Raped in wartime, rejected by their kin
Brutalized during Ethiopia conflict, mothers suffer anew after cease-fire
MEKELLE, Ethiopia — Shila survived three months of sexual enslavement during Ethiopia’s civil war and then the birth of a son fathered by an attacker. She told no one, maintaining that her youngest child was the result of a clandestine visit by her husband, a Tigrayan militiaman.
After three long years, she thought her husband was dead. When he returned and she saw his silhouette in the darkness, she collapsed.
"For years, I longed for him to come home," she said, tears sliding down her face. "But I also feared he would tell people what happened and reject me."
More than 100,000 women may have been raped during the two-year civil war in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, according to the most comprehensive study so far of these attacks in research conducted by the Columbia University biostatistician Kiros Berhane. And countless women who gave birth as a result are struggling with a hidden agony, often ostracized even by their families. They have been victimized twice, once during the conflict that pitted Ethiopia's military and allied soldiers from Eritrea against Tigrayan rebels, and a second time by their own communities, even after a ceasefire a year ago quieted the hostilities.
A dozen rape survivors, most raising young children, recounted in interviews their efforts to rebuild shattered lives. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity. During the war, all sides committed rapes, human rights groups and victims report, but the most sustained and organized violence was committed against Tigrayan women, who said they were raped by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers and by militiamen from Ethiopia's Amhara region.
A survey of more than 5,000 women of reproductive age in Tigray, published in July in the medical journal BMJ Global Health, found that nearly 8 percent said they had been raped. Of these, more than two-thirds said they were gang-raped, and a quarter said they were raped on multiple occasions. That is likely to be an undercount, because of stigma and because some areas where violence was highest — such as in Shila’s hometown — are inaccessible with Eritrean soldiers still occupying them. (Ethiopia and Eritrea have denied that their soldiers committed widespread rapes.)
According to the government-run Women's Bureau, more than half the women who reached a string of hospital rape centers were pregnant.
Medical staffers, counselors, nuns, and priests said in interviews that most men rejected wives who had been raped, especially those who had children as a result. “In most cases, the man leaves if she has a child,” said Abel Gebreyohannes, a counselor working with rape victims. “Some families also won’t accept the woman. So she keeps it secret.”
One 25-year-old woman said her parents refused to let her return to the family home and withheld her 7-year-old daughter — the product of her marriage — after she kept a baby boy fathered by one of her rapists.
“Mum said, ‘Give him away.’ When I went home, she would not even let me see my little girl,” she said. “When I speak to my daughter on the phone, she cries and begs me to come and take her.”
A second woman said her husband came home after the war, walked in without a word and took their older daughter, leaving behind a baby boy born of a rape. A third woman said her husband had called to say he heard that she had been raped and had a baby, so he had married someone else and was abandoning her and their four children.
Before the war, Shila’s family lived near the border of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Shila took care of the three children and ran a hairdressing salon. Her husband was in the regional militia. Then the Eritrean troops arrived, Shila said. The younger children fled as the soldiers dragged off Shila’s eldest daughter, a 13year-old nicknamed Mita, “the sweet one.” She loved jumping rope, playing with her mother’s makeup, and studying to become an accountant.
The soldiers demanded that Shila tell them where her husband was. She insisted he was dead, but they did not believe her. She was passed around groups of Eritrean soldiers and repeatedly raped along with other women.
Shila became pregnant. When she reached the regional capital, Mekelle, Shila said, she sought an abortion. But she was nearly five months along, and doctors said she had to deliver the baby. She dreamed of giving birth to the child and smothering it.
Weeks later, doctors wheeled Mita into Shila’s hospital room. The girl had been attacked so brutally that she could no longer walk or control her urine. Shila broke. She was largely confined to a psychiatric ward for the next five months.
After she gave birth, doctors bound her wrists and ankles to the bed and brought her son to be breastfed, Shila recalled.
Food was scarce. The little ones cried and developed rashes. When Mita was finally discharged after an abortion and multiple operations, she was starving, cold, and in pain. She lashed out at her mother repeatedly. One night, Shila ran to a church and prayed until morning, for food, help, patience, mercy.
“I hated my [baby] son. I used to beat him,” she said. “Push him away, throw him. … I couldn’t help it.”
Over the months, the baby started crawling and speaking. He called Shila “Mama.” He toddled back when she pushed him away. Gradually, she stopped pushing. She nicknamed him Hero. She told her other children that Hero was their full sibling.
A year later, her husband showed up. He had heard that Shila had been raped but not that she had had a baby. When she saw him, she fainted, banging her head so hard he had to take her to a hospital. The doctors told him her story.