We may be stubborn and perhaps naive, but we will never get used to the idea that the war rapes are an “inevitable” side effect of any conflict. It's happening again and in Ethiopia, in a war that officially isn't even a war, given that it has been defined by the premier, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy Ahmed, as "a police operation", and which, according to his government, has already been won.
Instead, we know from direct testimonies - although the country is closed to any type of journalistic and humanitarian control - that not only is the war not over, but that the Tigrinya rebels drove the federal forces out of Makalle and now they are breaking through to neighboring regions, Amhara and Afar.
An exceptional witness to the violence to which women in Tigray are subjected is Amnesty International, which revealed them in a report dated August 11, 2021.
"The rape and other forms of sexual violence – said Agnés Callamard, general secretary of the non-governmental organization – have been used as weapons of war to inflict physical and psychological damage to the women and girls of Tigray. Hundreds of them have been subjected to brutal treatment in order to degrade them and deprive them of their humanity. The seriousness and scale of these sexual offenses are appalling, to the point of constituting war crimes and maybe also crimes against humanity".
And to explain well what "rape as a weapon of war" means, Amnesty's report goes into the merits of stories of some of the survivors manage to escape to neighboring Sudan. Thus we come to know that gang rapes they lingered within military bases for days if not weeks; and, as if all this were little, the criminals enjoyed inserting nails, gravel, metal and plastic objects into the victims' vaginas which in some cases caused irreversible damage.
Who did it? Who can go that far?
Amnesty writes that twenty-eight survivors have been identified the Eritrean forces as solely responsible of their rape. While twelve, five of whom were pregnant, reported being raped by soldiers and militiamen in front of their families.
To clarify: the "Eritrean forces” shouldn't even be present in Ethiopia. Their involvement has always been denied by the Adisa Ababa government, but in reality everyone knows who they are Abiy's occult allies; While "soldiers and militiamen" I am the federal army, those who should defend all Ethiopians, including Tigrayans, from all kinds of violence and abuse.
That these "side effects" are the rule and not the exception is demonstrated by other data provided by Amnesty.
According to the report, health facilities in Tigray have registered 1.288 cases of gender-based violence between February and April 2021. The Adigrat hospital alone has calculated 376 cases of rape from the beginning of the conflict to 9 June. And these numbers do not represent the true scale of these crimes, as many survivors told Amnesty International that they had not been referred to any health facility.
If anyone has any doubts about this data, just remember that the organization collects it through interviews with those directly involved: between March and June 2021, 63 women and girls who survived rape reported, 15 in person in Sudan, where they had taken refuge, and another 48 remotely through secure connections. In addition to them, health and humanitarian workers who were caring for survivors in the towns of Shire and Adigrat and in refugee camps in Sudan were interviewed.
In short, there are no alibis for those in the international community who keep on pretending nothing happened, turning their faces away, perhaps embarrassed by the opening of credit too soon at the Prime Minister Abiy, elected with the ambition of uniting all the ethnic groups in a single country, and which also deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for this, but which has objectively failed. The Italian government is no exception.
What to do then?
Amnesty asks the government of Ethiopia “to allow the entry into Tigray to Commission of Inquiry of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights and we urge the UN Secretary-General to send the Team of Experts on Sexual Violence in Conflict to the region.”
Italy could support the organization in the request, for example; as well as imagining a new type of relationship, less condescending, with a government that allows these aberrations. If not now, when?
