600,000 dead – and now what? On the road in Tigray, where a war is over but peace has not yet begun
In the Ethiopian province of Tigray, the guns are silent after two years of war. But how can there be peace after so much death? Stories from a traumatized region.
«We laid down on the ground and pffff»: Abriha Arefe and her son survived the war.
Just outside the village of Yechila – where one of the biggest battles in one of the most brutal wars of recent decades was fought, where thousands of dead soldiers were afterward strewn across the terrain, where the village smelled so much of decay that an aid organization distributed a spray to mask the stench – three women and two boys are sitting under an acacia tree. They are on their way to the village to sell firewood, but just now they are resting. Wind brushes past, one woman braids the hair of another.
Remnants of the war near Yechila.
On the other side of the road, three dozen military vehicles are rusting away. Pickups destroyed by bullets, trucks, buses that once transported soldiers, artillery parts that look like flattened insects.
The war in Tigray has eaten into the landscape and also into peoples’ minds. «We laid down on the floor and pfffff,» Abriha Arefe says. She ducks and shows how she took cover from the bombs. She laughs.
The three women interrupt each other as they talk, telling of death, hunger, beatings by Ethiopian soldiers who occupied the village. And then Arefe tells a story. «A soldier came to my house. He was alone and drunk. He threatened to kill me with a knife. I screamed, but no one came to help. He did what he wanted to do, and then he left. After that I was sick for seven days. I went to the hospital because the pain was so great that I couldn't sit.»
Arefe now breaks small twigs with her hands. A little later, the women get up, heave their bundles onto their backs and move on.
Two years of war
According to estimates, some 600,000 people have fallen victim to a war in Ethiopia's Tigray region in the space of two years, a war that the world has barely noticed. Tigray is home to around 6 million people in an area slightly larger than that of Switzerland. The number of dead corresponds to the combined population of the cities of Zurich and Basel.
The war followed a power struggle between the Ethiopian central government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front. The TPLF had dominated Ethiopia's national politics for three decades, until Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018. Ahmed proved to be a young and confident prime minister who pushed the TPLF back into its home region.
The power struggle escalated, resulting in war and a blockade of Tigray that probably cost more lives than the fighting. On Nov. 2, 2022, two years after the war began, the parties signed a peace agreement in the South African capital of Pretoria.
Since then, Tigray has been in a state between war and peace. Parts of the region are still occupied, but the battles are over. Relief supplies are arriving, and there is gasoline, electricity and in some places internet again. But there are not enough relief supplies, and the lines at the gas stations are hundreds of meters long.
Flights between Addis Ababa and Mekele, the capital of Tigray, have also been operating again since January. They are fully occupied. The Ethiopian government does not want journalists to be on these planes. It does not issue visas to them. The NZZ was nevertheless able to travel to Tigray and visit sites in areas under control of Tigray forces. One sees a lot of liberated laughter at checkpoints and in bars where fighters sit and tell stories from the war. The relief is enormous.
But when is a war really over? When does peace begin? The relief is so great because so many terrible things have happened. The people now have two things in common. They are immensely happy that the fighting is over. And all have at least one story of death and survival to tell.
Perhaps one must first tell these stories before one can ask if peace has begun. Here we offer stories from four places in Tigray. They are about crime, and the hope that the war will not return.
1. Adi Kuylo: The father
Sahle Seged wanders across a field, up to the oak tree that stands in front of the rock wall. He has wrapped himself in a shawl, and sometimes he pulls it closed, as if to hide from the world. Seged, 29, is not one of those laughing liberally these days.
Seged points to spots in the landscape: There, where the cows graze, is a corpse. There, where, one woman wanders across the field, a second. And up there by the oak lays Seged's father. The day the war passed through Adi Kuylo village, the Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers killed civilians. It was Dec. 4, 2020, and the war was four weeks old.
Seged wanders up to the oak tree where his dead father was laid.
Between 12,000 and 60,000 civilians were killed in massacres in Tigray during the war, according to figures collected by Belgian researchers. As he travels throughout Tigray now, people keep saying similar things to Seged: A massacre took place over there in the field. Up there on the hill, civilians who were killed have been buried. In some places, entire villages were wiped out.
