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The arrest of 22 Ethiopian United Nations employees marks a new stage in the standoff between the Addis Ababa government and the international community. On Tuesday, November 9, the UN learned that around 20 of its local employees and their families were detained in various police stations in the Ethiopian capital. This unprecedented crackdown comes as intense diplomatic efforts take place in Addis Ababa to try to wrest a ceasefire and end the war between the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the rebels of the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF) for a year.
The New York institution has not received any explanation from Ethiopia about these arrests. “We are of course working actively with the Ethiopian government to obtain their immediate release”, explained Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for the UN in New York. Yesterday, 16 employees were still detained in the evening while six others were released.
These members of various UN agencies were arrested in Addis Ababa on Monday and Tuesday, reveals a humanitarian source. Ethiopian government spokesperson Legesse Tulu said they were apprehended by police “Because of their misdeeds and their participation in acts of terror”. But the Associated Press agency reveals that these UN workers are, in reality, all of Tigrayan origin and have been subjected to ethnic profiling, which the Ethiopian police deny.
“Absolutely unacceptable”
The police came to arrest them at their own home, also picking up their relatives. Harassment and detention of a person on the basis of their ethnicity are ” absolutely unacceptable “, made a point of recalling, Tuesday, Ned Price, the spokesperson for the American secretary of state. However, this would not be a first: in November 2020, in the Amhara region, bordering Tigray at war, the police asked the World Food Program for a list of its Tigrayan employees, which this UN agency had categorically refused.
The state of emergency declared on November 2 in Ethiopia authorizes the federal police to carry out this type of arrest without arrest warrants as well as searches without a permit. The official purpose of the provision is to unmask the “Spies” among the population. Except that it is, for now, mainly used to track down citizens of Tigrayan origin. Several human rights groups fear that thousands of them are currently being held in the Ethiopian capital.
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This roundup of UN workers is all the more disturbing as the UN is involved in the current attempt to mediate between the Ethiopian Prime Minister and the TDF rebels. Abiy Ahmed spoke by phone with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on November 3 before meeting Martin Griffiths, the director of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Addis. Ababa.
Prospects for peace seem to be fading
This is not the first incident between the Ethiopian government and the United Nations, which has 2,398 local employees in the country. Already, in September, seven senior officials of Unicef, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and OCHA were declared persona non grata, and forced to leave Ethiopia. An extremely rare decision on such a scale.
Before their expulsion, Martin Griffiths had provoked the ire of Addis Ababa by implicating the Ethiopian government, responsible, according to him, “A de facto humanitarian blockade” around Tigray. In the Northern Province, part of the population is now exposed to famine.
While emissaries, especially from the United States and from the African Union, have met the various belligerents in Addis Ababa, in Makale, the capital of Tigray, and in Kenya in Nairobi in recent days, the prospects for peace seem to be s’ remove. According to a diplomatic source, the two sides still do not agree on the preconditions for a ceasefire. On Monday, the chief of political affairs of the United Nations, Rosemary DiCarlo, noted in New York: “The risk of a generalized civil war in Ethiopia has never been more real than it is now. “
On Tuesday, the British embassy called on its nationals to leave Ethiopia, as the United States and several other countries had already done. Washington also ordered the departure of its non-essential diplomats this weekend. At the end of the morning, we learned that 72 WFP drivers had been detained in the north of the country.