Amhara under siege. One year of invasion and blockade.

Re: Amhara under siege

Dear Sir or Madam,

The year-long invasion and blockade of the Amhara region of Ethiopia by the federal government is at its worst. The failed state of emergency that was declared by the Ethiopian regime and lasted ten months to crush the armed resistance by force has not been officially terminated. The government, without any official extension of the state of emergency, continues its widespread human rights abuses, escalating the civil war and causing significant death and destruction in the region. Amharas continue to be jailed, tortured, and displaced throughout the country. The regime has allocated a large portion of its budget to purchasing weapons, drones, and jets, and forcefully conscripting youth across the country into various military sectors. Its priorities do not include feeding the 30 million hungry citizens, resettling the people internally displaced during the Tigray war, nor investing in developing the economy. Rather, its focus is on continuing the civil wars in both the Amhara and Oromo regional states.

The regime has failed to recognise the reasons for its stalemate in the Amhara region over the last ten months and the root causes of the armed resistance. The public widely supports the armed struggle due to the decades-long systematic persecution and the economic and political marginalisation of the Amhara people, followed by the current invasion and blockade of the region — a people who have never in their history risen up against any government in the country, but rather have been guardians of their governments and of the territorial integrity of Ethiopia even in the face of tyranny. The criminal acts of the regime’s ill-disciplined army, which is committing widespread human rights abuses and inhumane treatment of innocent civilians, have added insult to injury. The army is no longer seen as a national force in the Amhara region, but as an invading force and an instrument of the regime to crush the Amhara by force and wipe out their culture, including their faith.

The regime has failed to learn from its own recent mistakes in the two-year civil war, when nearly a million lives were lost and the destruction of infrastructure in Tigray, Amhara, and Afar amounted to an estimated 26 billion dollars. This should have been a lesson to pursue a political solution to the conflicts in the Amhara and Oromia regions. Instead, the regime has embarked on a new conflict in the Amhara region, forcefully conscripting hundreds of thousands of youth from Oromia and the southern regions and sending them to the Amhara region with little or no training. The regime is fighting for its survival while millions starve in different parts of the country, millions of internally displaced persons remain in dire conditions, the country struggles to service its foreign debts, inflation runs rampant, and millions live in poverty.

We urge the international community to recognise that the Amhara people remain under siege even though the state of emergency has not been officially extended. Reports on the ground indicate that schoolchildren cannot take their national exams, the sick cannot access hospitals, and food aid cannot reach the hungry. According to the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, the army continues its gross human rights violations and retaliatory ethnic-based summary executions, and the police continue arbitrary mass arrests and the detention of Amhara people even outside the Amhara region. Lawlessness, corruption, abduction, and extortion by the security apparatus of the government are unabating.

We therefore call for the following:

• We strongly demand that an independent United Nations-led commission of inquiry be established immediately to investigate the genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and human rights violations committed by Abiy Ahmed’s regime against the Amhara people, and to bring the perpetrators to justice.
• We call on governments, the EU, and the AU to urge the Ethiopian government to stop its failed military campaign in the Amhara region, end the arbitrary detention of civilians, pull its troops out of the region, free the representatives of the Amhara people, political activists, and journalists, and seek a political resolution to the conflict.
• We call upon international human rights organisations to press the government to allow independent investigations of ethnic-based atrocities committed against the Amhara people throughout Ethiopia.
• We urge independent international media to document gross human rights violations in Ethiopia and to expose the Ethiopian government as one of the worst jailers of journalists in the world.
• We bring to the attention of international aid organisations the imminent famine and humanitarian disaster in the making, as this is the second farming season in which large parts of Amhara society are unable to farm due to the ongoing conflict and the denial of access to fertiliser and seeds.
• We urge financial institutions to refrain from providing any monetary assistance or lending to the Ethiopian government, which is desperate for financial assistance to continue its war against its own people, driving the country into unsustainable debt.