The first war crime in the Ethio conflict …

The international human rights organization Amnesty International has verified, with specialized digital technologies, the first massacre of civilians in the conflict in Ethiopia. Amnesty received a series of photos showing “dozens and possibly hundreds” of dead civilians and analyzed them in its Crisis Evidence Lab. Technicians verified that the images had not been manipulated or edited, and verified by geolocation that they had been taken in the small town of Mai Kadra. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has called for an investigation into what she considers a war crime against civilians.

The massacre took place on Monday, November 9 in the late afternoon and the victims are peasants and workers who were in the city. None of the dead and injured played a role in clashes between the Ethiopian defense forces, the national army and armed militants of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. As can be clearly seen from the pictures, the peasants were killed with knives, daggers and machetes, which fits into the traditional profile of a “panga” attack, as the machete or other tool is called. long-bladed in Africa.

According to survivors and witnesses Amnesty International was able to interview, despite the Ethiopian government’s communications blockade, the attack on civilians was carried out by Liberation Front militiamen who had been defeated by the national army on Monday morning. . The sequence of events that the NGO reconstructed is that the vanquished entered the city after losing in battle and took revenge on the residents, whom they accused of providing food to the military.

The attackers advance towards the center of the small town and leave corpses in the streets leading to the central square. There, in front of the headquarters of the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, present in the most remote towns of the country, was the center of the massacre. It was not until mid-morning Tuesday and after having surrounded Mai Kadra that the national troops entered and encountered the victims. The few survivors were taken in by the military and the most serious were sent to Abreha Jira and Gonder, the nearest large town.

Amnesty International considers that it is not proven that the Tigrin forces are definitively guilty of this war crime, but affirms that the testimonies clearly point in this direction. A detail that reinforces the hypothesis is that the victims were mostly or totally Amariña, the dominant ethnic group in the south. Two witnesses asserted that the massacred were not Tigrinya and one other than the troops, after examining the documents of the dead, discovered that they were Amariña immigrants from the south. The government of Amhara province condemned the massacre and said the victims could be five hundred.

The ongoing conflict in northern Ethiopia began on November 4 when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent troops to Tigray province after a group of local militiamen attacked a military barracks. Tigray, which borders Eritrea and Sudan, sees Ahmed as a political enemy who has ended the enormous power of the province and its Liberation Front in national affairs. The Ethiopian Air Force bombs Front military installations and local police. According to the UN, the conflict has already generated at least 7,000 refugees who have left the western part of the province and entered Sudan.