Report: ‘Ethnic cleansing’ seen in Ethiopia’s Tigray
KAMPALA, Uganda – Widespread abuses against civilians in the western part of Ethiopia's embattled Tigray region amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have charged in a new report.
The crimes were perpetrated by security officials and civilian authorities from the neighboring Amhara region, sometimes “with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopian federal forces,” the rights groups say in the report released Wednesday.
The abuses are “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Tigrayan civilian population that amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes,” the report says.
Ethiopian federal authorities strongly deny allegations they have deliberately targeted Tigrayans for violent attacks. They said at the outbreak of the war in November 2020 that their objective was to disarm the rebellious leaders of Tigray.
Ethiopian authorities said Wednesday that they are “carefully examining” allegations in the rights groups' report. While the report has “ideas that are not useful for any peace effort, the government will reaffirm its determination to investigate all human rights violations and make public the results,” said a statement from the Government Communication Service.
The report, the result of a monthslong investigation including more than 400 interviews, charges that hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans have been forced to leave their homes in a violent campaign of unlawful killings, sexual assaults, mass arbitrary detentions, livestock pillaging, and the denial of humanitarian assistance.
Widespread atrocities have been reported in the Tigray war, with Ethiopian government troops and their allies, including troops from neighboring Eritrea, facing most of the charges.
Fighters loyal to the party of Tigray's leaders – the Tigray People's
Liberation Front, or TPLF – also have been accused of committing abuses as the war spread into neighboring regions. Fighters affiliated with the TPLF deliberately killed dozens of people, gang-raped dozens of women and pillaged property for a period of several weeks last year in Amhara region, Amnesty said in a report released in February.
The new report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International focuses on attacks targeting Tigrayans in western Tigray and describes them as “ethnic cleansing,” a term that refers to forcing a population from a region through expulsions and other violence, often including killings and rapes.
Publicly displayed signs in several towns across western Tigray urged Tigrayans to leave, and local officials in meetings discussed plans to remove Tigrayans, according to the report. Pamphlets appeared to give Tigrayans urgent ultimatums to leave or be killed, the report says.
“They kept saying every night, ‘We will kill you … Go out of the area,' ” said one woman from the town of Baeker, speaking of threats she faced from an Amhara militia group, according to the report.
The new report corroborates reporting by The Associated Press on atrocities in the war, which affects 6 million people in Tigray alone.