HAMDAYET, Sudan (AP) – One survivor arrived with broken legs, others fleeing.
In this fragile refugee community on the brink of the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia, those who have fled nearly two months of deadly fighting continue to bring new reports of horror.
In a simple clinic in Sudan, a doctor who became a refugee, Tewodros Tefera, examines the wounds of war: Children injured in explosions. Ax and knife cuts. Ribs broken by beating. Feet hurt from days of walking to safety.
He recently treated the broken legs of his newly arrived refugee companion Guesh Tesla.
The 54-year-old carpenter brought news of about 250 kidnapped youths to an unknown destination in a single village, Adi Aser, to neighboring Eritrea by Eritrean forces, whose involvement Ethiopia denies. Then, in late November, Guesh said he saw dogs feeding on civilian bodies near his home town, 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 court that he said was turned into a “slaughterhouse” by militias in the nearby Amhara region. He said he heard screams of men being killed and managed to escape by crawling at night.
“I would never go back,” said Guesh.
These reports remain impossible to verify, as Tigray has remained almost completely isolated from the world for more than 50 days since fighting began between Ethiopian forces, supported by regional militias, and those in the Tigray region that dominated the country’s government for nearly three decades.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize last year for political reforms that also marginalized Tigray leaders, continues to reject global “interference” amid calls to allow unimpeded humanitarian access and independent investigations. The conflict has shaken Africa’s second most populous country, with 110 million inhabitants, and threatens to undermine Abiy’s peace processes in the turbulent Horn of Africa.
“I know that the conflict caused unimaginable suffering,” Abiy wrote last week, but argued that “the heavy cost we incur as a nation was necessary” to keep the country together.
No one knows how many thousands of people have been killed in Tigray since fighting began on November 4, but the United Nations has noted reports of artillery attacks in populated areas, civilians being targeted and widespread looting. What happened “is as painful as it is terrible,” said UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet last week.
Now refugees are arriving from deeper areas of Tigray amid reports that fighting continues in some places. These newcomers have more severe trauma, said doctor Tewodros, with signs of hunger and dehydration and some with gunshot wounds.
It is the reports of refugees like Tewodros and Guesh, and of civilians who remain in Tigray, that will eventually reveal the scope of the abuses that are often committed along ethnic lines.
“Everyone looks at you and points out the part of you that doesn’t belong to them,” said Tewodros, who has origins in both Tigrayan and Amhara. “So if I go to Tigray, they will find out that I am Amhara, because Amhara is not part of them. When I go to Amhara, they would take Tigray’s part because Tigray is not part of them. “
These differences have become deadly. Many Tigrayan refugees have accused Amhara fighters of targeting them, while survivors of a massacre last month in the city of Mai-Kadra say Amhara fighters targeted Amhara. Other attacks followed.
Abrahaley Minasbo, a trained 22-year-old dancer, said members of the Amhara militia dragged him from his home in Mai-Kadra on November 9 and beat him in the street with a hammer, ax, sticks and machete, and left him for dead. The scars now fall on the right side of the face and neck. He was only treated six days later by Tewodros in Sudan.
Another patient, 65-year-old farmer Gebremedhin Gebru, was shot while trying to flee members of the Amhara militia in his town of Ruwasa. He said he stayed there for two days until a neighbor found him. People “will be hit if they are seen helping” the wounded, Gebremedhin said.
For Tewodros, the conflict has been one civilian victim after another, since the bombing began in early November, when he worked at a hospital in Humera. Some bombings came from the north, he said, in the direction of neighboring Eritrea.
“We didn’t know where to hide,” he said. “We didn’t know what to do.”
Fifteen bodies arrived at the hospital that first day and eight the next, he said. Then, while the bombing continued, he and his colleagues fled, transporting injured patients on a tractor to the nearby Adebay community. They left that city when the fighting intensified.
Tewodros and his colleagues hid for two days in the forest, hearing gunshots and shouts, before walking for more than 12 hours, hiding from military trains and crossing a river to Sudan. There, he accepted a position as a volunteer in the Red Crescent. Sudanese, dealing with other refugees.
“Where we are now is extremely unsafe,” he said of the reception center near the border, citing Amhara fighters who approach the river’s edge and threaten refugees. Militias “are more dangerous than Ethiopian national forces,” he said. “They are more insane and crazy.”
He does not know what will happen to his wife and two young children in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. He hasn’t seen them in 10 months, and the kids always ask when he can come home.
The Prime Minister of Ethiopia often speaks of “medemer”, or national unity, said Tewodros, 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, also of mixed ethnicity, have a future in the country.
Guesh, a father of three, knows even less about what’s to come. He left his wife and three children behind a month ago, in the village of Adi Aser, where a farmer was sheltering them. Now, like many refugees uprooted from their families, he does not know whether they are alive or dead.
Each time he sees another new refugee arriving in Sudan, he shows pictures of his family, so moved that he can barely speak. In this conflict that remains so much in the shadows, he now relies on strangers to know his destiny.
___
Hadero reported from Atlanta. Dear Anna in Nairobi contributed.