4. SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS IN TIGRAY
Sexual violence, along with other grave human rights violations, has been a defining element of the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region since its outbreak in November 2020. Multiple forms of sexual violence — including rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, sexual mutilation and torture — have been perpetrated against Tigrayan women and girls by Ethiopian government forces — the ENDF and ASF, and their allied Fano militias — as well as by the Eritrean forces that have been fighting alongside the Ethiopian military.21 The sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls in different areas of Tigray throughout the ninemonth conflict is shocking in its scale and level of brutality. It is often accompanied by threats and by additional acts of physical and psychological torture aimed at causing lasting fear, and physical and psychological damage. In the majority of cases investigated for this report, women and girls were gang raped. The victims included children and pregnant women, with several of them subjected to additional acts of torture, including being raped with objects, being beaten, threatened with the intention of humiliating them, and being denied assistance for the injuries sustained. Several were held captive in sexual slavery for up to several weeks. The patterns of sexual violence emerging from survivors’ accounts indicate that the violations have been part of a strategy to terrorize, degrade, and humiliate both the victims and their ethnic group. The fact that such practices have been widespread and continuous indicates that this strategy has been tolerated at the highest level of government in both Ethiopia and Eritrea. The accounts of survivors interviewed for this report show that sexual violence has been rampant from the very first days of the conflict in the Tigray region, and has occurred in various settings where women and girls have come into close proximity with the EDF, ENDF, ASF and Fano militia. Such settings include when government forces have searched houses and neighbourhoods or villages looking for fighters or weapons, and when they and/or Fano militias have raided homes in order to loot. They also include when women and girls were fleeing from one area of Tigray to another; when they were hiding in rural areas; when they were trying to cross the border to Sudan and following their abduction or detention.
GANG RAPE, INCLUDING OF PREGNANT WOMEN “I have not enough words. They see us [Tigrayan women] as a leftover kollo [a local cereal snack].” A 32-year-old woman raped by multiple perpetrators while in detention for two months at a police station in Humera, Western Tigray.22
The Fano militia is an Amhara armed group which has been participating in the Tigray conflict with the consent and cooperation of the Ethiopian government forces, at times alongside them and at times independently. 22 Amnesty International phone interview, Shire, 4 June 2021. 21
“I DON’T KNOW IF THEY REALIZED I WAS A PERSON” RAPE AND OTHER SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN THE CONFLICT IN TIGRAY, ETHIOPIA Amnesty International
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