HAMDAYET, Sudan (AP) – One survivor arrived with broken legs, others on the run.
In this fragile refugee community on the edge of the Ethiopian Tigray conflict, those who have fled nearly two months from deadly fighting continue to tell new tales of horror.
In a simple clinic in Sudan, a doctor turned refugee, Tewodros Tefera, examines the wounds of war: children injured in explosions. Cuts from axes and knives. Broken ribs from beatings. Feet scraped roughly from days of walking to safety.
He recently treated fellow refugee Guesh Tesla’s crushed legs, a recent arrival.
The 54-year-old carpenter announced about 250 young men who had been kidnapped to neighboring Eritrea from a single village, Adi Aser, by Eritrean forces, whose involvement Ethiopia denies. Then, 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 neighboring Amhara region. He said he heard the screams of men being killed and managed to escape by hiding at night.
“I would never go back,” said Guesh.
Such reports remain impossible to verify, as Tigray has been almost completely cut off from the world more than 50 days after the fighting began, backed by regional militias, and those of the Tigray region that had ruled the country for nearly three decades dominated.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner for political reforms that also marginalized Tigray’s leaders, continues to reject global “interference” amid pleas to allow unfettered humanitarian access and independent research. The conflict has shaken Africa’s second most populous country, at 110 million people, and threatens to undermine Abiy’s peacemaking in the turbulent Horn of Africa.
“I know the conflict has caused unimaginable suffering,” Abiy wrote last week, but argued that “the high costs we have incurred as a nation were necessary” to keep the country together.
No one knows how many thousands of people have died in Tigray since the fighting started on Nov. 4, but the United Nations has reported reports of artillery attacks on populated areas, targeted civilians and widespread looting. What has happened “is as heartbreaking as it is terrible,” said UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet last week.
Now refugees are arriving from areas deeper into Tigray amid reports that fighting continues in some locations. These newcomers have more severe trauma, Dr. Tewodros said, with signs of starvation and dehydration and some with gunshot wounds.
It is the reports of refugees such as Tewodros and Guesh, and civilians who remain in Tigray, that will eventually expose the extent of the abuses often committed along ethnic lines.
“Everyone is looking at you and pointing to the part of you that is not theirs,” said Tewodros, who has both a Tigrayan and Amhara background. So when I go to Tigray they will pick up that I am Amhara, because Amhara is not part of them. If I went to Amhara they would pick up the part of Tigray because Tigray is not part of them. “
Such differences have become deadly. Many Tigrayan ethnic refugees have accused ethnic Amhara fighters of attacking them, while survivors of a massacre in the city of Mai-Kadra last month say Tigrayan fighters were targeted by Amhara. Other attacks followed.
Abrahaley Minasbo, a 22-year-old trained dancer, said Amhara militia members dragged him from his home in Mai-Kadra on November 9 and hit him in the street with a hammer, ax, sticks and machete, leaving him behind. . for dead. Scars now run down the right side of his face and neck. He was not treated by Tewodros in Sudan until six days later.
Another patient, 65-year-old farmer Gebremedhin Gebru, was shot trying to flee from Amhara militia members in his town of Ruwasa. He said he was there for two days until a neighbor found him. People “will be hit if they help the injured,” Gebremedhin said.
For Tewodros, the conflict has been one civilian casualty after another since the shelling started in early November while he was working in a hospital in Humera. Some shelling came from the north, he said, towards nearby 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. When the shelling continued, he and his colleagues fled and transported injured patients on a tractor to the nearby community of Adebay. They left that city when the fighting intensified.
Tewodros and colleagues hid in the forest for two days, where they heard gunfire and screams, before walking for more than 12 hours, hiding from military convoys, and crossing a river into Sudan. There he accepted a volunteer position with the Sudanese Red Crescent Society treating fellow refugees.
“Where we are now is extremely unsafe,” he said of the refugee center at the border, citing Amhara fighters approaching the riverbank and threatening the refugees. The militias “are more dangerous than the Ethiopian national armed forces,” he said. “They are more crazy and crazy.”
He doesn’t know what awaits his wife and two small children in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Abeba. He hasn’t seen them for 10 months and the kids are always asking him when he can come home.
Ethiopia’s prime minister often speaks of ‘fellowman’, or national unity, said Tewodros, in a country with more than 80 ethnic groups. ‘I would have been Medemer. Medemer would have been my children. “But he no longer knows whether his children, also of mixed ethnicity, have a future in the country.
Guesh, a father of three, knows even less of what’s to come. He left his wife and three children a month ago in the village of Adi Aser, where a farmer was sheltering them. Now, like many refugees snatched from their families, he does not know whether they are alive or dead.
Every time he sees a new refugee arriving in Sudan, he presents pictures of his family so emotional he can barely speak. In this conflict that remains so much in the shadows, he now relies on strangers to know their fate.
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Hadero reported from Atlanta. Cara Anna in Nairobi contributed.