“In our lifetime, or even in our history, we have not seen such wickedness,” he said. “They killed youngsters who were wearing white clothes after having taken the Holy Communion. One woman who was holding a child and shouting ‘my son, my son’ was singled out and killed, and her seven-month-old baby fell to the ground right in front of us.”😠😠😠 😢😢😢
The 78-year-old Orthodox priest stayed inside his house until the killers had gone. Then, leaning on his wooden cane and holding a crucifix, he rushed outside to cover the bodies of his four sons and his two grandsons. Blood seeped through their white cotton scarves.
“They gathered them together and massacred them,” Lieqah Teaguhann Abraha Gaebbrrae said of the killers he identified as Eritrean soldiers by their accents, uniforms and facemarks.
They had arrived on foot in late November, he said, as the priest and his family were sharing injera flatbread and lentils to celebrate a Christian Orthodox holiday in the village of Dengelat in Tigray, the northernmost region of Ethiopia.
The celebration fell in the midst of conflict — the culmination of a power struggle between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, a regional party that ruled the country for 27 years until 2018.
This war has tipped Ethiopia, a gradually liberalising economic powerhouse and Africa’s second most populous country, into crisis. As tightly restricted humanitarian and foreign media access is loosened, testimonies such as that of Abraha are bubbling to the surface.
So too is evidence of the involvement of troops from Eritrea, which neighbours Tigray, to help the Ethiopian government fight the battle-hardened TPLF. After previous denials, this week Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, conceded that Eritrean troops had crossed into Ethiopia because, he said, they feared attack from the TPLF. During a meeting in Asmara on Friday, Isaias Afewerki, Eritrea’s strongman, “agreed to withdraw its forces out of the Ethiopian border”, read a statement from Abiy’s office.
For Eritrea, this conflict has been an opportunity to fight its decades-old Tigrayan foe, many claim. “This is open season for Eritrea,” said a foreign diplomat in Ethiopia. “Isaias wants to get rid of Tigray once and for all.” Their involvement and that of local militias and forces from elsewhere in Ethiopia has escalated a conflict that threatens to destabilise the region.
“You speak like us in Tigrinya. You are Eritreans. We are brothers. Come in and eat with us,” Abraha recalled telling six soldiers. But instead they took six men, aged between 15 and 46, to the banks of the nearby river, tied their hands behind their backs and shot them in the head. “They killed unarmed human beings whom they have not seen killing others. They are barbarians,” Abraha said.
‘Payback for Eritrea’
In total, local church officials and members of the Inter-Religious Council of Tigray estimate that at least 164 civilians were killed in Dengelat over two days in late November.
These are just a few of the thousands that diplomats and aid workers say have died since early November when Abiy began the so-called law and order operation against the TPLF, an organisation he has labelled a “criminal clique”. Weeks later, Addis Ababa claimed to “have completed and ceased military operations in the Tigray region”, establishing its own government there and killing or capturing some senior members of the TPLF leadership.
But the fighting rumbles on and Ethiopian and Eritrean forces, Tigrayan and other ethnic militias now stand accused of atrocities and even “ethnic cleansing”.
“This could be like the former Yugoslavia. Ethiopians will be digging up mass graves for a decade,” said a senior humanitarian official in Tigray.
Top members of the interim government in Tigray, which was appointed by Abiy, admit that Eritreans are in “full control” of a strip of Ethiopian territory of about 100km along the border. In private, even some senior federal government officials admit that the Eritreans remain present.
The involvement of Eritrea, where conscription is unavoidable and often indefinite, “is payback” because “the TPLF is the biggest existential threat to both Tigray and Eritrea”, said a senior federal government official, adding that Eritrean solders “have to leave” now because this has turned into “a majorly ugly war”.
The UN, US and EU have condemned the Eritrean presence in Tigray and said the perpetrators of human rights abuses should be held accountable. On Monday, the EU imposed sanctions on Eritrea, partly for its involvement in Tigray, diplomats say.
Eritrea’s information minister, Yaemmanae Ghaebremasqael, dismissed the allegations of abuses by Eritrean forces as “outrageous”, while the foreign ministry accused the EU of “doggedly working” to save the “TPLF clique” and to “drive a wedge between Eritrea and Ethiopia”.
For its part, Ethiopia’s foreign ministry has strongly denied ethnically motivated violence. The Ethiopian government recently said in a statement that “it undertook the law enforcement operations in the Tigray region with utmost precaution to avoid as much as possible collateral damage on civilians”, adding that it “takes any allegations of human rights abuses and crimes very seriously”.
Officials in Addis Ababa say the TPLF is “the source of all this mess”, blaming the party for almost three decades of dictatorship and fomenting ethnic division. Addis Ababa alleges the TPLF sought to undermine Abiy by sponsoring terrorist attacks around the country. It blames the TPLF and its militias for carrying out massacres, such as one at Mai Kadra in western Tigray in November.
