Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 10, 2021
…leaked letter claims.
✞ 12 Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers barged into the sacred room of the church. “They entered the holy room with their shoes. They shouted over us saying; ‘You are our enemies because you have comforted and preached to the villagers that this shall pass.”
💭 Very sad, nevertheless Great reporting, dear Lucy Kassa – many blessings to you. Please to have a detailed one-on-one interview with His Holiness, Abune Matthias. A golden opportunity for us all! Please, if you could!
The document, obtained exclusively by the Telegraph, claims a number of mass killings have taken place over the last five months
At least 78 priests were ‘massacred’ in one zone of Tigray, according to an official church letter leaked to the Telegraph.
The letter, which was addressed to the Synod of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, says that “priests, deacons, choristers, and monks” have been “massacred” over the last five months.
Half a dozen survivors confirmed the news to this newspaper and said that both Ethiopian national army soldiers and Eritrean troops went into their holy spaces across southeast Tigray and “shot them down”.
Ethiopia has been wracked by a horrific civil war since the Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy Ahmed sent his national army into the mountainous northern region of Tigray to oust the powerful regional government there on November 4.
The news comes several days after a video was smuggled out of the country showing the head of Ethiopia’s Orthodox Church Abune Mathias condemning what he calls a ‘genocide’ being committed on the ethnic Tigrayan people by the Ethiopian state.
Centuries-old monasteries and mosques, including the 6th century Debre Damo monastery and Al-Nejashi, Africa’s first Mosque, have been looted and bombed by Eritrean troops who are allied to Ethiopia’s government in Addis Ababa.
The stamped letter was sent on April 15 and lists the number of clergymen killed over the past five months in the church administrations.
Priests who survived the killings told the Telegraph the number of dead clergymen could be much higher than 78.
Gergera Maryam, Adi’Zeban Karagiorgis, Kidanemihret Bosa, Taksa and the monastery of Da Abune Ayzgi are some of the churches where churchmen were massacred, according to witnesses.
Kahsay* and his deacon son Halfom* fled their homes to the nearby mountains of Seharti after receiving news that the Eritrean and Ethiopian troops were raiding churches.
Two days later, Halfom returned back to the church in their village to see if the situation had improved. “I begged my son not to go back. He promised me he would return. But he did not return. The Eritrean soldiers killed my son” says Kahsay, an old man. “I learned a week later the villagers picked up my son’s body. I did not attend his burial. He was only 25.”
In Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, many priests and deacons gather in churchyards to celebrate Saints’ Celebration days.
Three witnesses told the Telegraph that Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers specifically target these celebration days to execute members of the church.
“In the afternoon of January 9, there were many of us in the church of Adi’Zeban Karagiorgis. We were there to celebrate the birth of the Virgin Mary,” one witness who asked to remain anonymous, said. “Suddenly, eight Ethiopian soldiers entered the churchyard. The soldiers picked 12 young deacons between the ages of 15 and 20. They took them out and shot them down,” he says.
Hadera*, an old priest, survived a massacre at the church of Gergera Da Mariam. He says there have been various killings and massacres since early December 2020.
The 76-year-old says he was praying on February 1 when 12 Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers barged into the sacred room of the church.
“They entered the holy room with their shoes. They shouted over us saying; ‘You are our enemies because you have comforted and preached to the villagers that this shall pass. You should not have done that,” recounts Hadera.
“There were six priests in the room. They shot us all and left the church. My friends died. It is nothing short of a miracle I survived.”
The Telegraph approached Eritrea’s information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel and spokeswoman of the Ethiopian Prime Minister office Billene Seyoum for comment. Neither had replied at the time of going to press.
❖ “After surviving 1,500 years of human history in a remote monastery, the Garima Gospels are now facing their most severe threat.“
❖ “The war in Tigray has inflicted more destruction on Ethiopia’s religious and cultural heritage than anything since the invasions of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi.”
After surviving 1,500 years of human history in a remote monastery, the Garima Gospels are now facing their most severe threat.
