Ethiopia, 600 civilians killed in a village in Tigray
Rights — di Andrea Barolini
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in a village in Tigray, the region where Ethiopia's federal army and separatist groups are clashing.
Ethiopia, 600 civilians killed in a village in Tigray
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in a village in Tigray, the region where Ethiopia's federal army and separatist groups are clashing.
"We managed to enter the city without harming innocent civilians." With these reassuring words, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced the recapture of Mekele, the main centre of Tigray, the northernmost of Ethiopia's nine regions. This would bring to a close the operation by the regular army launched on 4 November against the separatists of the Tigray People's Liberation Front, active in the area bordering Eritrea, who had rejected the authority of Addis Ababa.
#Ethiopia - Questions linger among the corpses of an Ethiopian massacre
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📸 @edusoteras #AFP
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📸 @edusoteras #AFP
According to the rebels, "the war in Ethiopia is not yet over"
Verifying the situation on the ground with any certainty is, however, almost impossible. According to the rebels, "the war is not yet over". And it is unclear whether fighting is still ongoing in the region (partly due to the closure of internet access). One episode linked to the Tigray war has, however, come to light. In all its atrocity.
On 9 November, five days after the Ethiopian government launched its military operation, several hundred inhabitants of a village in the western part of the region, near the Sudanese border, were killed. An act of violence so dramatic as to call to mind the tragedy experienced by Rwanda in the 1990s.
Violence reminiscent of the Rwanda tragedy
The inhabitants of Mai-Kadra were killed with clubs, machetes and axes. Some were even strangled with ropes. For several days, nothing of the massacre leaked out. Until a journalist from the AFP agency, who managed to reach the scene, found "dozens of decomposing bodies, unburied, piled in a ditch by the side of a road."
Hundreds killed in massacre in Ethiopia's Tigray, rights body says f24.my/76lw.t
At the end of November, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (a semi-independent public body) formally accused a militia of young people from Tigray, the samris, said to have been backed by some local security forces. In total, the militiamen are alleged to have killed no fewer than 600 people, "identifying them in advance on an ethnic basis." The victims, again according to the Commission, were almost all of Amhara origin — a population that had indeed mobilised in the conflict against the rebels, alongside the federal troops deployed from Addis Ababa.
Impossible to establish responsibility
Was this, then, an act of reprisal? Impossible to say with certainty, at this stage. Testimonies gathered by the non-governmental organisation Amnesty International and by reporters on the ground, however, point to a premeditated ethnic cleansing: "They wanted to exterminate us," said a 23-year-old farmer who was wounded but survived the massacre. Yet some Tigrayans who have taken refuge in Sudan accuse the federal army of having deliberately killed civilians. This version is confirmed by the Liberation Front, which for its part has denied all responsibility, claiming no involvement in the massacre.
What is clear is that it will take a very long time to establish the truth, not least because the region is cut off from the outside world. Equally clear is that the path towards the pacification and reconciliation of Ethiopia — championed at the start of his mandate in 2018 by Prime Minister Ahmed — still appears very, very long.