
Colonel Girma1 shook his head, forcing a smile. ‘No tribunal, no interrogations, no rights.’ Another negation, his gaze lowered, and a new ironic smile: ‘We will never get justice.’ After serving in the ranks of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) for over thirty years, this high-ranking officer was arrested on November 4, 2020, following the outbreak of the war that pitted the federal army against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) for two years, killing at least 500,000 soldiers and 360,000 civilians.
In the following days, soldiers from this northern region of Ethiopia were arrested and imprisoned in military camps, often without trial. After the cessation of hostilities agreement signed in Pretoria on November 2, 2022, many soldiers, including Colonel Girma, were released. Then, on September 10, on the eve of the Ethiopian New Year, the government granted amnesty to 178 soldiers who had been sentenced to heavy penalties including life imprisonment or the death penalty. These former prisoners were both victims and witnesses of abuses and murders.
’They were all sent to concentration camps’
Colonel Gebre, who also agreed to testify to Afrique XXI, is one of these amnestied soldiers. When the fighting began in 2020, Gebre held a senior position in a barracks in the capital, Addis Ababa: ‘Our superiors ordered us not to leave the buildings where we lived with our families, neither to go to our office nor even to go shopping. I was arrested while drinking coffee in front of my house...’
Rather than speaking of trauma or scandal, the fifty-year-old prefers to euphemistically describe the following four years as a ’joke’. ’The guards didn’t treat us like human beings. Moreover, we weren’t even in real prisons. Consequently, there were no rules or regulations,’ explains this father of a family who passed through several military camps in the south of the country and in the Oromia region. ’One of my friends had diabetes,’ Gebre continues. ’When he was arrested, he took his insulin with him. He only lacked a needle, which he was ready to buy. The guards refused, saying that they did not recognize the rights of junta members. He died two days later.’
The ’junta’ refers to the TPLF, which the Tigrayan soldiers were suspected of supporting. These latter were particularly represented in the upper echelons of the army due to the seventeen years of rule of this party at the head of the state, until the coming to power of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in 2018.
Lawyer Kiflay Mehari contributed to obtaining the pardon of 178 soldiers. He estimates that the federal troops included between 17,000 and 18,000 Tigrayans before the conflict. ’They were all sent to concentration camps,’ explains the magistrate. ’A small proportion were then brought before military tribunals, without a lawyer and without the possibility of appeal. At least eighty-four of them are still officially detained, but there could be many more.’
No income, no compensation, no pension
For its part, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has received more than 150 complaints from Tigrayan members of the ENDF and their relatives. ’While the majority of cases related to releases based on the Pretoria agreement and the right to appeal have been resolved, cases of enforced disappearance and compensation are still under investigation,’ says Selamawit Birhane, director of this government body. Among the 178 amnestied soldiers, six have not yet been released due to errors regarding their identity, rank, or length of sentence.
For those who were released, the return to life outside the walls has a bitter taste. ’I served the army for thirty-two years because I assumed it was my country,’ Colonel Gebre continues. ’But our colleagues told us that it was not our country because we are Tigrayan. I have not been allowed to resume my position. I now depend on my family to survive,’ comments the soldier who had been sentenced to eighteen years in prison for disobeying an order.
Colonel Yonas was also released in September, after the annulment of a treason sentence: ’I spent thirty-seven years serving the ENDF,’ this fifty-year-old laments. ’I was wounded several times. I am old. I have no income and will not receive any compensation or pension.’
It is precisely because he is approaching retirement that Colonel Girma has agreed to rejoin the institution that imprisoned, mistreated, and humiliated him for two years. Of the 5,000 soldiers who were incarcerated with him at Mirab Abaya, eight hours southeast of Addis Ababa, only one-fifth of them had the opportunity to rejoin the army. Colonel Girma is therefore taking a considerable risk by describing to Afrique XXI the abuses suffered in this military camp posted in the middle of an isolated area, without water or electricity, where the prisoners had to build their own shelters, on a vacant lot infested with snakes and bordered by a lake full of crocodiles.
After three days of torture, ‘he hanged himself’
The detained soldiers, along with a handful of Tigrayan civilians, were not fed. They survived by pooling their money to buy bananas from the neighboring village. ’The 208 female soldiers confined with us suffered particularly, in the absence of water and sanitary products,’ recalls Girma. His wife, son, and two daughters had no news of him for two years. Girma did not know if he would ever see them again: ’The guards beat us almost daily with electric cables. They targeted the higher ranks in particular and did not spare the women. They gagged and tied the hands of some prisoners behind their backs...’
