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[sarcasm]

Satellite images support survivors' accounts: Ethiopian forces held thousands, including children, in brutal camps

In the Tigray region of Ethiopia, beginning in November 2020, children who should have been laughing with friends and studying in school were instead locked up, crying, starving and abused in concentration camps, according to multiple eyewitness reports that have been corroborated by satellite imagery and analysis, as well as cell phone video footage smuggled out by an escapee.

Ethiopian federal forces, abetted by special forces, paramilitary groups, militia and police acting under the authority of the Amharan regional government, locked up in multiple locations hundreds of children of all ages — and even pregnant women, infants and toddlers — along with thousands of Tigrayan adults and senior citizens. These people appear to have been held in harsh conditions, systematically starved and beaten because of their ethnicity and with no judicial process or valid legal pretext. That is the definition of a concentration camp. This is a previously unreported part of an ongoing genocidal campaign led by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — ironically enough, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate — against various ethnic groups, including Tigrayans, Kimant, Gumuz, Ogaden (Somalis), Agew, Irob, Afar and Sidama, as well as Oromo people who fight to exercise the constitutional right to self-administration within a federal system.

The current civil conflict within Ethiopia is too complicated to explain here, and this report concerns just one aspect of it. As often happens in war, accusations and counter-accusations involving alleged war crimes have been made by the warring factions, which are primarily, the Ethiopian federal government forces, the Tigray regional government forces, the Amhara regional government forces and Amhara militia, and the Eritrean government forces. The Ethiopian embassy in Washington has not responded to Salon's questions about the specific and detailed evidence of human rights abuses presented in this report. If an official response arrives subsequent to publication, it will be included here.

This report is based on eyewitness accounts by dozens of people from five ethnic groups, including 11 former prisoners who were interviewed in four different refugee camps in eastern Sudan. Doctors have recounted their treatment of another seven former prisoners, including young children. Satellite imagery from Maxar (a space technology company based in Westminster, Colorado) and Planet Labs (an Earth imaging company based in San Francisco) corroborates these eyewitness reports. So does video footage which one former prisoner shot on his cell phone before he escaped a previously unreported concentration camp in western Tigray, located in the notorious Abbadi warehouse compound in Mai Kadra.


The cell phone footage admittedly does not conform to classic notions of what a concentration camp looks like, as in World War II films.There are no bars, guard towers, German Shepherds, barracks, searchlights or coils of razor wire. In the videos, prisoners can be seen eating popcorn, drinking coffee, teasing each other and making jokes in Tigrigna, the language of the Tigray people.

Continue reading https://www.salon.com/2021/09/25/eyewit ... tion-camp/

[sarcasm]

I interviewed #TigrayGenocide eyewitnesses in 4 refugee camps in Sudan. My @Salon piece breaks 2 big pieces of news:
a) Ethiopian genocidaires created concentration camps; and
b) They locked up, starved & abused Tigrayan children
https://bit.ly/3CIes6D #UNGA #genocide

Eyewitness reports of Tigrayans in concentration camps are consistent with satellite imagery & analysis (which geolocates a previously unreported concentration camp in the Abbadi warehouse compound in Mai Kadra), and cell phone videos smuggled out by an escapee.

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