UN seeks to investigate rights violations in Ethiopia’s Tigray
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for thorough investigations into possible violations in Ethiopia’s Tigray, a region ridden with a bloody conflict.
“If civilians were deliberately killed by a party or parties to the conflict, these killings would amount to war crimes and there needs to be, as I have stressed previously, independent, impartial, thorough and transparent investigations to establish accountability and ensure justice.”
Those are the remarks made by Michelle Bachelet during a virtual briefing in the Swiss city of Geneva on Tuesday.
The former president of Chile particularly referred to the alleged killing of several hundred people in the northwestern town of Mai Kadra on November 9.
The UN Human Rights Office spokeswoman, Liz Throssell, meanwhile, said her office had been in talks with the Ethiopian government aimed at setting up a team to verify violations as soon as possible.
Some of the incidents of individual killings of civilians, she added, were blamed on the pro-government ‘Fano’ militia from the province of Amhara.
Ethiopia’s army has been fighting the rebellious forces in Tigray for more than six weeks now.
The conflict erupted on November 4, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced the launch of military operations against the regional government, then led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
The prime minister accused the rebels loyal to the TPLF of launching deadly attacks on a pair of federal military camps there.
Thousands of people are believed to have been killed. The conflict is also estimated to have displaced 950,000 people, some 50,000 of whom into Sudan, according to the UN.
Until now, the UN has been monitoring the situation remotely and has obtained some of its information from refugees among the tens of thousands who have fled to Sudan.
Accounts on all sides are difficult to verify because telecommunications links were down for most of the conflict.
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