'Clean out our insides': Ethiopia detains Tigrayans amid war
A Tigrayan employee of the state-owned Ethiopian Airlines, who said he fled the country after being released on bail, poses for a portrait at an undisclosed location in April 2021. “We need you very badly today,” he recalled federal police saying as they took him from his home without explanation. He said he saw almost 100 high-ranking military officials during his two months in detention ending in January 2021.
(AP Photo)
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Ethiopia has swept up thousands of ethnic Tigrayans into detention centers across the country on accusations that they are traitors, often holding them for months and without charges, the AP has found.
The detentions, mainly but not exclusively of military personnel, are an apparent attempt to purge state institutions of the Tigrayans who once dominated them, as the government enters its sixth month of fighting in the Tigray region. Detainees, families and visitors spoke of hundreds or even more than 1,000 people in at least nine individual locations, including military bases and an agricultural college.
The government of Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy Ahmed acknowledges that it has locked up a small number of high-level military officials from the Tigrayan minority. But the AP is reporting for the first time that the detentions are far more sweeping in scope and more arbitrary, extending even to priests and office workers, sometimes with ethnic profiling as the sole reason.
A military detainee told the AP he is being held with more than 400 other Tigrayans, and lawyers are not allowed to contact them. Even families can’t visit. The AP is not using his name for his safety but has seen his military ID.
“They can do what they want,” he said on a smuggled phone. “They might kill us….We are in their hands, and we have no choice but to pray.”