BY ABDUREZAK MOHAMMED
ADDIS ABABA – Journalists who are working for various international media organizations and have visited Welkait Tegede recently said thousands of ethnic-Amharas had been being thrown off cliffs if they refused to denounce their identity and accept a Tigrayan identity.
In their discussion with Scoop Media’s Alastair Thompson, Getty Images’ Photographer Jemal Countess, PushStart’s Betty Sheba Tekeste, and Pacifica Radio’s Ann Garrison has recounted what the terrorist TPLF had been doing in Welkait for about forty years.
Jemal said that he visited various torture camps in Welkait Tegede. “I will call them elimination camps were basically constructed around natural rock formations on the edges of cliffs, on the valley edges, throughout this particular part of Welkait.”
He also stated that regrettably affords you some pretty horrendous circumstances is a matter of how you put people to death and how you end life by simply throwing people off cliffs if they refuse to denounce their Amhara ethnicity and accept a Tigrayan identity.
As to him, they wanted to go to because they wanted to actually explore the situation around Welkait. There is a lot of propaganda and a lot of false information around the history of Welkait, which is a part of the Amhara state for almost a thousand years.
This is a fact that is being withheld intentionally by media agents and the western political establishment to try to garner support for intervention and regime change and to revive or resuscitate the TPLF, he added.
According to the photographer, they visited the Dejena prison site, adding that the TPLF basically used caves and natural depressions to hold prisoners and they basically dropped prisoners or threw prisoners into these caves and natural depressions that had un-climbable walls around the sides and were adjacent to cliffs.
He further indicated that when people were marched to the cliff’s edge to denounce or accept their identity it was pretty much a done deal because most people were not going to denounce who they were and they were thrown off.
On her part Betty noted that identity was their cause because it was more than an issue of land even the people that were targeted initially since TPLF’s arrival were the elders in the community, the historians, those who had historic knowledge of the culture of the people of Welkait and retained the Amhara culture in itself.
She added that the idea was to wipe out anyone who could teach the generations coming about their true history and to replace their identity by getting rid of all the elders in the community,to force people to accept that they are Tigrayan, and to replace the culture including the language of the land into the Tigrayan.
So some of the ways they did that is people spoke Amharic and playing Amharic music would be targeted, tortured, killed, and disappeared, they would only be allowed to speak in Tigrigna, she also explained.
She further indicated that the really significant part is people were left dead in various places and were not allowed to be buried. “So if you knew of a family member or somebody that you knew that was killed or and you went to try to bury them and give them a proper burial you would be disappeared as well so for years.”
So they would just be covered up and then there is natural decay and soil and people were buried insides and this is the case for many people in the community. And, when you dig you would find remains and this is everywhere in the Welkait area, as to the journalist.
Ann Garrison also said that she has given quite a bit of thought and study to Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International(AI) and they more often than not serve as arms of the U.S. State Department,U.S Foreign Policy establishment. So it is not really rational to expect anything else from them.
She urged the researchers to submit their research to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
The Ethiopian Herald April 15/2022