Mulu Nega, the interim president of Tigray who was handpicked by Addis Ababa, said TPLF fighters were using civilians as “human shields”. “We’re trying to minimise this, but we cannot avoid completely human rights abuses,” he said in his office in the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle.
“This is a dirty war,” Yohannes Gebremeskel Tesfamariam, a government general in charge of a task force on the Tigray conflict, told diplomats during a March briefing in Mekelle. “On the atrocities, rape, crime . . . I don’t think we are going to be fortunate to see that such things have not happened,” he added.
Getachew Reda, a senior member of the TPLF, warned from his hide-out that TPLF forces would continue to fight until Tigrayans were liberated from what he called “occupation and perpetrators of genocide”.
‘In our lifetime . . . we have not seen such wickedness’
The wreckage of war is in plain sight on the 100km drive north of Mekelle to Dengelat. The Financial Times passed shelled villages, churches and mosques, looted factories, mangled tanks and charred combat trucks.
On arrival at the mountainous village of stone houses, men immediately rushed out to show mass graves — allegedly of between three and 13 people each — covered with cactus leaves or corrugated zinc. Women crouched under eucalyptus trees, holding photographs of dead relatives, sobbing in anger and despair.
Locals said “Eritrean soldiers” had fired on civilians, saying their orders were to get rid of potential TPLF militias. Some climbed a rock escarpment to shelter in the church but were warned by soldiers it would be shelled. Some who fled were shot dead.
Then, residents say, the Eritrean soldiers went on a murderous spree. They broke into the house of Yemane Gebremariam, 53, a seller of soft drinks. Out of the 13 people gathered there, he said, they killed seven, including his daughter and newly wed son, whose wife was shot in the hand.
“In our lifetime, or even in our history, we have not seen such wickedness,” he said. “They killed youngsters who were wearing white clothes after having taken the Holy Communion. One woman who was holding a child and shouting ‘my son, my son’ was singled out and killed, and her seven-month-old baby fell to the ground right in front of us.”
Weeping outside the church at Dengelat, 53-year-old Emnti Gobezay described the past months of conflict as “the worst war I’ve seen in my lifetime”, surpassing the TPLF’s insurgent war against the Derg regime in the early 1990s and the subsequent border war with Eritrea.
“I saw them with my own eyes,” she sobbed, describing when the “Eritreans” caught and killed her 20-year-old son. The Ethiopian government and its Eritrean “supporters” want “to wipe out the people of Tigray” by killing “peaceful people, teenagers, children, and priests”, she said.
Holding a leaf from a eucalyptus tree, she said: “The innocent blood of Tigrayans will fertilise this ground and grow fresh leaves. Our dead children will not be forgotten.”
The Shelling of a Tigrayan Church by Abiy Ahmed | St. Emmanuel Church Wuqro
The footage, recorded with a smart phone from a distance, shows Amanuel Orthodox church being shelled. The church is situated atop a hill near the famous Negash (al-Nejashi) mosque which has also been attacked and damaged.
According to the person who recorded the footage, the church was shelled by artillery fired by tanks on November 24, 2020. The church was, the person added, shelled 17 times, but not all of them hit their target, some landing on the hill. The person also added that the shelling was done by the Eritrean army, which he said he saw in close range. In the video, one voice is heard saying “Medhane Alem Adi Kesho has also been shelled”.
The invading armies have deliberately targeted Tigrayan religious sites. The most gruesome massacres are also committed in churches, as the massacres in Mariam Dengelat church and Mariam Tsion of Aksum showed.
Reports indicate churches are the main massacre sites. Their valuable properties are also looted. But they are also shelled and destroyed. In a recent interview Father Sereke Berhan from Australia did with another religious father from Tigray, churches in all parts of Tigray have been shelled, looted and plundered. He mentioned Debre Damo, Debre Abay in western Tigray, churches in Atsbi, churches in Hawzen and churches in many other places. The interviewee also added that he counted 70 priests that have been killed. He also said the Eritrean soldiers deliberately urinate on the Tigrayan churches while the faithful are there.
💭 Mulugeta Gebrehiwot is a Senior Fellow at World Peace Foundation and former Program Director of the WPF African security sector and peace operations program
💭 Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
This a special podcast from World Peace Foundation on the war in Tigray, Ethiopia. It is a recording of a phone call from somewhere in rural Tigray on January 27, in which Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe spoke with Alex de Waal.
Mulugeta was a member of the TPLF during the guerrilla war from 1975 to 1991, and served in several senior positions in the EPRDF government from 1991 to 2000. Subsequently he founded the Institute for Peace and Security Studies at Addis Ababa University, and among other things initiated the Tana High Level Forum on peace and security in Africa. Mulugeta is the author of Laying the Past to Rest: The EPRDF and the Challenges of Ethiopian State-building and co-author of a recent paper “Nationalism and Self-Determination in Contemporary Ethiopia,” reviewed recently on this blog.
Mulugeta was in Mekelle in November when the war broke out. He evacuated from the city to the mountains. This is the first time we have heard directly from him.
