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.
The United States Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa David Satterfield will travel to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, February 13-14, where he is expected to meet with Ethiopian government, African Union, and United Nations officials, as well as representatives of humanitarian organizations, the State Department said in a brief statement on Sunday.
A Biden administration official told Today News Africa in Washington D.C. that Satterfield is making the trip to “support peaceful efforts to resolve the conflict in Ethiopia.”
Satterfield’s visit comes only days after the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed returned from Ethiopia.
She is the highest-ranking UN official to visit Ethiopia, including the regions of Tigray, Amhara, Afar and Somali, since the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali launched an offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on November 4, 2020.
Speaking with reporters in New York on Friday after her five-day trip to the East African nation, Mohammed, who listened to the accounts of rape from women there, said that they had faced “unimaginable” horrors in the past 15 months.
Mohammed, a former Nigerian minister, said it was “unacceptable that one human being would do that to another.”
She asserted that the warring parties “cannot any lasting peace without reconciling and being held to account for the atrocities across the country.”
“Without a shadow of a doubt, justice and accountability have to be had,” she said.
The conflict in Ethiopia has killed thousands of people, displaced hundreds of thousands, and pushed many more into famine. Human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have accused all sides of widespread abuses and sexual violence.
