🔥 Indonesia’s Mount Semeru, which last erupted in on Saturday, Dec. 4, 2021, has awoken once again on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2022. Wow, on the very same day!
🔥 Thousands of residents in Indonesia’s East Java were on high alert on Monday after a violent eruption at the island’s tallest volcano prompted authorities to impose an 8-kilometer no-go zone and forced evacuations of entire villages.
The provincial search and rescue agency deployed teams to the worst-affected areas near Mount Semeru to assess damage, with low rainfall giving some reprieve, Tholib Vatelehan, a Basarnas spokesperson, told Reuters.
“Yesterday, the rainfall level was high, causing all the material from the top of the mountain to come down. But today, so far, there’s no rain, so its relatively safe,” he said.
No casualties have been reported and there has not been any immediate disruption to air travel.
The 3,676-metre volcano erupted at 2.46pm local time on Sunday (0746GMT). Footage shot by local residents showed Mt. Semeru spewing a giant cloud of grey ash high above its crater, which later engulfed the mountain and surrounding rice paddy fields, roads and bridges, and turned the sky black. A video shared by the Environment Ministry on Twitter showed a pyroclastic flow of lava, rocks and hot gases gushing down the mountainside.
People fled the eruption on motorcycles, with almost 2,500 people forced to evacuate, authorities said.
Indonesia’s volcanology and geological hazard mitigation agency on Sunday raised the alert level for Mt. Semeru to the highest level. The agency also issued a warning to residents not to approach within 8 km (5 miles) of the summit, or 500 metres of riversides due to risks of lava flows.
Semeru erupted last year killing more than 50 people and displacing thousands more.
The eruption, some 640 km (400 miles) east of the capital, Jakarta, follows a series of earthquakes in the west of Java, including one last month that killed more than 300 people.
An archipelago of 270 million that sits along the Pacific Ring of Fire, Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone nations on earth.
With 142 volcanoes, Indonesia has the largest population globally living in close range to a volcano, including 8.6 million within 10km (6.2 miles).
Mauna Loa, which means “long mountain” in Hawaiian, is the largest active volcano in the world. It covers 2,035 sq miles (5,271 sq km), and is one of a chain of five volcanoes which form Hawaii’s Big Island.
In the satellite imagery captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-West satellite, you can clearly see the volcanic eruption, a monstrous plume of gas and ash suddenly covering a large portion of the Big Island.
❖ የኅዳር ጽዮን ማርያም / Annual feast of St. Mary of Zion
This is a feast colorfully celebrated every year on Hidar 21 (November 30) at every church dedicated to St. Mary. The day is observed with special fervor particularly in Axum Tsion where the Ark of the Covenant is housed safely. The occasion is attended by massive Christian pilgrimages from all over Ethiopia and also foreign visitors making it one of the most joyous annual pilgrimages in Axum, the sacred city of Ethiopians.
The Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion claims to contain The original Ark of the Covenant.The Feast of the Ark of the Covenant (locally known as Tabote Tsion) is held in commemoration of different historical events including the coming of The Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia and the construction of the first church dedicated to St. Mary in Axum.
The day also marks the destruction of Dagon by the power of The Ark of God, as recorded in the Bible, and the return of The Ark to Israel after seven months of exile at the Dagon’s house in Philistine. (1 Samuel 4; 6)
In the Ethiopian Holy City of Axum – where we Orthodox Tewahedo Christians believe The Ark of the Covenant is housed — a massacre took place on 28 November 2020, continuing on 29 November, tallying more than 800 Christian worshipers deaths.
Survivors of these and other horrifying massacres in Tigray, and we children of Axum crying out for justice. Hundreds of thousands of survivors are still seeking justice and redress, which may only come through independent and credible investigations into the atrocities they and we all suffered. Our calls for justice and accountability must not go unheeded because of the hypocrite international community’s empty and self-serving refrain of “African solutions for African problems”.
