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classyfoxdestiny · 3 years ago

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Tigray massacre: How an Ethiopian festival turned into a killing spree

The corpses, some dressed in white church robes drenched in blood, were scattered in arid fields, scrubby farmlands and a dry riverbed. Others had been shot on their doorsteps with their hands bound with belts. Among the dead were priests, old men, women, entire families and a group of more than 20 Sunday school children, some as young as 14, according to eyewitnesses, parents and their teacher.

Abraham recognized some of the children immediately. They were from his town in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, Edaga Hamus, and had also fled fighting there two weeks earlier. As clashes raged, Abraham and his family, along with hundreds of other displaced people, escaped to Dengelat, a nearby village in a craggy valley ringed by steep, rust-colored cliffs. They sought shelter at Maryam Dengelat, a historic monastery complex famed for a centuries-old, rock-hewn church.

On November 30, they were joined by scores of religious pilgrims for the Orthodox festival of Tsion Maryam, an annual feast to mark the day Ethiopians believe the Ark of the Covenant was brought to the country from Jerusalem. The holy day was a welcome respite from weeks of violence, but it would not last.

A group of Eritrean soldiers opened fire on Maryam Dengelat church while hundreds of congregants were celebrating mass, eyewitnesses say. People tried to flee on foot, scrambling up cliff paths to neighboring villages. The troops followed, spraying the mountainside with bullets.

A CNN investigation drawing on interviews with 12 eyewitnesses, more than 20 relatives of the survivors and photographic evidence sheds light on what happened next.

The soldiers went door to door, dragging people from their homes. Mothers were forced to tie up their sons. A pregnant woman was shot, her husband killed. Some of the survivors hid under the bodies of the dead.

The mayhem continued for three days, with soldiers slaughtering local residents, displaced people and pilgrims. Finally, on December 2, the soldiers allowed informal burials to take place, but threatened to kill anyone they saw mourning. Abraham volunteered.

Footage obtained by CNN shows the shoes of some of those killed in Dengelat. Credit: Obtained by CNN

Under their watchful eyes, he held back tears as he sorted through the bodies of children and teenagers, collecting identity cards from pockets and making meticulous notes about their clothing or hairstyle. Some were completely unrecognizable, having been shot in the face, Abraham said.

Then he covered their bodies with earth and thorny tree branches, praying that they wouldn’t be washed away, or carried off by prowling hyenas and circling vultures. Finally he placed their shoes on top of the burial mounds, so he could return with their parents to identify them.

One was Yohannes Yosef, who was just 15.

“Their hands were tied … young children … we saw them everywhere. There was an elderly man who had been killed on the road, an 80-something-year-old man. And the young kids they killed on the street in the open. I’ve never seen a massacre like this and I don’t want to [again],” Abraham said.

“We only survived by the grace of God.”

Abraham said he buried more than 50 people that day, but estimates more than 100 died in the assault.

They’re among thousands of civilians believed to have been killed since November, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for resolving a long-running conflict with neighboring Eritrea, launched a major military operation against the political party that governs the Tigray region. He accused the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which ruled Ethiopia for nearly three decades before Abiy took office in 2018, of attacking a government military base and trying to steal weapons. The TPLF denies the claim.

The conflict is the culmination of escalating tensions between the two sides, and the most dire of several recent ethno-nationalist clashes in Africa’s second-most populous country.

After seizing control of Tigray’s main cities in late November, Abiy declared victory and maintained that no civilians were harmed in the offensive. Abiy has also denied that soldiers from Eritrea crossed into Tigray to support Ethiopian forces.

But the fighting has raged on in rural and mountainous areas where the TPLF and its armed supporters are reportedly hiding out, resisting Abiy’s drive to consolidate power. The violence has spilled over into local communities, catching civilians in the crossfire and triggering what the United Nations refugee agency has called the worst flight of refugees from the region in two decades.

The UN special adviser on genocide prevention said in early February that the organization had received multiple reports of “extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, looting, mass executions and impeded humanitarian access.”

Many of those abuses have been blamed on Eritrean soldiers, whose presence on the ground suggests that Abiy’s much-lauded peace deal with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki set the stage for the two sides to wage war against the TPLF — their mutual enemy.

