In hidden war, a massacre comes to light
BEIRUT — The shootings began after lunch.
It was Friday, Jan. 8, the day after Genna, the Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas. Around 2 p.m., Kidane Tesfay heard gunshots near his family’s home and thought of his two brothers, ages 17 and 20, walking outside.
“When I looked through the door’s peephole, I saw them on the ground, their blood spilling out,” he said in an interview. He also saw soldiers wearing mudflecked green camouflage gear striding up to the door.
“I had to escape,” Tesfay said. “Luckily our house has another entrance. I ran out the back.”
What followed was an hourslong killing spree, according to accounts from 10 survivors, including Tesfay, as well as from victims’ relatives and friends and activist groups. Ethiopian soldiers went from house to house in Bora, a town in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, and executed more than 160 people.
Done killing, the soldiers stopped families from taking their dead. Only on Sunday — two days after the slaughter — were gravediggers allowed to set about their grim task; one of them buried 26 corpses in the graveyard of the Abune Aregawi Church, survivors said.
“The town was filled with corpses. The bodies of our friends and neighbors started to smell,” said Girmay Hagos, a 30-year-old real estate agent and survivor. “We kept our grief to ourselves — the soldiers didn’t allow us to cry.”
The massacre in Bora is another deep stain on Prime Minister Abiy
Ahmed’s monthslong war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, which began in early November after the ruling faction there, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, attacked a government military base. Abiy retaliated with what he called a “law enforcement operation,” which killed tens of thousands of people, estimates say, and displaced hundreds of thousands more. More than 60,000 Tigrayans have fled to neighboring Sudan alone, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Behind those numbers has been a brutal, ethnically driven campaign of punishment against the 5.4 million people living in Tigray and the TPLF, which had ruled Africa’s second-most populous country for almost three decades before Abiy’s ascension to power in 2018.
Much of the war remains opaque because the government imposed a communications blackout Nov. 4, largely sealing Tigray from the wider world. Still, consistent reports have emerged in recent weeks of
“extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, looting of property, mass executions and impeded humanitarian access,” the U.N.’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide said in a statement last month.
On Monday, medical charity Doctors Without Borders said that 70% of clinics it visited in Tigray “were looted, vandalized and destroyed in a deliberate and generalized manner.”
Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that government forces had committed acts of “ethnic cleansing.”