Shell-shocked survivors describe rebel advance
AFTER seizing the farming village in northern Ethiopia, the rebels roamed the streets searching for young, able-bodied men who had fought alongside government forces.
Anyone with a militia ID was a suspect. So were men with marks on their shoulders left by rifle straps, even though it is common for farmers in Ethiopia’s Amhara region – militia fighters or not – to carry Kalashnikovs.
Before the day was over, the rebels had fatally shot two men in their homes and marched a third to a nearby river where they fired rounds into his back, according to 49-year-old Adisse Wonde, who said he buried all three.
“They want to suppress and rule us. Their deed is ethnic cleansing,” Adisse said of the rebels who hail from Ethiopia’s northernmost region of Tigray.
The alleged killings earlier this month in the village of Hara are one example of gruesome abuses described by witnesses of Ethiopia’s widening war. Long confined to Tigray, the conflict has recently spread to two neighbouring regions, Afar and Amhara, with heavy weapons fire killing an untold number of civilians and displacing hundreds of thousands more.
The rebels, known as the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), have dismissed allegations they have committed atrocities as “groundless” pro-government propaganda.
Displaced civilians in Amhara tell a different story. They blame TPLF fighters for killings, widespread looting and shelling of civilian areas.
Northern Ethiopia has been wracked by violence since November when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent troops into Tigray to topple the TPLF, then the region’s ruling party.
The 2019 Nobel Peace laureate said the move came in response to TPLF attacks on army camps and promised a swift victory. Instead, though, Tigray became engulfed in a grinding war marked by massacres and mass rapes.
In June, the TPLF stunned the world by retaking the regional capital Mekele, then pushed into Amhara and Afar, vowing to end what it describes as a humanitarian blockade of Tigray and prevent pro-Abiy forces from regrouping.
The TPLF advance forced Muchayu Degin, a 55-year-old mother of seven in the northern Amhara town of Kobo, to hide in her home for a week, trembling in fear as artillery booms drew nearer. Starving and desperate, she finally summoned the courage to flee on foot with her family, walking 15 hours south on roads strewn with bullet-ridden bodies. Eventually, she reached the city of Woldiya, then found transportation further south to the city of Dessie, a fast-booming hub for the newly displaced.
It has been a month since she fled, and she hasn’t managed to reach the nieces and nephews she left in Kobo.
“There is no network there,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. “We don’t know who is alive or not.”
This week, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, a government-affiliated but independent body, said it was deploying a mission to investigate reports of attacks on civilians.
The TPLF backs investigations but says they must be independent and UN-led. Meanwhile, the fighting drags on, with a recent internal EU document identifying four fronts in Amhara. Aid workers warn the hostilities will worsen the humanitarian consequences of a conflict that the UN says has driven hundreds of thousands of people into famine-like conditions.
The US Agency for International Development is providing food to more than 136 000 people “impacted by conflict” in Amhara and Afar, its boss Samantha Power said this week, while calling on the TPLF to withdraw from the two regions and negotiate. Neither side seems much in the mood for talks. In Dessie, officials continue to champion a military solution to the war while accusing the US and other world powers of downplaying – or even outright ignoring – TPLF abuses.
Far from spurring calls for peace among the general population, tales of civilian suffering are inspiring Dessie residents to take up arms.
“People are being displaced from their homes, including children and elderly people. When you see this, it motivates you to go and fight,” Mohammed Kedir said after completing a 20-day training course to join the Amhara security forces.
Recruit Tesfaye Abeba said he was eager to avenge what he said were TPLF crimes. “I have to protect the women and children,” he said.
Such words provide some comfort to displaced ethnic Amharas like Yemisarach Bezabeh, who fled her Mersa and has spent the past few days in Dessie struggling to find rice and flour to feed her three children.
She said her family dreams of returning to their home, assuming it is standing.