Two years ago the Ethiopian federal government signed a permanent Cessation of Hostilities Agreement with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, apparently bringing to an end what was at that time significantly the most lethal war of the twenty-first century. It had gone on for two years, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and hundreds of thousands of combatants, and embroiled fighters from at least one neighbouring state – Eritrea. The violence was shocking, and it retrospect it feels almost like a blueprint for later wars – in Ukraine and the Middle East, and of course Sudan:
- Massive numbers of extra judicial executions of civilians, mostly men and boys
- Rapes and sexual enslavement of women and girls of all ages, certainly more than 10,000 and possibly as many as 120,000. This is not the accident of war, but a systematic campaign of what academics have labelled “genocidal rape.”
- There was ethnic cleansing and displacement of large populations – nearly 3 million at one point;
- There was the mass detention, torture and expropriation of Tigrayans well beyond the conflict arena: former UN peacekeepers remain stuck in neighbouring Sudan now at risk from another brutal civil war.
- There has been indiscriminate aerial bombardment – by drones, artillery and aircraft – including the notorious double-tap attacks on schools, refugee centres, hospitals, and homes, that targeted rescuers of the original victims
- And for months and months of siege there was the destruction and withholding of resources necessary for survival including food aid – in short, deliberate starvation of a particularly vulnerable civilian population.
Two years later it is an achievement that the guns have mostly stayed silent in Tigray. But key elements of the situation have not been resolved as expected.
- More than three quarters of a million remain displaced from their homes, whilst new reports of enslavement and immiseration leak out from the occupied areas
- Amhara militia and Eritrean forces continue to occupy large swathes of what is constitutionally Tigrayan territory despite government commitments to reverse this
- Economic and humanitarian support is at pitiful levels, and reconstruction barely talked of
- Women and girls remain fearful to seek medical assistance amidst ongoing insecurity, and strong taboos that stigmatise rape victims as themselves sinful
- And one clinic close to the occupied areas in the northeast of Tigray, where the minority Erob community lives under ongoing Eritrean occupation, still reports that between 15 and 20 women daily continue to seek help after being raped.
The civilian population in Tigray is still held in limbo: subject to a war of attrition – brutalisation by other means. The abuses in the Tigray war (2020-2022) were extreme and egregious. They have been carefully documented by a UN Commission of Human Rights Experts in a series of unreadable reports. But in October last year, the UN Human Rights Council (including the UK) succumbed to Ethiopian pressure to terminate the mandate of the commission, despite its pleas to be allowed to continue its work. This summer, eminent lawyers working for the New Lines Institute, including Baroness Kennedy, reported reasonable grounds, on the basis of available evidence, to conclude that a genocide may have been committed in Tigray – a conclusion which should require additional investigation by states including the United Kingdom.
But the horror in Ethiopia didn’t start and end with Tigray. Tigray can be seen as only the worst one of a series of three consecutive and ongoing acts of brutality conducted by this Ethiopian government against its political enemies – and indiscriminately targeting those civilian populations thought to support them.
Already in January 2019, the Ethiopian army was using the airforce against so-called rebels in western Oromia. Large areas of this massive and wealthy region have been consumed with violence ever since – a murky, brutal and bloody campaign, marked by persistent reports of ‘false flag’ attacks – which continued even as the Ethiopian PM won the Nobel Peace Prize later in 2019. Most recently, the Ethiopian government’s own human rights commission has confirmed that Oromo children and young people are being kidnapped for ransom, and illegally press ganged into the military.
And in the summer of 2023, a few months after the signing of the Tigray agreement, and as the violence in Oromia continued into a fifth year, the Ethiopian government’s third act – its third campaign of brutality – began to engulf the large region of Amhara. Resistance by armed militia in Amhara brought down many of the same brutal – and illegal – military tactics on the civilian population. They have been strafed by drones in large numbers (hundreds in just the last few weeks), slaughtered by military forces going house to house, and (as reports increasingly now indicate) also raped in significant numbers. One could suggest that the war in Amhara – which has clearly become more violent in the last two months – is akin to a slow-motion version of the utter brutality wreaked in Tigray.
We must lobby our government to do more to bring this awful violence to a real and sustainable end. Ethiopia remains an important recipient of British aid, including a very large economic support package approved this year. The Ethiopian Prime Minister is a protegé of the very Gulf actors with whom our own Prime Minister has been meeting this week. Our relations with Ethiopia are too close to “business as usual” and that is often justified as because the country is too big to fail: well, my message to you to tonight is that it is failing, and we need to think harder about how to work differently with Ethiopia.
As we watch with horror the spread of unconscionable violence across the Middle East, we should be aware that just across the Red Sea, Ethiopia, the lynchpin of the Horn of Africa, is also still waging war on its citizens, even as neighbouring Sudan’s horror continues. If we neglect to push for peace, to push for accountability, we are complicit in entrenching impunity. Ethiopians – women, men, girls and boys – deserve better from us. Friends, you have heard it this evening. Peace and above all justice is what they want. I urge you be creative in finding ways to keep the desperate needs of Tigray, of Ethiopia and of the Horn before parliament.
Sarah Vaughan, 9 December 2024.
