Hundreds of tigray were murdered in Ethiopia despite peace agreement

Just days before an agreement to end the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, soldiers from neighboring Eritrea massacred more than 300 villagers in a week last fall, according to witnesses and relatives of the victims.

Enraged by a recent defeat on the battlefield, Eritrean forces, aligned with Ethiopian government troops, retaliated in at least 10 villages east of the town of Adwa in the week before the Nov. 2 peace deal, witnesses said and provided grim news. by the standards of conflict defined by the mass killing of civilians.

The massacres, previously unreported outside the Tigray region, were described in interviews with 22 relatives of the dead, including 15 who witnessed the killings or their immediate aftermath. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Only now are the survivors willing to speak: As long as the Eritrean troops remained close, the villagers were cowed into silence. As the soldiers finally withdrew from much of Tigray in late January, witnesses and relatives began reporting the following: A toddler killed with his seven-year-old brother and their mother. The old priests shot in their houses. A nursing mother was shot dead in front of her young sons. Family members beaten back as they clung to fathers and sons who were being taken to their deaths.

Residents of the village of Mariam Shewito, who fled the violence, said they returned from the bush to find the doors of their homes open, the floors inside black with blood and the air filled with the smell of death. Others searched for brothers and husbands among the half-eaten corpses on the mountain where they had been executed and left to the wild animals.

Satellite images first provided by Planet Labs and reviewed by The Washington Post show that at least 67 structures in the area, mostly homes, were severely damaged during the time witnesses say the murders took place. Additional images provided to The Post by Maxar Technologies show military vehicles matching witness descriptions of Eritrean vehicles less than three miles from where the massacres took place.

An agreement between the Ethiopian government and Tigray rebels has brought a ceasefire to a two-year war that has made northern Ethiopia one of the most dangerous places in the world. But the agreement did not address the position of the Eritrean troops. Neither the Ethiopian nor Eritrean governments have made any public statements about how the Eritrean soldiers who carried out mass killings such as the latest one near Adwa could be brought to justice.

A joint investigation by the Parliament-appointed head of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights documented crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by all parties up to June 2021. The EHRC’s Daniel Bekele said they had identified many other incidents requiring investigation and will be dealt with under the transitional justice mechanism.

A joint investigation by the Parliament-appointed head of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights documented crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by all parties up to June 2021. The EHRC’s Daniel Bekele said they had identified many other incidents requiring investigation and will be dealt with under the transitional justice mechanism.

The UN’s International Commission of Experts on Human Rights, an independent body, has also documented war crimes by all sides and said the government and its allies may have committed crimes against humanity. In January, the Ethiopian government asked the United States to support its efforts to shut down the commission, calling its work “highly politicized.”

A report by UN-backed researchers from the International Commission of Experts on Human Rights in Ethiopia concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed by all parties to the conflict: Ethiopian government troops, the Eritrean army and Tigray forces. . The report found that Ethiopian soldiers also resorted to “starvation of civilians” as a tool of war, while both Ethiopian and Eritrean forces were held responsible for “sexual slavery”.

Eritrea “vehemently rejects false allegations” against the military

In a rare press conference during a visit to Nairobi in February, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki dismissed allegations of rights abuses by his country’s forces as “fantasy”.