The Biden administration has determined that government troops and other forces in Ethiopia, a key U.S. partner in East Africa, committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during that country’s two-year civil war, Secretary of State Blinken said.
and is a key contributor for peacekeeping missions, has long been an important regional partner for the United States.when, during the conflict, U.S. officials denounced alleged abuses by government fighters and their Eritrean allies, and Ethiopian officials warned Washington to stay out of internal affairs. The United States has not yet restored the country’s participation in a preferential trade pact after its suspension over alleged abuses during the war.
Asked whether the United States might someday assess that genocide had occurred during the conflict, a State Department official said that this week’s finding “in no way precludes a future determination if new information becomes available.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely.Sen. James E. Risch , the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the Ethiopia determination was long overdue.
Beyond Ethiopia, Blinken pointed to an array of global abuses that he said amounted to a “backsliding in human rights conditions.” He named Iran’s crackdown on protesters and China’s treatment of minority Uyghurs, which the United States has deemed genocide, and its repression of political freedoms. Rights advocates welcomed the report but said the Biden administration, which has promised to put human rights at the core of its foreign policy, must do more to close the gap between words and practice.Nicole Widdersheim, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch, said the annual reports represented a valuable “cataloguing” of problematic behavior worldwide. “But they often don’t match policymaking,” she said.
Advocates say the Biden administration has sometimes subordinated human rights to security and economic concerns, and at times failed to sufficiently press allies on repression or other abuses. That criticism was particularly acute last year when Biden made a controversial visit to Saudi Arabia, which has a long track record of repression and whose de facto leader was blamed by U.S. intelligence agencies for the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
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