In Adi Kuylo, the soldiers shot eight civilians that day. Three priests, four farmers and a driver. They were between 27 and 70 years old. This is how Seged, his siblings and other villagers tell it. In Alasa, a neighboring town, 22 civilians were killed on the same day, and 42 in the entire area. This is the villagers' census. Their descriptions are consistent.
Adi Kuylo is located an hour's drive northwest of the capital Mekele on a mountain flank. It is easy to miss the village. The houses are scattered. There are almost 200 households, a community of farmers.
When the Tigray war began in early November 2020, it seemed to be over after only a few weeks. The Ethiopian troops overran the ill-prepared Tigray forces. The balance of strength was all the more uneven because the Ethiopians were supported by militias from the neighboring Amhara region and troops from Eritrea. The Ethiopian government has long denied this. However, Tigray residents often tell of Ethiopian and Eritrean troops traveling together. In Adi Kuylo, as elsewhere.
Hills and caves offered protection
War is often heard before it is seen. Residents of Adi Kuylo heard the impact of artillery shells as Tigray fighters retreated. Most of the inhabitants sought shelter in the hills, in caves and in surrounding villages. Seged, his parents and his siblings also fled.
On the morning of Dec. 4, a Friday, Seged climbed a hill overlooking Adi Kuylo. The noise of battle had died down the day before. Seged wanted to see if the troops had moved on and he could return to the village.
They were still there. A few hundred meters away, Seged saw two men running away from a group of soldiers. He heard two gunshots. When the residents of Adi Kuylo list the dead of that day, they do not include the two men. No one knows where they came from. But they too are now buried in Adi Kuylo.
Seged ran back. His father, however, had already left. He wanted to check on the house. He arrived at Adi Kuylo around noon. Presumably his father was killed on the same day.
Seged's brother Getnet, who ventured into the village the next morning, received the news from a neighbor: Their father was dead. His body was laying by the oak tree.
That Saturday, Adi Kuylo residents who returned found six more neighbors killed. They found the body of a priest only after a week, lying among bushes. A villager says, «When we found the bodies, we didn't dare to scream. We were afraid the soldiers would hear us and come back.»
The graves in Adi Kuylo.
Seged's father and the others killed were buried on the same day. They lie under cement slabs next to the wall that stretches around the village church. While the first returnees buried the dead, more and more residents gathered at the church. In the end, around 50 came. They mourned together, silently, until the sun set.
Seged did not return to Adi Kuylo until Sunday. He found a grieving Getnet and a ransacked house. Pots, blankets and even mirrors had been stolen by the soldiers. In the house, a black-and-white portrait of his father now hangs in a corner above the bed. Above it, the red-yellow flag of Tigray.
2. Wukro: The orphans
Abba Yohannes Gebregziabher put the war in a folder. They are records documenting every day. They state, for example, that Eritrean soldiers shot a mother who was carrying her nine-month-old child on her back. One woman gave birth to a child in the hills and bled to death because she did not receive medical help, he says.
Abba Yohannes Gebregziabher.
The priest bends over the desk in his office and flips through the pages. The records do not mean that his documentation is finished. «We haven't had time to edit yet,» he says. What has been confirmed: 82 killings of civilians and 52 rapes. The actual figures are probably much higher, he says.
Gebregziabher was head of St. Mary's College in the town of Wukro, an hour north of Mekele. The school had 700 students before the war, but has now been closed for three years. Gebregziabher was part of the council of elders of Wukro during the war. There were six of them, meeting in the morning and in the afternoon. There was a lot to record.
Even during wartime, intensifications can take place, leading to worse times among the bad. In Tigray, there is often talk of the «eight months.» This is the period between the invasion by Ethiopian and Eritrean troops and the recapture of large parts of the region by Tigray forces at the end of June 2021. During the eight months, thousands of civilians were killed and thousands of women were raped in Tigray. In Wukro, this time was worse than elsewhere.
Wukro had 50,000 inhabitants before the war. In the city one can find lovely corners, cobblestone streets flanked by trees. But the wounds are barely hidden. Pieces of cardboard are laid over broken windows like band-aids. On the main street, large pieces of broken glass protrude from bullet-torn facades.
At the end of January, Wukro was filled with hundreds of Tigray forces. They strolled down the main street, some hand in hand, some with Kalashnikovs strapped to their backs. Many were limping.
During the occupation, Wukro was temporarily divided between Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers and militias. Here, too, residents blame Eritreans for the worst crimes. Gebregziabher speaks of a «huge number of abused women.»
