\n Ethnic Tigrayans in a disputed region of northern Ethiopia are victims of discrimination and arbitrary detention, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday, assessing that the abuses could amount to \"crimes against humanity\".\n<\/p>\n
\n The region remains occupied by soldiers from the neighbouring Amhara region, who backed the federal government in its war against Tigrayan rebels during a brutal 2020-2022 civil war in which more than 600,000 are estimated to have died.\n<\/p>\n
\n Amhara forces still occupy western Tigray -- which they describe as \"ancestral Amhara lands\" -- in violation of the peace deal that ended the war.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Authorities and security forces in Ethiopia's contested Western Tigray Zone are arbitrarily detaining ethnic Tigrayans and severely restricting their movements, employment, and access to services,\" Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report, describing the abuses as \"unrelenting\".\n<\/p>\n
\n \"The Ethiopian authorities and their partners seem determined to ignore the treatment of Tigrayans as effectively second-class citizens,\" said Laetitia Bader, HRW deputy Africa director.\n<\/p>\n
\n Federal authorities did not respond to AFP's requests for comment.\n<\/p>\n
\n HRW interviewed 40 people, some residents of Western Tigray and others who had fled the region to displacement camps.\n<\/p>\n
\n One 20-year-old resident said he was afraid to move, unable to access his farmland to work, and only permitted to earn as a day labourer.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"If the (security forces) find you, they beat you so badly... We don't move freely, we move only if there's no choice,\" he told HRW.\n<\/p>\n
\n It said any displacement or forcible displacement caused by threats and violence would amount to crimes against humanity.\n<\/p>\n
\n A previous 2022 report, conducted by Amnesty International and HRW, said Western Tigray authorities, with the complicity of federal forces, had \"committed an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Tigrayan civilian population amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity\".\n<\/p>\n
\n Bader urged Ethiopian authorities and international partners to \"stop ignoring the Western Tigray crisis, central to ongoing tensions in the region\".\n<\/p>\n
\n More than three years after the end of the war, northern Ethiopia remains precarious, with increasingly tense relations between the government and Tigrayan authorities, raising worries of a renewed conflict.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ethnic Tigrayans in a disputed region of northern Ethiopia are victims of discrimination and arbitrary detention, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday, assessing that the abuses could amount to \"crimes against humanity\". The region remains occupied by soldiers from the neighbouring Amhara region, who backed the federal government in its war against Tigrayan rebels during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-158262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n