Isaias and Abiy’s Crocodile Tears

Fanos Haki 29.07.21

The Isaias, Amhara and Abiy partners in crime and their cronies (represented here by dictators Isaias and Abiy) are fully engaged in a well-coordinated campaign of charging the Tigray Defence Forces (TDF) of enlisting children in their war effort, abusing Eritrean refugees and hindering humanitarian aid to Tigray. The two rogue regimes, the Amhara extremist elite and their diaspora backers have conducted demonstrations, tweeter and other social media campaigns to shift the blame to Tigray, but their efforts were to no avail.

The reason is not only because Tigray does not enlist children, abuse refugees and hinder aid delivery into the people of Tigray, but the international community is not prepared to accommodate such politically motivated and cheap charges from ethnic cleansers and genocidal forces.

Forcing children under the age of 18 to participate in war is morally and legally wrong. Children under the age of 15 must not be enlisted and used as combatants whether or not they volunteer to participate in war too. The world knows that the Isaias regime enlists and enslaves children under the age of 18 as part of its compulsory national military service. There are a dozen of UN, EU and other rights groups’ reports which confirm this. Similarly, the Abiy regime has resorted to deploying children in its recent endeavour to deter the advancement of TDF to central Ethiopia. The captives that have been shown in some media outlets support this fact.

In contrast, the TDF does neither forcibly recruit anyone under the age of 18 nor enlist those who are under the age of 15. International media outlets have confirmed this through their interviews of the Tigray youth. After all, the TDF is a popular force that is defending the people of Tigray from ethnic cleansing, genocide, foreign aggression and grave war crimes.

Even if we endorse the accusations against the TDF for argument’s sake, a question is in order whether the Eritrean, federal and Amhara forces and their backers have a moral ground to criticise and accuse the TDF regarding abusing children. In other words, are they accusing the TDF because they have empathy to (Tigray) children?

The answer is certainly to the negative. The Abiy, Isaias and Demeke/Agejew forces have summarily executed children without mercy while they were in control of Tigray. They murdered children in the Axum, Mahbere-dego, Mariam-danglat, Adi-grat, Zalambesa, Adi-europe, etc massacres. The killing of male children in particular was instigated by a policy of the two regimes and their Amhara collaborators as a long-term strategy of weakening the Tigray society at large.

Tigray children as young as two years olds have been cruelly killed by all these forces. The Eritrean, federal and Amhara forces have also indiscriminately shelled civilian houses in almost all cities, towns and villages of Tigray where hundreds of children have been murdered and maimed. Some have sustained life-time disability, including two leg and hand amputation.

Most horrific is the violent gang and individual rapes perpetrated by the Eritrean, federal and Amhara forces on thousands of Tigray girls. Girls as young as 8 years old have been victims of such systemic use of sexual violence as a weapon.

Such direct attacks against Tigrayan children and babies have been documented and widely reported in western Tigray. Children have been massacred by machetes and sticks and guns in several places of the region. Even today, the Amhara Fanos are committing such crimes in places such as Humora and other parts of western Tigray. This went to the extent of forcibly eviting children and their families to Eritrea.

Similarly, the deliberately faked charge that the TDF hindered humanitarian convey destined to Tigray in the Afar region of Ethiopia further exposes the evil deeds of the three forces and their supporters.

There is no question that hindering humanitarian assistance is prohibited by international humanitarian law and constitutes a very serious war crime. This applies to civil wars or international conflicts. The TDF has no record of violating such a norm. The UN and other humanitarian actors have reported time and again that access to humanitarian assistance has greatly improved in Tigray since the TDF evicted the invading forces from most parts of Tigray and that the Tigray authorities are cooperating with them.

In contrast, the Eritrean, Amhara and federal forces are best known for hindering, diverting and sabotaging humanitarian delivery in Tigray; they also have a record of targeting aid workers, including UN agencies and demolishing critical infrastructure such as the Tekeze dam that are critical for aid delivery. They put Tigray under siege so that people would starve and submit to their rule. Their use of starvation as a weapon is widely endorsed by many countries, inter-governmental organisations, rights groups, the international media and scholars.

Their use of starvation as a weapon have resulted in the malnutrition of hundreds of thousands of Tigray children, as expressly reiterated by UNICEF and other UN agencies. It is expected, unless the situation changes very soon for the better, that tens of thousands of children will die as a result of the siege Tigray is under by the Abiy, Isaias and Amhara leaders. It has to be mentioned that the Abiy regime has barred the delivery of medicine to Tigray.

While starving tens of thousands of Tigray children to death through a deliberate policy of using starvation as a means of warfare, the Ethiopia, Eritrean and Amhara propaganda machines are shamefully expecting the international community to listen to their fake cry and a coordinated campaign against the Tigray forces and authorities regarding Tigray children.

It would be a mistake not to mention the brutal policy and practice of the Abiy regime pursued against the Tigrayans youth, including children, who have just returned from Saudi Arabia. Hundreds of them have been detained as part of the ethnic profiling campaign of the regime and their murder has been reported in the Afar region.  It is horrific to report that some of these returnees have been displayed in the regime’s media as TDF child soldiers. The same crime has been committed against Tigrayan children who have been ethnically profiled and arrested from Addis Ababa and other cities of Ethiopia. They were displayed on state tv as child soldiers while taken from their homes, the streets and caffes of Ethiopian cities.

By the same token, Tigray has been home to thousands of Eritrean refugees for the last 20 or years. Those who fled the brutal regime of Afewerki and its indefinite and compulsory military service have been treated humanely and as brothers and  sisters by the people of Tigray.

By contrast, as soon as the Eritrean regime entered the Eritrean refugee camps in Tigray in 2020, it forcibly abducted tens of thousands of the Eritrean refugees, murdered some of them, killed aid workers and destroyed and vandalised the refugee camps contrary to the UN Refugee Convention 1950.  The Abiy regime, Amhara leaders and their backers were complicit either by facilitating or condoning such crimes.  These are well-known globally.

In a word, Tigrayans, their friends and the international community won’t forget such heinous crimes that are being committed against Tigrayan children in the warzone and in other parts of Ethiopia. The extremist Ethiopian/Eritrean diaspora have backed and condoned the atrocities, rapes and starvation perpetrated in Tigray.  It is not surprising, therefore, that the noise that the criminals and their internal and diaspora supports are making regarding Tigrayan children, humanitarian assistance and Eritrean refugees, are perceived by the world community as Abiy/Isaias/Demeke and their cronies’ crocodile tears.  These partners in crime must therefore be either fully defeated by force or compelled to accept a peaceful resolution of the war. Eventually, they have to face justice for their monstruous crimes.