Africa-Press – Ethiopia. International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) used double-standard in its narrative of incidents in the Amhara and Tigray regions, according to the report of the Government of Ethiopia.
According to the Ethiopian government report, the Commission did not present the true scale and seriousness of the killings committed in Amhara and Afar regional states.
TPLF’s invasion resulted in enormous losses human and material, it noted.
A pending investigation found that not less than 2000 civilians have been victims of extra-judicial killing by TPLF forces, more than 1000 civilians were inflicted with bodily harm, and more than 400 civilians were treated inhumanly.
Besides, more than 2000 women and girls were raped and exposed to various forms of sexual violence.
The scale of the property damages, destruction, and looting inflicted by TPLF forces is beyond measure, the report stated, adding that churches and other religious sites were also destroyed and used as military camps and fighting sheds.
Furthermore, several persons had to cope with ethnic insults, and humiliations inflicted by TPLF forces across all areas affected by the conflict. Millions of ethnic Amharas were displaced from their homes.
In the grander scheme of injuries, the massacres perpetrated in Kobo, Chena, Agamsa, Maikadra, Antsokiya-Gemza, Qewot, Mersa, and Delanta stand highest as the most heinous crimes, the report pointed out.
These incidences have received widespread coverage in national and international media outlets that reported horrific transgressions based on the accounts of eyewitnesses, survivors, victims, and satellite images.
The gross professional disregard of the ICHREE is to account for the failure to narrate such grave massacres in-depth and follow the required procedures in the search for sources of information, the report stated.
Instead, the ICHREE hastened to simply rely on inadequate information from handful of sources and drew a shallow and unrepresentative picture of the scenario that unfolded in the two localities.
“It should be known that in Kobo alone, on 9 September 2021, TPLF fighters killed around 600 unarmed civilians, farmers, and laborers who had been working in nearby farmlands.”
A report by Al-Jazeera on 25 September 2021 described the incident as “the most extensive yet of one of the deadliest known killings of Amharas in the war,” it also cited.
The government report further noted that the town of Kobo had also been pictured by the international media and human rights advocacy groups as “the town of mass graves.” Likewise, in Chena, more than 120-150 civilians were killed in brutally, most of them executed with their hands tied back.
Following on its practice of serious flouting of evidentiary requirements and standards of proof, the ICHREE did not adduce a single source to verify the fact that TPLF forces killed persons rendered hors de combat.
This is a gambit of the highest scale with the blood of unarmed civilian farmers and laborers that once again showcases how predisposed the ICHREE is to cross the red line, the government report underlined.
Any semblance of fairness and objectivity by the ICHREE would have alluded to clear instigation by TPLF’s leader who publicly proclaimed that “this war is not going to be conducted by Special Forces or Militias. It is the civilian public war.”
The report also blamed ICHREE for bundling of atrocities in Kobo and Chena — under a single basket is intended to relegate the seriousness of the massacres.
“This (the ICHREE report) is a deliberate move on the part of the ICHREE to downgrade the seriousness of the crimes and give a superficial impression of the violations committed by TPLF forces in the eyes of the international community,” the government underscored.
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