Ethiopia: the dire stories of violence against women in Tigray, where rape is used as a weapon of war
Ethiopia: the dire stories of violence against women in Tigray, where rape is used as a weapon of war
More than five months after the announcement of the end of the war in Tigray, shocking evidence continues to emerge of the violence inflicted on the population by Ethiopian forces, Eritrean and local militias in the northern Ethiopian region, where according to journalists and activists sexual violence is used as a weapon of war on an "almost unimaginable" scale.
"This is ethnic cleansing", he told al New York Times an 18-year-old victim of an attempted rape that cost her the amputation of her arm, stating that soldiers target women in the region "to prevent them from giving birth to new Tigrayans". In addition to the conflict zones, in recent months the violence continued to be recorded also in the capital of Mekelle. However, many women choose not to go to hospitals, to which the soldiers themselves have easy access. To the British newspaper Telegraph, a doctor from Mekelle reported that every woman who goes to the hospital “says there were others 20 with her, who can't make it to the hospital ". In many cases, Doctors say government officials choose not to register cases out of fear of retaliation by the military.
To march Wafaa Said, Deputy Director of the United Nations Humanitarian Affairs Office for the Eastern and Southern Africa region, said that more than 500 Ethiopian women reported having been subjected to sexual violence at five hospitals in Tigray, an estimate of the phenomenon already considered downward “due to the stigma associated with rape. According to what health and humanitarian workers say, cases of violence in the region are increasing day by day.
The war in Tigray
The conflict, started with the offensive launched on 4 November by Ethiopian Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy Ahmed against the Popular Front for the Liberation of Tigray (Tplf) who ruled the region, involved, in addition to the forces of the federal government, also militiamen from the Amhara region and soldiers from neighboring Eritrea, accused by refugees and residents of committing massacres and indiscriminate violence against civilians. The presence of Eritrean soldiers was denied for months by the Ethiopian government, until Abiy's admission last year 23 March.
Last week, the G7 countries called for a “quick withdrawal” in a statement, unconditional and verifiable "by Eritrean forces. According to the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry, they "started" to leave Tigray, claiming that they had crossed the border after being provoked by members of the TPLF.
Eritrea became an unexpected ally of Ethiopia in 2018, with the signing of a peace agreement that formally put an end to a conflict that had begun 20 years ago. Abiy Ahmed took office in Addis Ababa a few months ago as prime minister, after three decades of governments led by the Tplf. The first head of government of the Oromo ethnic group, which constitutes more than a third of the population, has promoted ambitious political and economic reforms in just a few months, freeing tens of thousands of political prisoners. The attempt to overcome the ethnic violence that in previous years had caused millions of displaced people in the country earned Abiy the applause of the international community, leading him to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
However, the reforms have not prevented many of the ethnic divisions and within the Revolutionary Democratic Front of the Ethiopian people (Eprdf), the coalition that has ruled the country since the end of the Mengistu regime in 1991, became irreversible. Tplf, party of the Tigrinya minority always been hegemon within the coalition until the rise of Abiy, he refused to join the new party of Prosperity wanted by the prime minister in view of the elections scheduled for next June.
In an escalation that led to the November offensive, the Tplf first attempted to organize local elections without government authorization, to then attack a federal military base. The harsh response of Abiy Ahmed has rekindled the tensions that never subsided between ethnic groups such as the Amhara and the Tigers, representing about the 6 percent of 110 millions of inhabitants of the country, fueled during the three decades in power of the Tplf. Eritrea too, since the independence of 1993 under the rule of Isaias Afewerki, took the opportunity presented by the conflict to settle accounts with the Tplf, accused of supporting internal opposition.
Systematic violence against women
The telecommunications blockade, imposed intermittently even after the official conclusion of the conflict, it prevented news from reaching the rest of the world about what is happening in the region, where according to a reporter for the Telegraph, brutality is being committed against women on a scale "almost unimaginable”. In the last weeks, with the arrival of international organizations and journalists, Chilling testimonies emerged, accompanied by details of extreme rawness.
“The women say they have been raped by armed actors, they also told stories of gang rape, rapes in front of family members and men forced to rape their families under the threat of violence " Said said, addressing the United Nations Security Council last 25 March.
In one of the most striking cases, a video circulated on social networks and confirmed by the press shows a surgeon from Adigrat hospital extracting nails and pieces of plastic inserted into a woman's vagina. Several survivors of the violence, they told stories of gang violence that lasted whole days, accompanied by the killing of family members.
Last week Abiy acknowledged that "atrocities" were committed in Tigray by "raping women and looting property", without attributing incidents to specific groups. The Eritrean Information Minister Yemane Ghebremeskel, on the other hand, declared that the allegations of rape against the country’s soldiers are "sad and revolting". “All the stories made up, that are foreign to our culture and our laws, are passed off to cover up the crimes of the TPLF that started the war ".
Many testimonies, on the other hand, underline the systematic nature of the abuses. Several women were infected withHiv or have contracted sexually transmitted diseases as a result of the rape, a contagion intentionally sought by some of the soldiers, as reported by the survivors. A doctor in the Sudanese refugee camp of Hamdayet, Dr. Tedros Tefera, reported to Cnn that many victims said they were raped by Amhara militiamen who told them they wanted to "change her identity" and carry out ethnic cleansing. "Basically this was a genocide", he said.
