NY Times, July 11, 2012
How Local Guerrilla Fighters Routed Ethiopia’s Powerful Army
by Declan Walsh
SAMRE, Ethiopia — The Tigrayan fighters whooped, whistled and pointed
excitedly to a puff of smoke in the sky, where an Ethiopian military
cargo plane trundling over the village minutes earlier had been struck
by a missile.
Smoke turned to flames as the stricken aircraft broke in two and hurtled
toward the ground. Later, in a stony field strewn with smoking wreckage,
villagers picked through twisted metal and body parts. For the Tigrayan
fighters, it was a sign.
“Soon we’re going to win,” said Azeb Desalgne, a 20-year-old with an
AK-47 over her shoulder.
The downing of the plane on June 22 offered bracing evidence that the
conflict in the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia was about to take a
seismic turn. A Tigrayan guerrilla army had been fighting to drive out
the Ethiopian military for eight months in a civil war marked by
atrocities and starvation. Now the fight seemed to be turning in their
favor.
The war erupted in November, when a simmering feud between Prime
Minister Abiy Ahmed and Tigrayan leaders, members of a small ethnic
minority who had dominated Ethiopia for much of the three previous
decades, exploded into violence.
Since then, the fighting has been largely hidden from view, obscured by
communications blackouts and overshadowed by international outrage over
an escalating humanitarian crisis. But during a pivotal week, I went
behind the front lines with a photographer, Finbarr O’Reilly, and
witnessed a cascade of Tigrayan victories that culminated in their
retaking the region’s capital, and altered the course of the war.
We saw how a scrappy Tigrayan force overcame one of the largest armies
in Africa through force of arms, but also by exploiting a wave of
popular rage. Going into the war, Tigrayans were themselves divided,
with many distrustful of a governing Tigrayan party seen as tired,
authoritarian and corrupt.
But the catalog of horrors that has defined the war — massacres, ethnic
cleansing and extensive sexual violence — united Tigrayans against Mr.
Abiy’s government, drawing highly motivated young recruits to a cause
that now enjoys widespread support.
“It’s like a flood,” said Hailemariam Berhane, a commander, as several
thousand young men and women, many in jeans and sneakers, marched past
en route to a camp for new recruits. “Everyone’s coming here.
Mr. Abiy, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and has staked his
prestige on the Tigray campaign, has downplayed his losses. In a
self-assured address to Parliament on Tuesday, of a kind that once
dazzled admiring Westerners, Mr. Abiy insisted that his military’s
retreat from Tigray was planned — the latest phase of a fight the
government was on course to win.
Seen from the ground, though, Tigray has been slipping through his fingers.
In the past three weeks, Tigrayan fighters have captured a wide swath of
territory; retaken the regional capital, Mekelle; imprisoned at least
6,600 Ethiopian soldiers — and claimed to have killed about three times
as many.
In recent days, Tigrayan leaders have expanded the offensive to new
parts of the region, vowing to stop only when all outside forces have
been expelled from their land: Ethiopians, allied troops from the
neighboring country of Eritrea and ethnic militias from the next-door
Amhara region of Ethiopia.
“If we have to go to hell and back, we’ll do it,” said Getachew Reda, a
senior Tigrayan leader.
Press officers for Mr. Abiy and the Ethiopian military did not respond
to questions for this article.
We flew into Mekelle on June 22, a day after national elections in
Ethiopia which had been heralded as a major step toward the country’s
transition to democracy.
In Tigray, though, there was no voting and the Ethiopian military had
just launched a sweeping offensive intended to crush for good the
Tigrayan resistance, now known as the Tigray Defense Forces, commanders
on both sides said.
An Ethiopian airstrike had struck a crowded village market that day,
killing dozens. We watched as the first casualties arrived at Mekelle’s
largest hospital.
Days later, three aid workers from Doctors Without Borders were brutally
murdered by unknown assailants.
In the countryside, the war was moving at a furious pace. Ethiopian
military positions fell like dominoes. Hours after the Tigrayans shot
down the military cargo plane, we reached a camp holding several
thousand newly captured Ethiopian soldiers, about 30 miles south of Mekelle.
Clustered behind a barbed wire fence, the prisoners erupted into
applause when we stepped from our vehicle — hoping, they later
explained, that we were Red Cross workers.
Some were wounded, others barefoot — Tigrayans confiscated their boots
as well as their guns, they said — and many pleaded for help. “We have
badly wounded soldiers here,” said Meseret Asratu, 29, a platoon commander.
An estimated 3,000 Ethiopian soldiers captured by the Tigrayans were
being held at a makeshift prison camp about 30 miles south of Mekelle on
June 29. Many were wounded, others barefoot.
Further along the road was the battlefield where others had died. The
bodies of Ethiopian soldiers were scattered across a rocky field,
untouched since a fight four days earlier, now swelling in the afternoon
sun.
Personal items cast aside nearby, amid empty ammunition boxes and
abandoned uniforms, hinted at young lives interrupted: dog-eared photos
of loved ones, but also university certificates, chemistry textbooks and
sanitary pads — a reminder that women fight on both sides of the conflict.
Stragglers were still being rounded up. The next day, Tigrayan fighters
marched five just-captured prisoners up a hill, where they slumped to
the ground, exhausted.
Dawit Toba, a glum 20-year-old from the Oromia region of Ethiopia, said
he had surrendered without firing a shot. War in Tigray was not like he
had imagined it. “We were told there would be fighting,” he said. “But
when we got here it was looting, robbery, attacks on women.”
“This war was not necessary,” he added. “Mistakes have been made.”
Driving off, we came across a figure sprawled on the roadside — an
Ethiopian, stripped of his uniform, with several bullet wounds to his
leg. He groaned softly.
