LUCY KASSA, Nov 7, 2021, The Globe and mail
Medhanye, a 31-year-old Ethiopian of Tigrayan ethnicity, was watching a soccer match with his friends at a café in Addis Ababa when the police suddenly arrived. After demanding their identity cards, which show their ethnicity, the police separated 11 Tigrayans and took them to a site where hundreds of others were being held.
At dawn the next morning, they were forced onto three buses and driven to a secret detention camp in the Afar region. “They did not explain our crime,” Medhanye said.
For the next 93 days, he said he was imprisoned – and often tortured – at the camp with hundreds of other Tigrayans, until he finally managed to pay a bribe for his release last month.
Disappearances, ethnic profiling and mass arrests of Tigrayans have become increasingly common this year, especially after territorial gains by Tigrayan rebel forces in the escalating civil war, according to human rights groups and other independent sources.