The Ethiopian National Defense Forces are carting away young people, mostly men, from Lalibela—they’re suspected of backing Fano.
They’re arresting merchants in the town—suspected of financially helping Fano.
One of the holiest places in Ethiopia is now a de facto occupied town, and the occupiers are the soldiers who are supposed to protect them.
There’s no transportation of goods, so commerce is at a virtual standstill, and nobody is allowed to leave. To go to the market for shopping is an empty gesture. “The people are afraid that the ENDF soldiers will cause problems to the churches,” says one source. They presume that the soldiers throwing their weight around town are the same kind that bullied Orthodox Christians in Addis Ababa and other locales.
“Even yesterday, they take more and more young people away,” says the source. But nobody knows where exactly the arrested individuals are taken… or if they’re still alive.
None of this, however, seems to merit the attention of the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia for its latest report and news conference. Reading out their conclusions in monotone, the three experts paid passing lip service to “reports of violations against civilians in the Amhara region,” but devoted much of their time at today’s news conference to Tigray. Right from the start you could tell the game was rigged by the experts referring to Welkait as “Western Tigray.”
The report itself is a bad joke. While devoting the equivalent of two whole pages to Tigray, it gives only four brief paragraphs to “serious violations” perpetrated against Amhara for its time frame.
The Afar get even less in this report, with only two paragraphs, and their descriptions are lumped together with the section for Amhara.
Predictably, the report makes ENDF, EDF, Fano, Amhara Special Forces and even Afar Special Forces the villains for “human rights violations” in its Legal Findings but doesn’t even name the TPLF when it states that “Tigrayan and allied fighters… committed war crimes in Amhara region between July and December 2021 and in Afar Region between November 2021 and March 2022. The Commission finds these to be the war crimes of violence to life and person; outrages upon personal dignity; intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population; pillage; rape; sexual slavery; and sexual violence.”
It merely goes back in the next paragraph to repeating accusations against Ethiopian, Amhara, and Afar forces.
(To read the full articale at Jeff Propulsion) https://jeffpropulsion.substack.com/p/the-un-would-like-to-assure-you-it
Source: Jeff Propulsion by Jeff Pearce
