KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) – Ethiopia’s leader said on Tuesday that atrocities had been reported in Tigray, his first public acknowledgment of possible war crimes in the country’s northern region, where fighting continues as government troops hunt down his fleeing leaders.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed also acknowledged, after repeated denials by authorities, that troops were from neighboring Eritrea to Tigray, where their presence had inflicted ‘damage’ on the residents of the region.
“Reports indicate that atrocities have been committed in the Tigray region,” Abiy said in a speech to lawmakers in the capital, Addis Ababa, on Tuesday.
War is a ‘nasty thing’, he said, speaking the local Amharic language. “We know the devastation caused by this war.” He said soldiers who raped women or committed other crimes would be held accountable, although he called “propaganda of exaggeration” by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the once dominant party whose leaders challenged Abiy’s legitimacy after the postponement of the election last year.
Abiy said they crossed the border and crossed Tigray and “caused damage to our people … We will not accept it.”
He suggested that the Eritrean soldiers were not there with his blessing. “The argument put forward by the Eritrean government in this regard is that it is a national security issue because Ethiopian troops are behind other (Tigrayan) forces elsewhere, and therefore they want to continue to control border areas,” he said. “But they told us they were not prepared to stay as long as we controlled the trenches along the border.”
Abiy spoke as concerns continued about the humanitarian situation in the troubled region where 6 million of the more than 110 million people live in Ethiopia. Authorities have not yet named a death toll in the war, but a trio of opposition groups in Tigray say more than 50,000 was killed.
The United States characterized some abuses in the Tigray War as ‘ethnic cleansing’, which was declared unfounded by Ethiopian authorities. It also encouraged Eritrean troops fighting on the side of Ethiopian government forces to withdraw from Tigray.
The Ethiopian prime minister, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for his efforts to make peace with Eritrea, is being put under pressure to end the conflict in Tigray, as well as to launch an international inquiry into alleged war crimes. by the United Nations. According to critics of the government, an ongoing federal investigation is simply not enough because the government is unable to investigate itself effectively.
Rupert Colville, Geneva’s UN human rights spokeswoman Michelle Bachelet in Geneva, told The Associated Press last week that she had asked the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission to join her office in a “joint inquiry into allegations of serious human rights violations by all sides. ”In Tigray.
The reports of atrocities by Ethiopian and allied forces against Tigray residents were set out in reports by The Associated Press and by Amnesty International.
But Abiy said in the speech on Tuesday, which includes answering questions from lawmakers, that fighters loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front committed a massacre in the city of Mai Kadra. “But it is not getting enough attention,” he said of the massacre, describing it as “the worst” in the conflict.
The Tigray conflict began in November, when Abiy sent government troops to the region following an attack there on federal military facilities. The federal military is now hunting down the fleeing regional leaders, who have reportedly retreated into Tigray’s remote mountainous areas.
Abiy accuses Tigray’s leaders of damming up a war narrative while facing the area with challenges such as a devastating invasion of locusts and the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was misplaced and untimely arrogance,” he said. a transcript of his comments posted on Twitter by the prime minister’s office.
President Joe Biden last week sent Senate Chris Coons to Ethiopia to express the government’s “serious concern” over the growing humanitarian crisis and human rights violations in Tigray, and the risk of broader instability in the Horn of Africa. Details of Coons’ weekend visit have not been released.
Humanitarian officials have warned that a growing number of people in Tigray will go hungry. The fighting broke out on the verge of the harvest in the largely agricultural area and an innumerable number of people fled their homes. Witnesses described the widespread looting by Eritrean soldiers as well as the burning of crops.