Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Oct. 28th, 2022

[Dr. Abel Giday Kebedom, Medical Doctor, Security and Justice for Tigrayans Canada]

Good morning, respected parliamentary members, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Dr. Abel Giday Kebedom. I'm a recent immigrant from Tigray, Ethiopia. I'm a married man and have two kids. Up until January 2021, I served as a medical doctor in one of the largest hospitals in Ethiopia, the Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, which is the largest hospital that does referrals for the Tigrayan region. I'm one of the first witnesses to the war that began in November 2020.

I will start my speech by asking a question. The question is, imagine you have two kids. One of your kids is diagnosed with diabetes mellitus, and the other one is diagnosed with cancer, and you are told there is no medicine for either of them.

I would like to compile my speech into three circumstances.

The first thing that happened in Tigray was the mass destruction and mass killings. The air strikes, drone attacks and heavy shells all contributed to the mass killings and destruction of the city. It intensified as the Ethiopian National Defense Force and the Eritrean army approached to conquer the capital. Especially on the day before, there was heavy shelling ongoing the whole day long.

I saw 15 to 20 dead bodies and saw numerous injured people coming from the city. Unfortunately, four of them were from the same family: both children, the father and the mother. I was one of the first people to photograph everyone and present that to the international community. There were atrocities and unlawful killings on the streets of Mekelle. I had to walk over shrouded bodies every morning in the emergency OPD.

The second circumstance that was happening was the siege and the lack of basic medical services. I noticed suffering children gasping due to lack of oxygen, and the misery of cancer and diabetes patients. I saw women dying because of hemorrhages when trying to deliver on gurneys too.

The third circumstance is the rape and sexual violence. I had to hear unbelievable and unbearable stories of ladies who were gang-raped. Most of them were raped in front of their husbands and children, and their husbands were killed at the same time.

As a physician, the most important lesson I learned in life is how much a human life costs; I had to spend days and nights healing the soul of one human body, but I really wonder why the people, why the international community and why the world are ignoring the misery of six million people under siege.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

For the remaining time you have, you can pass it on to your colleagues.

[Britawit Arefayne, Accountant, Security and Justice for Tigrayans Canada]

Good morning, everyone.

I am Britawit Arefayne. I am from Tigray. I immigrated to Canada in 2009 and became a Canadian citizen in 2015.

First, I would like to thank the committee for giving me this chance.

In early November 2020, when the war broke out in Tigray, towns had been targeted with heavy shelling. My brother, Mebratu, left the town with his two young girls and his pregnant wife to go to her aunt in the nearby village. Weeks later, they ran out of food. He came back home on December 10 to grab some food and clothes, but never made it back to his children. He was taken the next morning by Eritrean soldiers with four other men from the neighbourhood. Days passed, but no one returned home, and the Eritrean soldiers refused to answer questions about their whereabouts.

Then the family decided to go on foot to Axum, 20 kilometres away, to ask the Ethiopian general to help them locate the missing men. The Ethiopian general sent two Ethiopian soldiers to escort the families back to Wukro Maray. The Ethiopian soldiers told the Eritreans they had orders from the Ethiopian general.

Then the Eritreans agreed and took them to the mountains outside of the city and showed them the dead bodies of all five men. My brother was one of them. They were found with their hands tied behind their backs, and their legs were bound. All had been shot, and rocks had been placed on their heads. They were buried eight days later.

My uncle, Teamrat, the most-loved person of our whole family and very popular for his kindness, was one of the over 800 civilians who were killed by Eritrean soldiers on the streets of Axum on November 28 and 29, 2020. Days later, one of our family members found him on the street. He was buried three days later. He left two young girls behind.

