The statement was made during a closed-door meeting with Ethiopian leaders, including Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, in February this year.
This was stated by Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto, who is also the EU Special Envoy to Ethiopia, during a Meeting in the European Parliament on Tuesday this week.
– The Ethiopian leaders said they wanted to exterminate the Tigray people for 100 years, Haavisto said, adding: – For us, this looks like ethnic cleansing.
Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry calls Haavisto’s statements “ridiculous” and believes they must be due to a hallucination or a kind of memory loss.
Finland’s special adviser, Otto Turtonen, tells the news agency AP that Haavisto has no further comment on the case.
Humanitarian crisis
The meeting between Haavisto and the Ethiopian leaders was basically about the humanitarian crisis in Tigray. Thousands have been killed and the population starved to death after the government in Addis Ababa decided to launch a military offensive to oust the province’s regional leaders in November last year.
The leaders belonged to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), Ethiopia’s former ruling party, and were on a sharp collision course with Abiy because of his political line.
Haavisto’s statement is one of the sharpest criticisms leveled at the Ethiopian government since the military offensive.
Ethiopian and Eritrean forces have previously been accused of widespread abuses and killings of civilians in the pursuit of those who supported Tigray’s former leaders.
However, Haavisto does not say anything about which of the meeting participants made the threatening statements that the tigrays should be wiped out.
– Very serious
– When I met the Ethiopian leadership in February, they really used that kind of language, that they would destroy the tigrays, that they would wipe out the tigrays for 100 years to come and so on, the Finnish Foreign Minister said during the meeting in the European Parliament.
– If you wipe out your country’s minority, well, what is it? You can not destroy the entire people, you can not destroy the entire population of Tigray. And I think it’s very obvious that we have to react because to us it looks like ethnic cleansing. It is a very, very serious act if it is true, Haavisto said.
When Haavisto spoke shortly after the February meetings, he said the crisis in Tigray seemed to be spinning out of control.
Elections Monday
The UN Office of Human Rights has stressed that all parties to the conflict have been accused of abuse, but eyewitnesses have primarily accused Ethiopian and Eritrean forces of, among other things, starvation, mass deportations and gang rapes.
On Monday, Ethiopia will hold elections at a new national assembly. It will be the first major test of how popular Abiy is after he began his attempt to centralize power through his own Prosperity Party. His project also aims to put an end to political divides following ethnic lines, but it has also led to even deeper ethnic conflicts in the country.
Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize one year after coming to power and launching a series of comprehensive political reforms. Among other things, they meant that the TPLF had far less influence centrally, as well as a peace agreement with Eritrea to which the TPLF was strongly critical.
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