Eritrea denies Amnesty’s Tigray war crimes allegations
The Eritrean government has denied allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity levelled against its soldiers in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region by human rights organization, Amnesty International.
The accusations come in the wake of a peace deal signed in November of the previous year, and Eritrea’s Ministry of Information released an official statement on September 5, 2023, refuting the claims.
Eritrean soldiers had supported the Ethiopian federal forces in the two-year civil war.
Eritrea’s Ministry of Information on 5 September said that Amnesty International’s allegations against the Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) “have no substance or merit”.
The ministry stressed that the report “suffered from its flawed methodology” and was “filled with disgusting lies and distortions that are a futile attempt to disparage the Eritrean people”.
“Amnesty conducted no research. Rather, it chose to use its platform to regurgitate unsubstantiated allegations against Eritrea’s military personnel, taken from third-party sources, faceless, nameless, in continuation of its libellous decade-long campaign against the State of Eritrea,” the statement said.
Recall that Amnesty International accused the Eritrean Defense Forces (EDF) of committing war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity in the Tigray region, both immediately before and after the signing of a Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA) between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in November 2022.
The report reveals a horrifying post-CoHA period, during which EDF soldiers allegedly raped and sexually enslaved women and extra-judicially executed 24 civilians in the Kokob Tsibah district over nearly three months.
