HAMDAYET, Sudan (AP) – One survivor arrived with broken legs and others fleeing.
In this fragile refugee community on the brink of the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia, those who have fled for nearly two months of deadly fighting continue to bring new horror stories.
In a simple Sudanese clinic, a doctor turned refugee, Tewodros Tefera, examines the wounds of war: children wounded in explosions. Ax splits and knives. Ribs broken by blows. Raw scratched feet from hiking days to safety.
One recent day, he dealt with the broken legs of his fellow refugee Guesh Tesla, a recent arrival.
The 54-year-old carpenter arrived with news of some 250 young people kidnapped by an unknown fate of a single people, Adi Aser, in neighboring Eritrea by Eritrean forces, whose involvement denies Ethiopia. In late November, Guesh said he saw dogs feeding on civilian bodies near his hometown, Rawyan, where he said Ethiopian soldiers beat him and took him to the border town of Humera.
There, he said, he was taken to a court that said he had been turned into a “slaughterhouse” by militias in the neighboring Amhara region. He said he heard the screams of killed men and managed to escape by crawling into the night.
“I would never go back,” Guesh said.
These accounts remain impossible to verify, as Tigray remains almost completely sealed off from the world for more than 50 days since fighting began between Ethiopian forces, backed by regional militias, and those in the Tigray region that had dominated the Tigray government. country for almost three decades.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for political reforms that also marginalized Tigray leaders, continues to reject global “interference” amid pleas to allow humanitarian access without obstacles and independent research. The conflict has shaken Africa’s second most populous country, with 110 million people, and threatens to destroy Abiy’s peace in the turbulent Horn of Africa.
“I know the conflict has caused unimaginable suffering,” Abiy wrote last week, but argued that “the heavy cost we incurred as a nation was necessary” to keep the country together.
No one knows how many thousands have died in Tigray since the fighting began on November 4, but the United Nations has reported reports of artillery attacks in populated areas, with civilian targets and widespread looting. What has happened “is as heartbreaking as it is frightening,” UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said last week.
Refugees now arrive from deeper areas within the Tigray amid reports that fighting continues in some places. These newcomers present with more severe trauma, Dr. Tewodros said, with signs of hunger and dehydration and some with gunshot wounds.
It is the stories of refugees like Tewodros and Guesh, and of civilians remaining in Tigray, that will eventually reveal the extent of the abuses that often take place on the ethnic line.
“Everyone looks at you and points out the part of you that doesn’t belong to them,” said Tewodros, who is of both Tigrayan and Amhara origin. “So if I go to Tigray, they would tell me I’m Amhara because Amhara isn’t part of them. When I go to Amhara, they pick up Tigray’s part because Tigray isn’t part of them.”
These differences have become deadly. Many ethnic refugees in Tigrayan have accused Amhara ethnic fighters of attacking them, while survivors of a massacre last month in the town of Mai-Kadra say Tigrayan fighters headed to Amhara . Other attacks followed.
Abrahaley Minasbo, a 22-year-old trained dancer, said Amhara militia members dragged him from his home in Mai-Kadra on Nov. 9 and beat him on the street with a hammer, an ax, sticks and a machete, and then they left him for dead. The scars now incline to the right side of the face and neck. Tewodros only treated him six days later in Sudan.
Another patient, farmer Gebremedhin Gebru, 65, was shot while trying to flee members of the Amhara militia in his hometown of Ruwasa. He said he was there for two days until a neighbor found him. Gebremedhin said “people will be beaten if they are seen helping” the injured.
For Tewodros, the conflict has been one civilian victim after another since the bombing began in early November while working at a Humera hospital. Some bombing came from the north, he said, towards nearby Eritrea.
“We didn’t know where to hide,” he said. “We didn’t know what to do.”
Fifteen bodies arrived at the hospital that first day and eight the next, he said. Then, as the bombing continued, he and his colleagues fled, transporting injured patients on a tractor to the nearby community of Adebay. They left that city when the fighting intensified.
Tewodros and his colleagues hid for two days in the forest, hearing gunshots and screams, before walking for more than 12 hours, hiding from military convoys and crossing a river into Sudan. There, he accepted a volunteer position at the Sudanese Red Crescent Society dealing with fellow refugees.
“Where we are now is extremely unsafe,” he said of the reception center near the border, citing Amhara fighters approaching the riverbank and threatening refugees. Militias “are more dangerous than Ethiopian national forces,” he said. “They’re crazier and crazier.”
He does not know what awaits his wife and two young children in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. He has not seen them for ten months and the children always ask him when he can return home.
Ethiopia’s prime minister often speaks of “medemer,” or national unity, Tewodros said, in a country with more than 80 ethnic groups. “It simply came to our notice then. Medemer would have been my son. ”But he no longer knows if his children, also of mixed ethnicity, have a future in the country.
Guesh, a father of three, knows even less of what is to come. A month ago he left behind his wife and three children in the village of Adi Aser, where a farmer gave them refuge. Now, like many refugees snatched from their families, he doesn’t know if they are alive or dead.
Every time he sees another new refugee arrive in Sudan, he lengthens the photos of his family, so emotional that he can hardly speak. In this conflict that is so overshadowed, he now relies on strangers to know his fate.
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Hadero reported from Atlanta. Cara Anna in Nairobi contributed.