«We feel as if we have been raped ourselves.»
One of the most gruesome episodes recorded by Gebredziabher occurred at another Catholic institution, on the northern edge of the city, five minutes away from St. Mary's College. There, the sisters of St. John's ran a school and an orphanage. These are also closed today, and only six nuns remain. They tell the story in their living room in the long, two-story building where the crimes took place. The sisters sit on sofas, wearing white hoods, an image of the pope staring down from the wall.
The building of the nuns of St. John's.
On the evening of Jan. 27, 2021, the sisters had locked the door. They knew that Eritrean soldiers were in the neighborhood. They were caring for eight orphans in those months; before the war there had been 50. Five were there that night, three girls, two boys. It was nine o'clock in the evening. The boys were already in bed. The girls were watching television. Then there was a knock, it was the guard.
«When we opened, we saw that the guard was tied up,» says one of the sisters. With him stood soldiers with guns and knives. Seven rushed in, she says, while the others had stayed outside. The soldiers spread out, some of them going upstairs. Some of them went to the girls.
The soldiers forced the nuns to turn off their cell phones. Then they locked them in a room on the first floor. There they sat on the floor and heard the soldiers trying to unscrew the TV from the wall in the recreation room. They heard how the invaders opened doors and closed them again, and how they finally tore the TV off the wall.
And they heard the sound of the metal bed on which the soldiers raped the girls. Two of the girls were 14 years old, one was 20. When the soldiers brought the girls into the room, they cried in pain, silently, afraid to anger the rapists.
The girls and the nuns remained locked in the dark room, crying and praying. «We were waiting for them to kill us,» says one of the nuns. At half past two the key turned in the hole. The attackers left. In the morning, the nuns took the girls to the hospital.
The room in which the nuns were locked.
In Wukro, since the incident, there have been rumors that the nuns were also raped. Sister Abeba Weldegergs, the superior, says, «What difference does it make? We could not protect the children. We feel like we've been raped ourselves.»
The girls later went back to their home villages. It didn't seem right for them to stay at the scene of the crime. Women who were abused during the eight months of the occupation still come to the convent portal every day. Some have been disowned by their families. Sister Weldegergs says, «Many don't talk about what happened. We're the only ones they tell.»
3. Abiy Addi: The neighbor
Birtukan Gebremichael was more confident than other Abiy Addi residents in the final days of the war. In the village, people talked about the fighting further north, and said the enemy was advancing. Drones circled in the air, armed with bombs. Many residents fled the city, seeking shelter in the villages.
But Gebremichael knew that peace talks were to about to begin. Soon everything would be better, she told her husband, a civil servant who had not received a salary for two years. That's the story told by neighbors who found Gebremichael after a bomb mortally wounded her.
Talks between the government and the Tigray forces began on Oct. 25. The African Union mediated. The talks were preceded by a new escalation of fighting, once again displacing 200,000 people. While negotiations were ongoing, Ethiopian and Eritrean troops created more casualties on the battlefield. And bombs fell in Abiy Addi, a small town in central Tigray that is considered a TPLF retreat.
Gebremichael died before the talks began, at about 10 a.m. on Oct. 23. It was the day when she, too, wanted to take temporary refuge in the countryside with her husband, her two-year-old son and her parents. She had mopped the small yard in front of her hut and filled the water canisters together with a neighbor. She had prepared traditional beer for her parents. Donkeys were to transport the beer and other belongings. Shortly before, a missile had hit a teachers' seminary a few hundred meters away. Wounded Tigray fighters were housed there. A drone circled. Then the second bomb hit.
Gebremichael's House.
Alemu Gebrekiros explains where he found his neighbor, in the rubble of her hut. This consists of a single room. On the floor is a yellow ration card from the U.N. World Food Program. There is a flower arrangement made of plastic. A child plays with bundle of socks. Tattered corrugated metal dangles from the roof beams, and above is blue sky.
Ten days between death and peace
Alemu Gebrekiros lives right next door. When the bomb hit, it tore off parts of his corrugated metal roof, and his courtyard filled with dust. «Then I heard screaming,» he says. He walked over. His neighbor was lying next to the door, water running onto her from the canister she had filled earlier. She was bleeding. Next to her lay her son. His skull was open. He was dead.
Alemu Gebrekiros.
