‘Very Brutal’: In Ethiopia, Tigray Forces accused of Abuses
DEBARK, Ethiopia — As they bring war to other parts of Ethiopia, resurgent Tigray fighters face growing allegations that they are retaliating for the abuses their people suffered back home.
In interviews with The Associated Press, more than a dozen witnesses offered the most widespread descriptions yet of Tigray forces striking communities and a religious site with artillery, killing civilians, looting health centers and schools and sending hundreds of thousands of people fleeing in the past two months.
In the town of Nefas Mewucha in the Amhara region, a hospital’s medical equipment was smashed. The fighters looted medicines and other supplies, leaving more than a dozen patients to die.
“It is a lie that they are not targeting civilians and infrastructures,” hospital manager Birhanu Mulu told the AP. He said his team had to transfer some 400 patients elsewhere for care. “Everyone can come and witness the destruction that they caused.”
The war that began last November was confined at first to Ethiopia’s sealed-off northern Tigray region. Accounts of atrocities often emerged long after they occurred: Tigrayans described gang-rapes, massacres and forced starvation by federal forces and their allies from Amhara and neighboring Eritrea.
Thousands of people died, though the opaque nature of the war — most communications and transport links have been severed — means no one knows the real toll.
The Tigray forces retook much of their home region in a stunning turn in June, and now the fighting has spilled into Amhara. Angered by the attacks on their communities and families, the fighters are being accused of targeting civilians from the other side.
The United States, which for months has been outspoken about the abuses against Tigrayans, this week turned sharp criticism on the Tigray forces.
“In Amhara now, we now know that the (Tigray forces have) … looted the warehouses, they’ve looted trucks and they have caused a great deal of destruction in all the villages they have visited,” the head of the U.S. Agency for Economic Development, Sean Jones, told the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation.
He called the Tigray fighters “very aggressive.” USAID, which feeds millions throughout Ethiopia, has seen Tigray forces looting and emptying some of its warehouses, he said.
While the U.S., United Nations and others urge all sides to stop the fighting and sit down to talks, those on the ground believe there’s no peace to come. Many Ethiopians outside Tigray support the federal government’s war effort, and as Tigray forces advance, families heed recruiting drives and send loved ones for military training. Ethiopia’s government says “millions” have answered the call.
“Our children are living in terror. We are here to stop this,” said Mekdess Muluneh Asayehegn, a new Amhara militia recruit. Propping a gun on a full plastic sack, she lay on the ground and practiced sighting.
But the consequences of the call to war are already coming home.
“As we came here, there were lots of dead bodies (of defense forces and civilians) along the way,” said Khadija Firdu, who fled the advancing Tigray forces to a muddy camp for displaced people in Debark. “Even as we entered Debark, we stepped on a dead body. We thought it was the trunk of a tree. It was dark. We came here crying.”
AP