Similarly, my cousin Yirga was a teacher in the town of Shire. Neighbours told my aunt that he was shot by an Eritrean sniper at his doorstep when they arrived at his door. My other cousin, who grew up with me in the same house, was a teacher and a farmer in Mai Kadra and escaped the first massacre, but his house and his business were burned down by the Amhara militia and the Fano vigilante group. Thank God he is alive. He took his wife and two boys to Shire. They had nothing other than clothes on their backs, and they couldn't travel to my family in Axum because they had no money for transportation. He had to leave them and travel on top of a minibus for free and borrow money from my mom. He had to come back and take his family back to Axum.

Thank you for listening.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Thank you for sharing your testimony with us. We will have more time in questions and answers.

Next, as an individual, we will have Mukesh Kapila, please, for six minutes.

[Dr. Mukesh Kapila, Professor Emeritus, Global Health and Humanitarian Affairs, University of Manchester, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for inviting me to speak to your committee.

The last time I had the honour of addressing the honourable parliamentarians of Canada, it was in relation to the Darfur genocide some 20 years ago. Here we are again, with “never again” happening again, this time in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.

I speak on this tragic matter from my perspective of experience with comparable situations. I was the first British government official to enter Rwanda in 1994 during the hundred days of killings, and I witnessed first-hand what a genocide looks like. I recall comparing notes, subsequently, with that great son of Canada, your former senator Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, who headed the United Nations forces in Rwanda.

Not long afterwards, I had a ringside seat to the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, culminating in the Srebrenica genocide. Then, as special adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, I was in Cambodia to examine the long and toxic aftermath of the 1975 genocide. Subsequently, in 2003-04, I headed the United Nations in Sudan, trying to stop the Darfur genocide, which unfolded on my watch. Sadly, we never prevented any of these genocides, although we had ample warning of them and could track their nasty progression in minute detail in real time; we could not claim ignorance of these matters.

The same is happening now in Tigray. Others will have testified before you about the depths of brutality and depravity being plumbed. My professional assessment is clear, based on my experience of nearly 30 years of international war and peace efforts: Progressive acts of genocide are being perpetrated by the governments and agents of the states of Eritrea and Ethiopia against Tigrayans.

I assert this categorically for the following reasons.

First is the orchestration of the violence on Tigrayans through the use of dehumanizing hate speech over Ethiopia's state communication channels and state-encouraged social media.

Second is the pattern of violence being experienced by Tigrayans. This includes direct attacks on civilians and mass rapes, as well as induced starvation, malnutrition, and epidemic risk and disease progression through a deliberate Ethiopian blockade of humanitarian relief, food and medicine. This is complemented by the systematic destruction of urban and rural livelihoods, including by cutting off electricity, Internet and banking. As these efforts are not targeted at combatants, generally, they are consequently violations of humanitarian law. They are war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Third is the systematization of these crimes through the Ethiopian and Eritrean authorities' command and control structures, in their official capacities. This imputes intent as well as proactive commission, not random acts of violence that can occur in the fog of war.

Mr. Chair, the Genocide Convention was defined in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the 1940s. Our world has changed immeasurably in the subsequent 70-plus years, and we must interpret the convention in today's context and realities. Putting together the pattern of the multi-faceted violence in Tigray in this, the second decade of the millennium, it is my conviction that the situation in Tigray is nothing less than a genocide.

Of course, there are many deniers. Denial is a hallmark of genocide, as we know from history. There are also apologists and distractors who argue that the conflict has complex causes and that atrocities have been committed on both sides. That may be true. It probably is true, but, as we saw in Second-World-War Europe, soldiers on all sides did terrible things, yet the genocide was committed only by the Nazis against Jews. Similarly, all groups suffered from violence in Rwanda, but the genocide was against only the Tutsi. Here, too, all of Ethiopia is suffering, including the Amhara and Oromo, but the genocide is against only Tigrayans.

Mr. Chair, war is not illegal. Sometimes it is even necessary. Civil war crosses all boundaries, but the commission of crimes against humanity, especially genocide, is always illegal. To test my assertion, we could ask the UN Security Council to rule on the matter or refer it to the International Criminal Court, but that's not going to happen any time soon, due to paralyzing UN geopolitics and the restricted referral rules at the ICC.

