Ethiopia war: Burning evidence of massive killing

15 eyewitness accounts say that the bodies of hundreds of individuals are being purposefully incinerated in an organized attempt to dispose of evidence of ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia’s Tigray area.

The charges come after repeated accounts of the Tigrayan population being targeted during the civil war.

They also come ahead of the likely deployment of a UN independent inquiry team led by Fatou Bensouda, a former prosecutor for the International Criminal Court.

Security personnel from the adjacent Amhara region, which is occupying western Tigray, have been recognized as digging up new mass graves, exhuming hundreds of victims, burning them, and then moving what remains out of the territory.

Authorities accept that graves have been dug up.

They claim that they indicate proof of Tigrayan forces carrying out their own ethnically motivated killing spree in recent decades.

Gondar University researchers have also been unearthing mass burial sites linked to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

In the ongoing civil war, all sides have been accused of carrying out mass atrocities.

However, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch recently accused Amhara politicians and security personnel of orchestrating an ethnic cleansing effort against Tigrayans in the area.

The conflict began in November 2020 as a result of a disagreement between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s federal government and Tigray’s leading political party, the TPLF.

The United Nations Human Rights Council issued a resolution calling for an independent investigation into all warring sides’ atrocities.

The Ethiopian government opposed to the resolution.

It stated that it would not cooperate, calling it a “political pressure instrument.”

Ethiopia’s attempt to restrict financing for the investigation panel was defeated in a March vote.

The Ethiopian government’s move to deny funding was backed by Russia and China.

Eyewitness’ position

“In the plot of land behind Hamele Hamushte School in Humera town, 200 bodies of ethnic Tigrayan civilians were buried in two mass graves. These were civilians massacred in the early months of the war,” said an eyewitness from the Welkyat ethnic group who lives in Humera.

“On 4 April, the Amhara militias and the Fano [militia] youth group exhumed the remains. They gathered wood, sprayed something we never saw before and burned the remains they collected. The remains crumbled and turned into ash.”

Another witness stated, “The bodies belonged to civilians who were paraded from detention camps. There were around 100 bodies buried en masse behind the land of the public office of the Humera Agricultural Institute.”

“They took the remains to the compound of the institute and turned them into ash using wood, fire, and chemicals that we don’t know. As they were doing that their faces were covered by masks and they wore gloves.”

“On the morning of 10 April, the Amhara militias dug up the four mass graves in the St Abune Argawi church,” a resident of Adebay said.

“There were 150 bodies of civilians killed in the August wave of ethnic cleansing. They loaded the bodies into a lorry. We don’t know where they took the remains.”