Ethiopia’s president said on Tuesday that atrocities had occurred in Tigray, his first public admission of possible war crimes in the country’s northern region, where fighting continues as government soldiers chase down the country’s fugitive leaders.
In an address to lawmakers in Addis Ababa, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said, “Reports suggest that atrocities have been perpetrated in the Tigray region.”
In the local Amharic language, Abiy described war as a “nasty thing.” “We are aware of the devastation that this war has wreaked.” Even though he quoted “propaganda of exaggeration” by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the once-dominant party whose leaders questioned Abiy’s legitimacy after the postponement of elections last year, he said soldiers who raped women or committed other war crimes would be held accountable.
Abiy spoke as the humanitarian situation in the troubled region, which is home to 6 million people, continues to worsen.
Some of the Tigray war violations have been labeled “ethnic cleansing” by the U.S., which Ethiopian officials have rejected as baseless. It has also asked Eritrean troops fighting alongside Ethiopian government forces in Tigray to withdraw.
The Ethiopian prime minister, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for his attempts to bring Eritrea and Ethiopia closer together, is under pressure to end the conflict in Tigray and launch an international investigation into suspected war crimes, preferably headed by the United Nations. Critics of the government argue that an ongoing federal investigation is insufficient because the government cannot successfully investigate itself.
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Last week, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet’s spokeswoman in Geneva, Rupert Colville, told The Associated Press that Ethiopia’s Human Rights Commission had requested to join her office in a “joint inquiry into accusations of serious human rights abuses by all sides” in Tigray.
The Associated Press and Amnesty International have published reports detailing Ethiopian and allied forces’ crimes against Tigray inhabitants.
However, Abiy claimed in his Tuesday address, which included questions from lawmakers, that fighters loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front had carried out a massacre in Mai Kadra. “However, it is not receiving enough attention,” he said of the massacre, which he called “the worst” in the conflict.
The conflict in Tigray began in November when Abiy dispatched government forces to the area in response to an assault on federal military facilities there. The federal army is now on the lookout for the fugitive regional officials, who are said to have fled to Tigray’s remote mountainous regions.
While the region faced problems such as a devastating locust invasion and the COVID-19 pandemic, Abiy accused Tigray’s leaders of drumming up “a war story.” According to a transcript of his remarks posted on Twitter by the prime minister’s office, he said, “This was misguided and untimely arrogance.”
Sen. Chris Coons was deployed to Ethiopia by President Joe Biden last week to express the administration’s “grave concerns” about the escalating humanitarian crisis and human rights violations in Tigray, as well as the danger of wider instability in the Horn of Africa. The visit of Coons over the weekend was kept under wraps.
Humanitarian officials have expressed concern that a rising number of people in Tigray may be starving to death. The fighting broke out just as the harvest was about to begin in the predominantly agricultural area, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes. Witnesses have reported extensive looting as well as crop burns by Eritrean soldiers.