African regional mechanisms for accountability are similarly handicapped, but that should not paralyze the planning. Genocide is a crime of universal jurisdiction, and all states have a duty to use their domestic legal systems to investigate it. Canada's courts could also do that. It would be good to get such legal determination, but parliamentarians are the supreme lawmakers in democratic states like Canada, where you have already declared the repression of the Uighurs in China as genocide. I would urge parliamentarians in Canada to consider such an inquiry, and for you to make your own determination.

Mr. Chairman, in conclusion, the explicit recognition of a genocide is important, not because we can prevent it, but to mitigate its worst effects so that humanity can rise again. That's why it's important that we don't keep on talking about the causes of the conflict and who attacked whom first and so on. That may or may not be relevant, but genocide, the commissioning of acts against humanity and crimes against humanity, is something that every country in the world and all legislatures in the world have a duty to do something about.

Mr. Chairman, I believe you and your colleagues have a prime duty, in a democracy in which you are the supreme lawmakers, to act through the mechanisms you have so that we can put an end to the inhumanities we're seeing in and around Tigray.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Thank you.

I would ask those who are participating by Zoom to keep an eye on whether or not your time is coming to an end.

We will now hear from the Ethio-Canadian Network for Advocacy and Support.

You have six minutes, please.

[Dr. Tihut Asfaw, President, Ethio-Canadian Network for Advocacy and Support]

Mr. Chair, honourable members, thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.

Let me be clear: The immense suffering of Ethiopians can be laid at the feet of the TPLF. For 27 years it ruled the country through terror, committed atrocities throughout the country and never held a free and fair election. It is a deposed and aggrieved former political party that launched terrorist attacks on the state and has been engaged in a well-resourced and long-planned insurgency and disinformation war.

We'd like to offer some recommendations for your consideration. One, redesignate the TPLF as a terrorist group. Before this conflict, the U.S. and Canada rightly considered it a terrorist organization. There are numerous pieces of evidence that the TPLF is committing such terrorist acts as torture, sexual violence and the murder of civilians as well as soldiers. A TPLF spokesperson even admitted on regional television that its forces attacked federal military outposts and thousands of national troops on November 3 and 4, 2020.

Two, send a delegation to Ethiopia to assess the issues of the ongoing conflict with first-hand evidence. If you check news articles before 2020, you will find credible reports of how the TPLF embezzled millions of dollars in aid from the Ethiopian people. They have used some of these stolen funds to run their propaganda campaign and bribe members of Congress, of which there is proof. For a proper evidence-based account, we recommend that the committee refer to the articles of Professor Ann Fitz-Gerald of the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

Three, Canadian constitutional experts should support the review of Ethiopia's constitution to help ameliorate ethnic tensions. The TPLF ratified a constitution in 1994 that has been compared by some to apartheid in South Africa. It has sowed the seeds of discontent and inspired horrible ethnic divisions. Canada could help enormously by supporting a new draft of a constitution that recognizes individual rights, regardless of tribe or ethnicity.

Thank you. I will stop here and allow Jeff Pearce to speak.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Mr. Pearce, you have approximately three minutes.

[Jeff Pearce]

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you.

I travelled to Ethiopia on two separate occasions last year to visit the war zones. I wrote articles and made video reports for two Ethiopian networks, Balageru TV and ARTS TV. It’s not enough to go look. You have to understand the background of what you’re looking at. The TPLF has routinely used its operatives as fixers for gullible Western journalists, showing them only what it wants to be seen and steering them to its narrative.

I can cite you the example of a British reporter for a major magazine who smugly flew off to Tigray and didn’t even bother to learn Ethiopia’s basic and essential history until after he returned to Europe. He advertised on Twitter for experts to help him.

I do have a reasonable understanding of the history. What I saw was appalling. Both the mainstream media and Amnesty International based their reportage of the Mai Kadra massacre in late 2020 on long-distance phone calls with sources they couldn’t possibly verify. They never visited the place. Virtually none of them went there.

