Fearing that their stories would disappear, Meseret Hadush has recorded the names of thousands of Tigrayan women who were victims of rape during the civil war in the northern Tigray region of Ethiopia, from 2020 to 2022. Her research has continued, more than a year after the peace agreement between the Ethiopian government and the Tigrayan insurgents of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) was signed in November 2022.
After collecting almost 5,000 testimonies with her organization Hiwyet ("healing" in the Tigrinya language), she now fears an AIDS "epidemic" among these women raped by troops from the neighboring Amhara region and Eritrea. Some 15% of them are thought to have contracted HIV, according to her organization's register of their stories.
Before the conflict, Tigray and its 6 million inhabitants were a role model in Ethiopia's fight against AIDS. The prevalence rate (the number of people infected) had fallen to 1.43%. Then, beginning in November 2020, war struck this mountainous, arid province – once the cradle of Ethiopian civilization. The unprecedentedly violent clashes – which took on a strong ethnic dimension – left up to 600,000 people dead, according to an African Union tally. They were also accompanied by widespread acts of rape. Regional authorities in Tigray have estimated the number of victims of sexual abuse at 120,000.
"A grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter were raped by the same Eritrean soldiers in a suburb of Shire, [a city] in central Tigray, in December 2020," said Hadush with tears in her eyes, from her office in Mekele, the regional capital. "These three generations of women are now HIV-positive. It's a tragedy for Tigray's future."
The region is still struggling to recover from the civil war. Maimed people, some with "broken faces," are everywhere in town. In Mekele, where refugee camps still number in the dozens, begging has become the only means of subsistence for all these internally displaced people. Economic activity has almost ground to a standstill, and the drought has brought hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans to the brink of starvation. Hospitals have struggled to regain their pre-war capacity.
"At least we have antiretrovirals," said Fisseha Berhane, the head of the AIDS department at the regional health office. Tigray was sorely lacking in such supplies over the two years of conflict. "Because of the blockade, HIV-positive people were, at best, taking expired antiretrovirals," he said. The clashes damaged or destroyed 70% of hospitals or health centers, according to the organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF). "We have lost track of 9,000 of the 46,000 patients registered before the war," noted Berhane, preferring to use the term "disappeared" to "dead."
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