The US State Department, in a statement to CNN, called for Eritrean forces to be “withdrawn from Tigray immediately,” citing credible reports of their involvement in “deeply troubling conduct.” In response to CNN’s findings, the spokesperson said “reports of a massacre at Maryam Dengelat are gravely concerning and demand an independent investigation.”

Ethiopia responded to CNN’s request for comment with a statement that did not directly address the attack in Dengelat. The government said it would “continue bringing all perpetrators to justice following thorough investigations into alleged crimes in the region,” but gave no details about those investigations.

“They were taking them barefoot and killing them in front of their mothers”

Rahwa

More than three weeks after CNN published this investigation, the Eritrean embassy of the UK and Ireland responded on March 22 by denying allegations of wrongdoing by Eritrean soldiers and denying that Eritrean troops were in Ethiopia.

The TPLF said in a statement to CNN that its forces were nowhere near Dengelat at the time of the massacre. It rejected that the victims could have been mistaken for being TPLF and called for a UN investigation to hold all sides accountable for atrocities committed during the conflict.

Still, the situation inside the country remains opaque. Ethiopia’s government has severely restricted access to journalists and prevented most aid from reaching areas beyond the government’s control, making it challenging to verify accounts from survivors. And an intermittent communications blackout during the fighting has effectively blocked the war from the world’s eyes.

Now that curtain is being pulled back, as witnesses fleeing parts of Tigray reach internet access and phone lines are restored. They detail a disastrous conflict that has given rise to ethnic violence, including attacks on churches and mosques.

For months, rumors spread of a grisly assault on an Orthodox church in Dengelat. A list of the dead began circulating on social media in early December, shared among the Tigrayan diaspora. Then photos of the deceased, including young children, started cropping up online.

Through a network of activists and relatives, CNN tracked down eyewitnesses to the attack. In countless phone calls — many disconnected and dropped — Abraham and others provided the most detailed account of the deadly massacre to date.

Footage of the 2019 festival shows congregants celebrating outside the church. Credit: Bernadette Gilbertas

Eyewitnesses said that the festival started much as it had any other year. Footage of the celebrations from 2019 shows priests dressed in white ceremonial robes and crowns, carrying crosses aloft, leading hundreds of people in prayer at Maryam Dengelat church. The faithful sang, danced and ululated in unison.

As prayers concluded in the early hours of November 30, Abraham looked out from the hilltop where the church is perched to see troops arriving by foot, followed by more soldiers in trucks. At first, they were peaceful, he said. They were invited to eat, and rested under the shade of a tree grove.

But, as congregants were celebrating mass around midday, shelling and gunfire erupted, sending people fleeing up mountain paths and into nearby homes.

Desta, who helped with preparations for the festival, said he was at the church when troops arrived at the village entrance, blocking off the road and firing shots. He heard people screaming and fled, running up Ziqallay mountainside. From the rocky plateau he surveyed the chaos playing out below.

We could see people running here and there … [the soldiers] were killing everyone who was coming from the church,” Desta said.

Eight eyewitnesses said they could tell the troops were Eritrean, based on their uniforms and dialect. Some speculated that soldiers were meting out revenge by targeting young men, assuming they were members of the TPLF forces or allied local militias. But Abraham and others maintained there were no militia in Dengelat or the church.

Marta, who was visiting Dengelat for the holiday, says she left the church with her husband Biniam after morning prayers. As the newlyweds walked back to their relative’s home, a stream of people began sprinting up the hill, shouting that soldiers were rounding people up in the village.

She recalled the horrifying moment soldiers arrived at their house, shooting into the compound and calling out: “Come out, come out you b*tches.” Marta said they went outside holding their identity cards aloft, saying “we’re civilians.” But the troops opened fire anyway, hitting Biniam, his sister and several others.

“I was holding Bini, he wasn’t dead … I thought he was going to survive, but he died [in my arms].

The couple had just been married in October. Marta found out after the massacre that she was pregnant.

After the soldiers left, Marta, who said she was shot in the hand, helped drag the seven bodies inside, so that the hyenas wouldn’t eat them. “We slept near the bodies … and we couldn’t bury them because they [the soldiers] were still there,” she said.

Marta and other eyewitnesses described soldiers going house to house through Dengelat, dragging people outside, binding their hands or asking others to do so, and then shooting them.

Rahwa, who was part of the Sunday school group from Edaga Hamus and left Dengelat earlier than others, managing to escape being killed, said mothers were forced to tie up their sons.

