💭 “At the center of this chaos is Abiy. At every turn he has blundered. He has overpromised, mistaken image for reality, made needless enemies and locked himself into dangerous alliances. Those who once embraced his rhetoric of reform and peacemaking are looking naïve at best. He’s not a consensus-builder, rather an agent of polarization. Perhaps most significantly for the incoming U.S. diplomatic team, the Ethiopian leader has demonstrated an explosive combination of hubris and poor judgement that make him an unreliable interlocutor — sitting atop a fragile country of 110 million people in a volatile region. There’s no obvious solution: it’s a problem from hell.”
👉 ፻/100% ትክክል! 👍
War broke out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia in November. Five months later, the scale of the carnage, destruction, and destabilization is becoming evident.
The spark for the fighting was an attack on army bases by soldiers loyal to the region’s ruling Tigray People’s Liberation Front which was at odds with the federal government headed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. But wars don’t happen overnight: the European Union, International Crisis Group, and many others issued warnings. Most worryingly, Eritrea — with whom Prime Minister Abiy had made a much-heralded peace agreement in 2018 — had a scarcely-hidden war plan.
Abiy’s initial goal was cutting the TPLF down to size. But his coalition partners’ war aims appear to go much further. For Eritrea’s President Isaias Afewerki, the aim is nothing less than the extermination of any Tigrayan political or economic capability. For the militia from the neighboring Amhara region it is a land grab — described by the U.S. State Department as “ethnic cleansing.”
Since then, we have learned of massacres, mass rape, ransacking of hospitals, and hunger as a weapon of war. It’s an urgent humanitarian crisis—and a threat to international peace and security.
For the first month, the Trump administration endorsed the war, backing up Abiy’s depiction of it as a domestic “law enforcement operation” and praising Eritrea for ‘restraint’ — at a time when divisions of the Eritrean army had poured over the border and reports of their atrocities were already filtering out.
The Biden administration is building a sensible policy — but is hampered by the slow process of putting its senior team in place. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made reasonable demands. President Biden dispatched Senator Chris Coons to convey how seriously Washington is taking the crisis. A special envoy for the Horn of Africa — reported to be the senior diplomat Jeffrey Feldman — is due to be appointed, short-cutting the process of confirming an Assistant Secretary of State for Africa. The new USAID Director Samantha Power, a passionate advocate of action against mass atrocity, is awaiting confirmation.
But Biden’s approach is not working. To be precise, the Ethiopian government is providing just enough of a plausible impression of compliance to postpone or dilute effective action.
Blinken’s first demand was that Eritrean forces should withdraw. This pushed Abiy — after months of dissembling — to admit that the Eritrean army was actually present and that he would request Pres. Isaias to pull them back. Abiy’s problem is that if Eritrea withdraws, he loses Tigray: the Tigrayan resistance would overwhelm his depleted army. Isaias is a veteran operator and he has prepared for this: his security agents and special forces are now so strategically placed inside Ethiopia that Abiy’s fragile government would be endangered if he withdrew.
Second, the U.S. insisted on a ceasefire and political negotiations. This is essential to stop the battlefield slaughter — thousands were killed in combat in March—and the ongoing scorched earth campaign that is reducing Tigray’s economy to the stone age. But Abiy rejected this. He and Isaias appear determined to try one more offensive to vanquish the Tigrayan Defense Forces. What they fail to see is that inflicting atrocities only stiffens the resolve of the Tigrayans to fight back. Speaking on April 3 Abiy belatedly conceded that a “difficult and tiresome” guerrilla war is in prospect — but he has made no mention of peace talks.
Third, Blinken demanded unfettered humanitarian access for international relief agencies to provide food and medicine for to the starving. He might have added, without a pause in the fighting, farmers cannot prepare their lands for cultivation. The agricultural cycle brooks no delay: ploughing needs to begin soon, before the rains come in June. If there’s no harvest this year, hunger will deepen.
The World Food Program and international agencies are reaching about 1.2 million of the 4.5 million people estimated to need emergency relief. But there are reports that as soon as food is distributed, soldiers sweep through and take it from civilians at gunpoint. The aid effort is, at the moment, too little and too late.
Last, there should be an independent investigation into reports of atrocities, which the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has begun, but in partnership with the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission. This has the drawback that it’s unrealistic to expect the staff of an Ethiopian government body—whatever their personal integrity—to withstand the personal pressure that the authorities will put on them. And many Tigrayans will automatically reject their findings as biased.
