“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.
U.N.: ‘Hundreds of Civilians Killed’ in Ethiopia Tigray Conflict
The Above Image: Ethiopian Asafu Alamaya, a 80-year-old blind who fled the Tigray conflict, is guided by her daughter at the Um Raquba refugee camp in Sudan’s eastern Gedaref state, on December 12, 2020.
Eyewitness reports suggest that artillery strikes have killed “hundreds of civilians” in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region amid an ongoing military conflict there, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Tuesday.
“We have received allegations concerning violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law, including artillery strikes on populated areas, the deliberate targeting of civilians, extrajudicial killings and widespread looting,” High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet told journalists in Geneva on December 22.
“These reports point to failure by the parties to the conflict to protect civilians. This is all the more concerning given that fighting is said to be continuing, particularly in some areas of north, central and southern Tigray,” she said.
The U.N. on Tuesday noted several recent accounts by people on the ground in Tigray alleging human rights violations.
Witnesses have described “artillery strikes on the town of Humera on the border with Eritrea between 9 and 11 November,” the international body noted.
The U.N. Human Rights Office said it interviewed several people from Humera “who alleged that shells launched from Eritrea had hit residential areas and the hospital. The Ethiopian army and regional Amhara forces and militia then reportedly took control of Humera, allegedly killing civilians and looting the hospital, banks, businesses, supermarkets, and private houses.”
Refugees crossing into Sudan from Ethiopia have made similar claims, “telling reporters and aid workers that artillery shells that hit towns in western Tigray had come from Eritrea,” the Guardian reported on December 21.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki both oppose the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), which dominated Ethiopia’s federal government for nearly 30 years before Abiy was elected to office in 2018. The ongoing conflict between the separatist TPLF and Addis Ababa began on November 4 after Abiy accused Tigrayan forces of attacking a federal military base. Ethiopian and Eritrean authorities have denied Eritrea’s involvement in the Tigray conflict.
“Artillery strikes against the town of Adigrat in early November reportedly forced many families to flee to the mountains, where they were then trapped by heavy fighting between 20 and 24 November, with many people reported to have been killed,” the U.N. further revealed at Tuesday’s press conference.
“Based on multiple accounts, the Amhara ‘Fano’ militia has reportedly committed human rights abuses, including killing civilians and carrying out looting,” the international body said.
It added that the U.N. Human Rights Office “has also received information, which it has not been able to verify, concerning the presence of Eritrean troops in Tigray, their involvement in the hostilities and related serious violations of international law.”
The U.N. Human Rights Office has been unable to verify reports of alleged human rights violations on the ground in Tigray due to an ongoing communications blackout in the northern region that started on November 4. While some telephone lines have since been restored in certain areas, internet connections remain down across Tigray.
“Since fighting flared up in Tigray, more than 54,500 refugees have fled the Tigray region into Sudan,” the spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Andrej Mahecic, told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday.
Selected „No-Empathy & compassion from Westerners“ Comments – even on Christmas Day:
“The Ethiopian army and regional Amhara forces and militia thenreportedly took control of Humera, allegedly killing civilians andlooting the hospital, banks, businesses, supermarkets, and privatehouses.”
They act the same as the Blacks do in the United States: Kill and loot. What can „you expect from low-IQ people?„
„The more Black a society, the less safe and prosperous it is.„
„Black lives don’t matter to blacks.„
„So sad please stay we’re you are and make your country better the west is full.„
„Talk to those who live in Maine about what a large influx of ” African refugees” can do to your state. Even San Antonio was smart enough to put them on buses to get them out of Texas when Africans stormed our southern border demanding asylum-„
„I think Ilhan Omar should go to the town of Adigrat for a month or two and give us an eyewitness report.„
„The U.N. exists to dump tens of millions of illiterate,diseased ,impoverished denizens of the third world on the U.,S taxpayers….for life…„
„Send Mike and Barrack over there to save them„
Just one sane comment:
„I am a white conservative American but my fellow white Americans just don’t get it. AFRICAN don’t pose a threat to America as much as the CHINESE and vast influx of MEXICANS. You guys always focus on the wrong people.„
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 24, 2020
Refugees tell VICE World News stories of government-aligned militias checking IDs to identify ethnic Tigrayans, as border tensions between Sudan and Ethiopia rise.
“We know he is planning to exterminate us, all Tigrayans in general,” said Kahsay, the refugee who left everything behind in Ethiopia. “We don’t believe him at all,” he said of Abiy’s call for civilians to return to Tigray. “Until the Tigrayan government calls us to go, we’ll never go back.”●
After waiting for days at the Sudanese border with Ethiopia, Amanael Kahsay boarded the back of the cargo truck that would take him to the safety of a new refugee camp in Sudan.
In the span of days, his concerns had gone from the routine worries of making enough money at the farm where he works to send back to his family, to simply surviving another day.
“First, I want to save my life. Food and clothes come later,” he said from the truck bed.
Kahsay fled from his native Ethiopia, without notice and in the middle of his usual work day, leaving behind all of his belongings and any knowledge about his loved ones. He is part of the first wave of Ethiopian arrivals in Sudan, refugees fleeing war in the country’s northern Tigray region.