When a Canadian scholar first glimpsed the ancient Garima Gospels, carried carefully into the sunlight by monks in a mountain monastery in northern Ethiopia, the pages were tattered and crumbling.
“The parchment was so brittle that flakes fell to the ground at every turn,” wrote Michael Gervers, a historian at the University of Toronto, recalling his earliest encounter with the manuscript more than 20 years ago.
Even then he did not fully realize what he was seeing. Some experts now believe it could be the world’s oldest intact version of illuminated Christian scripture. Radiocarbon analysis revealed that its pages date back as early as the fifth century, making it one of the oldest manuscripts of any kind in the world. Its brilliant colours and stunning illustrations make it even more valuable to world culture.
Today, after surviving 1,500 years of human history in a remote monastery, the Garima Gospels are facing their most severe threat.
Historic manuscripts, along with church icons and silver crosses, are among the treasures that have been plundered by Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers, raising global alarm for Tigray’s cultural heritage.
Cut off from the world by military clashes and telecommunications shutdowns, the fate of the Abba Garima monastery and its spectacular Garima Gospels is still unknown. But the area around the monastery is controlled by soldiers who have looted systematically since the start of the war. The fears are growing.
“It is chilling to many of us to think that these Gospels and other ancient artifacts are in the way of danger,” said Suleyman Dost, a professor in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
“These Gospels are not only among the earliest complete texts of the Christian scripture, but they also provide us with a rare glimpse into the language, religion and history of ancient Ethiopia,” he told The Globe and Mail in an e-mail.
“They are truly part of the world heritage and constitute indispensable sources for scholars of early Christianity, late antique Ethiopia and even early Islam.”
The Garima Gospels, bound and illustrated copies of the Four Gospels of the New Testament written in the classical Ethiopian language Ge’ez, are one of the treasures of the ancient Axumite kingdom, whose heartland is now engulfed by the war zone in Tigray.
“The war threatens countless invaluable remains from this period, including inscriptions, religious buildings and manuscripts that have been diligently preserved in monasteries for centuries,” Prof. Dost said.
The Axumite kingdom, whose territories extended across the Red Sea into modern-day Yemen, was one of the great cultural and economic empires of its time, a crossroads of early civilizations and one of the first states to accept Christianity as state religion, in the early fourth century, before even the Roman Empire. Its capital, Axum, is reputed by tradition to be the home of the Ark of the Covenant – another holy relic whose fate is unknown today.
“It was the one territory which retained its Christianity without external domination and has done so ever since,” Prof. Gervers said.
“It is the oldest free Christian culture in the world. And that culture was centred in what is now Eritrea and Tigray. The world is only at this point coming to recognize the importance of this area.”
The Garima Gospels are older than more famous Western manuscripts such as the Book of Kells, and a closer link to the original Greek gospels. “They are just amazing in their artistic expertise, incomparable even to early Gospel books that we have,” Prof. Gervers told The Globe in an interview. “They are of utmost importance to Christian culture as a whole. Their loss or displacement would be disastrous to the cultural heritage of Judeo-Christianity.”
Prof. Gervers has been documenting Ethiopian art and culture for decades, photographing historic church manuscripts and creating a unique database of about 70,000 digitized images, including the Garima Gospels. With no sign of the Tigray war ending soon, his database is becoming increasingly crucial. “We’re thankful that we were able to document so much of this over the past 30 years,” he said.
Among the most invaluable illustrations in the Garima Gospels, he said, are an unparalleled image of the evangelist Mark, and a rare image of a building that has been identified as the Old Temple in Jerusalem.
The war in Tigray has inflicted more destruction on Ethiopia’s religious and cultural heritage than anything since the invasions of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, who burned churches and manuscripts across the country in the 16th century, Prof. Gervers said.
He and his colleagues are trying to monitor the antiquities markets, in case any looters try to sell the manuscripts. “It would be an offence to Christianity if the Garima Gospels ended up for sale somewhere.” Even worse, soldiers could simply burn the manuscripts “out of spite,” he said. But so far their fate is a mystery. “We haven’t heard a word about it.”
