Trade Trumps Human Rights for Trudeau in Ethiopia’s Civil War
Disparity between Canada’s response to Ukraine and Ethiopia shows that not all lives matter.
A week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly announced that Canada had joined the growing chorus of states calling for the International Criminal Court to probe alleged war crimes by Russian troops in Ukraine.
“It was also important for us to show that we are steadfast in terms of our support to Ukraine,” Joly was quoted as saying after walking out of a planned virtual speech by her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov at the UN Human Rights Council.
The rhetoric has since intensified with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warning Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would be held accountable “for the war crimes he’s committed in Ukraine.”
The robust approach could be deemed fitting in the context of a war where invading forces have indiscriminately shelled residential areas of major cities and towns. On March 3, Russian airstrikes left 47 people dead in the northern Ukrainian town of Chernihiv, where victims had been lining up outside a bread stall when they died. Hospital haven’t been spared either, with a maternity hospital in the city of Mariupol bombed on March 9.
However, the uproar in Ottawa pales in comparison with reactions towards another conflict in which the toll of human suffering and victims is far worse: Ethiopia’s civil war, now in its seventeenth month.
Researchers who recently spoke to the Globe and Mail estimate that the war, and a famine exacerbated by it, may have caused as many as half a million deaths in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, the epicenter of fighting for much of the war.
The research team was headed by Dr. Jan Nyssen of Ghent University in Belgium, who clarified that most of the killings were of unarmed combatants murdered in cold blood, and not a result of accidental crossfire between warring entities.
“I know of an incident near Hagere Selam (eastern Tigray), where [Ethiopian] soldiers went deep into a gorge and forests in search of [TPLF officials] Getachew Reda and Debretsion Gebremichael, but couldn’t find them,” Dr. Nyssen explains. “When the soldiers returned, they took their frustration out on the inhabitants of the village near where their military vehicles were parked, killing twenty or so people.”
Nyssen’s research estimates that anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 of those victims were killed by armed combatants, largely from the Ethiopian army and its allies, which includes regional militias and soldiers from neighbouring Eritrea.
Continue reading https://opencanada.org/canada-ethiopia-civil-war/