He was working as a day labourer on a farm near the city of Mai Kadra when Ethiopian government-aligned ethnic militias known as Fano, from the neighbouring region of Amhara, descended.
“Fano from the Amhara region came, then took us all out from our homes. We saw our neighbours killed and slaughtered, in the same way as you cut wood, with an axe and knife,” Kahsay told VICE World News.
As chaos tore through the city, Kahsay said Ethiopian federal forces stood by as Fano fighters went door to door, demanding to see IDs in order to identify ethnic Tigrayans.
“We managed to escape and hide in a field for four days. On the fifth day, we made our way to the Sudanese border,” he explained, adding that Fano militants continued to terrorise civilians attempting to flee to Sudan.
On the way, he said, “youths were sent to kill us. [A group of] more than 70 were trying to kill us. We hid ourselves in the fields. They hunted us. On the way many were killed. We passed many dead bodies.”
In his own group of eight, only six of them made it to the border.
“They checked the IDs of people…if they find someone with Tigrayan origin…[they] slaughter with a knife.”
As Kahsay spoke of his journey from the relative safety of the camp in eastern Sudan, women and men sitting nearby wept quietly, reliving their own recent horrors as he spoke.
The violence he described was echoed by many firsthand accounts told to VICE World News at border crossings and at two new refugee camps that aid agencies are hurriedly setting up to accommodate the crush of over 50,000 new arrivals in under two months.
The nature of these attacks paint a stark contrast to the neat statements crafted by the office of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who until recently was celebrated by the international community as a reformer who had the potential to unite Ethiopia’s nine ethno-federal states.
Abiy declared war on the leadership of Ethiopia’s northernmost Tigray region in early November. The launch of large scale military operations on Tigray’s main cities and the capital, Mekelle, was in response to an attack by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, on the northern command of the federal army.
The TPLF constitutes both the political party that runs the regional government there and the regional army which dwarfs the manpower of the federal army in the region.
Before their attack on the Northern Command of the Ethiopian Defense Forces, the TPLF leadership ratcheted up tensions with the federal government by holding regional elections in September, despite a national ban on elections due to COVID-19.
The elections and attack were framed as provocations by Prime Minister Abiy but the relationship between the TPLF and the prime minister has been strained since he took office in 2018, unseating TPLF leadership which had ruled the country for nearly 30 years.
Since then, the TPLF claims they have been marginalised from positions of power and targeted by overly aggressive corruption probes.
For his part, Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2019 for ending a 20-year war with Eritrea, but has long had the TPLF in his sights.
“He felt as long as TPLF was lurking around and still held levers of economy and power, he would not be settled… And his fears were confirmed by [Eritrean Prime Minister Isaias] Afwerki, who has the same paranoia, related to the border war which goes back a decade… The two men met and confirmed their fears and suspicions about the TPLF,” said Rashid Abdi, a Kenya-based Horn of Africa analyst.
Planning for the war against Tigray “undoubtedly” dates back to before Abiy was feted by the international community as a great reformer and peacemaker.
“There is no doubt that both Abiy and Afwerki had a vested interest in this war and were planning it, probably going back two years,” Abdi told VICE World News. “All the to’ing and fro’ing between Eritrea and Ethiopia were actually related to this conflict. All the signs were there that the two leaders were planning something major.”
Now, with confirmed reports of Eritrean troops fighting alongside Ethiopian troops within Tigray, this early alliance with Eritrea is seen by regional analysts as a strategic move to bolster Eritrean support for his efforts to marginalise and eventually attack Tigray.
While Prime Minister Abiy has repeatedly assured the international community that no civilians were targeted in the offensive on Tigray, countless stories of refugees in Sudan contradict the official line.
“Their words and practices are unrelated,” Bahti Adal told VICE World News from Um Rukuba refugee camp in eastern Sudan. Adal is settling in at the camp 11 days after fleeing Humera, one of the first cities to be attacked by federal forces and the target of a reported bombardment campaign by Eritrea, to its north.
“Everything happened suddenly… children were outside walking in the street. Bombs were falling. How could you protect yourself? Innocents were killed, young [people] and elders also,” she said, seated next to her brother and husband, who fled across the border with her.
Prime Minister Abiy declared the war in Tigray over at the end of November when federal forces took the regional capital Mekelle, and has several times called for refugees to return home. But TPLF leadership has said the fight is ongoing and has simply shifted to guerrilla warfare. The TPLF is battle-hardened from decades of war with Eritrea and an insurgency to overthrow Ethiopia’s Marxist dictatorship in the 1990s, so while they lack heavy weaponry, they are well versed in guerrilla tactics.
Reports from inside Tigray remain murky as parts of the region emerge from a six-week total communications blackout.However recent arrivals at the refugee camps tell of a conflict that has morphed from a military offensive to a gruesome, ethnic-conflict.
