From: Collective of the Eritrean Community in Switzerland Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
To: Conference of Cantonal Directors for Justice and Police (KKJPD) Haus der Kantone
Speichergasse 6, P.O. Box CH-3001 Berne
Bern, 22 August 2022
Subject: Planned propaganda event of the Eritrean regime in Switzerland Honourable members of the Conference of Directors for Justice and Police
Honourable members of the Conference of Directors for Justice and Police.
By this letter, we would like to draw your attention to the so-called “Eritrea Festival”, which is being organised every summer under the guise of a “cultural event” at the behest of the Eritrean regime not only in Switzerland, but in numerous other European countries as well.
By organising concerts with musicians who enjoy a certain degree of fame among the Eritrean public, the regime of President Isaias Afewerki manages to attract the members of the diaspora; the main aim is, however, to be able to spread its political messages of war and hatred. Anti-Western and, more recently, pro-Russian propaganda are also part of the repertoire of the various speakers, who include not only high-ranking representatives of the YPFDJ, but also members of President Isaias Afewerki’s cabinet. In 2018, for example, Foreign Minister Osman Saleh incited government supporters with anti-Western propaganda.[1]
A U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Eritrea has issued a report critical of the deteriorating situation there, noting forced military conscription, arbitrary arrests, disappearances and torture among the violations recorded.
In a report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker said Eritrea’s involvement in the armed conflict in neighboring Ethiopia shines a light on the impact of the Eritrean government’s system of indefinite national military service. He described the rights situation as dire.
Those who attempt to evade the draft, he said, are imprisoned in inhuman and degrading conditions for indefinite periods of time.
Heasley: CSW’s letter to His Excellency Estifanos Habtemariam Ghebreyesus raises a host of concerns, including the plight of Christian denominations in Eritrea, the majority of which have been proscribed for 20 years now, as well as the continued arbitrary and indefinite detention of tens of thousands of Eritrean citizens, often in inhumane or life-threatening conditions.
A body recovered from the Setit River is carried by stretcher to a boat.
Wad El Hilou, Sudan (CNN)The ghostly outlines of limbs emerge through the mist along the Setit River in eastern Sudan. As the river's path narrows, the drifting bodies become wedged on the silty clay bank and their forms appear more clearly; men, women, teenagers and even children.
The marks of torture are easily visible on some, their arms held tightly behind their backs.
On a trip to Wad El Hilou, a Sudanese town near the border with Ethiopia, a CNN team counted three bodies in one day. Witnesses and local authorities in Sudan confirmed that in the days after the team's departure, 11 more bodies arrived downstream.
Evidence indicates the dead are Tigrayans. Witnesses on the ground say the bodies tell a dark story of mass detentions and mass executions across the border in Humera, a town in Ethiopia's Tigray region.
CNN has spoken with dozens of witnesses collecting the bodies in Sudan, as well as international and local forensic experts and people trapped and hiding in Humera, to reveal what appears to be a new phase of ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia's war.
Forces aligned to the Ethiopian government subjected hundreds of women and girls to sexual violence
Rape and sexual slavery constitute war crimes, and may amount to crimes against humanity
Women and girls in Tigray were targeted for rape and other sexual violence by fighting forces aligned to the Ethiopian government, Amnesty International said today in a new report into the ongoing Tigray conflict.
Hamdayet, Sudan -- More evidence of sexual violence being used as a deliberate weapon of war is emerging from Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, where an armed conflict has been raging for months.
Women are being gang-raped, drugged and held hostage, according to medical records and testimonies from survivors shared with CNN. In one case a woman's vagina was stuffed with stones, nails and plastic, according to a video seen by CNN and testimony from one of the doctors who treated her.
CNN has spoken with nine doctors in Ethiopia and one in a Sudanese refugee camp who say they've seen an alarming increase in sexual assault and rape cases since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched a military operation against leaders in Tigray, sending in national troops and fighters from the country's Amhara region. Forces from neighboring Eritrea are participating in the military campaign on the side of Ethiopia's government, as CNN has previously reported.
