Rounded up, massacred and posted on social media: can Ethiopia bring justice for atrocities in Tigray? The country is about to start investigating crimes reported in a brutal regional war. But trust is at an all-time low and survivors feel forgotten
By Fred Harter
Meaza Teklemariam was seven months pregnant when the soldiers came to her home in January 2021, dragged her husband, Tsegaye, outside and bound his hands together, before taking him away with other men from their neighbourhood in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.
“They said to him, ‘You are a fighter, you are a fighter’,” says Meaza, tears rolling down her cheeks. “He kept saying, ‘No, no. I’m a farmer, I’m a civilian.’”
Videos filmed by the soldiers and posted on social media show what happened next. The soldiers gather dozens of men on a rocky clifftop. Then they lead them to the edge and shoot them with automatic rifles. The limp bodies are tossed into the valley below, as the soldiers fire rounds into anyone showing signs of life.
At one point, before the slaughter begins, a smiling soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder beckons to the camera. “Why don’t you go closer and film?” he asks. “You should film how these are going to die.” In another video a soldier identifies his name and military unit and then passes his phone to a comrade who films him shooting someone.
Today, a modest stone monument stands at the massacre site in Mahbere Dego town in Tigray, where children graze herds of donkeys and cattle among the orange aloe vera flowers. A tally by local officials, reviewed by the Guardian, puts the number of people killed at 50. It was six months before relatives discovered their loved ones’ remains, when the soldiers withdrew from the area in the face of a rebel offensive.
People were identified by their scattered belongings: tattered identity cards, charred shoes and bloodstained bits of clothing. Bones were collected in sacks as the sounds of battle echoed in the surrounding mountains, and buried in mass graves at two local churches.
“It was heartbreaking,” says priest Gebremeskal Berhe, standing beside one of the graves at his church of Mahbere Tsadkan. “We don’t know the exact number of people buried here,” he says. “We can only guess.”
This massacre is just one atrocity in the brutal war that engulfed northern Ethiopia from 2020 to 2022. About 600,000 people died, according to Olusegun Obasanjo, a negotiator for the African Union and former president of Nigeria. Many died from disease and hunger when aid was blocked to Tigray, prompting a UN investigation into accusations of Ethiopia’s government using starvation as a weapon. An estimated 100,000 women were raped, and UN investigators concluded all sides committed war crimes, including rebels from Tigray when they entered the neighbouring regions of Afar and Amhara.
Now, two years after the war ended, Ethiopia is preparing to launch a transitional justice process. In April, its cabinet approved a policy setting up a special prosecutor and court to deal with the most serious abuses, as well as a truth commission with powers to grant reparations and amnesties to mend fractured community relationships. Their work will start in the coming months, covering not just the recent civil war, but all crimes committed in the country since 1995, when its constitution came into force.
The transitional justice policy has drawn praise from donors such as the US and the European Union, which froze aid to Ethiopia during the conflict and demanded a transitional justice process before they normalised relations. But it has been criticised by international and national human rights groups, who question the government’s commitment to accountability.
During the conflict, the government cut Tigray’s phone lines and officials downplayed or denied accusations its forces and allies committed abuses. Eritrean troops fought alongside Ethiopia’s military, but Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, denied their presence for months. The ministry of justice says it has carried out investigations but has released little information about findings, raising fears the transitional justice process will be similarly opaque.
Laetitia Bader, Horn of Africa director at Human Rights Watch, says: “Time and time again, the government has demonstrated outright resistance to any international oversight, scrutiny and transparency. And we are seeing that again with this process.”
A major concern is the lack of international participation in the process. A group of Ethiopian academics who helped draft the policy floated the possibility of including international experts as judges, investigators and commissioners, but the final policy limits them to training and advisory roles.
The government has insisted on a nationally led process, under the banner of “African solutions to African problems”, and refused to cooperate with the UN investigation, whose mandate it lobbied hard to end. The investigation was allowed to quietly lapse last year, as the EU restored €600m (£500m) in frozen funding to Ethiopia, a move that seemed to indicate a shelving of its demands for accountability.
“Europe is turning a blind eye because Ethiopia is an important partner in Africa,” alleges a European diplomat in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.
One senior member of the UN investigation says: “We left the process with the view Ethiopia was not serious about accountability, that this was something they were primarily doing for external consumption.” They describe this tactic as “quasi-compliance”.
A government spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
There is still fighting in Amhara and Oromia, Ethiopia’s biggest regions, where security forces face accusations of abuses. This includes a massacre of dozens of civilians early this year, which the government is yet to investigate. Much of these regions are too dangerous for officials, so it is not clear how the transitional process will work there. Civil society groups say the ongoing atrocities cast doubt on the government’s commitment to accountability.
The new special prosecutor will have powers to extradite suspects, but Eritrea sending men to face justice in Ethiopia is a remote prospect, with its president, Isaias Afwerki, calling allegations of war crimes in Tigray “a fantasy”.
Eritrean troops have been accused of committing some of the worst atrocities of the war. This includes the massacre of hundreds of men and boys in Axum, an hour’s drive north of Mahbere Dego through flat farmland. On 28 and 29 November 2020, Eritrean soldiers reportedly carried out a door-to-door killing spree after clashing with local militia in this ancient city, whose church is believed by Orthodox Ethiopians to house the Ark of the Covenant.
At her home in Axum’s old town, Tirhas Berha recalls how gunfire rang through the city. Then a group of Eritrean troops barged in. She says they ordered her husband, Tamrat, into the street, lined him up with five other men and opened fire.
When she eventually managed to drag him inside, Tamrat was still breathing. But he bled to death in front of her and their children two hours later. They could not leave their home to bury his decomposing body for three days.
Trust in government institutions is low in Tigray. According to a recent survey, just 2% of people living there want domestic courts to adjudicate. This includes Berha, who has little confidence her husband’s killers will ever be prosecuted.
“We need justice, but it’s been four years and nothing has happened. They have just forgotten about us,” she says.
“No one can understand how I feel.” As she speaks, her young daughter wipes her tears away with a scarf and rubs her back.
Leake Embaye helped to collect the bodies. He says they were fired upon by Eritrean troops while doing the work. At his barber shop, stripped bare by looting, he unfurls a large poster with the pictures and names of the dead from his neighbourhood. He says he too doubts there will be justice.
“The government lied about what happened, they said Eritrean troops weren’t here at the time,” he says.
In a recent interview, Ethiopia’s army chief downplayed what happened in Axum, saying Eritrean troops “were fired upon” and “took action against those who attacked them”. “In the midst of this, peaceful people might have been harmed,” he said.
In the countryside around Mahbere Dego, wrapped in a white shawl, Kiros Berhe walks along a dirt path through fields teeming with crops ready for harvest, up to the church gate where her husband, Solomon, and other relatives lie buried. But she won’t go inside. “It is too painful,” she says.
Despite losing six family members in the massacre at the cliff top, she considers herself “very lucky” because her only son survived. “I am sure God will punish them,” she says, “but I don’t trust the government. They are responsible for this.”
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