“It is Past Time to Stop The Slaughter in Tigray and to Bring Mr. Abiy to Justice.”
An Ethiopian woman who fled the ongoing fighting in Tigray region holds her child under a World Food Programme banner in a on the Sudan-Ethiopia border on Dec. 15, 2020.
Ethiopia is killing its own citizens, wantonly. That is chilling, but true: By attempting to extirpate Ethiopians of Tigrayan ethnicity and heritage, Ethiopia’s military and government stands accused of purposeful ethnic cleansing, a precursor to all-out genocide, as outlawed by the UN convention against genocide.
Upholders of world order, such as Canada, should immediately refer the atrocities in the Tigrayan region of Ethiopia to the International Criminal Court so that its investigators can examine the massacres and prepare prosecutions. Additionally, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm, championed by a Canadian-instigated commission and adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005 to end a slaughter of the innocents, should now be invoked.
Late last year, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed decided that leaders from the Tigray region – and apparently, by extension, all Tigrayans – had undermined his authority by defying the central government and holding a vote for its local legislative assembly. As punishment, Mr. Abiy sent the military to invade the small northern region of Tigray.
Only 6 per cent of Ethiopians are Tigrayans, but Mr. Abiy – whose Oromo ethnic group is the largest in the country, comprising 34 per cent of the population – had seemingly decided that their very existence threatened his control of 110 million Ethiopians.
Ethiopian refugees who fled fighting in Tigray province are pictured at a reception centre in Sudan’s eastern Gedaref province, on November 17, 2020. – Around 25,000 Ethiopians fleeing conflict in the Tigray region have crossed into neighbouring Sudan, state news agency SUNA reported, as the UN said it was working to find them shelter. (Photo by Ebrahim HAMID / AFP)
Mr. Abiy promised that the campaign would be short and surgical, but that’s not how events have played out. Because telephone service and the internet have been mostly cut off since November in Tigray, no one really knows how many Tigrayans have been maimed or killed by the Ethiopian army and how much of Tigray has been destroyed. However, smuggled reports indicate that thousands have died in combat and collaterally; despite Mr. Abiy’s claims to the contrary, doctors in the main hospital in Mekelle, Tigray’s provincial capital, have said that indiscriminate shelling has killed civilians. At least 50,000 Tigrayans have fled across the Sudanese border into squalid refugee camps. About 4.5 million of Tigray’s six million inhabitants desperately need emergency food aid, and some will soon starve.
Two weeks ago, the military executed Seyoum Mesfin, Ethiopia’s former long-time foreign minister; at least 47 of 167 prominent Tigrayans on a most-wanted list have also been killed or captured. About 750 civilians huddling in a cathedral in the historic town of Aksum were reportedly massacred. Widespread raping is alleged, especially in Mekelle. Troops are still scouring the jagged Tembien mountains for remaining Tigrayan leaders, taking no prisoners.
Tigrayans, who were once mainstays of the country’s army, air force, sections of the civil service and Ethiopian Airlines (which was headed by a Tigrayan who has since been refused permission to fly), have been marginalized even beyond Tigray’s borders. It has the appearance of a pogrom.
The underlying cause of Mr. Abiy’s sudden hostility to Tigrayans stems from the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 by a Marxist military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, a vicious dictator who drove Ethiopian deeper into poverty than ever before with a Stalinist-inspired agricultural program.
Meles Zenawi, a charismatic Tigrayan, created a revolutionary guerrilla force in the Sudan and, in 1991, led the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) to a series of striking military victories against Mr. Mengistu’s army. After Mr. Mengistu eventually fled to Zimbabwe, Mr. Meles and a cabal mostly made up of Tigrayans ruled Ethiopia in a quasi-democratic fashion, rigging elections (especially in 2005) but also gradually uplifting the lives of many Ethiopians, including those who are Oromo and Amhara, the largest two ethnic groups in the country.
The Oromo and other ethnic groups felt discriminated against by Tigrayans under Mr. Meles. After he died unexpectedly in 2012, he was succeeded by Hailemariam Desalegn, an Ethiopian from the southern Wolayta ethnic group. He ruled on behalf of the Tigrayans who had assisted Mr. Meles.
After protests by Oromo erupted in 2017, Mr. Hailemariam transferred power in 2018 to Mr. Abiy, an Oromo who had fought with Mr. Meles and the EPRDF against Mr. Mengistu and who was a trusted ally in the Tigrayan-led government. Now, he has abruptly turned against Tigray.
In 2019, Mr. Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the country’s 19-year diplomatic standoff with Eritrea and for releasing political prisoners and adopting liberal governance within Ethiopia. Mr. Abiy was lauded across Africa, Europe and the Americas as a welcome new democratic leader. Now he has exposed his true colours, besmirching the very name and ideals behind the Nobel Peace Prize.
It is Past Time to Stop The Slaughter in Tigray and to Bring Mr. Abiy to Justice.
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