Gebrehywit Aragawe, a 44-year-old priest, crossed through Eritrea to arrive in Sudan with his wife, Latakidan, and two-year-old daughter, Hewa, and a small group of other families. Dazed, Aragawe explained to medical workers at the arrival point that his daughter ran into a cooking fire when government-allied militias descended on their village, Shiglil. As his wife swatted flies away from Hewa’s blistering burn wounds, Aragawe quietly told VICE World News that they had seven other children. “The militias stripped them and beat them in front of us,” he said. “All of them died.”
Government backed ethnic-militias along with federal forces continue to target Tigrayan civilians. And as the conflict becomes more entrenched, humanitarians say there has been an alarming drop in the number of arrivals from Sudan, from thousands a day to hundreds or dozens.
According to those still managing to cross and humanitarian sources, members of the Fano militias and federal troops are blocking refugees trying to cross along the main border posts.
Those still managing to flee Tigray have sought out alternative, riskier routes, including crossing through Eritrean territory to arrive at a transit centre in the border city of Hamdayet. From here, they wait to be transferred to refugee camps.
A Sudanese businessman who makes his living smuggling illegal goods and people across the border with Ethiopia told VICE World News that requests for his services from Tigrayans has increased significantly since the start of the war but that militias operating near the border have made his routes perilous.
Further south, others sneak through shoulder-high stalks of sorghum overnight, passing through farms that span the Sudanese border with Ethiopia, hoping to arrive to a welcoming farmer Adam Mohammed Rahma.
Rahma manages a sorghum and cotton farm and knew from the beginning of the conflict that he and his neighbours living along the porous, vast border would soon see the fallout.
“We heard the sounds of clashes and we expected that civilians and soldiers would come. They were afraid of the tarmac road because of their Federal army. So when this route is safe, they take it,” he told VICE World News from a farm that straddles a border area that now threatens to draw Sudan into its own conflict with Ethiopia.
Sudanese authorities have welcomed the influx of refugees and Sudan’s Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok has offered to broker a ceasefire between the TPLF and the federal government.
But the issue of disputed agricultural land at the border could tip Ethiopia’s civil war into a regional conflict that could entangle Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.
Military sources at the border told VICE World News that they have recently advanced further into the long-disputed border territory, taking advantage of the removal of Ethiopian troops from the border to fight inside Tigray. The claim gives credence to an accusation lobbed by Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy.
Last week, the Sudanese military claimed their forces were “ambushed by Ethiopian forces and militias inside Sudanese territory” in a December 15 cross-border attack that led to several deaths and casualties on the Sudanese side.
Military sources told VICE World News that the two countries are unlikely to go to war on the border, however increasingly strained ties between Sudan and Ethiopia might tip the scales for the TPLF.
Historically, the former regime in Sudan – toppled after a revolution in 2018-19 – supported the TPLF in a successful insurgency against Ethiopia’s Marxist dictatorship in the 1990s.
Today, the possibility of establishing supply routes from Sudan into Tigray could be instrumental to the potential success of the TPLF against the federal government. As it stands, the TPLF leadership has fled the main cities to regroup in the mountains and Tigray is fenced in: the federal government controls the roads into the region and Eritrea, to Tigray’s North, is supporting the federal army.
Prime Minister Hamdok has signalled an interest in neutrality and diplomacy but military leaders in Sudan wield significant power in the national government.
Lt-Col Swarmi Khalid, who served as the spokesman for the Sudanese army for several decades, told VICE World News that the Sudanese forces have not yet offered material or logistical support at the border to the TPLF.
But he added, “If Ethiopia continues to escalate, this may change things.”
“Sudan is particularly influential with Ethiopia and Eritrea,” Khalid told VICE News, “Ethiopia must remember that it must have a peaceful stand with the Sudanese government so that Sudan is not forced to enter into any conflict to support Tigray.”
And if Sudan does decide to lend support to the TPLF, through opening supply routes or otherwise, analyst Rashid Abdi agrees their influence could be decisive and extremely dangerous for the stability across the Horn of Africa.
“Sudan is extremely adept at these kinds of proxy conflicts and very opportunistic. [And] Abiy’s hands are so tied with Tigray so he cannot move against them. The Ethiopians will probably move at some point [but] if they move now, the Sudanese will just open a supply route to the TPLF and Egyptians will get in on the act so it could become a much more serious, regional conflict.”
Ethiopia’s international backers, including the US, have repeatedly urged negotiations between Addis Ababa and Tigrayan leadership but Abiy’s tough talk painting the TPLF leadership as a “criminal clique” may have backed him into a corner.
“The only path out of this is negotiated settlement yet he has criminalised the entire TPLF, tagged them with treason. So he’s locked himself to a place where he either fights to the death or surrenders,” analyst Abdi told VICE World News.
With the conflict unlikely to end any time soon, tens of thousands of refugees remain in Sudan, terrified to return despite the sweeping promises of safety from their prime minister.
“We know he is planning to exterminate us, all Tigrayans in general,” said Kahsay, the refugee who left everything behind in Ethiopia. “We don’t believe him at all,” he said of Abiy’s call for civilians to return to Tigray. “Until the Tigrayan government calls us to go, we’ll never go back.”
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