“They were ordering their mothers to tie their sons’ hands. They were taking them barefoot and killing them in front of their mothers,” Rahwa said eyewitnesses told her.

Samuel, another eyewitness, said that he had eaten and drank with the soldiers before they came to his house, which is just behind the church, and killed his relatives. He said he survived by hiding underneath one of their bodies for hours.

“They started pushing the people out of their houses and they were killing all children, women and old men. After they killed them outside their houses, they were looting and taking all the property,” Samuel said.

As the violence raged, hundreds of people remained in the church hall. In a lull in the gunfire, priests advised those who could to go home, ushering them outside. Several of the priests were killed as they left the church, Abraham said.

With nowhere to run to, Abraham sheltered inside Maryam Dengelat, lying on the floor as artillery pounded the tin roof. “We lost hope and we decided to stay and die at the church. We didn’t try to run,” he said.

Two days later, the troops called parishioners down from the church to deal with the dead. Abraham said he and five other men spent the day burying bodies, including those from Marta’s household and the Sunday school children. But the troops forbid them from burying bodies at the church, in line with Orthodox tradition, and forced them to make mass graves instead — a practice that has been described elsewhere in Tigray.

“… most of them were eaten by vultures before they got buried, it was horrible”

Tedros

Abraham shared photos and videos of the grave sites, which CNN geolocated to Dengelat with the help of satellite image analysis from several experts. The analysis was unable to conclusively identify individual graves, which witnesses said were shallow, but one expert said there were signs that parts of the landscape had changed.

The initial bloodshed was followed by a period of two tense weeks, Abraham said. Soldiers stayed in the area in several encampments, stealing cars, burning crops and killing livestock before eventually moving on.

Tedros, who was born in Dengelat and traveled there after the soldiers had left, said that the village smelled of death and that vultures were circling over the mountains, a sign that there may be more bodies left uncounted there.

“Some of them were also killed in the far fields while they were trying to escape and most of them were eaten by vultures before they got buried, it was horrible. [The soldiers] tied them and killed them in front of their doors, and they shot them in the head just to save bullets,” he said.

Tedros visited the burial grounds described by eyewitnesses and said he saw cracks in the church walls where artillery hit. In interviews with villagers and family members, he compiled a death toll of more than 70 people.

The families hope that the names of their loved ones, which Tedros, Abraham and others risked their lives to record, will eventually be read out at a traditional funeral ceremony at the Maryam Dengelat church — rare closure in an ongoing conflict.

Three months after the massacre, the graves in Dengelat are a daily reminder of the bloodshed for the survivors who remain in the village. But it has not yet been safe enough to rebury the bodies of those who died, and that reality is weighing on them.

Update, March 22: A comment from the Eritrean embassy of the UK and Ireland has been added to this story.

Correction: An on-screen title in an earlier version of the video in this story misstated the date of CNN-obtained footage from Tigray. It was filmed in 2021.

Eliza Mackintosh wrote and reported. Barbara Arvanitidis, Nima Elbagir, Bethlehem Feleke, Gianluca Mezzofiore and Katie Polglase reported.

Edited by Nick Thompson. Video and editorial supervised by Dan Wright. Design and visual editing by Peter Robertson, Henrik Pettersson, Brett Roegiers, Sarah Tilotta, Temujin Doran and Lauren Cook.

Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report from Washington, DC.

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arakannewsagency · 6 years ago

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Dead People From Kyauk Tan village in Rathedaung Township Tanken To Be Hidden By Myanmar Military Soldiers

Myanmar soldiers killed six detained civilians and wounded eight others early Thursday inside a school in a village in western Myanmar’s violence-wracked Rakhine state, as villagers tried to grab their guns in a coordinated attack, the government military said.

Government forces have been holding 275 civilians in Rathedaung township’s Kyauk Tan village since Tuesday to interrogate them about possible links to an alleged Arakan Army (AA) training camp.

Bridger General Zaw Min Tun, a military spokesman, said villagers attacked police and security forces who were conducting the investigations to determine if those held had ties to the AA, an ethnic Rakhine armed group that is battling Myanmar forces for greater autonomy in the state.

“Around 2 a.m. this morning, the villagers cheered and attacked police and military forces conducting the interrogations,” he said.