The United States has other policies in this complicated mix too. Last year, the Treasury took on the task of trying to mediate in the Nile Waters dispute between Ethiopia and Egypt. Abiy inherited a huge dam, under construction on the Blue Nile, from his predecessors. It’s a point of national pride, the centerpiece of Ethiopia’s development. Egypt sees any upstream state controlling the Nile waters as an existential threat.
To protect the “Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam” project, Ethiopia’s ministry of foreign affairs had constructed a coalition of African riparian states, which isolated Egypt and minimized the danger of direct confrontation. Abiy upended this: 18 months ago he went into direct talks with Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who invited the United States to mediate — confident that the Trump administration would lean his way. Sudan, the other party to the talks, had no option but to line up with Cairo and Washington. By the time he had realized his error, Abiy was stuck, and the scenario foreseen by his diplomats was unfolding: Ethiopia was the one isolated as Egypt pressed home its advantage and the United States suspended some aid. Since then the talks have repeatedly broken down, with each side escalating its rhetoric.
To compound the error, in preparing for his assault on Tigray, Abiy antagonized Sudan. A few days before the war, he asked Sudanese leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan to seal the Sudanese border. He hadn’t anticipated that this would trample over a delicate live-and-let-live border agreement, whereby the Sudanese allowed Ethiopian farmers to cultivate land inside their territory. They were ethnic Amharas. In sealing the frontier, the Sudanese troops drove those villagers out — enraging the powerful Amhara regional government and igniting a needless border conflict.
To complicate the picture still further, Isaias’s planned axis of autocracy extends through Ethiopia to Somalia. A painstaking process of stabilizing and reconstructing Somalia is imperiled by President Mohamed Farmajo’s failure to agree an electoral timetable with the opposition, and refusal to step down when his term of office expired in February. Farmajo’s special presidential forces have been trained in Eritrea and many Somalis believe that he plans to use them to impose a military solution on his rivals.
The African peace and security order lies wrecked. The African Union has failed to act. Ethiopian diplomacy and pressure (the organization’s headquarters are in Addis Ababa) has kept Ethiopia’s war and Eritrea’s destabilization of the wider region off the AU agenda. Abiy rebuffed African mediators and convinced enough of his fellow African leaders that it was a purely domestic affair to prevent an African consensus position against the war. In turn, Africa’s inaction gave a green light to Russia and China to threaten to veto any resolution at the UN Security Council. Last month, the U.S. tried and failed this route. This passes the baton to the U.S. and Europe acting alone — at the G7 last week and next week at the Spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF.
At the center of this chaos is Abiy. At every turn he has blundered. He has overpromised, mistaken image for reality, made needless enemies and locked himself into dangerous alliances. Those who once embraced his rhetoric of reform and peacemaking are looking naïve at best. He’s not a consensus-builder, rather an agent of polarization. Perhaps most significantly for the incoming U.S. diplomatic team, the Ethiopian leader has demonstrated an explosive combination of hubris and poor judgement that make him an unreliable interlocutor — sitting atop a fragile country of 110 million people in a volatile region.
There’s no obvious solution: it’s a problem from hell.
The atrocities have been seared into the skin and the minds of Tigrayans, who take shelter by the thousands within sight of the homeland they fled in northern Ethiopia.
They arrive in heat that soars above 38 C (100 F), carrying the pain of gunshot wounds, torn vaginas, welts on beaten backs. Less visible are the horrors that jolt them awake at night: Memories of dozens of bodies strewn on riverbanks. Fighters raping a woman one by one for speaking her own language. A child, weakened by hunger, left behind.
Now, for the first time, they also bring proof of an official attempt at what is being called ethnic cleansing in the form of a new identity card that eliminates all traces of Tigray, as confirmed to The Associated Press by nine refugees from different communities. Written in a language not their own, issued by authorities from another ethnic group, the ID cards are the latest evidence of a systematic drive by the Ethiopian government and its allies to destroy the Tigrayan people.
The Amhara authorities now in charge of the nearby city of Humera took Seid Mussa Omar’s original ID card displaying his Tigrayan identity and burned it, the soft-spoken nurse said. On his new card examined by the AP, issued in January with the Amharic language, an Amhara stamp and a border of tiny hearts, even the word Tigray had vanished.
“I kept it to show the world,” Seid said. He added that only 10 Tigrayans remained of the roughly 400 who worked at the hospital where he had been employed, the rest killed or fleeing. “This is genocide … Their aim is to erase Tigray.”