❖❖❖ [Isaiah 42:1–4] ❖❖❖
“Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his law.„
💭 Satellites at the beginning of this year identified new fissures near one of the world’s most active volcanoes, Erta Ale, in Ethiopia, also known as the “steaming mountain” and the “gate of hell.”
🔥The Third World War began on October 24 / 2013 (Ethiopian calendar – on the Days of Saints George and Abune Teklahaymanot) on November 4, 2020, when the Edomites and Ishmaelites opened their Jihad against Axum Zion (on the Ark of the Covenant). The US presidential election took place on this very day.
And just today, it was reported that Ethiopian government and Tigray forces agreed to ceasefire after first face-to-face talks – and this over a million massacred ancient Christians later – and nobody is talking about JUSTICE.
Our expedition leader and guide from VolcanoDiscovery Ethiopia, Enku Mulugeta, visited the volcano in mid-October to make new observations. A couple of significant changes in the southern pit crater have been observed since the last update.
Vigorous lava spattering continues to eject hot, fresh and plastic lava clots that in turn have piled into 5-7 meters high deposits (so-called hornitos) at the northern and southern walls of the crater due to short travel distance from and/or above the vent. Hornito is considered to be rare hawaiian-type phenomena that is formed when part of lava, flowing within lava tube, escapes through a hole out of lava tube due to strong degassing in the form of spattering.
Furthermore, both hornitos are formed on the thin solidified crust of the pit crater, among which a gap resembling a cave-like lava tube appears to be prone to collapse into a large lava lake as it used to be before. Slabs of dark, solidified crust continue to shift on the lava lake surface accompanied by typical bright orange lava glow between them.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 1, 2021
On November 30, they were joined by scores of religious pilgrims for the Orthodox festival of Zion Maryam, an annual feast to mark the day Ethiopians believe the Ark of the Covenant was brought to the country from Jerusalem. The holy day was a welcome respite from weeks of violence, but it would not last.
A group of Eritrean soldiers opened fire on Maryam Dengelat church while hundreds of congregants were celebrating mass, eyewitnesses say. People tried to flee on foot, scrambling up cliff paths to neighboring villages. The troops followed, spraying the mountainside with bullets.
A CNN investigation drawing on interviews with 12 eyewitnesses, more than 20 relatives of the survivors and photographic evidence sheds light on what happened next.
The soldiers went door to door, dragging people from their homes. Mothers were forced to tie up their sons. A pregnant woman was shot, her husband killed. Some of the survivors hid under the bodies of the dead.
The mayhem continued for three days, with soldiers slaughtering local residents, displaced people and pilgrims. Finally, on December 2, the soldiers allowed informal burials to take place, but threatened to kill anyone they saw mourning. Abraham volunteered.
Under their watchful eyes, he held back tears as he sorted through the bodies of children and teenagers, collecting identity cards from pockets and making meticulous notes about their clothing or hairstyle. Some were completely unrecognizable, having been shot in the face, Abraham said.
Then he covered their bodies with earth and thorny tree branches, praying that they wouldn’t be washed away, or carried off by prowling hyenas and circling vultures. Finally he placed their shoes on top of the burial mounds, so he could return with their parents to identify them.
One was Yohannes Yosef, who was just 15.
“Their hands were tied … young children … we saw them everywhere. There was an elderly man who had been killed on the road, an 80-something-year-old man. And the young kids they killed on the street in the open. I’ve never seen a massacre like this and I don’t want to [again],” Abraham said.
“We only survived by the grace of God.”
Abraham said he buried more than 50 people that day, but estimates more than 100 died in the assault.
They’re among thousands of civilians believed to have been killed since November, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for resolving a long-running conflict with neighboring Eritrea, launched a major military operation against the political party that governs the Tigrayregion. He accused the TigrayPeople’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which ruled Ethiopia for nearly three decades before Abiy took office in 2018, of attacking a government military base and trying to steal weapons. The TPLF denies the claim.
The conflict is the culmination of escalating tensions between the two sides, and the most dire of several recent ethno-nationalist clashes in Africa’s second-most populous country.
