Ethiopia. The Temesgen Tiruneh NISS pogrom against the Tigrinis throughout the country and abroad
The violence and human rights violations against Tigray ethnic group Ethiopian citizens are not limited to the conflict in Tigray, which began in November 2020, but extended to the whole national territory. Temesgen Tiruneh, head of the NISS political police, is the creator of a real ethnic pogrom against Tigrinya’s citizen. The Ethiopian diaspora living in Europe and North America, is spied and threatened too.
The conflict in Tigray and the related crimes against humanity attract international attention but prevent us from understanding the key points of the strategy behind the decision to start the civil war. Abiy Ahmed Ali is far from being the leader of Ethiopia. On the contrary, he is an instrument in the hands of the nationalist Amhara leadership.
The civil war in Tigray is not the fulcrum of the Ethiopian crisis. It’s an important but not unique piece of it. The conflict is part of the project to restore central control and Amhara ethnic domination. Considering that the evolution of Ethiopian society (to which the TPLF also contributed in its almost thirty years of power) certainly does not allow the return to the Emperors, the ethnic domination is attempt with a semblance of democracy but the substance of the project does not change.
The civil war in Oromia and the ongoing ethnic violence in various State Regions are part of the need of the Amhara leadership to bloodily suppress any opposition to their plan of domination. They do not want to obtain consensus through inclusive and democratic popular support but through the repression of other ethnic groups, pushing them into submission.
Another aspect that we tend to ignore is that of decision-making power. The wars in Tigray and Oromia, the alliance with the Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki, the tensions with Sudan and the unilateral management of the GERD mega dam, which also creates conflict with Egypt, are decisions taken not by the “Little Boy” but by Amhara leadership. Temesgen Tiruneh, head of the NISS political police and Agegnehu Teshager, president of the Amhara State Region are the prominent leaders who decide and act in the shadows without putting their face and using the Nobel Peace Prize as a “ public face ”and, at the same time,“ sacrificial lamb ”in case something “goes wrong ”.
In the specific case of Tigray, the two leaders have assumed very specific roles that are part of the single and shared project of ethnic domination. Agegnehu Teshager is in charge of material conflict management and related strategies. Faced with the military victory recently achieved by the TPLF, Teshager has now implemented a siege strategy, through the decoy represented by the unilateral declaration of a ceasefire “for humanitarian reasons”. Temesgen Tiruneh, on the other hand, is in charge of the systematic and violent repression of the Tigrinya citizen implemented on a national scale since the 1st day of the conflict. A repression that has so far escaped the international media attention.
Tiruneh’s work of repression, with classic Nazi methodologies, is slowly emerging now, thanks to the careful analysis of the situation outside Tigray made by journalists who still do their job. The pioneers of the denunciation of ethnic repression on a national scale are Simom Marks in Addis Ababa and Abdi Latif Dahir in Nairobi. Both correspondents for The New York Times. They recently published a detailed report on the work of the NISS. The only gap of their work is to identify Abiy as the creator of the repressive strategy without understanding the decisive role of the Amhara management and, in the specific case of Mister Tiruneh.
Since the beginning of the conflict, every citizen of Tigrinya origin or with relations with Tigray (regardless of their ethnic origin) is considered as a potential enemy and an agent of the fifth column of the TPLF who must be suppressed.
Since November 2020, every individual suspected even remotely of supporting or sympathizing with the TPLF suffers a monstrous repression that confirms the genocidal plan put into practice not only in Tigray but at the national level.
In the capital Addis Ababa and in other parts of the country, all Tigrinis are suspected criminals and subjected to various forms of discrimination, harassment and abuse by the head of the NISS, Tiruneh. They are arrested and detained without charge, placed under house arrest, prevented from traveling out of the country and fired. The raids, without a warrant, at their homes in Addis Ababa and the kidnappings by the NISS have become common currency.
The repression done by Tiiruneh with clear connotations of ethnic cleansing is not aimed at repressing individual Tigers living outside the regional borders of the Tigray but also to purge their presence inside the national economic contest. An objective that began before the conflict, in 2019 with a series of arrests and trials for corruption in state-owned companies that targeted Tigrinis but not the Amhara, responsible for the same embezzlement, corruption and speculation against the State. An operation presented as a fight against corruption promoted by the “reformer” Abiy who actually hid the Amhara monopoly project not only in the administration and public companies but also in the private sector, international NGOs and UN agencies.
Sur Construction of Addis Ababa, a subsidiary of the Tigray Rehabilitation Endowment Fund, had all bank accounts frozen. Freezing is unfortunately an understatement. The accounts were emptied and the illicitly obtained money served to finance the war effort and, in part, the pockets of the Amahara leaders.
Each Ethiopian private company has received orders to fire their Tigrinis employees, whether they are managers or simple drivers and watchmen. Private Tigrinis security companies were the first to be hit for fear that they could turn into hotbeds of paramilitary militias. They have all been closed and their assets confiscated.
The ethnic purge is taking place with greater intensity within state-owned companies such as Ethio Telecom, the country’s only telephone and internet provider. The fight against corruption with an accompanying wave of arrests of public company executives in the pre-war period (2019–2020) and the current ethnic purge are not closely linked to the genocidal plan underway in Tigray.