What started as a political dispute in one of Africa’s most powerful and populous countries has turned into a campaign of ethnic cleansing against minority Tigrayans, according to AP interviews with 30 refugees in Sudan and dozens more by phone, along with international experts. The Ethiopian government of Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy Ahmed is accused of teaming up with his ethnic group — his mother was Amhara — and soldiers from neighboring Eritrea to punish around 6 million people. Witnesses say they have split much of Tigray between them, with the Amhara in the west and Eritrean forces in the east.
Ethiopia claims that life in Tigray is returning to normal, and Abiy has called the conflict “tiresome.” But the refugees the AP spoke with, including some who arrived just hours before, said abuses were still occurring. Almost all described killings, often of multiple people, rapes and the looting and burning of crops that without massive food aid could tip the region into starvation.
For months, the people of Tigray have been largely sealed off from the world, with electricity and telecommunication access severed and mobile phones often seized, leaving little to back up their claims of thousands, even tens of thousands, killed. That has begun to change.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted last month that “ethnic cleansing” has taken place in western Tigray, marking the first time a top official in the international community has openly described the situation as such. The term refers to forcing a population from a region through expulsions and other violence, often including killings and rapes.
Refugees told the AP that Amhara authorities and allied forces in western Tigray have taken over whole communities, ordering Tigrayans out or rounding them up. A refugee from Humera, Goitom Hagos, said he saw thousands of Tigrayans loaded into trucks and doesn’t know what happened to them.
The Amhara now control some government offices in western Tigray and decide who belongs — and even whether Tigrayans exist at all. Some were ordered to accept the Amhara identity or leave, and others were told to leave anyway, the refugees said.
Lemlem Gebrehiwet was forced to flee while heavily pregnant and gave birth three days after reaching Sudan. She recalled the new authorities telling her, “This is Amhara.”
Shy, her baby girl waiting, she struggled to comprehend. “Maybe we did something wrong.”
Seid, the nurse, fled Humera early in the conflict after his hospital came under heavy shelling, with the wounded carried in screaming and colleagues killed. He returned in January in the hope that conditions had improved, as Abiy’s government promised.
They hadn’t. His home had been looted, and the remaining Tigrayans had shrunk to a quiet population of the elderly, women and children who were discouraged from speaking their own language, Tigrinya.
At the hospital, Tigrayans had to pay for care, unlike the Amhara. Anyone who came was allowed to speak Amharic only. Tigrayan staffers weren’t paid, and every night there was gunfire.
Ten days after returning to the hospital, Seid left for Sudan. Now, at this dusty post, refugees pass blazing days sprawled on plastic mats under shelters of woven straw. They stay perilously close to the border in the hope that missing loved ones will emerge from Tigray.
“The federal government is trying to be king. We Tigrayans refuse,” said one refugee, Nega Chekole.
In response to allegations that the Amhara are ordering Tigrayans to leave and issuing new ID cards, the spokeswoman for the prime minister’s office, Billene Seyoum, said the area is under a provisional administration “who are all from the region.”
The Ethiopian government says it rejects “any and all notions and practices of ethnic cleansing” and will never tolerate such practices, “nor will it turn a blind eye to such crimes.” However, almost everyone the AP interviewed said they had watched fellow Tigrayans being killed or seen bodies on the ground.
In her town of more than a dozen ethnic groups, Belaynesh Beyene was dealt a ghastly lesson in just how little Tigrayans suddenly were worth.
In the early days of the fighting, she said she saw 24 bodies in the streets of Dansha in western Tigray. The 58-year-old grandmother and other residents were prevented from burying them by the Amhara youth militia, a practice that witnesses across Tigray have reported as an added insult to grief. The practice applies only to Tigrayan corpses.
“They accidentally killed an ethnic Oromo in a Tigrayan household,” she said. “When they realized their ‘mistake,’ they came and buried him.”
A spokesman for the Amhara regional government, Gizachew Muluneh, didn’t answer questions from the AP. The Amhara have said they are taking back land they claim belongs to them.
Soldiers from Eritrea, long an enemy of Tigray’s now-fugitive leaders, have also been blamed for some of the worst human rights abuses. Under pressure, Abiy said last month the soldiers will leave, after long denying their presence.
Hiwot Hadush, a teacher from Zalambessa, said scores of people were killed after the Eritreans went house to house, opening fire.
“Even if someone was dead, they shot them again, dozens of times. I saw this,” she said. “I saw many bodies, even priests. They killed all Tigrayans.”
In another border community, Irob, furniture maker Awalom Mebrahtom described hiding and watching Eritrean soldiers order 18 Tigrayans, mostly young men like him, to lie in a remote field. They were shot to death.