After seizing control of Tigray’s main cities in late November, Abiy declared victory and maintained that no civilians were harmed in the offensive. Abiy has also denied that soldiers from Eritrea crossed into Tigrayto support Ethiopian forces.
But the fighting has raged on in rural and mountainous areas where the TPLF and its armed supporters are reportedly hiding out, resisting Abiy’s drive to consolidate power. The violence has spilled over into local communities, catching civilians in the crossfire and triggering what the United Nations refugee agency has called the worst flight of refugees from the region in two decades.
The UN special adviser on genocide prevention said in early February that the organization had received multiple reports of “extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, looting, mass executions and impeded humanitarian access.”
Many of those abuses have been blamed on Eritrean soldiers, whose presence on the ground suggests that Abiy’s much-lauded peace deal with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki set the stage for the two sides to wage war against the TPLF — their mutual enemy.
The US State Department, in a statement to CNN, called for Eritrean forces to be “withdrawn from Tigrayimmediately,” citing credible reports of their involvement in “deeply troubling conduct.” In response to CNN’s findings, the spokesperson said “reports of a massacre at Maryam Dengelat are gravely concerning and demand an independent investigation.”
Ethiopia responded to CNN’s request for comment with a statement that did not directly address the attack in Dengelat. The government said it would “continue bringing all perpetrators to justice following thorough investigations into alleged crimes in the region,” but gave no details about those investigations.
“They were taking them barefoot and killing them in front of their mothers”
CNN has reached out for comment to Eritrea, which has yet to respond. On Friday, the government vehemently denied its soldiers had committed atrocities during another massacre in Tigrayreported by Amnesty International.
The TPLF said in a statement to CNN that its forces were nowhere near Dengelat at the time of the massacre. It rejected that the victims could have been mistaken for being TPLF and called for a UN investigation to hold all sides accountable for atrocities committed during the conflict.
Still, the situation inside the country remains opaque. Ethiopia’s government has severely restricted access to journalists and prevented most aid from reaching areas beyond the government’s control, making it challenging to verify accounts from survivors. And an intermittent communications blackout during the fighting has effectively blocked the war from the world’s eyes.
Now that curtain is being pulled back, as witnesses fleeing parts of Tigrayreach internet access and phone lines are restored. They detail a disastrous conflict that has given rise to ethnic violence, including attacks on churches and mosques.
For months, rumors spread of a grisly assault on an Orthodox church in Dengelat. A list of the dead began circulating on social media in early December, shared among the Tigrayan diaspora. Then photos of the deceased, including young children, started cropping up online.
Through a network of activists and relatives, CNN tracked down eyewitnesses to the attack. In countless phone calls — many disconnected and dropped — Abraham and others provided the most detailed account of the deadly massacre to date.
Eyewitnesses said that the festival started much as it had any other year. Footage of the celebrations from 2019 shows priests dressed in white ceremonial robes and crowns, carrying crosses aloft, leading hundreds of people in prayer at Maryam Dengelat church. The faithful sang, danced and ululated in unison.
As prayers concluded in the early hours of November 30, Abraham looked out from the hilltop where the church is perched to see troops arriving by foot, followed by more soldiers in trucks. At first, they were peaceful, he said. They were invited to eat, and rested under the shade of a tree grove.
But, as congregants were celebrating mass around midday, shelling and gunfire erupted, sending people fleeing up mountain paths and into nearby homes.
Desta, who helped with preparations for the festival, said he was at the church when troops arrived at the village entrance, blocking off the road and firing shots. He heard people screaming and fled, running up Ziqallay mountainside. From the rocky plateau he surveyed the chaos playing out below.
We could see people running here and there … [the soldiers] were killing everyone who was coming from the church,” Desta said.
Eight eyewitnesses said they could tell the troops were Eritrean, based on their uniforms and dialect. Some speculated that soldiers were meting out revenge by targeting young men, assuming they were members of the TPLF forces or allied local militias. But Abraham and others maintained there were no militia in Dengelat or the church.
