For more than a year and a half, a largely invisible campaign of ethnic cleansing has played out in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray. Older people, women, and children have been loaded onto trucks and forced out of their villages and hometowns. Men have been herded into overcrowded detention sites, where many have died of disease, starvation, or torture. In total, several hundred thousand Tigrayans have been forcibly uprooted because of their ethnicity.
These crimes are an outgrowth of a war that began in November 2020, pitting Ethiopian federal forces and their allies, including troops from Eritrea and the neighboring Ethiopian region of Amhara, against forces linked to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which once led Ethiopia’s coalition government. Early in the conflict, Amhara security forces and officials gained control of Western Tigray, a long-contested area of the region, where with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopia’s federal military, they have carried out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayan communities.
Many of these abuses have been hidden from view. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has imposed communication restrictions throughout Tigray and obstructed the efforts of independent investigators, journalists, and humanitarian workers, making it difficult to verify accounts from the region. In the first half of 2021, chilling reports of rapes, killings, and mass displacement nonetheless trickled out, prompting U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to condemn the ethnic cleansing and call on Ethiopian and Amhara troops to withdraw. Ethiopian authorities, however, have since sealed off Tigray almost entirely, severing telecommunications and even banking services.
But as investigators for Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have shown, the atrocities have continued. For over ten months after Blinken’s condemnation of the ethnic cleansing, Amhara regional officials and security forces carried out a systematic campaign of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, unlawful imprisonment and torture, forced displacement, sexual violence, possible extermination, and other inhumane acts. The United States and other countries have pressed for a cessation of hostilities and sought to negotiate humanitarian access to Tigray, but they have largely ignored the horrors in the west of the region. They can no longer afford to look away.
Go out or we will kill you
Western Tigray is a fertile area of northwestern Ethiopia that borders Sudan and Eritrea. In the early 1990s, Ethiopia’s previous government, led by the TPLF, incorporated the zone into the newly formed regional state of Tigray, setting the stage for decades-long disputes over boundaries, self-government, and identity. Some ethnic Amharas viewed these changes as an annexation, believing that the territory should have become part of the Amhara regional state. At various times, Amharas in Western Tigray sought to gain greater recognition and representation in government, unsuccessfully petitioning regional and federal officials and staging protests that were violently suppressed.
The outbreak of war in 2020 brought these longstanding grievances to the fore. Officials from Amhara, whose forces fought alongside Ethiopian federal troops, established administrative control over Western Tigray. Soon, war crimes and ethnic cleansing were underway. Ethiopian federal forces indiscriminately shelled towns and villages while Amhara Special Forces—paramilitary forces accountable to the Amhara regional government—and allied Amhara militias carried out extrajudicial executions in towns across the area. Tens of thousands of Tigrayans were forced to flee.
Amid the offensive, Tigrayan militiamen and other residents killed scores of Amhara residents and seasonal laborers in the town of Mai Kadra. In subsequent days, Amhara forces and Ethiopian federal troops targeted Tigrayans in a wave of revenge killings, arbitrary detentions, and eventual expulsions.
In the months that followed, the new Amhara administrators, Amhara Special Forces and allied militias, and Eritrean troops pillaged Tigrayan crops and livestock and looted and occupied Tigrayan homes. These forces also subjected Tigrayan women and girls to sexual violence, including gang rape and sexual slavery. A shop owner from the town of Dansha reported that she was raped by half a dozen Amhara militiamen and recalled her attackers saying, “You Tigrayans should disappear from the land west of Tekeze”—a river that marks the boundary between Western Tigray and the rest of the region. “You are evil, and we are purifying your blood.”
Read th efull report: Ethiopia’s Invisible Ethnic Cleansing
Source: HRW