The killings continue. In early March, after months on the run, 30-year-old Alem Mebrahtu attempted a desperate crossing of the Tekeze river. Separated from her three small children in the early chaos of the conflict, she had heard they were in Sudan.
Sympathetic women from the Wolkait ethnic group pleaded with Eritrean soldiers near the river to let Alem cross, while urging her to pretend to be Wolkait, too. It worked, but she saw a grim reminder of what could have happened if she had failed.
Bodies lay scattered near the riverbank, she said. She estimated around 50 corpses.
“Some were face-down. Some were looking up at the sky,” she said.
Exhaustion still pressed deep under her eyes, Alem started to cry. There by the river, confronted with death, tears hadn’t been allowed. The Eritrean soldiers beat people for expressing grief, she said.
Samrawit Weldegerima, who had arrived just two weeks earlier in Hamdayet, also saw corpses by the river, counting seven. Freshly branded on their temples were the markings some Tigrayans have to express their identity, she said.
“When I saw them, I was terrified,” Samrawit said, touching her belly, six months pregnant. “I thought I was already dead.”
Those who crossed the river were amazed to find that the Amhara were now in charge in western Tigray. Alem’s home in Humera was occupied by Amhara militia. She asked them for her clothes, but they had been burned. She was told to get out.
Reluctantly, to protect herself, she is trying to learn Amharic.
“Their aim is to leave no Tigrayan,” she said. “I hope there will be a Tigray for my children to go home to.”
The idea of home remains dangerous. Days after Abiy urged people in Tigray to return in late March, at least two men trying to do so from Hamdayet were fatally shot within sight of the border crossing.
They were buried by hundreds of refugees at the Orthodox church in Hamdayet, where the blank walls are being mapped for murals of sacrifice and salvation. Some of the faithful drop to their knees and clutch the stones, deep in prayer. Others rest their foreheads against the entrance, as if they can’t go on.
Even as the Amhara fighters took turns raping her, they offered the young woman a twisted path to what they considered redemption.
She had returned to her looted home in Humera. There, she was seized by militia members speaking Amharic. When she asked them to speak her native Tigrinya, which she understood far better, they became angry and started kicking her.
She fell, and they fell upon her. She remembers at least three men.
“Let the Tigray government come and help you,” she recalled them saying.
They also made her a proposal: “Claim to be Amhara and we’ll give you back your house and find you a husband. But if you claim to be Tigrayan, we will come and rape you again.”
The woman’s Amhara neighbor was present during the attack. When she later approached him for help, there was none.
“So what?” she recalled him saying. “You came back. Behave and be quiet.”
The woman cried all night. The next day, she found little comfort in learning that many others in her neighborhood had been raped, too.
“One mother and daughter had been forced to watch each other,” she said. “One woman was raped on the road, with people watching. Other accounts were worse than mine.”
She left for Sudan. It was mid-February. Afraid to speak with anyone, she waited almost a month before seeking medical care.
“I was ashamed,” she said, and started to cry. She watched the doorway warily, fearing the rumors that can spread among the refugees.
She said she was grateful to be HIV-negative, but she is pregnant. For a long moment, she was silent. She can hardly think about that yet. Her family back home doesn’t know.
The United Nations has said more than 500 rapes in Tigray have been reported to health care workers. But the woman from Humera, whose account was confirmed by her doctor, assumes many more survivors are hiding it just as she did. The AP doesn’t name people who have been sexually abused.
Several refugees from different Tigray communities told the AP they watched or listened helplessly as women were taken away by Amhara or Eritrean fighters and raped. It was like taunting, said Adhanom Gebrehanis from Korarit village, who had just arrived in Hamdayet with the welts from a beating by Eritrean soldiers on his back.
“They do these things openly to make us ashamed,” he said.
He described watching Eritreans pull aside 20 women from a group of Tigrayans and rape them. The next day, 13 of the women were returned.
Go,” Adhanom said the Eritreans told the others. “We already have what we want.”
A midwife from Adwa, Elsa Tesfa Berhe, described treating women secretly after Eritrean soldiers swept through health centers, looting even the beds and telling patients to leave. As Berhe snuck out to deliver babies and care for the wounded, she saw people trying to bury bodies at the risk of being shot, or pouring alcohol on corpses in an attempt to hide the smell.
With the health centers destroyed, little if any care remains for women and girls who have been raped. No one knows how many now carry the children of their attackers.
Berhe had just arrived in Sudan. She cried as she recalled a 60-year-old woman who was raped vaginally and anally by Eritrean soldiers and then waited for days, trying to hide the bleeding, before seeking help.
