Young children are among those being held amid a new wave of ethnic Tigray detentions suspected of supporting Tigray forces in Ethiopia’s growing war, a detainee said, while witnesses and a human rights watchdog described new disappearances in recent weeks.
In an interview with the Associated Press (AP) on a hidden phone, described one of the detained gloomy conditions in which more than 700 soldiers in Tigrayan, their families and pensioners are being held in a camp in Ethiopia’s Oromia region.
He readily gave his military ID number but spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation, saying non-combatants died, two prisoners died after being beaten and another died from a lack of medication for an existing condition.
“They call us cancer and tell us they will destroy us,” the detainee said, describing how military personnel monitoring the detainees threatened to shoot “each of you” if anyone tried to escape.
New prisoners continue to arrive, he said, and they have not appeared in court. He listed five children in custody who are under three years old. His story reveals worse conditions than those described in AP interviews with more than a dozen prisoners and their families earlier this year before rising Tigray forces recaptured much of the Tigray region in June and the Ethiopian military withdrew. His account could not be verified because Ethiopian authorities have not granted the press access to detention facilities.
A spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that the group began visiting prisoners in July, months after becoming aware of them, but she could not comment on the conditions under which they are being held.
What began as a political dispute between current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Tigray regional leaders who dominated the Ethiopian government for nearly three decades has killed thousands of people since the fighting began in November.
The war has spread to Ethiopia’s Amhara and Afar regions in recent weeks, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of people in the Tigray region are still separated from the world, and some have started starving to death.
The Ethiopian government, on the defensive, last week urged all citizens to stop the Tigray forces “once and for all”, while urging people to look for suspicious collaborators. Although the government has repeatedly said it is targeting Tigray forces and not ordinary Tigray civilians, many testimonies claim otherwise.
An Ethiopian military spokesman, Colonel Getinet Adane, did not respond to a request for comment on the detainee’s account or a question as to why small children were being held. Outside the military, thousands of ordinary Tigrayans have been targeted.
In a new report on Wednesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that Ethiopian authorities have carried out “rampant arbitrary arrests and forced disappearances” of Tigrayans in the capital Addis Ababa since the stunning turnaround in the war in June, when Ethiopia withdrew its troops from Tigray and announced a unilateral ceasefire.
The rights group cited interviews with eight current and former prisoners plus relatives, witnesses and lawyers for 23 others whose whereabouts are unknown. Several people said they later saw detained civilian relatives or friends in state media broadcasts claiming they showed captured Tigray forces.
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