Civil War in Ethiopia: No Freedom for Women

By Ciara Cronin

Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report in May communicating that conflict-related sexual violence has reached alarming levels in Ethiopia. A civil war began in Ethiopia’s northernmost state Tigray in November 2020, in which Tigrayan forces opposed the Ethiopian government and its allies. Their allies include the Amhara regional forces, the Amhara militia also known as Fano, the Afar troops, and the Eritrean forces. HRW highlighted in their report the ethnic cleansing of Tigrayans in the Western Tigray Zone by the Amhara regional forces and their militia.

The crimes committed against Tigrayans include widespread, brutal, and systemic conflict-related sexual violence against women and girls, says the report. The story of Shila, who lived near the Eritrean border in Tigray, encapsules the violence of the war on women and girls. Eritrean soldiers came knocking on Shila’s door. They asked for the whereabouts of her husband, a Tigrayan militiaman. She was then “passed around groups of Eritrean soldiers and repeatedly raped along with other women”. Shila got pregnant as a result of these assaults. When she finally reached a hospital to seek an abortion, she was already 5 months pregnant and was told she would have to deliver that baby. This led to Shila being kept in the hospital because of her reaction to this news. In fact, Shila was already a mother of three at that time, which included Mita, her 13-year-old daughter, who was taken by the soldiers at the same time as Shila. A few weeks later, her daughter Mita was wheeled into her room by doctors. The girl was so brutally attacked that she could no longer walk or control her urine. Shila’s story is one of many in Tigray and demonstrates how women are used as a weapon in war and therefore are not free to possess their own bodies.

Women are always a target for war crimes during conflict. They are used as pawns to commit crimes and try to weaken the enemy. In their new report, HRW have rang the alarm for widespread sexual violence in Tigray, which includes rape, sexual enslavement, sexual mutilation and torture against Tigrayan women, and so have other human rights organisations such as the United Nations, or Physicians for Human Rights. Women are not safe for the sole reason that they are women. Over 100,000 women may have been raped in Tigray during the two-year war. These women are first made victims when they are sexually assaulted and are then revictimized when they are ostracized by their own communities for having gone through such violence. In fact, most husbands will leave their wives when they find out about the sexual assaults. These women are not let back into their family homes where their children live, and religious leaders in some remote areas call them “rapists leftovers”. They are left with nothing.

A survey of more than 5,000 women of reproductive age in Tigray reported that nearly 8% of the interviewees had been raped. Of that 8%, over two thirds were gang raped, and a quarter said it happened on multiple occasions. The figure is very likely to be an undercount as the survey was only conducted on 5,000 women of reproductive age, which is only a very small portion of the population. This does not include women and girls that are not of reproductive age, women that were not participants in the survey because where they live is inaccessible due to the military presence which does not allow the survey to know if specific areas are more prone to widespread sexual violence than others, because their attacker killed them, or women that did answer the survey but were too afraid to tell the truth because of the stigma around rape. 

In conflict, women are used as a tool. They are dehumanized entirely. This can be highlighted with Shila’s story where she was “passed around”, like how a bottle of alcohol would be passed around among soldiers. Women are seen as an item to share and damage. No woman is free until all women are. Although these women are not behind bars, they are prisoners in their own lives, trying to live with the trauma that was caused by the violence they endured, or the constant fear that it could happen anytime.