“She didn’t want to tell anyone,” Berhe said. She heard the woman ask, “Can anyone trust me if I say I was raped?”
Another woman was raped by four Eritrean soldiers while her husband hid under the bed, Berhe said. Her husband recounted the attack when they sought an abortion.
A third woman described how Eritrean soldiers ordered her father to rape her, then shot and killed him when he refused. The soldiers raped her instead.
Berhe fears that the situation in rural areas is even worse, as described by the displaced people arriving in cities. So far, few from the outside world can reach the areas where the majority of Tigrayans lived before the conflict, as fighting continues.
“Do you think there is a word to explain this? There is no word,” said a midwife from Humera, who gave only her first name, Mulu.
In Hamdayet she befriended seven women from the same village, Mai Gaba, who said they were raped separately by various fighters, including Ethiopian federal forces. Mulu fears that Mai Gaba is a conservative example and estimates that some communities have seen scores of assaults.
“This is to harm the community psychologically,” Mulu said. “Most of the people in Tigray support the (fugitive Tigray leaders). To destroy them, you must destroy Tigrayans.”
There is more to come.
Almost every person interviewed described a worrying shortage of food, and some said Tigrayans are being starved. Many recalled seeing crops being looted or burned in communities by Amhara or Eritrean fighters, a toll that even shows up in satellite imagery.
Kidu Gebregirgis, a farmer, said he was questioned almost daily about his ethnicity, his shirt yanked aside to check for marks from the strap of a gun. He said the Amhara harvested around 5,000 kilograms (5.5 short tons) of sorghum from his fields and hauled it away, a task that took two weeks. He shook his head in amazement.
The conflict began shortly before the harvest in the largely agricultural region. Now the planting season approaches.
“But there is no seed,” Kidu said. “There’s nothing to start again.”
The prospect is terrifying, said Alex de Waal, the author of a new report warning of mass starvation in Tigray and a researcher at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
“What I fear is that millions of people are in the rural areas, staying because they are hopeful they will be able to plant,” he said. “If they’re not able to plant, if food supplies run out, then all of a sudden we could see a mass migration.”
Tigrayans who passed through rural communities described starving people, often elderly, begging outside churches. Sometimes they did, too.
Alem, the exhausted mother, begged for money and tightened her clothes to control the hunger pangs. Abedom, a day laborer who only gave one name, begged while roaming the mountains and villages for three months.
“It was normal to go a whole day without food,” he said. “So many people were hungry. They loot everything, so if they take it all, how do I survive?”
The hunger was staggering. One refugee saw a man faint on the road in Adi Asr, close to death. Another described a fellow traveler so tired he simply stopped walking. Yet another saw a child, too weak to go on, left behind.
Again, ethnicity was crucial. Belaynesh, from Dansha, said she made sure to speak Amharic when approaching farmhouses in western Tigray for food.
Ethiopia, under international pressure, has said food aid has been distributed to more than 4 million people in Tigray. Refugees disagreed, saying they saw no such thing in their communities or asserting that food was being diverted.
Maza Girmay, 65, said she heard food was being distributed, so she went to the government office in her community of Bahkar to inquire.
“They told me, ‘Go home, you’re Tigrayan,’” she said. “We Tigrayans are Ethiopian. Why do they treat us as non-Ethiopian?”
The rejection brought her to tears. An Orthodox cross tattooed on her forehead, long faded from childhood, wrinkled with her sorrow.
In the community of Division, farmer Berhane Gebrewahid said he was shot by Amhara fighters seeking his cattle. He said food aid was distributed in February by Amhara authorities but refused to Tigrayans, including him. Even the name of his homeland had been changed to Northern Gondar, after a major city in Amhara.
A colonel with the Tigray fighters, Bahre Tebeje, worried that starvation will kill more people than the war itself.
“Most food aid returns to the Amhara and Eritreans,” he asserted, leaning forward intently, a tattered black-and-white kaffiyeh around his neck. “It’s not being distributed to the people.”
Severe malnutrition is already above emergency levels as humanitarian workers rush to reach communities, the U.N. has said. In Hamdayet, a handful of such cases were recently sent to a regional hospital for treatment, according to a doctor there. One woman, recovering, still couldn’t produce milk for her baby, who whimpered and sucked at a limp breast.
Battered and hungry, Tigrayans still arrive daily at the border post where Sudanese soldiers watch a no man’s land in the shadow of a fading flag. One recent evening, the AP saw three new refugees approaching.
