“extent persistently denied”
NGOs document war crimes in Tigray
4/6/2022 3:16 am
Ethiopian government troops have been fighting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front for a year and a half. The civil war has catastrophic consequences for the civilian population. Human rights organizations report an ethnic cleansing campaign.
Systematic mass expulsions, rape, looting and brutal killings: According to a recent human rights report, security forces in the contested Tigray region of the East African state of Ethiopia are committing serious war crimes. The human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report on Wednesday, according to which security forces from the Amhara region are primarily responsible for these attacks in western Tigray state. They are taking place with the approval and possible participation of the Ethiopian military, it said.
“The Ethiopian government has consistently denied the shocking scale of these crimes and has done nothing to prevent them,” said Wenzel Michalski, Germany director at Human Rights Watch. The report referred to an ethnic cleansing campaign against Tigray’s civilian population as a crime against humanity. Regional authorities should also be involved. Access to the region has been massively restricted so that humanitarian aid hardly ever arrives and hundreds of thousands are at risk of starvation.
“The Ethiopian government must finally react: It must immediately disarm and withdraw from the region those security forces who were involved in human rights violations,” demands Markus Beeko, Secretary General of Amnesty International Germany. “The reactions of Ethiopia’s international and regional partners do not do justice to the seriousness of the crimes being committed in western Tigray,” he said. Aid organizations must be granted unimpeded access to the region, all those arbitrarily detained must be released and human rights violations must be investigated, the organizations demand in their report.
The parties to the conflict should agree to the deployment of an international peacekeeping force under the leadership of the African Union to West Tiger to ensure the protection of all population groups from attacks. The conflict between the central government in Addis Ababa and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) began around a year and a half ago. With almost 115 million inhabitants, the multi-ethnic state of Ethiopia is the country with the second largest population in Africa. For a long time it was considered the anchor of stability in the region.