Ethiopia: Erasing Ethnicity
A Nobel Peace Prize winner is waging war against millions of his own people. Ethiopia's government has tried to hide the spreading horrors. But The Associated Press has exposed major lies on both sides of the conflict, revealing the ethnic cleansing, forced starvation and reprisal killings tearing apart one of the world's most ancient and populous countries.
The atrocities have been seared into the skin and the minds of Tigrayans, who take shelter by the thousands within sight of the homeland they fled in northern Ethiopia.
Witnesses: Eritrean soldiers loot, kill in Ethiopia’s Tigray
The Eritrean soldiers’ pockets clinked with stolen jewelry. Warily, Zenebu watched them try on dresses and other clothing looted from homes in a town in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region.
Bodies with gunshot wounds lay in the streets for days in Ethiopia’s holiest city. At night, residents listened in horror as hyenas fed on the corpses of people they knew. But they were forbidden from burying their dead by the invading Eritrean soldiers.
‘People are starving’: New exodus in Ethiopia’s Tigray area
Skinny, hungry, fleeing threats of violence, thousands of people who have been hiding in rural areas of Ethiopia’s Tigray region have begun arriving in a community that can barely support them — and more are said to be on the way.
‘Look after my babies’: In Ethiopia, a Tigray family’s quest
Gunfire crackled near the straw-woven home of Abraha Kinfe Gebremariam. He hoped it drowned out the cries of his wife, curled up in pain, and the newborn twin daughters wailing beside her.
‘Clean out our insides’: Ethiopia detains Tigrayans amid war
Ethiopia has swept up thousands of ethnic Tigrayans into detention centers across the country on accusations that they are traitors, often holding them for months and without charges, the AP has found.
Women who make it to the clinic for sex abuse survivors in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray usually struggle to describe their injuries. But when they can’t take a seat and quietly touch their bottoms, the nurses know it’s an unspeakable kind of suffering.
Lost limbs, rising anger as town is caught up in Tigray war
Shops remained shuttered, some government workers hadn’t been paid and the town’s main hospital was utterly laid to waste. But the Tigrayan fighters still claimed victory, swaggering through the streets of Hawzen with their guns.
First the Eritrean soldiers stole the pregnant woman’s food as she hid in the bush. Then they turned her away from a checkpoint when she was on the verge of labor.
Trapped in Ethiopia’s Tigray, people ‘falling like leaves’
The plea arrived from a remote area that had so far produced only rumors and residents fleeing for their lives. Help us, the letter said, stamped and signed by a local official. At least 125 people have already starved to death.
At scene of Ethiopia’s new killings, some fight, some flee
The smell of death lingered for days after the killings. The bodies, more than a dozen in the uniforms of fighters, others in civilian clothing, were still scattered on the muddy ground.
In parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, people now eat only green leaves for days. At a health center last week, a mother and her newborn weighing just 1.7 pounds died from hunger. In every district of the more than 20 where one aid group works, residents have starved to death.
‘God have mercy’: Tigray residents describe life under siege
As food and the means to buy it dwindled in a city under siege, the young mother felt she could do no more. She killed herself, unable to feed her children.
In parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, people now eat only green leaves for days. At a health center last week, a mother and her newborn weighing just 1.7 pounds died from hunger. In every district of the more than 20 where one aid group works, residents have starved to death.
The man who counts the dead sees them everywhere.