“They attempted to take guns from the security forces, so the security forces acted according to Section 131 of the Penal Code,“ he said. “They first verbally warned the crowd to disperse, then fired warning shots in the air. When they didn’t disperse and kept moving forward, the security forces fired shots as the last resort.”

At the time, Zaw Min Tun told RFA’s Myanmar Service that he did not have detailed information on the deaths and injuries from the incident, but an announcement by the military indicated that six villagers died, eight were wounded, and four were missing.

Following the shootings, the military surrounded the area with more than 300 troops, the announcement said.

Unconfirmed news reports said that as many as 10 villagers had been killed because some of those injured had died.

Responding to Zaw Min Tun’s comments, AA spokesman Khine Thukha dismissed the brigadier general’s version of events.

“His comments are senseless,” he said. “The security forces have kept the villagers in detention since April 30. Their detention site was heavily guarded by the security forces, so how could they be cheering and attacking them?”

“We think this is a plot made up by the Myanmar military to cover up their atrocities against the villagers,” he said.

A woman from Kyauk Tan village, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation, told RFA that she heard about 20 shots coming from the school.

“I heard the shooting at the school around 2 a.m.,” she said. “It was around 20 shots. No one dared to go out to look. The soldiers had completely surrounded the village.”

When residents later went to the school, soldiers prevented them from removing the bodies of the dead and taking the injured for treatment, she said.

“After a while, they gave the list of dead villagers to the village head and asked him to inform the families,” the woman said.

An impossible scenario

The eight injured civilians were taken to Sittwe General Hospital in Rakhine’s capital Sittwe in the afternoon, but the bodies of the deceased remained inside the school until evening, when soldiers told villagers they could collect them, villagers said.

The Myanmar military announced Wednesday that its troops had captured a temporary AA training camp in the mountains on April 28 and had started interrogating Kyauk Tan village residents two days later.

The soldiers detained the villagers in the local schoolhouse when they received information that AA forces were retreating from the captured training camp and taking shelter in Kyauk Tan village.

The announcement said army officials checked the family registration records of the 477 families living in the village, and decided to detain and question 275 males between 15 and 50 years old.

AA spokesman Khine Thukha denied that the Myanmar Army had seized the training camp and that AA soldiers had taken refuge in Kyauk Tan village.

The Arakan National Party (ANP), the state’s predominant political party representing the interests of Buddhist Rakhines, sent a written appeal on Thursday to President Win Myint, State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, military commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing, and the Myanmar Human Rights Commission, to take action against the shooters and to end attacks by government soldiers in Rakhine state.

“We sent this letter to inform, complain, and appeal to the government to take action to protect the lives of civilians by preventing further tragedies involving them, especially children, the elderly, and women,” said Tun Aung Kyaw, general secretary of the ANP.

The letter also alleged that Myanmar forces questioning the detained boys and men had concocted the story about a coordinated attack by villagers as a pretext for shooting some of them, he said.

“We have some of our party members in this village,” Tun Aung Kyaw said. “According to their account, the accusation that villagers tried to take the guns is impossible because they have been heavily guarded while being detained and denied food and water. Our allegation in the letter is based on the villagers’ claim that it was not possible for them to attack the security forces.”

Offering a different, unconfirmed account of what led to the shooting, Rakhine state lawmaker U Than Naing of Rathedaung township said the shootings occurred when a mentally ill detainee started yelling.

When reached by RFA later, Zaw Min Tun repeated his earlier statement that soldiers had fired on the villagers as a last resort and denied that the detainees were being deprived of food and water.

“With regard to accusations that the detainees were denied food and water, I have confirmed with officials from the police force and security forces on the ground that they are wrong,” he said. “Because they [the detainees] are only suspects, we have provided food and water accordingly.”

Injured people from Kyauk Tan village in Rathedaung township are carried on stretchers as they arrive in Sittwe, capital of western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, May 2, 2019.Credit: AFP

Preventing ‘unwanted confusion’U Than Naing, Kyauk Tan village elders, members of civil society organizations, and staff from the International Committee of the Red Cross went to the schoolhouse earlier to collect the bodies of the dead villagers, but were turned away, he said.

“We had just arrived at the entrance of the village,” he said. “We were not allowed to remove the bodies of the deceased villagers.”

Zaw Min Tun told RFA that Myanmar forces had stopped them for security reasons, but said they would be allowed to enter the village once the interrogations ended.

