UMM Rakuba, Sudan (AP) – The only survivors can agree that hundreds of people were massacred in a single Ethiopian city.
Witnesses say security forces and their allies attacked civilians in Mai-Kadra with glasses and knives or strangled them with ropes. The body odor lasted for days during the initial chaos of the Ethiopian government’s action in the rival Tigre region last month. Several mass graves have been reported.
The incident, which began on November 9 in an agricultural town near the Sudanese border, has become the most visible atrocity in the war, mostly in the shadows. But even here, a lot is unclear, including who killed whom.
Witnesses in Mai-Kadra told the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International that the ethnic Tigrian army and allies attacked Amhar – one of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic groups but a minority in the Tigris. In Sudan, where nearly 1,000,000 people have fled, an ethnic Amhara refugee gave a similar account to the Associated Press.
But more than a dozen Tigrian refugees told the AP it was the other way around: in surprisingly similar stories, they said they and others were targeted by Ethiopian federal forces and allied our regional armies.
Citizens of both races have been targeted in Mai-Kadra, Amnesty International says.
“Anything they found would kill them,” said Tesfalam Germay, an ethnic Tigrin who fled Sudan with his family. He said he saw hundreds of corpses, when he made pruning gestures on his neck and head remembering Gashesh.
But another refugee, Abbott Refe, told the AP that many ethnic us like him who were left behind were massacred by Tigrian forces.
“Even the government doesn’t think we’re alive, they think we’re all dead,” he said.
Conflicting accounts are a sign of war, little is known about as Ethiopian forces entered the Tigris on November 4 and closed the area to the world, barring the entry of journalists and support workers. For weeks, food and other supplies Terribly low. Ethiopian security forces opened fire this week And the UN’s first assessment of how to deliver aid. The employees were briefly detained, a senior Ethiopian official said.
The Ethiopian government and Tigre have filled the vacuum with propaganda. Each party has taken over the killings in Mai-Kadra to support its cause.
The conflict began after months of friction between governments, which now consider each other illegal. Tigre leaders once dominated Ethiopia’s ruling coalition, but were ousted by Prime Minister Abiya Ahmed when they came to power in 2018.
The long-running tension over land in the western Tigre, where Mai-Kadra is located, between Tigreans and Amhara, has fueled the fire.
Amnesty International said it had confirmed that at least scores and possibly hundreds of people had been killed in Mai-Kadra, with videos and photographs of the bodies being verified using geographical location. It also conducts remote “limited set of interviews”.
“My-Cadra” is just the tip of the iceberg, “Amnesty researcher Fisheha Tekley said in an event on Tuesday.” There are growing fears of atrocities elsewhere in Tigre. “Other credible allegations are emerging … not just in My-Cadra, In the city of Humera, Dansha and Macaulay, the capital of Tigris.
In Mai-Kadra, witnesses told the visiting Ethiopian Rights Commission that they were attacked by members of the police, army and Tigre youth group.
“The streets were still lined with bodies still being buried,” the commission said days later. One person who saw the identity cards with the identities of the bodies told Amnesty International that many of them said Amhar.
But many ethnic Tigris who fled blamed Ethiopians and allies our regional forces for the simultaneous killings in the same city, saying some people asked to see an identity card before the attack.
In some cases, they said they identified the killers as their neighbors.
A mechanic named Samir Bayen said he was stopped and asked if he was a Tigryan, then beaten and robbed. He said he saw people being slaughtered with knives and dozens of rotting corpses.
“It was like the end of the world,” he recalled. “We couldn’t bury them because the soldiers were close.”
Cut off from their homes, refugees now want to briefly escape from horrific memories, waiting in very solid houses or under shelters in Sudan with plastic and branches together, playing checkers with Coca-Cola bottle caps or being dragged to sleep on mats.
AP Tigre is unable to obtain permission to travel in the region and has not been able to independently verify reports of the massacre. Neither Amnesty International nor the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission agreed to requests to speak with the witnesses who visited them.
The Ethiopian Commission, an institution created under the country’s constitution, calls its findings preliminary. His investigators were allowed to visit Mai-Cadra by the federal government, but when asked if he was being allowed to investigate other alleged atrocities as well, spokesman Aaron Masho replied, “We are working on it. . “
The UN human rights office called for an independent inquiry into the conflict this week, but Ethiopian officials have denied any involvement, saying the government does not need a “babister” this week.
It is “beltling” to assume that the government cannot do such a thing on its own, Redwan Hussein, a senior Ethiopian official, told reporters on Tuesday.
The prime minister called the killings in Mai-Kadra a “sign of moral decay” and expressed suspicion that the perpetrators had fled Sudan and were hiding among refugees. Abi gave no evidence, only pointing to the number of young people among the refugees – although about half are women.
The prime minister also denied allegations of abuse by the Ethiopian Defense Forces, saying “not a single person has been killed in any city during the conflict.”
But Tigre’s leader, Debrecen J. Bre Bremikle, blamed the “invading” federal forces for the killings and told the AP that “we are not the people who can ever commit this crime.”
Racial conflicts and profiles must stop, UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet warned this week, saying they were “promoting ambiguity and sowing seeds for more instability and conflict” – a rift already in the field.
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Associated Press writers Sami Magdy in Cairo and Hallelujah Hadero in Atlanta contributed.
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