His voice breaks as he recalls his friend, Colonel Gabre Tsadik, who was tortured for two days. ’On the third day, he hanged himself,’ says Girma. ’He was a highly professional division head. He served his country for thirty-three years. He participated in numerous wars during which he was shot several times. He left four orphans behind.’ Shortly after, on November 21, 2021, while the prisoners, mostly faithful to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, were celebrating Saint Michael, eighty-three of them, including two women, were murdered by their fellow soldiers. Girma continues:
Among the thirty-five soldiers watching us, seventeen appeared equipped with black AK-47 rifles made in Turkey. They first fired three shots into the air. We immediately dispersed. Then they opened fire on us. Between 4 and 5 pm, there were three dead and 208 wounded. As there was no hospital, no care, and no medicine, many died that evening.
The survivors had to negotiate to recover the bodies that had fallen outside the authorized perimeter. ’I found the remains of a captain whose lower half had been devoured by crocodiles,’ adds the colonel, who buried his colleagues in a mass grave.
‘They took them outside and shot them’
Two years after the armistice, no family had access to the burial site. ’The Minister of Defense has stated that those responsible have been punished, but that is false. They were simply transferred to another area,’ suspects Girma. According to a retired ENDF commander who volunteers as a link between the families of victims and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, 168 Tigrayan soldiers were arbitrarily executed in detention while 97 have never been found.
In a December 2022 article documenting the Mirab Abaya massacre, the Washington Post wrote:
Many [Tigrayan soldiers] were arrested in November 2021 as Tigrayan forces advanced towards Addis Ababa. Most of the massacres, including the one at Mirab Abaya, took place at that time. The prisoners assumed that these attacks had been triggered by fear or a desire for revenge.
The five witnesses interviewed by Afrique XXI confirm that the mistreatment intensified each time the Tigray Defense Forces, the armed wing of the TPLF, gained ground.
Tigrayan soldiers were also shot at the whim of their executioners, regardless of the timing of the clashes. ’There were a lot of beatings and insults against our ethnic group,’ reports Omman, another soldier who agreed to recount his experience. On November 22, 2020, the guards didn’t like the way four prisoners looked at them. They took them outside the cell and shot them.’ Also arrested at the beginning of the war, this officer recalls the moment when his superiors isolated the Tigrayans from the rest of the troops...
‘They told us it was for our safety and took us to the Didessa concentration camp in the Oromia region. I didn’t trust them. I was scared,’ he confides. This was followed by overcrowded cells where prisoners had to take turns to sleep, lack of food and water, and beatings that caused one prisoner to lose his teeth and another his eye...
Injustice continues to haunt him
After a year and a half without any interrogation, Omman appeared before a military tribunal. ’I was denied a lawyer. The ENDF officials brought in false witnesses,’ the officer says. ’I was sentenced to life imprisonment. My appeal was denied.’ This sham trial took place in May 2022. From then on, Omman’s detention conditions improved slightly as he was transferred to a real prison in Amhara.
In August 2023, this region bordering Tigray was in turn engulfed in an armed conflict between Fano militiamen and the federal government. These rebels were joined by members of the Amhara regional forces, who had fought alongside the Ethiopian army during the Tigray War. The latter were disappointed by the Pretoria Agreement, which did not specify the status of Western Tigray, which they claim.
It was the Fano who freed Omman and his fellow detainees in December 2023. Back in his native village, this father of three survives thanks to family solidarity, supplemented by donations from charities. A sense of injustice continues to haunt him. According to him, the suspicions of collaborating with the TPLF are unfounded. ’When you are a soldier on duty, you carry out the orders of the government, regardless of any ethnic or religious consideration,’ the officer assures. ’I couldn’t have refused the orders of my superiors.’
For his part, since Colonel Girma has returned to the barracks, the accusations of “snakes”, “Satan”, and “collaborators of the junta” continue to echo in his mind. He eagerly awaits retirement. In the meantime, this survivor is trying to get his superiors to allow the families of the soldiers killed in the Mirab Abaya massacre to bury their loved ones with dignity.
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1All military names have been changed for security reasons.