Ethiopia’s Leader Vows to ‘Bury This Enemy,’ Even as Rebels Advance

NAIROBI, Kenya – As rebel fighters approached the capital on Wednesday, Ethiopia’s embattled leader appealed to its soldiers to defend the city “with our blood,” a populous country.

“We will sacrifice our blood and bones to bury this enemy and to preserve Ethiopia’s dignity and flag,” said Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed at the military headquarters in the capital Addis Ababa, the day after he declared a state of emergency and called on Ethiopians to do so Pick up weapons and repel approaching troops from the northern region of Tigray.

Mr Abiy, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, made his comments when the United Nations’ leading human rights body released a report that provided further evidence of serious human rights abuses by all sides in the year-old conflict, including civilian massacres, sexual violence and assault on refugees.

Addis Ababa Police continued a wide-ranging raid on ethnic Tigrayans, raiding homes and cafes, and checking ID cards on the street. Authorities claimed to be looking for intruders, but analysts feared the arrests, combined with Mr. Abiy’s heated discussions, could encourage ethnically motivated attacks in the city.

The U.S. embassy advised American citizens in Ethiopia to leave immediately and on Wednesday asked Washington to allow the families of diplomats and non-essential staff to leave voluntarily, said a senior official who was not allowed to speak publicly.

The State Department, concerned about the so-called “expansion of fighting and intercommunal violence” there, said it was sending its envoy from the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, to Ethiopia on Thursday.

Alarm spread in the capital over the weekend after Tigrayan rebels captured two large cities about 160 miles north after weeks of fighting against Ethiopian government forces and allied ethnic Amhara militias.

The Tigrayans have teamed up with a smaller rebel group of the Oromo ethnic group and are preparing a major advance towards Addis Ababa, an Oromos spokesman said on Wednesday.

Mr. Abiy swore to meet them with fire.

“The enemy is digging a deep pit – a pit where Ethiopia will not fall apart, but where they will be buried,” he said during a candlelight ceremony at the military academy celebrated in Tigray a year after the outbreak of war.

International pressure to end the fighting, accompanied by reports of rape, massacre and ethnic cleansing, has completely failed. Efforts to hold even a minimum of accountability for these atrocities have also fallen short, as the United Nations report released on Wednesday shows.

On presenting a document full of troubling testimony from victims and witnesses, United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said it referred to “appalling brutality” in the Tigray War that amounted to war crimes.

But the report of the UN body, which carried out the investigation with a human rights commission of the Ethiopian government, was drawn up under severe government restrictions, which critics said they had forced them to clap their fists. Ms. Bachelet said her team members were intimidated and harassed during their research, and one was expelled for “internal affairs”.

Investigators were unable to visit several locations allegedly suspected of having committed serious violations and did not include statements from 60,000 Ethiopian refugees in camps in Sudan.

The final report continued to say which side had committed the most atrocities, and rights groups protested that they were engaging in false equivalence – apparently the atrocities committed by the Tigray armed forces, mostly in the early weeks of the fight, with equate to a much larger number of serious crimes committed by Ethiopian forces and their allies over the next eight months.

Even so, it was the first official report on the Litany of Horrors of War that erupted in November 2020 after a simmering political feud between Mr Abiy and Tigrayan leaders. After Tigrayan troops attacked a federal base in the region, government troops launched an offensive. They were quickly supported by fighters who crossed the border from Eritrea, the neighboring country to the north.

A woman kidnapped from a bus described that she was raped for 11 days by 23 Eritrean troops who left her for dead. Witnesses said Tigrayans armed with axes and machetes killed 200 ethnic Amhara civilians in western Tigray in two days.

Days later, they said, Amhara fighters came to carry out revenge killings.

An elderly man said he was among 600 Tigraan men led naked through a village by Eritrean troops who mocked and photographed them.

Understand the conflict in Ethiopia

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A year of war. On November 4, 2020, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed began a military campaign in the country’s northern Tigray region in hopes of defeating the Tigray People’s Liberation Front – its toughest political enemy.

Rebels have turned the tide. Despite Abiy’s promise of a swift campaign, the Ethiopian military suffered a heavy defeat in June when it was forced to withdraw from Tigray. Now the fighting is rapidly moving south.

Tigrayan troops approach. In the past few days, Tigrayan rebels have captured two cities near the capital Addis Ababa. The government declared a state of emergency and urged citizens to arm themselves.

No end in sight. President Biden has threatened to impose sanctions on the country to draw the sides to the negotiating table, but the current course of the war could cause the collapse of Ethiopia.

Ms. Bachelet denied that her team was influenced by the Ethiopian government, whose federal human rights organization jointly investigated and drafted the report.

“Of course it’s impartial,” she said. “The report stands on its own. I can say that it was taken very seriously. “

Human Rights Watch welcomed the report but said it was “not an exhaustive account” of the atrocities in Ethiopia and that a more thorough, independent investigation was needed.

While most reports of atrocities in Tigray have focused on Ethiopian and Eritrean troops and their allies, the UN report also points to blatant attacks by the Tigra armed forces.

It described how members of a Nigerian youth group called Samri went door to door in Mai Kadra town in November, slaughtering ethnic Amharas and other minorities, and looting their property.

Although the report does not quantify the extent or proportion of atrocities committed by either side – in other words, those more to blame – Ms Bachelet pointed to Eritrean and Ethiopian troops during a press conference.

The report also said it “cannot confirm” the use of starvation as a weapon of war in Tigray. But other UN organs are loudly criticizing a de facto government blockade that has existed since July, which has largely cut off the food and medicine supplies in a region where 5.2 million people are in urgent need of help and 400,000 are believed to be living under famine.

However, Ms. Bachelet did not hesitate to describe the harsh effects of this blockade – since October 18, aid trucks have not been allowed to enter Tigray, she said. But that only raised the question of why such information was excluded from the report.

Several Western diplomats familiar with the work of the UN-led investigation acknowledged its limits, but hoped it could lay a foundation for future law enforcement.

The report does not identify individual perpetrators, however, and the Ethiopian judicial system has a poor record of solving such cases. Authorities said they had convicted seven soldiers of rape and brought another 20 on trial, Ms. Bachelet said.

However, these procedures are not transparent and do not meet international standards, she added. She said she supports the creation of an international investigative agency for Ethiopia along the lines of those already working on war crimes and atrocities in Syria and Myanmar.

Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed the coverage from Geneva, Simon Marks from Milan and a New York Times employee from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.