A burnt tank is found near the town of Adwa, Tigray region, Ethiopia, on March 18, 2021. REUTERS / Baz Ratner
Eritrea told the UN Security Council on Friday that it had agreed to begin withdrawing its troops from the Tigray region in Ethiopia, and publicly acknowledged for the first time the country’s involvement in the conflict.
Admission in a 15-member council letter – and published online by the Eritrean Ministry of Information – comes a day after UN aid chief Mark Lowcock said the world body did not he had seen no evidence that the Eritrean soldiers had withdrawn.
“As the approaching serious threat has been largely thwarted, Eritrea and Ethiopia have agreed – at the highest levels – to undertake the withdrawal of Eritrean forces and the simultaneous redistribution of Ethiopian contingents along the international border.” wrote UN Ambassador to Eritrea Sophia Tesfamariam.
Eritrean forces have been helping Ethiopian federal government troops fight Tigray’s former ruling party in a conflict that began in November. However, so far Eritrea has repeatedly denied that its forces are in the mountainous region.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed last month acknowledged the Eritrean presence and the United Nations and the United States demanded that Eritrean troops withdraw from Tigray.
“Neither the UN nor any of the humanitarian agencies we work with have seen evidence of Eritrea’s withdrawal,” Lowcock told the security council on Thursday. “However, we have heard some reports of Eritrean soldiers now wearing Ethiopian Defense Force uniforms.” Read more
The conflict has killed thousands and forced hundreds of thousands more of their homes into the five-million-strong region.
Lowcock said there were “widespread and corroborated reports of Eritrean guilt in massacres and murders.” Eritrean soldiers opened fire Monday in an Ethiopian city, killing at least nine civilians and wounding more than a dozen others, a local government official told Reuters.
The Security Council has been informed privately five times since the conflict began. According to Lowcock’s briefing notes on Thursday, he told the body that sexual violence is being used as a weapon of war, that the humanitarian crisis has worsened in the past month, and that people are now starving to death. Tigray.
“We heard false allegations about ‘the use of sexual violence and hunger as a weapon,'” Tesfamariam wrote on Friday. culture and history of our people “.
He said the priority should be the delivery of civilian aid to Tigray.
Our standards: the principles of trust of Thomson Reuters.