“More than 8,500 Ethiopians from Tigray illegally detained in camps” | Abroad

According to the EHRC, a public institution that operates independently, the men, women and children have been held since December in two camps in Semara, the capital of the Afar region, which is next to Tigray. Men and women are not kept in the same camps, so relatives were separated from each other.

“These individuals have been the subject of arbitrary and illegal arrests based on their ethnic origin and should therefore be released immediately,” said Daniel Bekele, the commission’s head, in a press release.

For the first time, the committee explicitly refers to camps in which people from Tigray are imprisoned. She previously criticized the fact that people from Tigray are persecuted and imprisoned on the basis of their origin.
The arrests took place on the border with Tigray, “at the initiative of the security officials of the Afar region and in cooperation with local civil officials”.

“This situation has no legal basis whatsoever and those living in the camps are subjected to numerous human rights violations,” Bekele said. For example, medical and humanitarian aid in the camps is very limited, as a result of which several people have already died of diseases.

A fierce battle has been raging since 2020 between forces loyal to the government and the rebels in the north of the country after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched an offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which the government in Addis Ababa does not recognize. The conflict spread to neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar in 2021, after the TPLF almost completely recaptured control of Tigray.