Tigray, the reality on the ground indicates the Ethiopian government’s rejection of Tigray’s call for the start of peace negotiations. This rejection is not only illustrated by an intensification of aerial bombardments, but also by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces’ attempt to reinvade liberated Tigrayan land, the continued brutal ethnic cleansing in Western Tigray by Amhara and Eritrean forces, and the Eritrean occupation of Irob land in the north of Tigray on the Eritrean border. Eritrean troops, the Ethiopian army and its allied militias are attempting to reinvade Tigray from the north through Badme, northeast from Irob, southeast through Afar, and the west through Western Tigray.

In the Afar region, there are several credible reports of Eritrean and allied Afar militant groups extrajudicially killing and massacring Tigrayans. Therefore, the crimes against humanity, war crimes, and acts of genocide against Tigrayans
continue. Furthermore, Tigrayans outside of Tigray, living throughout Ethiopia, are targeted for their ethnicity and tens and thousands remain in concentration camps that lack food, water and hygienic sanitation facilities where they face rape, torture and executions.

The international community called upon the Tigray government to withdraw the TDF from Afar and Amhara region to facilitate a peace process, which it has, but renewed acts of genocide across Tigray on the part of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and allied forces loom. The international community has yet to seriously address the consistent aerial bombardments and the threat of another round of genocidal acts throughout Tigray. There have, however, been some measures taken. On December 17, 2021, after a special session of the United Nations Human Rights Council called by the European Union, member countries voted in favor of the establishment of an independent Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the crimes committed in Tigray—a development crucial in establishing accountability and justice for victims. Furthermore, on December 23, 2021, the United States government terminated Ethiopia’s participation in the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) as a result of its human rights abuses. That said, more meaningful action needs to be taken by the international community, as the Tigray genocide continues and Tigrayans starve to death, are massacred, sexually assaulted, bombed, detained, tortured, and executed.

More than a year into the state-sanctioned genocidal war on Tigray, the ensuing humanitarian catastrophe continues to endanger the lives of millions. After declaring war on the region of Tigray on November 4, 2020, the Ethiopian government, along with its allies, Eritrean forces, and Amhara special forces and militias, have overseen a campaign that has ushered in the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world. Consequently, tens of thousands have died, 70,000+ Tigrayans have sought refuge in Sudan, and over 2.2 million have become Internally Displaced People (IDPs). Civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, public facilities, and places of worship, have been looted and destroyed. Furthermore, weaponized Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV)has been an egregious aspect of this war, affecting tens of thousands of survivors who are currently cut off from desperately needed medical and psycho-social support.

As a consequence of the campaign of destruction the Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Amhara forces have unleashed on Tigray, the region is experiencing a severe famine which threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, primarily children and vulnerable populations. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), since July 12, 2021, only15% of the trucks necessary to meet the overwhelming humanitarian needs have been allowed to enter Tigray. Aid trucks were not allowed into Tigray between October 18, 2021, and the last week of November, leaving Tigray with no lifesaving supplies, including food and medicine, for more than a month. While there are hundreds of trucks with lifesaving supplies in Semera, in the neighboring region of Afar, these trucks have been prohibited from traveling into Tigray.

The Abiy administration uses bureaucratic roadblocks to obstruct the delivery of aid into Tigray. This siege most severely affects children, pregnant women, and nursing mothers. The Tigray External Affairs Office reported in November2021 that the global acute malnutrition (GAM) rate among children aged 6months to 59 months is at an alarming rate of 32%. Moreover, 28,541 children have been diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, while malnutrition rates among pregnant and lactating mothers is at an alarming 85%

Furthermore, with only 14% of the total population having access to health facilities and medical supplies and medicine almost non-existent as a result of the intentional targeting of Tigray’s health infrastructure by invading forces and the Abiy administration’s siege, there is a healthcare emergency in Tigray, in which thousands are susceptible to otherwise preventable deaths. Because of the destruction of health facilities and telecommunication blackout, it is impossible to determine the severity of the humanitarian crisis, especially in rural areas that bear the brunt of the famine.

It is impossible to overstate the severity of the humanitarian catastrophe in Tigray. Without concerted efforts to facilitate a cessation of hostilities and an all-inclusive political dialogue, this expanding catastrophe endangers not only the people of Tigray and Ethiopia but will further destabilize the entire Horn of Africa region. The international community has long called for all parties to enter into discussions to resolve the myriad of crises Ethiopia faces and alleviate human suffering. To this end, international and continental mediators, chief among them Olusegun Obasanjo, the African Union’s High Representative for the Horn of Africa, have been holding consultations with the Abiy administration and representatives of the Tigray Regional Government in Tigray’s capital city of Mekelle. While these mediation efforts had offered a brief glimmer of hope, true to form, the Abiy administration immediately began undermining these efforts by carrying out bombardments of civilian settlements in Tigray in the last weeks of November 2021. Moreover, instead of urging restraint and de-escalation, Abiy himself and many of the top officials from his party have vowed to go to the battlefront themselves, escalating the warmongering rhetoric and closing the window of opportunity for dialogue and peaceful resolution.