In Sudan, the Tigrayans are registered and asked for their ethnicity. For once, they are free to answer.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 5, 2021
🔥 #TigrayGenocide / የትግራይ ጀነሳይድ
💭 “Many people believe that it is now genocidal, that what is a political intent to destroy is becoming now an intent to destroy, in whole or part, a people,”
We get an update on how the Ethiopian government has announced Eritrean forces are withdrawing from the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, where harrowing witness accounts have emerged of Eritrean soldiers killing Tigrayan men and boys and rape being used as weapon of war by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. Eritrea entered the Tigray region to support Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s military offensive in November targeting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The true death toll from the conflict remains unknown, but researchers recently identified almost 2,000 people killed in 150 massacres by warring factions. CNN senior international correspondent Nima Elbagir, who just returned from reporting on the region, says what started as a “competition for power” has descended into ethnic cleansing. “Many people believe that it is now genocidal, that what is a political intent to destroy is becoming now an intent to destroy, in whole or part, a people,” says.
☆ “This is ethnic cleansing. Soldiers are targeting Tigrayan women to stop them giving birth to more Tigrayans.
☆ Mona Lisa, named for the iconic painting, the 18-year-old Ethiopian high school graduate had survived an attempted rape that left her with seven gunshot wounds and an amputated arm.
☆ In early December, Ms. Mona said, an Ethiopian soldier burst into the house she shares with her grandfather in Abiy Addi, a town in central Tigray, and ordered them to have sex.
☆ “Please,” she recalled her grandfather, an Orthodox Christian, telling the soldier. “This is abnormal and against our religious beliefs.”
☆ Rocks, nails and other objects have been forced inside the bodies of women — and some men — during sexual assaults, according to health workers. Men have been forced to rape their own family members under threat of violence, Pramila Patten, the top U.N. official on sexual violence in conflict, said in January.
☆ “Rape is being used as a weapon of war,” said Letay Tesfay of the Tigray Women’s Association, which runs a safe house for women in Mekelle. “What’s happening is unimaginable.”
☆ “Even if we had shouted,” one woman said, “there was no one to listen.”
☆ “I lost count,” she said. “They took photos of me, poured alcohol on me and laughed.” Some of her assailants also shot dead her 12-year-old son, she added.
☆ “But women were raped yesterday and today when the local police and federal police are around.”
‘They Told Us Not to Resist’: Sexual Violence Pervades Ethiopia’s War
Rape is being used as a weapon as fighting rages in remote parts of Tigray region. “Even if we had shouted,” one woman said, “there was no one to listen.”
Mona Lisa lay on a hospital bed in Mekelle, the main city in war-torn northern Ethiopia, her body devastated but her defiance on display.
Named for the iconic painting, the 18-year-old Ethiopian high school graduate had survived an attempted rape that left her with seven gunshot wounds and an amputated arm. She wanted it to be known that she had resisted.
“This is ethnic cleansing,” she said. “Soldiers are targeting Tigrayan women to stop them giving birth to more Tigrayans.”
Her account is one of hundreds detailing abuses in Tigray, the mountainous region in northern Ethiopia where a grinding civil war has been accompanied by a parallel wave of atrocities including widespread sexual assault targeting women.
A senior United Nations official told the Security Council last week that more than 500 Ethiopian women had formally reported sexual violence in Tigray, although the actual toll is likely far higher, she added. In the city of Mekelle, health workers say new cases emerge every day.
The assaults have become a focus of growing international outrage about a conflict where the fighting is largely happening out of sight, in the mountains and the countryside. But evidence of atrocities against civilians — mass shootings, looting, sexual assault — is everywhere.
In early December, Ms. Mona said, an Ethiopian soldier burst into the house she shares with her grandfather in Abiy Addi, a town in central Tigray, and ordered them to have sex.
“Please,” she recalled her grandfather, an Orthodox Christian, telling the soldier. “This is abnormal and against our religious beliefs.”
When her grandfather refused, the soldier shot him in the leg and locked him into the kitchen. Then he pinned Ms. Mona to a sofa and tried to rape her. She fought back, kicking the man in the crotch and briefly grabbing his gun, she said.
But he quickly overpowered her and, after shooting her in the hand and firing warning shots into the floor, issued another ultimatum. “He said he would count to three and if I did not take off my clothes he would kill me,” she said.
The soldier fired a volley of bullets that cut through Ms. Mona’s right arm and right leg. By the time she got transportation to the Mekelle General Hospital a day later, doctors were forced to amputate the arm.
