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Three Eritrean refugees, including two children, were killed by an air strike that hit a refugee camp in Ethiopia's Tigray region, where the government has been waging a year-long war against rebels, the United Nations said Thursday.
He replaces Debretsion Gebremichael, whose immunity from prosecution was removed Thursday.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International said Thursday that scores of civilians were killed in a \"massacre\" in the Tigray region, that witnesses blamed on forces backing the local ruling party.
The \"massacre\" is the first reported incident of large-scale civilian fatalities in a week-old conflict between the regional ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), and the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize.
\"Amnesty International can today confirm... that scores, and likely hundreds, of people were stabbed or hacked to death in Mai-Kadra (May Cadera) town in the southwest of Ethiopia's Tigray Region on the night of 9 November,\" the rights group said in a report.
Amnesty said it had \"digitally verified gruesome photographs and videos of bodies strewn across the town or being carried away on stretchers.\"
The dead \"had gaping wounds that appear to have been inflicted by sharp weapons such as knives and machetes,\" Amnesty said, citing witness accounts.
Witnesses said the attack was carried out by TPLF-aligned forces after a defeat at the hands of the Ethiopian military, though Amnesty said it \"has not been able to confirm who was responsible for the killings\".
It nonetheless called on TPLF commanders and officials to \"make clear to their forces and their supporters that deliberate attacks on civilians are absolutely prohibited and constitute war crimes\".
Abiy ordered military operations in Tigray on November 4, saying they were prompted by a TPLF attack on federal military camps -- a claim the party denies.
The region has been under a communications blackout ever since, making it difficult to verify competing claims on the ground.
Abiy said Thursday his army had made major gains in western Tigray.
Thousands of Ethiopians have fled across the border into neighboring Sudan, and the UN is sounding the alarm about a humanitarian crisis in Tigray.
Kofi Atta Annan, born on 8 April 1938 in Kumasi, Ghana, served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) between 1997 and 2007. As a young man, Annan finished his undergraduate studies in economics at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1961. He then completed his graduate level work, also in economics, at the Institut universitaire des hautes études internationales in Geneva, Switzerland from 1961 to 1962. Annan returned to the United States, and earned a Master of Science degree in management in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Annan fluently speaks French, English, and a number of African languages.
Kofi Annan joined the United Nations in 1962 when he went to work for the World Health Organization. Since then he has been involved with the United Nations in a number of different branches, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the UN Emergency Force in Ismailia. Annan was assigned to UN Headquarters in New York where he worked with issues ranging from human resources management to peacekeeping.
On January 1, 1997, Kofi Annan became the Secretary-General of the United Nations. He served a second five year term beginning in 2002. Annan is the first Secretary-General to have been appointed from a UN staff position. In 2005, he helped establish two new bodies within the UN; the Peacebuilding Commission and the Human Rights Council. His involvement with peacekeeping is vast, as he has played key roles in a number of international negotiations. In 1996, he facilitated negotiations with Baghdad, Iraq in regards to their oil sales as funding humanitarian relief. In 1999, he played an important role in helping ease tensions between Libya and the UN Security Council, During the same period he also persuaded the international community to focus on the violence that was occurring in East Timor. Two years later, in 2000, he helped facilitate Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon.
Annans years at the UN have focused on creating relationships
The Southern African Development Community is holding week-long meetings that will culminate in a virtual Extraordinary Summit of Heads of State and Government to review the bloc's mission in Mozambique on Friday.
Shops were shuttered and streets empty as Nigeria's largest city Lagos was locked down under curfew after unrest flared following the shooting of protesters.
Blog - As 2020 draws to a close, the terrible toll of the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region is coming into sharper focus. The human costs continue to mount; the United Nations estimates that 1.3 million people need emergency assistance as a result of the conflict, and over 50,000 people have fled to neighboring Sudan. Eritrean refugees that had fled to Ethiopia have reportedly been attacked, in some cases forcibly repatriated. UN agencies remain unable to access some areas with humanitarian relief. And despite
More than 1,200 civilians have been killed in the restive DR Congo provinces of Ituri and North Kivu so far this year and millions of people now need humanitarian aid in the eastern region, the UN refugee agency said Friday.
[The New Humanitarian] Addis Ababa -- 'We are surrounded by war, and we can't move.'
Donatien fled Burundi in 2016 with his family. He is moving back home from Rwanda with his wife and three children. He has kept touch with friends and family back home and now plans to rent a house and find any job to support his family.
Bir Lehlou (Saharawi Republic) — The Saharawi National Commission for Human Rights (CONASADH), called on the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), to urgently intervene for the release of Saharawi political prisoners in Morocco, to protect them from possible Covid-19 infection.
Here is the complete text of the letter sent by CONASADH to ICRC of which Saharawi.net received a copy:
\"Request of urgent intervention for the release of Saharawi political prisoners in various Moroccan jails
It is with deep concern that the Saharawi National Commission for Human Rights (CONASADH) addresses you this letter hoping to draw your attention to the dangerous conditions in which Saharawi political prisoners are living in various Moroccan prisons, especially with the alarming spread of Covid-19 infections all over the world, including in Morocco.
The dire conditions of the Moroccan prisons and the alarming lack of the minimum hygienic environment necessary for the protection of prisoners is a permanent threat to the lives of political prisoners, whose only crimes, as evidenced by all international organization, are related to their political views and peaceful activities, as human rights defenders.
The Moroccan regime of occupation arrested those Saharawi political prisoners simply because they were defending theirs and their people's rights to self-determination and independence, which are recognized to them by the UN and other international and regional organizations and instruments.
For all these reasons, Mr. President, CONASADH calls on you and on your organization to immediately and urgently intervene for the release of Saharawi political prisoners and to put an end, not only to their ordeals and possible threats to their lives, but also to a long continuing violation of the international humanitarian law in Western Sahara, the last colony in Africa.
[RFI] New photos from Ethiopia's Tigray region published on Thursday reveal more about the conditions thousands of people are suffering after fleeing the conflict in the country's north, as access for humanitarian aid remains difficult.
