According to the report, TPLF soldiers were responsible for massacres and other abuses in two towns in northern Amhara State, which borders Tigray.
In the northeastern Amhara town of Kobo, AI verified the killing of at least 24 Amhara civilians in September and October 2021 by TPLF soldiers, who were apparently exacting revenge on the town for attacks on their advancing forces by farmers and local militias. Most of the victims were bound and shot execution-style, then buried in mass graves by townspeople forced to do so by the Tigrayan troops, according to numerous survivors and relatives who spoke with the human rights group.
Satellite photos of the area helped provide further evidence for the locations of the mass graves.
Satellite imagery used by Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab to identify the locations of mass graves near Kobo, Amhara State, Ethiopia, where the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) executed civilians in September and October 2021.
© Amnesty International
In Chenna Teklehaymanot, a town in northwestern Amhara that was seized by the TPLF in the opening days of their offensive in July 2021, AI documented the gang rapes and torture of at least 30 Amhara girls and women at various locations, with some of the girls as young as 14 years of age.
According to the report, doctors who provided medical care to many of the rape survivors told AI that 10 of them had been hospitalized for three months after they were raped, and that many more had suffered severe and long-term physical and psychological damage. Two of the survivors had to be treated for lacerations likely caused by rifle bayonets being inserted into their genitals.
“Several residents of Kobo, Chenna and surrounding villages told Amnesty International that Tigrayan forces also looted and vandalized public property, including medical facilities and schools,” the report also notes. AI also cataloged reports in the two towns of looting of residents’ homes, particularly for food.
Amnesty has also documented other instances of mass rape by the TPLF, including the gang rape, robbery and abuse of 16 women in the Amhara town of Nifas Mewcha in August of last year “and has received credible reports of rape from other areas of the Amhara region,” the group said. “Such atrocities constitute war crimes and, potentially, crimes against humanity.”
New graves in the St. George’s Church graveyard in Kobo, Ethiopia, where witnesses and survivors told Amnesty International that they buried those summarily killed by Tigrayan forces on 9 September 2021.
© Amnesty International
“Tigrayan forces have shown utter disregard for fundamental rules of international humanitarian law which all warring parties must follow,” Sarah Jackson, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes, said in a Friday news release.
“Evidence is mounting of a pattern of Tigrayan forces committing war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in areas under their control in the Amhara region from July 2021 onwards. This includes repeated incidents of widespread rape, summary killings and looting, including from hospitals,” she said. “The TPLF leadership must put an immediate end to the atrocities we have documented and remove from its forces anyone suspected of involvement in such crimes.”
Amnesty isn’t the first to investigate TPLF abuses in these two towns following news reports at the time they occurred: Human Rights Watch published a separate report on December 9, 2021, on executions in Chenna and Kobo. However, the HRW report documented a total of 74 killings between the two towns and surrounding areas, including 39 in Chenna not mentioned by the Amnesty report.
HRW also received reports of up to 200 civilians killed in the fighting, which it was unable to verify, as well as reports the TPLF used civilians as human shields by holding them in residential compounds and fighting ENDF forces from those compounds.
Scratching the Surface
These reports begin to push back on the narrative of the TPLF as victims who are standing up to an authoritarian ruler, which has been popularized by the New York Times and CNN, among other publications, and widely decried by Ethiopians and Eritreans in Africa and across the diaspora. However, they have only scratched the surface of the numerous abuses documented by local journalists and residents across Amhara and Afar through the second half of 2021.
In December 2021, as the TPLF was pushed out of Amhara and Afar by a powerful ENDF offensive, Agence France-Presse and BreakThrough News reported on the looting and destruction left behind in Lalibela, including of the hospital and airport, and interviewed women who were raped and abused by TPLF soldiers.
In Dessie and Kombolcha, the UN World Food Program (WFP) reported “mass looting” of its food warehouses in the two cities in the days leading up to the TPLF withdrawal, and residents also reported looting of the regional airport. In Afar, photos emerged online of several mosques burned and looted by TPLF forces, including in Kasagita, Sifra, and Burka.
In addition, no serious probe has been mounted of reports that the TPLF has used food as a weapon in Tigray itself where the group has been accused by Abiy’s government of withholding food aid from families until a man from the family enlists in the TPLF.
However, any further investigations may face compounding challenges thanks to one US law and another bill presently being debated in Congress.
The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Pentagon’s massive annual budget, was passed in December and included a clause requiring the US Department of State to make a “determination of genocide” in Tigray by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces, but does not require the State Department to look at any other group or region, necessarily precluding a probe of TPLF abuses in Amhara or Afar.
The TPLF has claimed since the first day of hostilities with the ENDF on November 4, 2020, when it launched a surprise attack on ENDF forces inside of Tigray, that Abiy’s government was blockading food aid and creating a genocide in Tigray. The narrative quickly spread across Western media, but the only investigation of the situation thus far, by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and the UN Human Rights Office, documented widespread human rights abuses by all sides, but did not find evidence of genocide in Tigray.
A second bill containing sanctions on the Ethiopian government and others that cooperate with it also requires the State Department to make a determination about “allegations of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide,” but without specifying by which party.
While the US has maintained a public position of neutrality in the conflict, in reality, Washington has secretly supported the TPLF, as leaked video of a meeting between TPLF leaders and Western diplomats revealed. The TPLF ruled Ethiopia for 27 years and was the US’ primary partner in the region for much of that time. However, after the TPLF lost power when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018 and he quickly made peace with Eritrea, which the US has long treated as a pariah state, Washington’s opinion of Abiy waned.