04 – 12 – 2022
Subject – The Imperative of the UK Government’s Responsibility to Stop the Genocidal War on Tigray
- In its 16th month, the war in Tigray continues to inflict unimaginable pain, devastation and horror on the people of Tigray. There is credible, corroborated and widespread evidence by multiple domestic and international agencies and institutions that war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide have been committed by the armed forces of the regimes in Ethiopia, Eritrea and the Amhara Regional Government.
Hunger, starvation and famine; and sexual violence and rape whose scale has not been seen since the Second World War have occurred and are being weaponised as the preferred stratagem war in Tigray. Systematic and widespread mass atrocities, the wanton destruction of Tigray’s infrastructure and economic sectors including agriculture, industry, banking, civil infrastructure, health facilities, telecommunication, the Internet and transport have inflicted horrific damage to Tigrayans. The damage done to Tigray’s cultural and religious artefacts and institutions is deliberate, strategic and extensive. Tigray has been purposefully starved off by 360 Degree suffocation and strangulation – “An Anaconda Strategy and Plan of Total War Against Tigray” – through a complete economic and transport blockade and military siege. The latest study by the Ghent University based in Belgium as reported by Geoffrey York on the Globe and Mail on 14 March 2022 states that up to 500,000 Tigrayans have perished due to the onslaught of the war, man-made hunger and famine and the
deliberate blockade of world humanitarian aid reaching Tigray: “As many as 500,000 people have died from war and famine in Tigray Region of Northern Ethiopia over the past 16 months. The estimate by experts, who have closely monitored the Tigray conflict since its beginning, is a rare attempt to calculate the war-related death toll in a Region that has been largely cut off from the outside world”. The unfolding horrors of the genocidal war on Tigray has been told about by many global institutions as well as reporters, such as Jay Nordlinger of the National Review:
“Every now and then, East Africa breaks into world consciousness. It happened in the mid-1980s, when Ethiopia underwent a terrible famine. Teams of pop stars made two hit “Charity Singles”: “We are the World” and “Do they Know it is Christmas?” Today, Ethiopia is again in the news, for War in Tigray, a region in the country’s north. What is happening there is worse than war, if such a thing is possible. Tigray is a theatre for war crimes and crime against humanity. To make it more interesting – if that is the word – Ethiopia’s head of state is the 2019 Nobel Peace Laureate, Prime Minister of Ethiopia.”
(Jay Nordlinger, National Review; 22 March 2021)
“A Pogrom is happening in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is killing its own citizens wantonly. That is chilling, but true: by attempting to extirpate Ethiopia of Tigrayan ethnicity and heritage, Ethiopia’s military and government stands accused of purposeful ethnic cleansing, a precursor to all-out genocide, as outlawed by the UN Convention against Genocide”
(Professor Robert Rotberg, Former President of the World Peace Foundation; 28 January 2021)
“Modern genocides aren’t done Nazis style. Cheap, stealthy, smart way to do it is by starving, pillaging, raping,
displacing. World then automatically demands humanitarian aid which will come but always little & late – allowing
ethnic cleansers to finish job first #Ethiopia #Tigray”
(Professor Mukesh Kapila; @mukeshkapila; 23rd March 2021) - The Mekete Tigray UK has witnessed the emerging horrors of the current war in Ukraine as the result of the blatant aggression unleashed by the Government of the Russian Federation against the sovereign Ukrainian Nation and people. We have begun to see the unfolding spectre of war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed against the Ukrainian people. The Mekete Tigray UK, the Tigrayan people and the Tigray Regional Government have rightly condemned the aggression against the nation and people of Ukraine as well as supporting the robust and all-rounded response to date by governments and global institutions. This is in parallel and is consistent with Tigray’s and Tigrayans’ experience of the horrors of war and where a smaller nation’s existence is challenged by much larger alignment of forces. In contrast, the Eritrean and Ethiopian regimes have supported, in the UN General Assembly vote, the Russian aggression against Ukraine directly or through abstention. This is due to the authoritarian and dictatorial nature of the regimes and as a return for
Russian and Chinese governments’ support for their Genocidal War on Tigray. - The Mekete Tigray UK supports the world response, including our UK Government’s, to the aggression against Ukraine by the Government of Russia. The response to the Russian aggression is unprecedented in its scope, scale, intensity and resolution. During the month since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, no day passed without the UK PM, Government or the Secretary of State for FCD denouncing the Russian invasion. The UK has imposed all-round and unprecedented varieties and levels of sanctions against the Russian Government. The UK PM has travelled far and wide to denounce the invasion and rally support for the Ukrainian nation and people. The UK Parliament has rightly convened many times to denounce the war in Ukraine and to express support for and solidarity with Ukrainian people.
