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COVID-19 AS A WEAPON: the Ahmed Regime’s Style of Genocide
Isaac M. 12-27-2021
It is now an open-secrete that the Ethiopian, Eritrean and Amhara (EEA) allied forces and their foreign backers have used rape, starvation and a siege of the Tigray population as weapons. Despite their attempt to shift the blame to victims of their crimes, it is well-documented that they have perpetrated war crimes and crimes against humanity in Tigray and elsewhere against Tigrayans.
As the Guardian rightly alarmed the world, however, what the EEA allied forces are doing amounts to genocide against the Tigrayan ethnic group as well. The crime of genocide can be committed through bullets, starvation, enforced transfer of populations, including children and by causing serious physical and mental harm on an ethnic group. Most importantly, ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’ constitutes this crime of crimes.
In addition to evicting over a million Tigrayans from western Tigray, the massacring of innocent Tigrayans in over 260 cases of extrajudicial killings some of which in front of aid workers, the mass rape and destruction of historic and cultural sites in Tigray, and their open intention to eradicate Tigrayans as told by state officials to Pekka Haavisto, former EU envoy to Ethiopia and by the mouthpieces of the Ethiopian regime such as Deacon Daniel Kibret and Andragachew Tsige, one of their modus sopranid of destroying Tigrayans in whole in part for the last couple of weeks (and months) have been elevated to putting tens of thousands of civilians in concentration camps en masse.
While the regime’s Human Rights Commission and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated the arrests at few hundreds or up to a thousand respectively, UN officials told the Human Rights Council recent session the illegal detention of 6-7 thousand Tigrayans in Addis Ababa. The truth is that tens of thousands of Tigrayans have been detained in Addis Ababa and elsewhere simply because they belong to the Tigray ethnic group. These detainees include the elderly, women, children and people with serious health predicament.
These Tigrayans who are levelled as ‘junta’ or supporters of ‘the junta’, similar to the various agitative levelling of the Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide and the Serbs during the Yugoslavia genocide, have been held in appalling conditions. As they are held in overcrowded police stations, administrative buildings, business compounds and the likes. Some of these facilities have housed over 1500 people. There is no sufficient toilet and sanitation facilities and potable water provision within.
Some of these detainees are lucky as their families bring them food once a week and see them from distance, while thousands have been detained in communicado or their whereabouts are not known. Some prominent Tigrayans, including academics, medical doctors and journalists have been subjected to enforced disappearance, and their loved ones do not know their whereabouts.
There are deplorable news coming from some of the detention facilities. Almost all detainees of some Addis Ababa facilities have contracted Covid-19, and most likely the Omicron variant. While countries of the global north and several responsible regimes of the global south are investing in vaccines and Covid-19 treatment and enact laws and regulation to ensure the safety of their citizens through various preventive regulations and guidelines, the Ethiopian regime, in collaboration with its partners in-crime have deliberately exposed the Tigray ethnic group to Covid-19 by running mass detention centres without any regard to their health and safety. Each life lost, human organ affected and mental illness under such circumstances would add to the genocidal deeds of the Abiy regime. There is no excuse, including a state of emergency, for such mass arrests and poor detention facility in a situation of global pandemic.
What the regime in Addis is doing cannot be seen in isolation; they have banned medical supplies to Tigray, with the intention of depriving the population the basic necessities, including medicine, food, water, banking and telephone services.
However, as the Abiy regime is using Covid-19 as a means of genocide and ethnic cleansing which is unheard of in other parts of the world, the United Nations, its various agencies and responsible world powers, must:
1. Expressly condemn the collective punishment of Tigrayans, including the deliberate (or reckless) exposure of tens of thousands of Tigrayans to Covid-19; 2. Exert pressure on the regime to release all Tigrayans, including the 17 thousand former police and military officers, without any condition; 3. Urge the authorities in Addis to open up the detention facilities to UN and humanitarian personnel for purposes of monitoring, verifying and urgently assisting those who are in need; 4. Ask the regime to disclose the whereabouts of those who have been subject to enforced disappearances; and
5. Stop the mass detention and exposing the community to the pandemic without a delay as this, taken into account with the other crimes committed against Tigrayans, amounts to crimes against humanity, genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The UN, its Secretary General and world powers have either miserably failed to protect Tigrayan civilians, or some of them are condoning and backing the on-going crimes against the Tigrayan ethnic group. This great shame must be reversed before it is too late.
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