Possible war crimes on all sides in Ethiopian conflict, says report
War crimes and other crimes against humanity may have been conducted by all sides in the bloody year-long civil war in Ethiopia, according to a joint investigation by the UN and the country’s human rights commission.
The most comprehensive report yet into the conflict, which has centred around the rebel province of Tigray, includes a string of first-hand accounts of massacres, torture and sexual violence in a war that began almost exactly a year ago.
It was released the day after Ethiopia declared a state of emergency and two days after Tigrayan forces said they may march on the capital to topple the government.
Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that “all parties to the Tigray conflict have committed violations of international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law. Some of these may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Significantly, the high commissioner added that “the majority of the violations” documented between November 2020 and June 2021 – the initial phases of the conflict – appear to have been committed by Ethiopian forces and their Eritrean allies as they attacked and occupied Tigray. But she added that since the Tigrayans had staged a successful counter-offensive that potentially threatened the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, there were “an increasing number of allegations of human rights abuses by Tigray forces”.
The investigation recounts a report of a massacre of “more than 100 civilians” in Axum, Tigray by Eritrean forces on 28 November 2020. The victims were “mostly young men” but one witness told the joint investigation team that others were targeted too.
“EDF soldiers took a 70-year-old man and his two sons out of their homes. They took them to the nearby water tanker, ordered them to lay on the ground and shot all three of them in the head,” the witness said.
Nearly three weeks earlier, on 9 and 10 November, the report says that a Tigrayan youth group called Samri killed “more than 200 civilians” – ethnic Amhara – in Mai Kadra, western Tigray, with the help of local police, militias and others affiliated with the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
A woman told the investigators that at 3pm on the first day people were warned in Amharic to go home and get inside. “Immediately after, some 30 Samri youths came to our home armed with machetes … When they set the house on fire, my husband picked up his stick to defend himself and stepped outside. The Samri then started swinging machetes at him but when he tried to defend himself, he was shot in the back [by a town militia]. As he fell face first, the others started hitting him with machetes. They then threw his body in the fire.”
Concerns had been voiced before the publication of the report that the UN’s investigation would be constrained because it was forced to work with the Ethiopian governmentcreated human rights commission (EHRC) in order to obtain any access to Tigray in the first phases of the fighting.
But the 156-page review, based in part on 269 interviews with victims and witnesses of alleged crimes, repeatedly cites alleged human rights violations conducted by Ethiopian government forces and their allies.
Investigators also conducted 30 interviews with women who were survivors of rape and other forms of sexual violence. Many were subject to gangrape, and there was a pattern of women and girls associated with fighters being targeted.
One survivor told the investigators that she “was taken from a minibus by four EDF [Eritrean] soldiers and kept for 11 days”. She was subsequently “gang-raped by 23 EDF soldiers” and then left her for dead before she was taken to hospital and “treated for four months”.
Ethiopian forces were accused of conducting torture in military camps in occupied Tigray. One woman, a captured Tigrayan fighter, said Ethiopian “soldiers also tortured prisoners at the camp with electric cables and plastic-covered metal rods and wooden sticks” and threatened to kill prisoners by holding guns to their heads.
The primary focus of the investigation covered November 2020 to the end of June 2021, when the Ethiopian forces announced a unilateral ceasefire after a Tigrayan counter-offensive had recaptured the province’s capital, Mekelle. But Bachelet said the situation was being monitored, as the tide had turned.
Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, said he accepted the report, despite some “serious reservations”, adding it did not accuse the government of genocide or using food as a weapon. He said a civil-military taskforce would be established to investigate all the allegations in the report. Previously, Ethiopia has also said some individual soldiers were on trial for rape and killing.
A statement from Tigray’s External Affairs Office said the joint report was “fraught with problems,” partly because, it said, “hardly any effort was made to reach out to the government of Tigray”. The statement said the involvement of the EHRC meant the inquiry was “an affront to the notion of impartiality”, while making no comment on accusations of abuses by Tigrayan or allied forces.
Eritrea refused to engage with investigators, the report said, but has previously denied that its forces carried out rapes. The Eritrean foreign minister, Osman Saleh, declined to comment.