(Following is a translation of an article by Rosa Moussaoui, entitled “Nos corps sont blessés, nos consciences sont touchées” published in the French-language daily, L’humanité. (Humanity), Paris, Saturday Dec 25th, 2021.)

She was seated on a swing wooden bench set against the classroom wall, her body wrapped in a gabi, a large and white hard-spun cotton. She had tattoos on her forehead and temples, discreet silver rings in her ears, the only thing of value she had managed to keep since the fighters of the Tigray Liberation Front (TPLF) forced her door open to sow devastation in mid-August. “They took everything from us, they left us naked, in every sense of the word,” breathes Agere, a woman in her thirties, who lifted her head to share her horrific account of being raped. “They arrived on August 12. We could hear gunfire in all directions. There were a lot of corpses lying by the road, whom we couldn’t bury or mourn publicly.”

“They started to loot everything: the hospitals, the commerces, then the houses one by one. What they could not take, they demolished”, she says. “When they entered my home, they seized my cell phone, my cross, food, and all my savings. They directed my two children, aged 4 and 12, to go outside, threatening to kill them. Then they raped me at gunpoint,” she stated. “They were two and very young. If I hadn’t been afraid of their weapon, I would certainly have given them their just deserts. They said to me: “If you scream, we will kill you.”

Her eldest son had to flee, walking out of the town alone, through hills and rough mountains, for two days to join his relatives. His swollen feet were bleeding when he did.

Tigrayan rebels occupied the area from August 12th to 21th, nine days of terror for inhabitants of Nefas Mewcha, a town in Gayint district of the Amhara region, perched at an altitude of more than 3000 m, between two vertiginous cliffs.

“They told us that they had come to destroy the donkeys, that is how they refer to us, the Amharas. They grabbed us by the throat, by the hair, slapped us, beat us, and threatened to kill our children. They said that these snakes should not be allowed to grow up, they would eventually turn against them.

They didn’t kill any children, but we were terrorized, holed up at home. They finally left in the direction of Debre Tabor, promising to come back and slaughter us if the army forced them to go back”, Agere continued. In this nightmare, her only source of relief is having escaped pregnancy.

Her husband, who was then in Bahir Dar, the regional capital, was completely unaware of her ordeal. A woman who is raped brings shame on her family in the Ethiopian tradition. Other women may have kept silent and accepted their fate. The trauma on the whole family and community has been magnified by the public nature of many of these rapes, used as a weapon of war.

In Nefas Mewcha, 73 women reported that they have been subjected to sexual violence. Doctor Biniam believes the true figure is likely to be significantly higher. The 35-year-old doctor, assigned to Debre Tabor, was asked to come and lend a hand at the local hospital when the shifting front of the deadly civil war that has been tearing Ethiopia apart for a year moved closer to Nefas Mewcha. With his teams, he managed to evacuate the patients as soon as possible, before the arrival of the TPLF. He saw thousands of wounded people. When the area was taken over by the federal army, he found the places devastated, equipment destroyed, beds overturned, drugs scattered. “I was devastated when I found the hospital in this state”, he whispered. “We treat everyone, all the belligerents, I do not differentiate. If they had taken the drugs, the material to save lives elsewhere, okay, but destroy everything! All the surrounding villages depend on this hospital, for the maternity ward, and the pediatric services. Here, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV are wreaking havoc. For many people in this isolated area, it is an absolutely vital service.”

The victims of sexual violence of this chaos were slow to come forward and report what happened to them. Many, struggling with traumatic episodes, have never come for treatment. Some asked for abortion services when they discovered that they had fallen pregnant. Others feared they had contracted HIV. All suffered from vaginal bleeding, extensive vaginal tears leading to complications. Multiple bruises and wounds, too, were left by their abusers. “The psychological consequences are serious. One victim recently committed suicide. There have been cases of gang rapes, and women raped in front of their children. In this community of Orthodox Christians with strong faith, admitting to being raped was seen as a dishonor to the victim and families,” says Doctor Biniam.

The women of Nefas Mewcha, however, want to tell their ordeal. Forty of them came to the room opened for us by a municipal official, who demanded them to deliver their testimony in a truthful manner and without exaggeration, and without a spirit of revenge. From adolescents who looked distraught to older women, with serious features, eyes drowned in distress, they confided in us, one by one.

Abbaye Tsegaye must be around fifty years of age. When the TPLF forces arrived, she went to the forest with her neighbors to hide. The three men in the group were shot dead before the attackers turned on the seven fleeing women. “There were two of them, one grabbed me by the throat, the other pulled my legs away by reproaching me for supporting the government, even though I was never involved in politics,” she recounted. “They took everything I had on me. I wandered naked in the forest for five days”. She stood up, lifted a part of her dress to show the long scar on her groin. Mnalou Goshou, a woman of the same age, was by her side, desperate to find a way out. She also reveals the scars of an injury: she was raped under the threat of a knife which slashed her stomach and left leg. He said to me: “My mother was attacked by the Eritrean army (an ally of the Addis Ababa government in the offensive against the TPLF) so I do the same to you.” He was very young. He could have been my son,” she recalls, her voice shaking. She collapsed in tears. Alem Tsehaye is less than 30 years old, she was pregnant at the time of the rape. “I had a flag of the Prosperity Party (Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s party) at home. He said to me: even if you are pregnant, I must rape you because you are Abiy’s donkey. He raped me while someone else watched,” she whispered.

In the hospital of Nefas Mewcha, where ambulances constantly flew, the beds of the wounded and sick were lined up in the corridors; the doctors sew up the wounds on the patio. Every day, three or four patients die. One room was closed; to open it, the nursing staff must ask for the keys to a colonel in blue sportswear, head covered with a black cap. Inside, in a 9-square-meter room, six wounded young Tigrayan fighters, taken prisoner, lay on the mattresses on the dirt floor. In a corner, plastic bottles filled with urine were piling up. They have been registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross, we were told. “If we are there, it is because each house had to give a man to the war,” one of them said with pleading eyes, curled up a soiled blanket. The oldest says he is 21, the youngest 18. Too young to be exposed to such horrors.