Wolbert Smidt, an ethnohistorian at Jena University in Germany who studies Ethiopian culture and history, said he has received reports of soldiers regularly searching churches and sometimes looting or burning church relics, including rare parchment manuscripts that were written by hand in late antiquity.
But there is still hope, he says. During conflicts of past centuries, the monks of Abba Garima carefully hid the Garima Gospels, possibly in mountain caves. Today there is a chance that the monks may have succeeded in hiding them again.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 10, 2021
The United States ambassador to Ethiopia on Monday hosted the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church after he warned of “genocide” in the Tigray region in his first public comments on the war.
In a Facebook post, the U.S. Embassy said Ambassador Geeta Pasi discussed the humanitarian situation in Tigray with the patriarch, Abune Mathias, as well as his video message released last week and first reported by The Associated Press.
In the message, filmed by an American friend on a mobile phone and taken out of Ethiopia, the church leader said that “they want to destroy the people of Tigray” and said his previous attempts to speak out on the six-month conflict had been blocked.
The patriarch, an ethnic Tigrayan, also said that “many barbarisms have been conducted” these days all over Ethiopia, but “what is happening in Tigray is of the highest brutality and cruelty.” Thousands of people have been killed in the fighting between Ethiopian and allied forces and Tigray ones, the result of a political struggle that turned deadly in November.
The ambassador hosted the patriarch at her residence in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and invited him to attend future interfaith community meetings at the embassy to “further explore and continue their conversation,” the Facebook post said.
It was not clear whether the patriarch requested protection from the U.S. and the embassy did not comment on that. While the U.S. government has been outspoken on the Tigray conflict, notably urging soldiers from neighboring Eritrea to leave immediately, the embassy has been publicly quiet.
The spokeswoman for Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Billene Seyoum, did not respond to questions about the patriarch’s comments. The prime minister, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been under growing international pressure as atrocities in Tigray come to light, especially those committed by Eritrean forces, whose presence Abiy denied for months before admitting they were there.
Ethiopia’s government says it is “deeply dismayed” by the deaths of civilians, blames the former Tigray leaders and claims normality is returning in the region of some 6 million people. It has denied widespread profiling and targeting of Tigrayans.
But witnesses have told the AP about seeing bodies strewn on the ground on communities, Tigrayans rounded up and expelled and women raped by Ethiopian, Eritrean and allied forces. Others have described family members and colleagues including priests being swept up and detained, often without charge.
🔥 Today, in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, large numbers of women and girls are again being subjected to “unimaginable” terror and suffering as a result of pervasive sexual violence
🔥 Civilian casualties continue to mount, regional analysts say. Accumulating evidence suggests war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed by all parties. But Abiy’s army, the Eritrean troops he secretly invited into Tigray, and Amhara militia are believed to be the main culprits.
🔥 Prime minister Abiy Ahmed opened the way for victimisation of women with disastrous decision to attack Tigray
🔥 Ethiopia – once Africa’s big success story – is at growing risk of fracture and failure under Abiy Ahmed. The international community should call him personally to account before it’s too late.
🔥 Tigray’s abused, abandoned women cannot do it themselves. Unseen and unheard, they are drowning in a sea of tears.
The use of rape as a weapon of war is as old as warfare itself. In Bosnia in the 1990s, thousands of Muslim women were brutalised by Bosnian Serb forces, who set up “rape camps” as part of a policy of “ethnic cleansing”. In 2001, the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal redefined mass rape as a crime against humanity. Yet there have been many similar atrocities since then, including in South Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and Myanmar.
Now the world looks on – or rather, looks away – as it happens again. Today, in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, large numbers of women and girls are again being subjected to “unimaginable” terror and suffering as a result of pervasive sexual violence. The word “unimaginable” is taken from a disturbing new report on Tigray by Parliament’s international development committee – a report largely ignored by the British government and media.
