Both sides blame each other after hundreds massacred in Tigray

It was like the end of the world. We could not bury them because the soldiers were near.

Mai-Kadra mechanic Samir Beyen

The only thing the survivors can agree on is that hundreds of people were slaughtered in a single Ethiopian town.

Witnesses say security forces and their allies attacked civilians in MaiKadra with machetes and knives or strangled them with ropes.

The stench of bodies lingered for days during the early chaos of the Ethiopian government’s offensive in the defiant Tigray region last month.

What started on November 9 in the agricultural town near the Sudanese border has become the most visible atrocity in a war conducted in the shadows. But even here, much remains unclear, including who killed whom.

Witnesses in Mai-Kadra told the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International that ethnic Tigrayan forces and allies attacked Amhara — one of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic groups but a minority in Tigray. In Sudan, where nearly 50,000 people have fled, one ethnic Amhara refugee gave The Associated Press a similar account.

But more than a dozen Tigrayan refugees told the AP it was the other way around.

In strikingly similar stories, they said they and others were targeted by Ethiopian federal forces and allied Amhara regional troops.

It’s possible civilians from both ethnicities were targeted in MaiKadra, Amnesty now says.

“Anyone they found, they would kill,” Tesfaalem Germay, an ethnic Tigrayan who fled to Sudan with his family, said of Ethiopian and Amhara forces. He said he saw hundreds of bodies, making a slicing gesture at his neck and head.

But another refugee, Abebete Refe, said many ethnic Amhara like him who stayed behind were massacred by Tigrayan forces.

“Even the government doesn’t think we’re alive, they thought we all died,” he said.

The conflicting accounts are emblematic of a war about which little is truly known since Ethiopian forces entered Tigray on November 4 and sealed off the region from the world, restricting access to journalists and aid workers alike. For weeks, food and other supplies have run alarmingly low.

The conflict began after months of friction between the governments, which regard each other as illegitimate. The Tigray leaders once dominated Ethiopia’s ruling coalition but Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sidelined them when he came to power in 2018.

Amnesty International said it confirmed that at least scores, and likely hundreds, of people were killed in Mai-Kadra, using geolocation to verify video and photographs of the bodies. It also remotely conducted “a limited set of interviews”.

But Mai-Kadra “is just the tip of the iceberg”, Amnesty researcher Fisseha Tekle said as fears grow about atrocities elsewhere in Tigray. “Other credible allegations are emerging ... not only in Mai-Kadra but also” in the nearby town of Humera, the town of Dansha and the Tigray capital, Mekele.

In Mai-Kadra, witnesses told the Ethiopian rights commission they saw police, militia and members of a

Tigray youth group attack Amhara.

“The streets were still lined with bodies yet to be buried” days later, the commission said. One man who looked at identity cards of the dead as he cleared away the bodies told Amnesty International that many of them said Amhara.

But several ethnic Tigrayans who have fled blamed Ethiopian and allied Amhara regional forces for killings in the same town at the same time, saying some asked to see identity cards before attacking. In some cases, they said they recognised the killers as their neighbours.

Samir Beyen, a mechanic, said he was stopped and asked if he was Tigrayan, then beaten and robbed. He said he saw people being slaughtered with knives, and dozens of corpses.

“It was like the end of the world,” he recalled. “We could not bury them because the soldiers were near.” —