The wounded soldier appeared to have been dumped there, although it
wasn’t clear by whom. We drove him back to the prisoner camp, where
Ethiopian medics did some basic treatment on the ground outside a
school. Nobody was sure if he would survive.
Artillery boomed in the distance. The Tigrayan offensive was continuing
to the north, using captured heavy guns against the Ethiopian troops who
had brought them in. A platoon of fighters walked through, bearing a
wounded man on a stretcher. Teklay Tsegay, 20, watched them pass.
Before the war, Mr. Teklay was a mechanic in Adigrat, 70 miles north.
Then, last February, Eritrean soldiers fired into his aunt’s house,
killing her 5-year-old daughter, he said. The following day, Mr. Teklay
slipped out of Adigrat to join the resistance.
“I never thought I would be a soldier,” he said. “But here I am.”
As Tigrayans quietly mustered a guerrilla army this year, they drew on
their experience of fighting a brutal Marxist dictatorship in Ethiopia
in the 1970s and 1980s, under the flag of the Tigray People’s Liberation
Front.
Then, Tigrayan intellectuals used Marxist ideology to bind peasant
fighters to their cause, much like the Viet Cong or rebels in Angola and
Mozambique.
But this time, the Tigrayan fighters are largely educated and hail from
the towns and cities. And it is anger at atrocities, not Marxism, that
drew them to the cause.
At the recruitment camp, instructors standing under trees gave speeches
about Tigrayan culture and identity, and taught new recruits to fire an
AK-47.
.
The wave of recruits has included doctors, university professors,
white-collar professionals and diaspora Tigrayans from the United States
and Europe, colleagues and friends said. Even in government-held
Mekelle, recruitment grew increasingly brazen.
Two weeks ago, a T.D.F. poster appeared on a wall beside St. Gabriel’s,
the city’s largest church. “Those who fail to join are as good as the
walking dead,” it read. Hours later, Ethiopian soldiers arrived and tore
it down.
Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe, 61, a senior fellow at the World Peace
Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts
University, in Massachusetts, was visiting Mekelle when war erupted in
November. I found him near the town of Samre, a leather-holstered pistol
on his hip.
“I joined the resistance,” said the academic, who once helped broker a
peace deal for the United Nations in Darfur. “I felt I had no other option.”
Even some Ethiopian commanders felt alienated by Mr. Abiy’s approach to
the conflict.
Until late June, Col. Hussein Mohamed, a tall man with a gold-tooth
smile, commanded the 11th Infantry Division in Tigray. Now he was a
prisoner, held with other Ethiopian officers in a closely guarded farmhouse.
Of the 3,700 troops under his command, at least half were probably dead,
said Colonel Hussein, confirming that he was speaking voluntarily. “The
course of this war is political madness, to my mind,” he said.
He always had serious reservations about Mr. Abiy’s military alliance
with Eritrea, Ethiopia’s old foe, he said: “They ransack properties,
they rape women, they commit atrocities. The whole army is unhappy about
this marriage.”
Still, Ethiopian soldiers have been accused of much the same crimes. I
met Colonel Hussein in a stone-walled room, with a tin roof, as rain
splattered outside. When the room’s owner, Tsehaye Berhe, arrived with a
tray of coffee cups, her face clouded over.
“Take it!” she snapped at the Ethiopian officer. “I’m not serving you.”
Moments later Ms. Tsehaye returned to apologize. “I’m sorry for being
emotional,” she said. “But your soldiers burned my house and stole my
crops.”
Colonel Hussein nodded quietly.
Even before Ethiopian forces abandoned Mekelle on June 28, there were
hints that something was afoot. The internet went down, and at the
regional headquarters where Mr. Abiy had installed an interim
government, I found deserted corridors and locked offices. Outside,
federal police officers were slinging backpacks into a bus.
Smoke rose from the Ethiopian National Defense Forces’ headquarters in
Mekelle — a pyre of burning documents, it turned out, piled high by
detainees accused of supporting the T.D.F.
Weeks earlier, Ethiopian intelligence officers had tortured one of them,
Yohannes Haftom, with a cattle prod. “We will burn you,” Mr. Yohannes
recalled them saying. “We will bury you alive.”
But after he followed their orders to cart their confidential documents
to the burn pit on June 28, the Ethiopians set Mr. Yohannes free. Hours
later, the first T.D.F. fighters entered Mekelle, setting off days of
raucous celebration.
Residents filled streets where young fighters paraded on vehicles like
beauty queens, or leaned from speeding tuktuks spraying gunfire into the
air. Nightclubs and cafes filled up, and an older woman prostrated
herself at the feet of a just-arrived fighter, shouting thanks to God.
On the fourth day, fighters paraded thousands of Ethiopian prisoners
through the city center, in a show of triumphalism that was a pointed
rebuke to the leader of Ethiopia. “Abiy is a thief!” people chanted as
dejected soldiers marched past.
The celebrations eventually reached the house where Mr. Getachew, the
Tigrayan leader and T.D.F. spokesman, now descended from his mountain
base, was staying.
As the whiskey flowed, Mr. Getachew juggled calls on his satellite phone
while a generator rattled in the background. Mr. Abiy had once been his
political ally, even his friend, he said. Now the Ethiopian leader had
cut the power and phone lines to Mekelle and issued a warrant for his
arrest.
Buoyed by victory, the guests excitedly discussed the next phase of
their war in Tigray. One produced a cake with the Tigrayan flag that Mr.
Getachew, sharing a knife with a senior commander, cut to loud cheers.
For much of his career, he had been a staunch defender of the Ethiopian
state. But the war made that position untenable, he said. Now he was
planning a referendum on Tigrayan independence.
“Nothing can save the Ethiopian state as we know it, except a miracle,”
he said. “And I don’t usually believe in them.”
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