Amnesty International denounces brutal cases of sexual violence against women and girls in Ethiopia

Hundreds of women raped and subjected to sexual slavery. Ethiopian and Eritrean troops made women a double victim of conflict in the Tigray region, in Ethiopia, according to a report by Amnesty International posted Wednesday.

The report, made with interviews with 63 victims, documents the abuses that led to the opening of an investigation by the Ethiopian authorities, and this resulted in the conviction of at least three soldiers for rape and 25 others accused of “sexual violence and rape”.

Some rescued said that They were gang raped while detained for weeks, others were raped in front of family members, and some claim that objects such as nails or gravel were inserted into their vaginas, “causing lasting and possibly irreversible injuries “. according to Amnesty.

“It is clear that rape and sexual violence have been used as a weapon of war to inflict lasting physical and psychological damage on the women and youth of Tigray. Some of them were subjected to brutal treatment degrade and dehumanize themAccording to Amnesty General Secretary Agnès Callamard.

“The gravity and scale of the sex crimes committed are particularly shocking, which can be war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.”added.

In recent months, the agency AFP interviewed many women who said they had been raped by Ethiopian soldiers Yes Eritrea.

Fighting in the Tigray region (north) started in November after the dispatch by the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, of the federal army to dismiss the regional authorities, belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Tigray (TPLF). According to the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, this operation was in response to attacks on federal army camps commanded by the TPLF.

With the intensification of the conflict, the humanitarian toll is dramatic: according to the UN, around 400,000 people live in a state of famine while humanitarian aid is barely arriving.

According to Amnesty, the alleged perpetrators belong to troops from neighboring Eritrea, who supported the Ethiopian prime minister, security forces and militiamen in the Ethiopian region of Amhara, neighboring Tigray.

About 20 people told Amnesty that they had been raped by single Eritreans, while other women said Eritreans and Ethiopians were together.

“They raped us and starved us to death. There were many who lined up to rape us ”, said a 21-year-old girl, who said she was detained for 40 days. “There were about 30 women, they all raped us.”

According to the Amnesty report, health centers in Tigray have collected 1,288 cases of violence against women from February to April 2021, and doctors estimate that many victims do not resort to it.

“From the start, all these forces, everywhere and for a long time, it seemed perfectly normal to commit these crimes because obviously they thought they could do it with impunity, nothing stopped them“, Researcher Donatella Rovera told the agency AP.

The investigator declined to speculate whether any leaders authorized the rapes, which the report said was aimed at humiliating women in particular and their Tigray ethnic group in general. During his years of working to investigate atrocities around the worldsaid Rovera, these were among the worst.

Amnesty report called for accountability for sexual violence in conflict, and noted that rape and sexual slavery are war crimes. Many women in Tigray now live with the physical and mental consequences of the attacks, such as HIV infections and continuous bleeding.the group said.

The Ethiopian government has not allowed human rights researchers access to the Tigray region, although there is a joint investigation into the alleged atrocities underway by the UN human rights office and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission.

(With information from AFP and AP)

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