She is still in the hospital, the bones in one leg still shattered. An uncle at her bedside corroborated her account of the assault on Dec. 4. Ms. Mona, who consented to be identified, called it a calculated act of war.
“My case is not unique,” she said. “I fought the soldier off. But there are so many women all over this region who were actually raped.”
After months of increasingly desperate pleas for international action on Ethiopia, led by senior United Nations and European Union officials, the pressure appears to be producing results. President Biden recently sent an envoy, Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, to Ethiopia for talks with Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, that lasted five hours.
The majority of sexual violence accusations in Tigray have been leveled against Ethiopian and allied Eritrean soldiers. But Tigrayan forces may also be guilty of war crimes, the top U.N. human rights official, Michele Bachelet, said this month.
In some ways, the bitter fight is driven by deeply rooted forces — longstanding land disputes, opposing visions over the future shape of Ethiopia, and a rivalry with Eritrea going back decades. But civilians, and particularly women, are bearing the brunt of the most disturbing violence.
Rocks, nails and other objects have been forced inside the bodies of women — and some men — during sexual assaults, according to health workers. Men have been forced to rape their own family members under threat of violence, Pramila Patten, the top U.N. official on sexual violence in conflict, said in January.
“Rape is being used as a weapon of war,” said Letay Tesfay of the Tigray Women’s Association, which runs a safe house for women in Mekelle. “What’s happening is unimaginable.”
The epidemic of sexual assault is exacerbated by a collapsing health system. Many victims have contracted sexually transmitted diseases, including H.I.V., doctors say. Demand for abortions and emergency contraceptives has risen.
But outside the main towns of Tigray, most health clinics are shut — some destroyed in fighting, others plundered by soldiers as part of what Doctors Without Borders recently called a concerted effort to destroy the region’s health care system. In his meeting with Mr. Abiy in March, Senator Coons said they discussed “directly and forcefully” the reports of widespread human rights violations including rape.
Whether Mr. Abiy delivers on his promise of bringing the perpetrators to justice, he added, “is going to be critical to any successful resolution of this conflict.”
The anguish of victims resonates quietly through the wards of the Ayder Referral Hospital in Mekelle, the region’s biggest medical facility.
A doctor specialized in sexual assault said he had received at least three new patients every day since Ethiopian troops marched into Mekelle on Nov. 28. Some said they had been raped by soldiers in the camps for displaced people on the edge of the city; others were abducted from their homes in rural areas and held for days as soldiers repeatedly raped them.
The doctor, who like several other medics spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the authorities, produced a list of 18 registered sexual violence patients at the hospital. The youngest was 14. Most said their attackers were soldiers, he said.
In one bed, a 29-year old woman who asked to be identified only by her first name, Helen, trembled as she recounted how Eritrean and Ethiopian troops had tied her to a tree near her home in Agula, 15 miles north of Mekelle, and assaulted her repeatedly over a 10-day period in late November.
“I lost count,” she said. “They took photos of me, poured alcohol on me and laughed.” Some of her assailants also shot dead her 12-year-old son, she added.
Selam Assaeffae, a police investigator working on rape cases at the Ayder Referral Hospital, corroborated Ms. Helen’s account.
Most sexual assault cases in Tigray, however, may not be recorded anywhere. Health workers said that officials are reluctant to register such violence, fearing that the military could target them for documenting the crime. Patients often remain anonymous for the same reason.
Filsan Abdullahi Ahmed, Ethiopia’s minister of women, children and youth, insisted that the federal government was taking seriously the reports of sexual violence in Tigray, and had sent a task force including social workers, police officers and prosecutors to investigate.
While her own mandate was limited to providing victims with psychological support, Ms. Filsan said she had pressured Ethiopia’s attorney general to deliver justice. But it is a difficult process, she insisted.
“I cannot 100 percent confirm whom this is being committed by,” Ms. Filsan said, referring to the perpetrators.
The sexual attacks are so common that even some Ethiopian soldiers have spoken out. At a public meeting in Mekelle in January, a man in military uniform made an outburst that was broadcast on state television.
“I was angry yesterday,” he said. “Why does a woman get raped in Mekelle city?” The soldier, who was not identified, questioned why the police weren’t stopping them. “It wouldn’t be shocking if it happened during fighting,” he said. “But women were raped yesterday and today when the local police and federal police are around.”
Haben, a waitress in Mekelle, was raped with two other women at the cafe where they work in December, she said. Her body is still covered in bruises from the assault.
“They told us not to resist,” she recalled. “‘Lie down. Don’t shout.’”
