It is better to die, say raped women. Atrocities in Ethiopia are endless

When government military units searched houses in the South Gondar area on January 5, they also entered the house where 21-year-old Enat lived. The soldiers asked her if members of Fano go to the cellar where she works. She answered yes, because the militia is made up of local residents. The soldiers immediately started insulting her and then threatened her crying eight-year-old niece with a rifle. Then one of them raped Enat in front of the child. “I begged them not to hurt me. I called all the saints and begged. But they had no mercy,” she told the BBC.

Enat was a virgin. “I had never known a man until then.” She calculated that she would marry him only after the wedding, as required by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He cannot marry now, the woman must be virgin before marriage. “It would be better if they killed me.” she added.

She became pregnant during the rape. She considered an abortion but did not go for it. “I feared God and thought of my mother. What would happen to her if I died in an abortion?”

Now she has a daughter and lives with one of her relatives, but she doesn’t know how to take care of herself and her daughter. He says bitterly: “If this counts as life, then I live.” Nevertheless, he considers a child a gift from God.

The victim was an 18-year-old Tigist from the western Gojjam area. It happened in January 2024. She was working in a family tea shop, where a soldier started groping her. She rejected him. When she was returning home after work in the evening, a rejected soldier attacked her and others on the street, and everyone gang-raped her on the way.

“My family found me unconscious by the side of the road. They took me to the clinic, where we stayed for five days,” she testified. After the rape, she was unable to leave the house. “Fear prevented me from going to work. Whenever I saw a soldier or any man, I panicked and hid.” She finished work and then tried to kill herself. Her family found her early. She told journalists that she had promised the family that she would never take her own life again, but that she was still thinking about suicide.

The BBC team managed to obtain data from 43 health facilities in the Amharic region and from other health sources. From July 18, 2023 to this May, 2,697 rapes were reported. Roughly 45 percent of the victims were underage girls. The youngest victim was eight and the oldest was 65. Tests showed that half of all rape victims were infected with sexually transmitted diseases. Many were also pregnant. A medical expert, who did not wish to be named, said that the reported cases are only the tip of the iceberg.

Those who sought help often came late. In case of contact with an HIV-infected person, it is possible to administer antiviral drugs that reduce the risk of infection. However, they must be submitted within 72 hours at the latest. Many victims from rural areas do not have a chance to get to the clinic in time. Public transport does not work and there are roadblocks and checkpoints on the roads.

Health centers said that “the number of HIV infections could rise and psychological problems reach catastrophic levels.” Even before the conflict, HIV infection in the area was above average. There were 1.1 cases per hundred people.

However, many victims never came forward to report what had happened to them for fear of stigmatization and the horror of learning that they had been infected. Even 23-year-old Lemlem did not go to the doctor because she is afraid that she might be infected. In January, soldiers came to her house and demanded information from her. When she did not give them to them, one of the soldiers raped her. “He threatened me that if I screamed, one bullet would be enough for me,” she testified. She could not recover from it for a month, she hardly ate and preferred to stop going to church so that they would not start pointing at her. “It’s disgusting to be born a woman. If I were a man, they might beat me, but they didn’t ruin my life like that.”

Because the Ethiopian government does not allow independent journalists into the area, only pro-government ones, the reporters talked to women and health workers in neighboring Kenya, where some had fled. They could not even verify the suspicion that members of the Fano militia were also proceeding in the same way.

The conflict between the Amharic and the soldiers erupted in April 2023 when the government decided to disband the local special forces at a time when the conflict between the Amharic and Orormy continued. But the Tigray defense forces were not disbanded. The conflict quickly flared up and in August resulted in a rebellion by the new Amharic Fano militias, which attempted to take over major Amharic cities in order to gain autonomy. Government troops intervened and operations continue. In March of this year, the government admitted that over three hundred Fano members were killed, often shot without trial. But the real number is not known. About one hundred thousand people left their homes.

However, the conflict has deeper roots, it broke out after the Tigray war ended in 2022. In December 2020, the Tigraians rebelled against the Amharic-led Ethiopian government. The government decided on a quick military intervention, which led to the escalation of the conflict. Tens of thousands of people were killed directly in the fighting, other victims were claimed by hunger and the unavailability of health care.

The most sobering figures state 160,000 and 380,000 dead. Up to one hundred thousand people were killed in the fighting, another 250 to 300 thousand died. Even in this conflict, rape was used as a weapon. It is reported that eight Tigray women out of a hundred were raped, half of them gang-raped.

However, peace could not be established, the formerly ruling Amharic people were marginalized.