Released on bail, a politician speaks of torture by TPLF operatives targeting one ethnic group

ESAT News (March 23, 2016)

The former vice president of All Ethiopian Unity Party (AEUP), Zemene Meheret, who is recently released on bail after 14 months in jail on trumped up charges, said he and his cellmates were tortured by agents of the ruling TPLF in the most inhuman way, because, as the tormenters told them, they were Amharas.

Zemene recounted to ESAT details of the everyday ruthless tortures by Tigrayan agents of the TPLF who tell the Amharic speaking inmates that the Amharas would never come to power in Ethiopia.

Zemene said he was blindfolded all the way from Gondar to Addis Ababa with his hands and legs tied. Once at the Central Investigation Bureau, a. k. a. Ethiopia’s torture chamber, he was strip naked, beaten and then agents of the TPLF take a leak on his naked body. He said the Tigrayan agents torture and hurl ethnic slurs at every inmate who is an Amhara.

“It is a crime to be an Amhara in Ethiopia,” he told ESAT DC Bureau on the phone from Ethiopia. “People are being jailed not because they are criminals, but because they are Amharas. I have learnt from my stay at the prison that the TPLF Tigrayans have a deep rooted hate towards the Amharas,” said Zemene.

He said an Amhara inmate with gunshot wounds with four bullets still in his torso was denied medical treatment because he was “a terrorist” for the prison officials.

His tormentors once told him they would help him if he would change to a “trusted opposition” but otherwise would remain in prison like Andualem Arage, a prominent opposition politician and Prof. Asrat Woldeyes, Ethiopia’s pioneer surgeon par excellence, who died after being tortured by the brutes.