An ethnically motivated detention campaign largely targeting Ethiopians of Tigrayan descent threatens to further unravel Africa’s second-most populous country a year into a civil war.
The
family was startled awake by a loud bang in the middle of the night on the gate
of their home on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
Police
officers barged in without a warrant, ransacking the living room and looking
under the beds. They seized three members of the family, among them a
76-year-old, one-legged amputee yanked from bed while his sons begged to go in
his place.
“They
showed him no mercy even after he cried, ‘I am disabled and diabetic,’” said
the man’s nephew, Kirubel, who would give only his first name for fear of
reprisals.
The
family is among hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Ethiopians belonging to the
Tigrayan ethnic group who have been rounded up and detained in the capital and
beyond in recent weeks.
For
the past year, Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, has been waging a grisly
war against Tigrayan rebels in the country’s northernmost region. Tigrayans had
dominated the Ethiopian government and army for decades until Mr. Abiy took
power in 2018 and sidelined their leaders. But since the war began, the
Tigrayans have routed the Ethiopian army in Tigray, swept south, recently
captured two strategic towns and threatened to advance toward the capital.
On
Nov. 2, the government declared a state of emergency, and the resulting
roundups have swept up anyone of Tigrayan descent, many of whom had no ties to
the rebels or even affinity for them. They were not just young men and women,
but also mothers with children and the elderly, according to human rights
advocates and interviews with nearly a dozen family members and friends of
detainees.
They
have been seized off the streets, in their homes and even in workplaces —
including banks, schools and shopping centers — and taken to overcrowded cells
in police stations and detention facilities.
Tigrayans
have been targeted by the police based on a mix of hints: their surnames,
details listed on identification cards and drivers licenses, even the way they speak
Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia.
The
campaign of arrests, which has also been aimed at members of some other ethnic
groups, has swept up people in cities across the country, according to
information provided by the police, rights groups and opposition parties. At
least 10 United Nations staff members and 34 subcontracted drivers also have
been seized.
“The
state of emergency in force in Ethiopia risks compounding an already very
serious human rights and humanitarian situation in the country,” the top U.N.
human rights official, Michelle Bachelet, said Tuesday through a spokeswoman.
“Its provisions are extremely broad, with vague prohibitions going as far as
encompassing ‘indirect moral’ support for what the government has labeled
‘terrorist groups.’”
The
ethnically motivated detentions come amid a significant rise in online hate
speech, which is only adding fuel to the civil war tearing apart Africa’s
second-most populous nation. Reports of massacres, ethnic cleansing and
widespread sexual assault by all sides in the conflict have undermined the
vision of Ethiopian unity that Mr. Abiy, the prime minister and a Nobel Peace
Prize laureate, promised when he rose to power more than three years ago.
The
war between Ethiopian federal forces and their allies and Tigrayan rebel
fighters has left thousands of people dead, at least 400,000 living in
famine-like conditions and millions displaced. It risks engulfing the whole of
Ethiopia and the wider Horn of Africa.
Mr.
Abiy’s determination to prosecute the war seems to have been only hardened by
economic threats from the Biden administration, which has imposed sanctions on
his military allies in neighboring Eritrea and suspended Ethiopia from
duty-free access to the U.S. market.
Secretary
of State Antony J. Blinken, who is traveling to Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal this
week, has expressed worry that Ethiopia could “implode.”
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