Of the hospital that begins its days with an influx of bodies bearing gunshot or knife wounds — people killed, relatives and Red Cross workers say, for breaching the nightly curfew.
Of the young man who made the mistake of getting into a heated argument with a government soldier in a bar. Hours later, friends said, four soldiers followed him home and beat him to death with beer bottles.
What followed was an hours-long killing rampage, according to accounts from 10 survivors, including Tesfay, as well as from victims’ relatives and friends and activist groups. Soldiers went house to house in Bora, a town in northern Ethiopia’s 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 President reiterated the importance of working with global partners and through multilateral institutions to end the pandemic, improve global health security, and ensure that our nations drive an equitable and sustainable economic recovery,” it said.
Sexual violence against women – one of the horrific weapons of war. In Ethiopia where the conflict between Ethiopia’s national defence forces and Eritrean troops on one side, and fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front has been raging since last November, thousands of women have been raped and tortured.
“The situation in Sheraro is beyond dire. Despite families arriving every day, no aid has been delivered for weeks. Food, water and medicine are running out fast. People could die unless they get humanitarian aid now,” warned Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
“People have told us that they fled sexual violence, killings and widespread violence in Tigray, only to arrive in Sheraro and find a desperately helpless situation. We also heard accounts of refugees hiding in remote villages scared to be identified, which puts them at the risk of being cut off from any assistance. Lactating mothers also told us that they have been unable to produce milk for their babies,” he added.
Tigray residents have told human rights groups and journalists of massacres, widespread sexual violence and indiscriminate killings of civilians by security forces in the region.
Aid workers, meanwhile, say Tigray’s health system has largely collapsed and warn of possible large-scale starvation.
Bachelet “responded positively” to a request from the state-run Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for joint investigations in Tigray, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman Jonathan Fowler said on Wednesday.
“The U.N. Human Rights Office and the EHRC are now developing an investigation plan, which includes resources needed and practical modalities, in order to launch the missions as soon as possible,” Fowler said.
United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has agreed to an Ethiopian request for a joint investigation in the country’s northern Tigray region, where Bachelet says possible war crimes may have been committed.
The world is standing by, allowing a genocide to unfold in Tigray, Ethiopia. After all the promises of “never again”, there’s a deafening silence over the outrages taking place in one of the west’s “go-to” partners in Africa.
At a recent 24-hour global lobby on the crisis, one of the young Tigrayan presenters broke down on air. The cause was social media footage of yet another massacre. Young Tigrayan men, already gunned down by forces from their own country’s government, were being finished off and having their bodies thrown over cliffs by federal soldiers shouting racial abuse.
The breadth and depth of human suffering in the Ethiopian region of Tigray is perfectly clear to humanitarian workers, human rights groups and the international diplomatic community.
After four months of warfare between Ethiopia’s national defence force and fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), observers are collecting a worrying selection of data.