These actions are mainly oriented to replace the TPLF previous ethnic management with the Amhara one in anticipation of the wild privatizations promised by Abiy, of which Ethio Telecom is the first company to pay the price. The project of the Amhara entrepreneurial class (implemented through Tiruneh) is to secure the ethnic monopoly of privatizations in order to enjoy the profits at the expense of the population and Ethiopia socio-economic development.
Since September 2020, the total purge of diplomatic personnel of Tigrinya origin has also been carried out at the Ethiopian Embassies in Europe, North America, China, and in the main African countries. A necessary purge as the Amhara leadership has transformed the Ethiopian Embassies into centers of propaganda, lobbies, intelligence activities against their own diaspora (especially Tigrinis and Oromo) and as facilitators of arms purchases. Tasks that can’t be carried out except by a purely ethnic diplomatic corps aligned with the nationalist and fascist policies of the Amhara leadership and the project of ethnic domination over the country.
The Amhara authorities have also targeted Tigrinis journalists and all those not aligned with the crude and primitive propaganda disinformation offered to national public opinion to justify the various civil wars unleashed and hide the crimes committed. Tigrinis journalists and non-”aligned” journalists are persecuted, fired, arrested and sometimes eliminated in order to have total control of information following directives suggested by Chinese experts, who replicate the same tactics of suppression of the free press adopted since 2015 in Burundi. In short, an experimented and functional methodology that the Chinese communication firms, in close collaboration with the totalitarian regime in Beijing, offer the Prosperity Party under high remuneration.
As happened in Burundi, foreign journalists also suffer intimidation and expulsions from the country while black lists of foreign journalists operating outside the national territory have been drawn up and now become targets for cyber terrorism actions (always conducted by Chinese experts). All foreign journalists identified as opposed to the regime are placed on this blacklist on charges of supporting TPLF or OLA terrorism. Should they venture to Ethiopia they would be immediately arrested. On this sector of repression we have news of the collaboration of some foreign ministries and European secret services that help identify non-aligned foreign journalists by providing the Amhara regime in Addis Ababa with valuable informations.
The repression is also trying to hit the Tigrinis of the diaspora. Secret investigations are underway to ascertain whether these citizens have arrived in Europe illegally posing as Eritrean refugees. If the evidence collected is irrefutable, they are passed to the interior ministries of certain compliant European countries in the hope that they will revoke any refugee status granted and proceed with forced expulsions to Ethiopia where these citizens would be immediately arrested on charges of being terrorists. At the moment, however, there are no cases of expulsion of Tigrins Ethiopian citizens residing in European countries.
On the contrary, the Amhara regime of Addis Ababa is trying to promote forms of blackmail or retaliation against the family members of citizens of the Tigray diaspora, especially those who are particularly active in spreading news of the conflict in Tigray and reporting crimes against humanity. on Western social media and media.
This is the main reason for many “anonymous” Tigrinis accounts users who are found on Facebook, Instagramm and Twitter. All Ethiopian citizens of the diaspora who participate in peace demonstrations in various Western countries are registered by the Ethiopian intelligence present in the same country with particular ferocity if the citizen who participates in these demonstrations are of Amharic ethnicity who is directly accused of treason.
Retaliation against family members of identified Western Diaspora Tigrinya activists is already a sad reality. Several Tigrinis living outside the US, Canada and the European Union said they had not heard from family members who were suddenly taken to police stations and prisons for weeks.
The situation becomes very serious for Ethiopian citizens of mixed Tigray Amhara ethnicity whether they live in Ethiopia or abroad. “Just have a single drop of Tigrinya blood and you are discriminated against and persecuted” says one of our sources protected by anonymity.
The national airline, Ethiopian Airlines, is subject to repression of its Tigrinya personnel who are also prevented from leaving the country. An airline pilot and a foreign diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, report that Ethiopian Airlines CEO, Tewolde GebreMariam, was prevented from boarding a flight to Paris on November 8 due to of its strong links with the TPLF. Tigrinis pilots and cabin crew are fired or strictly supervised in order not to reveal that civil aircraft are used for military actions in contravention of the international laws governing civil aviation around the world.
The activities of ethnic pogrom, repression, arbitrary arrests and spying abroad of Tigrinis Ethiopian citizens or mixed ethnicity are so widespread that they force the Amhara authorities in Addis Ababa to make partial statements aimed at minimizing the phenomenon.
The Ethiopian Attorney General, Gedion Timothewos acknowledged last month that there have been “isolated incidents” in which the police “have acted incorrectly” . But he said the government takes the issue of ethnic repression very seriously and will set up a dedicated hotline for the public to report their grievances. “We are doing everything in our power to make sure there are no arbitrary or discriminatory measures,” said Timothewos, adding: “These are abuses that the government has already reported.” Daniel Bekele, who heads the Ethiopian Commission for Human Rights, said in a recent interview that the commission is “alarmed by the growing number of complaints of people who have been prevented from traveling, even on a job mission, for medical treatment or Education”.
The crackdown devised and coordinated by NISS head Temesgen Tiruneh sparked serious concern at the United Nations Office for the Prevention of Genocide, which said that cases of ethnic profiling constitute “a dangerous trajectory that increases the risk of genocide, crimes of war, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity “.