- Yet, the Mekete Tigray UK’s British citizens and residents are perplexed, deeply saddened and wounded when the UK Government’s little and double standard responses to the genocidal war on Tigray is compared and contrasted with the robust and all-rounded response to the war in Ukraine. Similarly, the general lack of concern and response to the Tigray Genocide by Her Majesty’s Official Opposition has been extremely disappointing to say the least. Overall and in effect, the UK Parliament and MPs, the governing and opposition parties and their leaders, and the British Ambassador to Ethiopia, H.E. Dr Alastair McPhail OBE, silence on the Genocidal War on Tigray during the past 500 days is deafening. This is a clear and shameful failure of UK foreign policy on the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia and Tigray. However, this is despite the notable and noble exceptions of a few MPs and Peers, such as Helen Hayes MP, Lord David Alton, Lord William Hague and the Rt Reverend Dr Christopher J. Cocksworth the Bishop of Coventry, and former MPs and ministers, such as Sally Keeble amongst others, who have been vocal and outstanding in their humanitarian stand on the war in Tigray. Tigrayans and Ethiopians in general will always be grateful and remember this in the annals of their history. As for the silent friends of Tigray and Ethiopia, we say, as in the immortal words of Dr Martin Luther King: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”.
- Notwithstanding geopolitical considerations and the exigencies of global great power politics, humanity, morality, justice or the rule-of-law is one and indivisible. War crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing and genocide are all against international humanitarian law wherever they occur or whoever they are against – whether they are against Europeans or Africans, Ukrainians or Tigrayan Ethiopians, white people or blacks. All lives, peoples, races, religions and nations matter equally. We believe aggressors must be confronted wherever they happen to be located. We believe world governments and institutions must show commensurate levels of concern and solidarity, and employ similar types of concrete actions to stop the horrors of wars wherever they occur. Similarly, the extremely huge disparity in news coverage of the War in Ukraine and the Genocidal War in Tigray, Ethiopia by the BBC and the UK national media in general, again with a few exceptions, depicts sadly not one standard morality or principle or humanity, but a divided, biased and unjust
world. Regarding the war in Tigray the world prefers to look the other way as alluded below by Lord William Hague. This in the 21st Century. Yet, some have stood up and have spoken about the Tigray Genocide. “I vividly recall the shocking images back in 1984 of a million emaciated Ethiopian men, women and children, many of them from Tigray, who had fled the country in the midst of a massive famine caused by prolonged drought, widespread food shortages, and discriminatory government policies. Today, the people of Tigray are being subjected to human rights atrocities on an appalling scale, and they are being denied urgently needed humanitarian aid – aid that is being blocked by the Ethiopian and Eritrean militaries as well as other armed groups. The terrible reality today is that
famine, crimes against humanity and genocide are occurring in Tigray, and they are occurring for one reason: the complicity of government officials in Addis and in Asmara. In fact, there are reports that the situation in Tigray could be worse than in Darfur.”