Reporting from Tigray last week, where fighting erupted in November after government-led forces invaded to topple the region’s breakaway leadership, the International Rescue Committee charity warned the crisis was especially affecting women. “Women are having to engage in sexually exploitative relationships, receiving small amounts of money, food and/or shelter to survive and feed their children,” an IRC spokesman said.
“Rape is being used as a weapon of war across the conflict. Multiple displaced people have given eyewitness accounts of mass rape. Women who are assaulted are in need of multiple levels of care, including emergency contraceptives, and drugs to prevent HIV in addition to psychological support. With 71% of hospital and medical facilities damaged and many looted, medical supplies are scarce,” the IRC said.
Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, opened the way for this mass victimisation of women with his disastrous decision to attack. Once feted as a peacemaker, he will be remembered as the man who chose brute force to settle a political argument, in one of the world’s most fragile states, in the middle of a global pandemic.
After failing to secure the quick victory he predicted, Abiy has minimised the scale of the emergency. The latest UN assessment tells a different story: 4.5 million people in need of food and assistance, hundreds of thousands displaced, 67,000 refugees sheltering in Sudan, and humanitarian convoys blocked. Opposition parties say more than 50,000 people have died. Amnesty International last week decried a “ferocious tide” of rights violations including “numerous credible reports of women and girls being subjected to sexual violence, including gang rape, by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers”.
Save the Children also sounded the alarm. Thousands of children separated from their families were at daily risk of abuse while living in “unsafe and dire conditions” in informal camps, it said. “Many survivors are too scared to report sexual assault or seek treatment due to stigma and fear of reprisal”.
The worst crimes are often hidden from view, Doctors Without Borders said: “Many of Tigray’s six million people live in mountainous and rural areas where they are all but invisible to the outside world.” Malnutrition was on the rise, especially among children and pregnant women, it said.
The extent of the fighting is unclear, given the government’s internet blackout, reporting restrictions, and unreliable official information. Civilian casualties continue to mount, regional analysts say. Accumulating evidence suggests war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed by all parties. But Abiy’s army, the Eritrean troops he secretly invited into Tigray, and Amhara militia are believed to be the main culprits.
His initial bullishness dispelled, Abiy now describes the war he began as “tiresome”, says some reports of atrocities are exaggerated or faked, and has promised investigations. He claims Eritrean soldiers are withdrawing. There’s no doubt opposition forces are also much to blame for continuing carnage and misery. But hopes Abiy will heed appeals to stop fighting and open peace talks were dashed last weekend when Ethiopia’s council of ministers formally designated Tigray’s leadership, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, as a terrorist organisation. The International Crisis Group warns guerrilla warfare could drag on for years.
Anyone expecting decisive international intervention is likely to be disappointed. The African Union has proved ineffective, the UN security council even more so. G7 foreign ministers, meeting in London last week, went out of their way to avoid upsetting Abiy’s government, which they persist in regarding as a strategic ally rather than a problematic actor.
“We condemn the killing of civilians, rape and sexual exploitation, and other forms of gender-based violence,” the G7 communique said. It backed an investigation process, called for a ceasefire and improved humanitarian access, and urged “a clear, inclusive political process in Tigray”.
But direct pressure on Abiy, such as the threat of sanctions and aid cuts, and concerted, collective action to find and prosecute those legally responsible for atrocities and mass rapes were wholly lacking. It was a feeble start for US president Joe Biden’s putative “alliance of democracies” and Boris Johnson’s idea of Britain as a global “force for good”.
Maintaining Ethiopia’s “unity and territorial integrity” appears to be the west’s main concern. Yet under Abiy’s divisive leadership, lethal clashes between the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups are escalating. Political violence affects several regions. A possible war with Egypt looms over Addis Ababa’s new Blue Nile dam. And on 5 June, ill-prepared, boycotted, and un-monitored national elections that Abiy vows to win could drive Ethiopians further apart.
Under Abiy, Ethiopia – once Africa’s big success story – is at growing risk of fracture and failure. The international community should call him personally to account before it’s too late.
Tigray’s abused, abandoned women cannot do it themselves. Unseen and unheard, they are drowning in a sea of tears.
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