Amnesty International says Tigray rebels have raped women and girls en masse in Ethiopia conflict
Tigrayan fighters deliberately killed civilians and gang-raped dozens of underage women and girls in two towns in Ethiopia’s Amhara region last year, Amnesty International said on Wednesday, in the latest example of the horrific toll of the 15-month war.
The rights group interviewed 30 rape survivors – some as young as 14 – and other victims of violence to paint a picture of the atrocities that occurred in Chenna and Kobo in August and September after the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) rebels took control of the area. the cities.
Nearly half of the victims of sexual violence said they had been gang-raped, with doctors telling Amnesty that some survivors likely lacerated their genitals with bayonets.
A 14-year-old schoolgirl told the rights group that she and her mother were raped by TPLF fighters, who said the attacks were in retaliation for the atrocities committed against their families.
“One of them raped me in the yard and the other raped my mother inside the house,” she said.
“My mom is so sick now, she’s so depressed and desperate. We don’t talk about what happened; it’s impossible.”
The investigation followed the publication in November of an amnesty report that documented sexual assaults by Tigrayan rebels in the Amhara town of Nifas Miusha.
“Evidence is mounting of a pattern of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity committed by Tigrayan forces in the areas under their control in the Amhara Region from July 2021 onwards.
“This includes large-scale incidents of rape, summary killings and widespread looting, including from hospitals,” said Sarah Jackson, Amnesty International’s deputy director for East Africa.
revenge killing
Kobo residents said TPLF fighters shot dead unarmed civilians, apparently in a retaliatory killing spree after they faced resistance to their advance by Amhara militias.
“The first bodies we saw were near the school fence. There were 20 bodies lying in their underwear facing the fence and three more bodies in the school compound, most of them shot in the back of their heads and some in the back.
“Those who were shot in the back of the head were partially unrecognizable,” one resident said.
The agency said its analysis of satellite images revealed new burial sites indicated by the villagers.
Amnesty said the TPLF had not responded to the latest allegations. But the rebel group had earlier criticized the commission over its earlier report on the alleged atrocities in Nivas Miusha, saying it would conduct its own investigation and bring the perpetrators to justice.
The war in northern Ethiopia was punctuated by accounts of massacres and mass rapes, where thousands of people were killed, and hundreds of thousands were on the brink of starvation.
Amnesty International previously documented the rape of hundreds of women and girls by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers in Tigray.
A joint investigation by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet and the government’s Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, which was published last November, found evidence of “gross violations” by all parties, saying some abuses may amount to crimes against humanity.
(AFP)
