Notwithstanding the fact that the terrorist TPLF group has been engaged in perpetrating irrefutable atrocities in Amhara and Afar states with impunity, the international community kept on turning a deaf ear to the war crimes being committed by the group. Across the full range of contexts, they do not want to expose the truth provided that they work in close collaboration with the terrorist group, servant groups and activists.
Despite the fact that the federal government has been pulling out all the stops to familiarize the international community with the existing reality on the ground, the international media outlets have continued to give the cold shoulder in what could be a smear campaign to whitewash the group’s brutal acts.
However, after long period of silence and denial by the international community, Amnesty International recently broke the silence by issuing a statement that reflect the hidden atrocities perpetrated by the terrorist TPLF group in Amhara state.
In a shocking revelation, Amnesty discl osed women in Amhara state where the terrorist TPLF group made incursion to have been gruesomely raped and tortured.
The statement said that sixteen women from the town of Nifas Mewcha in Ethiopia’s Amhara region told Amnesty International they were raped by fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) during the group’s attack on the town in mid-August 2021.
“Survivors described how they were raped at gunpoint, robbed, and subjected to physical and verbal assaults by TPLF fighters, who also destroyed and looted medical facilities in the town. Fourteen of the 16 women Amnesty International interviewed said they were gang raped,” the report indicated.
The TPLF took control of Nifas Mewcha, in Amhara’s Gaint District, for nine days between 12 and 21 August 2021, as part of an ongoing offensive into parts of the Amhara and Afar regions. Regional government officials told Amnesty International that more than 70 women reported to authorities that they were raped in Nifas Mewcha during this period.
“The testimonies we heard from survivors describe despicable acts by TPLF fighters that amount to war crimes, and potentially crimes against humanity. They defy morality or any iota of humanity,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
“TPLF fighters must immediately stop all human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, including sexual and gender-based violence. The leadership must make clear that such abuses will not be tolerated and remove suspected perpetrators from their ranks.”
Amnesty International used secure video call applications to individually interview 16 survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in Nifas Mewcha.
The organization also interviewed the head of Nifas Mewcha hospital, as well as local and regional government officials with knowledge of the assault and its aftermath.
According to a local government desk officer for Women, Children and Youth Affairs, 71 women reported that they were raped by TPLF fighters during the period in question; the Federal Ministry of Justice puts the number at 73.
Survivors told Amnesty International that the attacks began as soon as the TPLF took control of the town on 12 August 2021. The women all identified the perpetrators as TPLF fighters based on their accents and the ethnic slurs they used against victims, as well as their overt announcements that they were TPLF.
Bemnet, a 45-year-old is a resident of Nifas Mewucha. Four TPLF fighters came to her house on the evening of 14 August and demanded she make them coffee, before three of them gang raped her, she told the organization.
“I suspected their intentions, and I sent away my daughters to stay away from the house. [The soldiers] told me to bring them home. I told them they won’t come. Then they started to insult me. They were saying ‘Amhara is donkey’, ‘Amhara is useless’. One of them told the others to stop insulting me. He said, ‘she is our mother; we don’t have to harm her’. They forced him to leave the house and three of them stayed back at my home. Then they raped me in turns.”
The other victim of the terrorist’s inhuman action is Gebeyanesh, who is a 30-year-old. She told Amnesty: “It is not easy to tell you what they did to me. They raped me. Three of them raped me while my children were crying. My elder son is 10 and the other is nine years, they were crying when [the TPLF fighters] raped me. [The fighters] did whatever they wanted and left. They also assaulted me physically and took shiro and berbere [local food items]. They slapped me [and] kicked me. They were cocking their guns as if they are going to shoot me.”
For many though Amnesty’s revelation is only the tip of the iceberg, there have been wide scale atrocities committed against the communities in Amhara and Afar states by the terrorist TPLF group.
As a matter of fact, the group caused unimaginable human suffering and material damage by signifying extreme brutality, and unparalleled treachery.
Some international media outlets set in motion getting themselves engaged in a smear campaign against Ethiopia now and then working in close collaboration with the terrorist group and its cliques. Some of them came up intentionally or unintentionally with allegations of bringing into play starvation as a weapon of war though this has been debunked by many factual evidences time after time.
However, in an act of tension, the terrorist TPLF group jumpstarted slaughtering thousands of civilians, displacing millions and doing away with assets of the people of Amhara and Afar while the international community turned a blind eye to prevailing reality unfolding on the ground.
As testified by various reports, the terrorist group killed several inhabitants in consequence of their ethnic background in Mai Kadra and other parts of the Amhara state. Most of the residents that lost their lives in Mai Kadra were eking out a living by working as laborers. At that particular juncture, in addition to whipping with wire brushes and lancinating them with daggers, blades and hatchets, hundreds of civilians were stabbed and executed.
In the present climate, apart from holding the Tigray people captive, the terrorist TPLF group has sustained perpetrating carnages with impunity in the northern part of Ethiopia. For the sake of truth, the group has been getting itself fully involved in extreme looting, property destruction and spreading cooked up stories.
As the international community remains tightlipped in the face of unrelenting terrorist TPLF’s slaughters, the latter has been mounting the stakes of its criminal behavior against civilians residing in Amhara and Afar states.
The ghastly assassination of noncom batants in Mai Kadra by the terrorist TPLF drew not enough condemnation from the international community though the latter play a double-standard role. Likewise, the terrorist group has been undertaking crimes in defiance of augmented international community’s egocentricity. Besides, the group has been replicating the risks of its illegal evil deeds against civilians over and over again. By choosing silence, the self-confessed rights groups have continued their predisposed and unreasonableness. Amnesty’s report however is encouraging and other right groups should follow suit and make a through investigation that have been committed by the terrorist TPLF group in different areas.
BY ADDISALEM MULAT
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD NOVEMBER 11/2021