My colleague, photojournalist Jemal Countess, was one of the first to go there, for Getty Images, and I later went there. My team interviewed survivors, a few of whom could name their assailants as agents of Samre, the TPLF youth wing.

During my trips, I visited IDP camps and spoke to witnesses and survivors. While western media keeps calling this the war in Tigray, and Tigray under siege, the TPLF were well beyond Tigray’s borders. I saw what the rebels did to the Amhara and Afar regions.

I toured a hospital where operating tables, ultrasound equipment, drugs and oxygen plants had been stolen and facilities vandalized. I saw a university where a whole COVID lab was stolen and every computer drive taken. The floors were landscapes of broken glass. I walked through a museum where TPLF soldiers had defecated on the floor and stolen priceless artifacts. I was there. People in Afar have been asking, “Why are aid trucks going through our region up to Mekelle, while the TPLF is allowed to harm and kill us?”

It is easy. It is too convenient to reflexively say, “Oh, it's both sides.” It isn’t. Given more time, I could lay out for you in meticulous detail the overwhelming bias shown for two years by the western media, but I want to bring to your attention the set of internal UN communications, leaked to me by sources, that I have included in my additional documents. There is also an additional document that I understand won't get to you until next week, which offers the hate speech of one of your speakers, Mukesh Kapila.

These UN documents show conclusively how UN staff have not only looked the other way as the TPLF committed war crimes, but have even lied to the world about their help in restoring telecoms to the Tigray region. I hope you will review them carefully.

I urge you to do the right thing by Ethiopia, and not let a terrorist group rewrite history and an ancient nation’s destiny.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Thank you.

We will now continue with our panel, and allow the members to ask questions of the witnesses.

I am going to start with Mr. Viersen. You have six and a half minutes.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

What we do know, Mr. Chair, is that lives are being taken in Ethiopia. We know that murder seems to be on the rise there. We know that there is a conflict happening. We have had reports of human rights abuses across northern Ethiopia.

I don't think this committee is here to point fingers at who started this. What we are here to do is.... Recognizing the people who are committing these atrocities, how do we hold them to account, and how do we bring an end to the violence that is happening in Ethiopia?

I would like to start with Mr. Pearce.

It is interesting. I was looking at your Twitter presence, and your Twitter seems to reveal an alarming animosity toward the Tigrayans. Do you feel that you have contributed to the violence when you've suggested that the Tigrayans who don't leave should eat rocks?

[Jeff Pearce]

I expected this kind of question. It's fitting that you put it so disingenuously, seeing as how I don't have animosity towards Tigrayans but towards the terrorist group that started this war. I also don't—

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

I really have to say—

[Jeff Pearce]

May I answer the question, please?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

No, you may not. You are not recognized right now. Thank you, Mr. Pearce.

Mr. Ehsassi is recognized. You have to wait your turn. Thank you, Mr. Pearce.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Obviously this witness has a very difficult time following simple instructions. You have advised him several times that he can speak only when he has been recognized by you. That's a simple rule that this witness does not understand, and I have to say that the manner in which he testifies and the manner in which he is responding to our colleague here is truly obnoxious and should not be allowed, Mr. Chair.

Could you kindly warn him to keep his language and his decorum appropriate?

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Thank you for that, Mr. Ehsassi.

I will give a warning to you, Mr. Pearce. If this happens again, you will not be part of this witness panel any longer—

[Jeff Pearce]

May I answer the question, please?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

No, you may not, and if you interrupt me one more time, you will be off this panel.

Do you understand?

[Jeff Pearce]

Yes, I'm leaving now. Goodbye.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Take care. Thank you for joining us.

[Jeff Pearce]

You don't want me to stay and answer the question. Goodbye.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Good.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Mr. Chair, may I resume?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

I think your witness has left, unfortunately, but you can resume with the other witnesses.