One survivor came on broken bones, others on the run.
In this fragile group of refugees on the edge of the Ethiopian Tigray conflict, those who have fled nearly two months of deadly fighting continue with new stories of terror.
At a simple clinic in Sudan, a doctor who became a refugee, Tewodros Tefera, examines the war years: children injured in explosions, blows from axes and knives, broken ribs from blows, feet scraped raw from days of hiking to safety.
One new day, he treated the shattered legs of colleague Guesh Tesla, a new arrival.
The 54-year-old carpenter brought news of about 250 young men abducted to an unknown fate from a single village, Adi Aser, to Eritrea’s nearby by Eritrean forces, whose commitment Ethiopia denies. In late November, Guesh said he saw dogs feeding on the bodies of civilians near his hometown of Rawyan, where he said Ethiopian soldiers beat him and took him to the border town of Humera.
There, he said, he was taken to a courthouse that he said had been turned into a “slaughterhouse” by militias from the nearby Amhara region. He said he heard the screams of men who were killed and managed to escape by crawling away at night.
“I would never go back,” Guesh said.
Such accounts are still impossible to verify because Tigray remains almost completely cut off from the world for more than 50 days since the fighting began between Ethiopian forces, backed by regional militias and those in the Tigray region that had dominated the country for nearly three decades.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, last year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for political reform who also marginalized Tigray’s leaders, continues to reject global “interference” among grounds to allow unlimited humanitarian access and independent investigations. The conflict has shaken Africa’s second most populous country, with 110 million people, and threatens to merge Abiy’s peacekeeping operations in the turbulent Horn of Africa.
“I know that the conflict has caused unimaginable suffering,” Abiy wrote last week, arguing that “the great cost we had as a nation was necessary” to keep the country together.
No one knows how many thousands of people have been killed in Tigray since the fighting began on November 4, but the UN has noted reports of artillery attacks on populated areas, civilian targets and widespread looting. What has happened “is as heartbreaking as it is frightening,” said UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet last week.
Refugees are now arriving from areas deeper inside Tigray amid reports that fighting is continuing in some places. These newer arrivals have more severe trauma, said doctor Tewodros, with signs of starvation and dehydration and some with shots.
It is the stories of refugees such as Tewodros and Guesh, and civilians who remain in Tigray, that will eventually reveal the extent of the abuse often perpetrated on ethnic lines.
“Everyone looks at you and points out the part of you that does not belong to them,” says Tewodros, who has both Tigrayan and Amhara backgrounds. “So if I were to go to Tigray, they would say I’m Amhara. because Amhara is not a part of them. When I go to Amhara, they would pick up part of Tigray because Tigray is not part of them. ”
Such differences have been fatal. Many ethnic Tigrayan refugees have accused ethnic Amhara warriors of targeting them, while survivors of a massacre last month in the city of Mai-Kadra say Tigrayan warriors targeted Amhara. Other attacks followed.
Abrahaley Minasbo, a 22-year-old trained dancer, said Amhara militia dragged him from his home in Mai-Kadra on November 9 and hit him on the street with a hammer, an ax, sticks and a machete and then left him for dead. Scars now lean over the right side of his face and neck. He was treated just six days later by Tewodros in Sudan.
Another patient, 65-year-old farmer Gebremedhin Gebru, was shot as he tried to run away from Amhara militia members in his town of Ruwasa. He said he lay there for two days until a neighbor found him. People “will meet if they are seen helping” the wounded, Gebremedhin said.
For Tewodros, the conflict has been one civilian accident after another since the shelling began in early November while working at a hospital in Humera. Some shelling came from the north, he said, heading towards nearby Eritrea.
“We did not know where to hide,” he said. “We did not know what to do.”
Fifteen bodies arrived at the hospital the first day, and eight the next, he said. Then, as the shelling continued, he and colleagues fled, transporting wounded patients on a tractor to nearby Adebay. They abandoned the city as the fighting intensified.
Tewodros and colleagues hid in the woods for two days, heard gunshots and screams before walking for more than 12 hours, hid from military convoys and crossed a river to Sudan. There, he accepted a volunteer position in the Sudanese Red Crescent Society, which treated other refugees.
“Where we are now, it is extremely unsafe,” he said of the reception center near the border, referring to the Amhara fighters approaching the riverbank and threatening the refugees. The militias “are more dangerous than the Ethiopian national forces,” he said. “They’re more crazy and crazy.”
He does not know what lies ahead for his wife and two young children in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. He has not seen them in ten months, and the children always ask when he can come home.
Ethiopia’s prime minister often speaks of “medemer” or national unity, Tewodros said, in a country with more than 80 ethnic groups. “Medemer would have been me. Medemer would have been my children.” But he no longer knows if his children, even of mixed ethnicity, have any future in the country.
Guesh, a father of three, knows even less about what is to come. He left his wife and three children a month ago in the village of Adi Aser, where a farmer gave them protection. Now, like many refugees torn from their families, he does not know if they are alive or dead.
Every time he sees a new refugee arrive in Sudan, he holds out pictures of his family, so emotional that he can hardly speak. In this conflict that remains so much in the shadows, he now trusts strangers to find out their fate.
