It’s more sinister than you thought. Put the pieces together, and it’s hard to escape the implication that the TPLF always intended to have a bloodbath, possibly one right across the country and in Addis if they had been more successful in battle. The clues are there. And evidence is waiting to be examined. Unfortunately, the top newspapers and TV networks of North America and Europe refuse to look, really look.
In early March, a certain correspondent defended the highly questionable allegations over Axum and told me in a Twitter direct message, “The notion that remote investigations don’t count is utterly bogus.” I know a few academics who would spit up their coffee at this. And his logic presumes that reportage must be either-or. Yes, of course, you might get some valuable answers from behind your desk. But you better believe going there always beats long-distance calls, fuzzy satellite pictures and guessing.
Jemal Countess is a real journalist. He went to where the story is. A freelance photographer and former regional correspondent for Getty Images, he traveled to Mai Kadra in early March and spoke to witnesses and survivors of the horrors there that took place late last year.
An important detail to keep in mind: When Mai Kadra first broke in the Western news, major outlets such as Reuters and the Washington Post reported that the incidents of people “stabbed, strangled, and bludgeoned to death” took place on November 9 — they were following the narrative established by Amnesty International in its first report and by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, which visited Mai Kadra, Gondar and other towns in the region to investigate between November 14 to 19 and released findings on November 24.
But the witnesses Jemal Countess spoke to and photographed date the violence and killing back to November 6 and running until November 10.
“Most victims were slashed or hacked,” Countess wrote in his caption copy accompanying his pictures. “Many victims who survived the initial attacks with bladed weapons were shot to death.”
And it’s possible that some isolated murders might have happened well before even that timeline.
One witness, Selemon Abera, 40, told him he thinks the massacre was well planned very far in advance — at least by two weeks. “The wealthy Tigrayans who owned farms didn’t pay their laborers their wages and withheld them because they knew the genocide was coming. There are indications that they knew everything that was planned and that was going to happen… I also know that Tigrayan Special Forces were arriving in Mai Kadra during the days leading up to the massacre.”
Selemon says the initial murders — those of workers who lived in farms — were hidden from local people, with officials and the farm owners using tractors to dump their bodies in ditches or in nearby bush beyond Mai Kadra River and sometimes the fields at Shilela Mocha.
Gashaw Birhanu, 43, knew of the horrors that were coming. Though he’s ethnically Amhara, he was mistaken for Tigrayan by community leaders in Mai Kadra and invited to two closed-door meetings before the fateful attack on the Ethiopian Northern Defense base. According to Gashaw, the Tigrayans at the meeting discussed how they would survive the imminent war, take control of resources in the region — and exterminate the local Amhara.
In the end, Gashaw’s charade didn’t protect him, and he was assaulted by seven men with sticks, managing to escape but losing his front teeth in the attack.