(US Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Press Statement on Tigray; 6 June 2021)
“We must stop barbaric crimes against women. Gang rapes and mutilation are being carried out in the Tigray conflict but the world prefers to look the other way. Innumerable witness accounts leave no doubt that war crimes are being committed on a huge scale in Tigray, the region of Ethiopia where a military offensive against rebels was launched last November. Often committed by the armed forces of neighbouring Eritrea, working alongside Ethiopia’s own army, these actions include mass sexual violence against women and girls. Such reports are terrible enough but it is only
when you go into the details that you can fully appreciate that these crimes are against the very core of humanity. The accounts from Tigray include women being repeatedly raped next to the bodies of husbands or brothers who had tried to protect them; being told the men in uniform raping them are deliberately selected for being HIV-positive; assaulted with….”
(Lord William Hague, The Times, 31 May 2021) - The war in Tigray and its attendant war crimes and crimes against humanity are largely forgotten by the world media, more so in the aftermath of the Ukrainian War. Writing for the Observer on 11 April 2022, Trevor Lwere, after an extensive analysis of the differential and reporting with racial connotations of the wars in Ukraine and Tigray and other conflicts in Africa by the mainstream global media, opined:
“The war has gone on too long. It has caused a lot of suffering, death and destruction. No, I am not talking about the war in Ukraine. I am talking about the civil war in Ethiopia that has raged since November 2020.
More than 500,000 people have died and many more have been displaced and left helpless because of this brutal conflict. While Tigrayans starve away under siege with only scanty help from the international community in a conflict that has lasted more than two years, last week the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen hosted a fundraiser for Ukraine at which over 9 billion Euros were raised for Ukrainian refugees… It is not difficult to understand why the international community has been scarcely bothered by the protracted conflicts in Africa. For certain it is not for a lack of resources but for a lack of sufficient interest as these areas are of no significant strategic value. Unlike the Ukrainian conflict that spells danger for Europe, the conflicts in Africa are of no serious direct consequence. So, the commitment is not to peace and protection of life but to the protection of white lives. And there we have it, the racism that underlies the little interest in these other conflicts. It is not that the suffering of non-white peoples has been ignored. To add salt to the wound, statements have been made to the effect that non-white peoples are more accustomed, even more deserving of living in conditions of war and conflict. … Thus, when one compares the attention that has been given to the Ukrainian conflict to the scanty attention given to the Ethiopian conflict, one cannot help but recall the incisive assessment of W.E.B DuBois who wrote at the dawn of the 20th century that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line. More than a century later, DuBois’s assessment rings truer in our day. I am certainly no DuBois but dare I say that the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the color line. Steve Biko knew better when he said, “Black man, you are on your own.”
(Trevor Lwere, The Observer; 11 April 2022) - We urge the UK Government to show far more concern, resolution and responsibility to stop the ongoing genocidal war on Tigray. The UK Government engagement and actions to date are too little and overdue to make any difference to the horrors of the genocidal war being experienced by the Tigrayan people. Tigray is still subjected to a complete transport and economic blockage and military siege where hunger and famine is being used to crush and subjugate Tigrayans.
“As a Director General of WHO, I have a duty to protect and promote health wherever it is under threat. And there is nowhere on earth where the health of millions of people is more under threat than in Tigray. Just as we continue to call on Russia to make peace in Ukraine so we continue to call on Ethiopia and Eritrea to end the blockade, the siege and allow safe access for humanitarian supplies and workers to save lives”.
(Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of, WHO, – The Guardian, 19 March 2022) - Finally, we thank you for your time and attention, and trust that our Government will do much more of what is morally, politically and legally right to address our concerns as British citizens and residents of Ethiopian origin. We look forward to getting an audience with your ministers and civil servants, and to hearing your response to our concerns. The Petitioners of this Letter – Ethiopian Tigrayans in the UK – can be contacted at the above-referred Email and Address. Thank you very much.
Most respectfully,
Ethiopian Tigrayans in the UK
Mekete Tigray UK Members and Steering Committee
Tigrayan Women in the UK
Tigrayan Youth Network
Global Tigrayan Diaspora