But even if they had shouted, she added, “there was nobody to listen.”
Mr. Guterres, do you allow any probe into war crimes that involves the EHRC which is a state organ biased in favor of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed who lied to you?
Any probe into war crimes that involves the African Union or the government’s own human rights commission stands little chance of being effective.
Since 4 November, soldiers from the Ethiopian federal government, Amhara regional state, and Eritrea have waged a coordinated war in Tigray. For months, the region has been under a telecommunications blackout with journalists’ movement severely restricted. Nonetheless, reports continue to emerge of massacres, rape and ethnic cleansing. Humanitarian access has also been blocked, denying millions of civilians in need of assistance.
Given the apparent scale of the gross human rights violations, European Union, US and UN agencies among others have been calling for an international . The Ethiopian government first resisted this pressure, but eventually came up with a questionable proposal. It called upon the African Union (African Union) to investigate human rights abuses together with the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), a government agency.
In a surprising move, the Ethiopian government then also invited the UN Commissioner for Human Rights to jointly investigate, which was accepted. It remains unclear whether the UN’s acceptance now means the African Union’s involvement has been annulled or what exact arrangement is being planned. What does remain clear, however, is that any investigation in Tigray that involves the African Union or EHRC stands little chance of being legitimate and meaningful.
Un-independent arbiters
When the war against the Tigrayan Regional Government began, it quickly created a major humanitarian crisis and insecurity that threatened to destabilise the entire region. The need for African Union action was clear, yet the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, displayed no interest in intervening. In fact, a month and a half into the war, he declared that: “In Ethiopia, the federal government took bold steps to preserve the unity, stability and respect for the constitutional order of the country, which is legitimate for all states.” With this stance, he not only displayed partisanship and a disregard for the civilians caught up in the fighting, but he also undermined the peace efforts embarked upon by African Union Chair, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa.
One reason for the African Union’s bias may have been the international influence and diplomatic capital that Ethiopia has built up, ironically mostly during the time when the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) dominated the government. Another factor may be the undue influence accorded to Ethiopia due to the fact that it hosts the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa.
The EHRC is widely regarded as being similarly compromised. It is nominally an independent state organ, but many Ethiopians see it as biased in favour of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s administration. One reason for this is that its reporting has often been selective, targeting cases that reinforce the government’s narrative. For example, it took the EHRC only a few days to send a team to the Tigrayan town of Maikadra to investigate allegations of a massacre in November 2020. About a week later, it released its preliminary report which attributed responsibility to Tigrayan fighters. In doing so, the EHRC ignored or discredited witness statements from numerous refugees in Sudan, reported in several news agencies, who claimed that Amhara militias had also committed massacres in Maikadra.
The EHRC has been much slower to investigate many other reports of massacres in Tigray. Although it did recently release a preliminary report regarding “grave human rights violations committed in Axum” and pointed the finger at “Eritrean soldiers”, these findings came nearly four months after the November attack. Notably, its statement also came just the day after Abiy acknowledged publicly for the first time that Eritrean forces were indeed operating in Tigray, after denying it for months.
Why a UN-led investigation is needed
Most Tigrayan political parties and the President of Tigray Debretsion Gebremichael have made it clear that they wouldn’t consider a probe into the war led by the African Union or EHRC as legitimate. They expect that any such effort would be unduly influenced by the Ethiopian government and serve as a way for the state to cover up, rather than expose, war crimes.
Impartiality – and the perception of impartiality – must be a key part of any human rights probe if it is to meaningfully investigate and pave the way for justice, accountability, and reconciliation. In the case of Tigray, this means that the task can only be entrusted to an international body that is seen as neutral and commands the trust of all the actors.
There is a practical element to this too. An investigation involving the African Union or EHRC would struggle to secure cooperation not only from the parties to the conflict but many witnesses and victims. Moreover, it is likely that only an international body like the UN would have the African Unionthority and independence to be able to navigate such a complex conflict with such a wide range of actors that includes Eritrea and sub-regional ethnic militias. Investigators will not only need to shed light on atrocities in a context in which almost all allegations are being denied but make sense of the deeply historical drivers of the conflict, which will require the analysts to be detached from politics.
A UN-mandated and -led investigation is the closest we can get to such a feat. And the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur may be a good blueprint. The alleged atrocities are similar and some parallels can also be drawn regarding parties to the conflicts.
It is promising that Ethiopia invited the UN to join the investigation in Tigray. However, if the probe is to be effective and legitimate, the UN must now insist that it is conducted by only its officials – working independently, impartially, and without the intervention of any third party.