The neighbors took Gebremichael to the hospital. She died after one hour.
Birtukan Gebremichael was 23. She was the local hairdresser. In the courtyard in front of her hut, she braided women's hair. «She was a beauty, and she was popular,» says Gebrekiros. Her son had begun to speak, saying mama, papa, injera – the Ethiopian flatbread.
On Oct. 2, the warring parties signed the peace agreement in Pretoria. «There were 10 days between her death and the signing,» says Gebrekiros. «That's sad.»
In the rubble of the hut there are also parts of the bomb that killed Gebremichael and her child. They are fragments of a MAM-L aerial bomb used to equip Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones. The manufacturer of the weapon promises «high precision and efficiency» on its website. The Ethiopian army had greatly expanded its drone fleet during the Tigray War, thanks in part to an agreement with Turkey. Satellite images from the month Gebremichael and her son were killed show that a Bayraktar drone was at the military airport in the city of Bahir Dar, about 300 kilometers southwest of Abiy Addi.
Hundreds of civilians were killed in drone strikes during the Tigray war. Some of the last on Oct. 27, also in Abiy Addi, when a bomb hit next to the traffic circle in the center of the village. It hit a truck that was supposed to bring fighters and civilians to Mekele. Witnesses say the road was full of limbs and pieces of flesh. About 20 people died. Dried blood sticks to the curb. Here, too, lie parts of the bomb. It is the same type as in the house of Birtukan Gebremichael.
4. Mekele: The general
When does peace begin? Few would know this better than General Tsadkan Gebretensae, a man who has spent nearly a third of his life at war.
Tsadkan Gebretensae.
Some consider Gebretensae to be one of the best military strategists in Africa. He has fought three wars. In the 1970s and 1980s as a guerrilla leader against a communist regime. In the late 1990s, as chief of staff of the Ethiopian military against Eritrea. Now as commander of the Tigray forces against Ethiopia. Together, the wars caused more than 1 million deaths.
Gebretensae sits on the terrace of his house in Mekele. Before the peace agreement in November, this would have been too dangerous; the air strikes also targeted Tigray's leaders. In footage from the war, Gebretensae's face looked narrower than usual. Now it is round again, he has recovered from the forced marches across the mountainous region. Gebretensae turns 70 this year.
This last war, the general says, was the toughest. Not only for him, for all of Tigray. Gebretensae had tried to prevent it. In 2019, he mediated between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the TPLF. «I did my best,» Gebretensae says. «But I failed.» Then, at the age of 67, he himself went to war once again, although he could have gone abroad. He says his fate and that of Tigray are inseparable.
The future of the peace agreement is also partially in Gebretensae's hands. He was one of two Tigray negotiators in South Africa. He is also now in constant contact with the Ethiopian side. He says, «We are more optimistic than we were when the agreement was signed.» Many things did not happen as quickly as the Tigray leadership would have liked. For example, government employees are not yet receiving salaries, and retired employees are not receiving pensions. But one must build trust. In early February, the Tigray leadership and Prime Minister Ahmed met for the first time.
Hardly anyone is discussing the massacres and rapes committed not only by Eritrean and Ethiopian troops, but also by Tigray forces. Amnesty International has been critical, noting that the peace agreement does not contain a clear plan for dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
When does peace begin?
When does peace begin? At the airport in Mekele, members of the national police force are conducting inspections again. But their authority does not extend beyond the airport grounds. Ten minutes away, in the city center, captured Ethiopian army vehicles roll through the streets, driven by Tigray fighters in captured Ethiopian uniforms. Nigerian pop music plays again in the bars, alternating with songs that evoke Tigray's freedom.
Tsadkan Gebretensae, the man of war, says that the better one knows war, the greater the longing for peace. «Because you've seen the horror of war. The mutilated and dead young people. The economic and social destruction. It is almost impossible to explain what war does to a society. It tears everything apart.»
Gebretensae says he would like to retire. He has three small grandchildren, he thinks he is missing the chance to play with them. But there is still not enough peace in Tigray.
But when does peace begin? When you can again cultivate the fields without fear of being shot by soldiers? When you can forget? When justice is done?
When so many terrible things have happened as in Tigray, does that make peace impossible? Or all the more urgent?
The most common saying in Tigray right now is, «We can finally sleep soundly again.» That, too, is a form of peace.
Forrest Rogers contributed to this article.
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