Ethnic cleansing in western Tigray included discriminatory aid denial

Newly appointed Amhara and Walqayte authorities in western Tigray have restricted or blocked access to available humanitarian aid to Tigrayan populations over the course of the ongoing conflict in northern Ethiopia, according to a report published Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. This was part of an overall campaign of ethnic cleansing, it said.

The report — which was based on 427 interviews conducted between December 2020 and March 2022 — found the newly appointed local authorities deliberately denied access to aid to Tigrayans, which had been distributed to other residents in the area.

“Our research shows how Tigrayans who were trying to access what assistance was being distributed were being discriminated against. Aid was instrumentalized, and this contributed to this campaign of ethnic cleansing,” Laetitia Bader, Horn of Africa director at Human Rights Watch, told Devex.

The report said regional authorities in western Tigray “imposed discriminatory rules that deny Tigrayans basic services and access to humanitarian aid.”

“When there is aid, it is up to the administration to call people, and they didn’t call us [Tigrayans],” a driver in the town of Rawyan in western Tigray is reported to have said. “Tigrayans were starving. When we asked for food, we were told we were ‘junta.’ The Fanos and Amhara Special Forces would say, ‘Tigrayans ate for 27 years and that’s enough.’” Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has derogatively referred to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front as “junta” — a term used to describe a group that takes over power by force — along with other terms like weed, cancer, and disease.

The report also found civilian authorities, Amhara regional security forces, with the consent and possible participation of Ethiopian forces, “committed numerous grave abuses as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Tigrayan civilian population that amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes. These crimes include murder, enforced disappearances, torture, deportation or forcible transfer, rape, sexual slavery and other sexual violence, persecution, unlawful imprisonment, possible extermination, and other inhumane acts.”

The conflict in Tigray versus western Tigray has taken on different forms over the past 17 months. Before the conflict, there were longstanding, mounting tensions in western Tigray over highly contested boundaries, which resulted in mainly Tigray regional forces committing abuses against ethnic Amhara and Walqaytes residents, who historically inhabited the highland areas of western Tigray.

“The outbreak of conflict, in November 2020, brought these longstanding and unaddressed grievances to the fore: Amhara regional forces, along with Ethiopian federal forces, seized these territories and displaced Tigrayan civilians in a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign,” the report said.

Amhara regional authorities took over administration of the area during the conflict, which still remains under their authority.

“The newly appointed authorities imposed a regime of ethnically targeted restrictions on movement and access to farmland, as well as on speaking Tigrinya — the local language of Tigrayans,” according to the report.  

The report documents that over the course of the conflict, even when there were aid deliveries in western Tigray, they weren’t reaching areas heavily populated by Tigrayans. This was corroborated by a report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, published in March 2021.  

Problematic from the start

Aid workers and donor governments said the humanitarian response at the onset of the war, particularly from the U.N., was “slow and disorganized,” according to the report. Aid groups also followed the federal government’s lead in the structuring of their humanitarian responses, despite the government's role as a key party to the conflict.

“Yes, we had a great relationship with the government on development, on drought [response]. But now, we needed to have a different conversation and dialogue because you are dealing with a government that is an active party to the conflict,” one aid worker is reported to have said.

During those early days, the federal Ethiopian government’s National Disaster Risk Management Commission, the U.S. Agency for International Development-funded Joint Emergency Operation Program, and the World Food Programme divided the region up in terms of where the different groups would distribute food aid. The federal government’s NDRMC was given the responsibility of distributing food in western Tigray.

While western Tigray is a fertile area, Tigrayan communities are now highly dependent on food aid for survival because Ethiopian forces, Amhara special forces, Fano militias, and Eritrean military forces pillaged homes, businesses, crops, and livestock.

As has been the case across broader Tigray, aid organizations in western Tigray have “faced bureaucratic restrictions, harassment, and obstruction by armed forces and groups.”

Because of all of this, international humanitarian presence has been minimal in western Tigray which is “limiting independent monitoring of the humanitarian and human rights situation and neglecting the protection role that a strong humanitarian presence can provide.”

In January 2021, for example, Amhara security forces in western Tigray denied aid agencies access to western Tigray despite federal government permissions. Regional authorities did not allow access for a U.N. interagency assessment to take place until March 2021, which reported there was a lack of reliable data on the aid assistance received “such as information on beneficiaries covered, not covered and the estimated number of those still in need.”

Many people reported they did not receive any food from the government’s distribution, with an unidentified local authority reporting in June 2021 to an assessment mission that no food aid was distributed in western Tigray since February 2021.

Along with forced expulsions, the lack of access to food, and limited access to health care, among the other abuses, led many Tigrayans to flee western Tigray.

"From what we understand there is still no international aid going into western Tigray but there is very little oversight and information as to how much [federal government] assistance is in fact going in,” Bader said.

The federal government announced a humanitarian truce in Tigray in March to allow humanitarian aid to flow into Tigray. Following this, limited amounts of aid have entered Tigray, but there are calls for these deliveries to be scaled up drastically to meet the widespread, urgent humanitarian crisis.

The organizations that published the report have called for an African Union-led peacekeeping mission, which would work to facilitate humanitarian access into western Tigray.

“We're calling for a scale up of international humanitarian assistance but really underlining the need for it to be protection-led, independent, and for there to be significant oversight mechanisms,” Bader said.