I am writing to make an urgent appeal to your office to strongly denounce the mass detentions of Tigrayans in Addis Ababa and other parts of Ethiopia and press Mr. Abiy Ahmed’s government to stop this practice immediately.
I do not doubt the UN’s knowledge of the year-long war of genocide and the atrocities committed on the people of Tigray by the allied forces of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Amhara region. Since the forces were driven off much of Tigray about four months ago, these atrocities are continuing in western Tigray and in minority communities bordering Eritrea which are still occupied by these forces. Tigray continues to be under humanitarian siege by the Abiy government which has shut down all utilities.
The government of Mr. Abiy has declared a state of emergency throughout Ethiopia and is using this declaration to detain any Tigrayan in all of Ethiopia. The federal government and the Amhara regional Administration have also called upon ordinary Ethiopians to use whatever weapon they have including knives and machetes, and turn on civilian Tigrayans living throughout Ethiopia, inciting bloodshed. The Amhara government on October 31, 2021, issued a nine-point pronouncement calling everyone and everything to be mobilized to continue the war they started a year ago.
Clearly, the objective of these calls and declarations, as many of the Amhara and Ethiopian officials have been telling their constituents, is designed to perpetuate the ethnic cleansing and other atrocities its forces have been committing in western Tigray, which the regional government still occupies.