“They are trying to maintain stability to avoid confusion while they are issuing warnings and trying to disperse the crowd,” he said of the security personnel. “When they finish the announcements and interrogations, they will allow the aid groups to come in.”

“The military troops usually have a paramedic with them,” he added. “[The] paramedic from the unit is treating those who were injured. The aid groups have not been allowed to visit the scene for now to prevent unwanted confusion.”

The shooting incident comes on the heels of the deaths in custody of three other detainees who were taken away for questioning by Myanmar soldiers along with two dozen others from Letka village in Mrauk-U township, center of much of the fighting that has raged since January between the government army and the AA. The men were suspected of supporting the Arakan fighters.

Their deaths have raised suspicions of torture, bereaved relatives and local lawmakers told RFA a week ago.

The Myanmar Army is not the only one rounding up villagers, however.

The AA abducted more than 50 ethnic Chin villagers from Paletwa township in western Myanmar’s Chin state during a February clash with government soldiers that spilled over from the armed conflict in adjacent Rakhine state.

The AA has said that it took the civilians to a safe place after an attack by Myanmar forces prompted them to hide in a forest.

Fighting between the Myanmar Army and the AA has displaced nearly 33,000 civilians in central and northern Rakhine state and northern Chin state since hostilities escalated in November 2018, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Others have been injured or killed.

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the latest detentions and shootings of civilians in the Rakhine conflict are nothing new.

“The Tatmadaw [Myanmar military] is well known for targeting civilians when it conducts war against insurgents, and this looks like a continuation of that horrific rights-violating practice.”

“Human Rights Watch and other organizations have repeatedly documented Myanmar troops using torture and even committing extrajudicial executions while interrogating persons they suspect to be members of insurgent groups, so there is every reason to suspect these incidents fall into the same pattern of behavior,” he said.

Letka villagers transferred

In a related development, Myanmar forces transferred the detained Letka villagers to Mrauk-U where they are being held in a police station in Sittwe, but did not clear them of any charges, their relatives and a military spokesman said Thursday.

“The police haven’t called us to go and see the detainees,’ said Khine Hla Sein, wife of one of the men being held. “We can only go and see them after they call us.”

“All villagers, including my husband, have no connection to the AA,” she added.

The detainees’ family members, who are staying at a monastery in Mrauk-U’s Pyipinyin village, said they are afraid to return home because two military units are now deployed there.

It is not clear, however, if all 24 have been handed over to Mrauk-U police.

“We knew they would be transferred to police today, but we don’t know the details,” said Brigadier General Win Zaw Oo, spokesman for the military’s Western Regional Command, which is responsible for Rakhine state. “We don’t know if all 24 people will be transferred or not.”

It is also unclear which offenses the villagers will being charged with.

“Twenty-four detained people are at No. 1 Police Station in Sittwe now, but we still don’t know what they will be charged with,” said Agga Wuntha, head monk of the monastery where the families are staying.

Rakhine state police chief Kyi Lin told RFA that the villagers have been transferred, but would not go into details.

“It is correct they have been transferred,” he said. “If you want to know the details, please come to see me, because I won’t give them over the phone. I will explain to you about it if you ask me in person because I am concerned about [you] getting the wrong information.”

RFA was unable to reach Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun for comment, and Police Colonel Lin Htut from the Rakhine State Police Force said he did not know about the matter.

Yu Lwin Aung from the Myanmar Human Rights Commission said it is a human rights violation for the military to arrest villagers and shoot them.

“Even if the military arrests and questions AA members who are pretending to be villagers, it is a violation of human rights if those people are shot,” he said. “It is also a violation of human rights to shoot prisoners of war.”

“But it is difficult to blame the military for shooting those people without knowing the actual situation on the ground,” he said.

Maung Maung Lay, a member of the group Human Rights Defenders and Promoters, agreed.

“From a human rights point of view, their human rights have been violated,” he said. “All related parties and organizations that are detaining these villagers, and the government, are responsible for this situation. This is a terrible human rights violation.”

Reported by Khin Khin Ei and Wai Mar Tun for RFA’s Myanmar Service Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung and Khet Mar. Written in E

Myanmar Army Kills Six Detained Rakhine Villagers And Offers ‘Impossible’ Explanation Dead People From Kyauk Tan village in Rathedaung Township Tanken To Be Hidden By Myanmar Military Soldiers…

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