Simon Ateba is Chief White House Correspondent for Today News Africa covering President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, U.S. government, UN, IMF, World Bank and other financial and international institutions in Washington and New York.
Outrage has exploded after a Sudanese official confirmed that more than 40 bodies of people apparently fleeing the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region had been found floating in the river between Sudan and Ethiopia.
One of the pictures sent to Today News Africa in Washington D.C. show the body of a man with gunshot wounds and his hands tied behind his back.
Other gruesome pictures are hard to describe and cannot be published as they show pure horror.
The AP quoted the Sudanese official who spoke on condition of anonymity as saying Monday that a forensic investigation would be needed to determine the causes of death, and two Ethiopian health workers in the Sudan border community of Hamdayet as confirming seeing the bodies found in the Setit River, known in Ethiopia as the Tekeze.
“The river flows through some of the most troubled areas of the nine-month conflict in Tigray, where ethnic Tigrayans have accused Ethiopian and allied forces of atrocities while battling Tigray forces,” AP wrote, adding that Tewodros Tefera, a surgeon who fled the nearby Tigray city of Humera to Sudan, said two of the bodies were found Monday, “one a man with his hands bound and the other a woman with a chest wound.”
The latest horrors in the region come as the U.S. aid chief Samantha Power is visiting Sudan and Ethiopia and has said she will press the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali of Ethiopia to allow humanitarian access into the region.
The United States, she said last week, is focused on preventing famine in the region, ending the war and holding those responsible for human rights abuses to account.
The United Nations has said that hundreds of thousands of people in Tigray are at an increased risk of famine and Germany said last month that the war was exploding again and destabilizing the region.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize has pursued war and deaths rather than peace and reconciliation. Calls by the United States, the United Nations and others to allow unhindered humanitarian access into Tigray have been ignored even as things have continued to worsen.
This is garbage “news”. The bias and malicious nature of the story can be caught by the phrase “Tigray city of Humera”. Only TPLF imbeciles believe of a Western Tigray region that never existed in the history and map of Ethiopia. Humera was and is part of Gonder, forcefully annexed by the repulsive junta in 1991 into Tigray. The genocide and displacement actually occurred against the ethnic Amhara, and that is the actual crime the world needs to investigate.
After 30 years of TPLF in power, our Tigrean brothers and sisters still live in abject poverty, misery and nearly 40% have been on food insecurity safety zone for 30 years. A few TPLF elites meanwhile have lived in luxury an plump over stolen money and loots. TPLF is defunct, its Marxist Leninist die hard ideologues are still stuck in time to 50 and 60 years backward. They are of no value, no service, of no use to Ethiopia in general, and Tigray in particular. Just pack up and go. You are disturbing the peace. The TPLF era ended in 2018. Accept that. A regime rises and falls. You are defunct, outdated, useless, and not even someone to ask for advice because your corruption and lack of respect for merit and effort based achievement makes you utterly incompetent.
Anyone who continues to deny the genocide of war especially claiming 30 years this in 27 years that is complicit not to mention shelling out garbage their own selves. No matter what incomprehensible idiotic reasons you can try to muster up, nothing, absolutely no one thing will ever justify mass murders, mass rapes, and starvation being used as a weapon of war. History will most definitely not forget these rampant apologists walking amongst up right human beings.
Ethiopian federal army continues to use child soldiers as canon fodder and the international community does absolutely nothing. There are interviews of captured ENDF child soldiers wow Abiy and his cronies spread false and ridiculous rhetoric to the contrary. If children don’t matter to the United Nations, what does?