Marta, who was visiting Dengelat for the holiday, says she left the church with her husband Biniam after morning prayers. As the newlyweds walked back to their relative’s home, a stream of people began sprinting up the hill, shouting that soldiers were rounding people up in the village.
She recalled the horrifying moment soldiers arrived at their house, shooting into the compound and calling out: “Come out, come out you b*tches.” Marta said they went outside holding their identity cards aloft, saying “we’re civilians.” But the troops opened fire anyway, hitting Biniam, his sister and several others.
“I was holding Bini, he wasn’t dead … I thought he was going to survive, but he died [in my arms].
The couple had just been married in October. Marta found out after the massacre that she was pregnant.
After the soldiers left, Marta, who said she was shot in the hand, helped drag the seven bodies inside, so that the hyenas wouldn’t eat them. “We slept near the bodies … and we couldn’t bury them because they [the soldiers] were still there,” she said.
Marta and other eyewitnesses described soldiers going house to house through Dengelat, dragging people outside, binding their hands or asking others to do so, and then shooting them.
Rahwa, who was part of the Sunday school group from Edaga Hamus and left Dengelat earlier than others, managing to escape being killed, said mothers were forced to tie up their sons.
“They were ordering their mothers to tie their sons’ hands. They were taking them barefoot and killing them in front of their mothers,” Rahwa said eyewitnesses told her.
Samuel, another eyewitness, said that he had eaten and drank with the soldiers before they came to his house, which is just behind the church, and killed his relatives. He said he survived by hiding underneath one of their bodies for hours.
“They started pushing the people out of their houses and they were killing all children, women and old men. After they killed them outside their houses, they were looting and taking all the property,” Samuel said.
As the violence raged, hundreds of people remained in the church hall. In a lull in the gunfire, priests advised those who could to go home, ushering them outside. Several of the priests were killed as they left the church, Abraham said.
With nowhere to run to, Abraham sheltered inside Maryam Dengelat, lying on the floor as artillery pounded the tin roof. “We lost hope and we decided to stay and die at the church. We didn’t try to run,” he said.
Two days later, the troops called parishioners down from the church to deal with the dead. Abraham said he and five other men spent the day burying bodies, including those from Marta’s household and the Sunday school children. But the troops forbid them from burying bodies at the church, in line with Orthodox tradition, and forced them to make mass graves instead — a practice that has been described elsewhere in Tigray.
“… most of them were eaten by vultures before they got buried, it was horrible”
Tedros Abraham shared photos and videos of the grave sites, which CNN geolocated to Dengelat with the help of satellite image analysis from several experts. The analysis was unable to conclusively identify individual graves, which witnesses said were shallow, but one expert said there were signs that parts of the landscape had changed.
The initial bloodshed was followed by a period of two tense weeks, Abraham said. Soldiers stayed in the area in several encampments, stealing cars, burning crops and killing livestock before eventually moving on.
Tedros, who was born in Dengelat and traveled there after the soldiers had left, said that the village smelled of death and that vultures were circling over the mountains, a sign that there may be more bodies left uncounted there.
“Some of them were also killed in the far fields while they were trying to escape and most of them were eaten by vultures before they got buried, it was horrible. [The soldiers] tied them and killed them in front of their doors, and they shot them in the head just to save bullets,” he said.
Tedros visited the burial grounds described by eyewitnesses and said he saw cracks in the church walls where artillery hit. In interviews with villagers and family members, he compiled a death toll of more than 70 people.
The families hope that the names of their loved ones, which Tedros, Abraham and others risked their lives to record, will eventually be read out at a traditional funeral ceremony at the Maryam Dengelat church — rare closure in an ongoing conflict.
Three months after the massacre, the graves in Dengelat are a daily reminder of the bloodshed for the survivors who remain in the village. But it has not yet been safe enough to rebury the bodies of those who died, and that reality is weighing on them.
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