By Lucy Kassa for BBC
The remains of hundreds of people are being deliberately destroyed in an organised campaign to dispose of evidence of ethnic cleansing in the west of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, according to interviews with 15 eyewitnesses.
Last December, the UN human rights council passed a resolution to establish an independent investigation into atrocities committed by all warring parties in the conflict.
The Ethiopian government objected to the resolution and vowed not to co-operate, saying the resolution was an “instrument of political pressure”.
In a vote in March, Ethiopia’s bid to block funding for the investigative panel failed. Russia and China had backed the Ethiopian government’s attempt to block funding.
Remains burned
Eyewitnesses have said that three days after the funding was approved, the campaign to destroy evidence of atrocities was launched in western Tigray.
“In the plot of land behind Hamele Hamushte school in Humera town, 200 bodies of ethnic Tigrayan civilians were buried in two mass graves. These were civilians massacred in the early months of the war,” said an eyewitness from the Welkyat ethinc group who lives in Humera.
Whereas Tigrayans either fled the area during the fighting or are in detention, members of the Welkyat ethnic group remained and have provided the eyewitness reports.
“On 4 April, the Amhara militias and the Fano [militia] youth group exhumed the remains. They gathered wood, sprayed something we never saw before and burned the remains they collected. The remains crumbled and turned into ash.”
This testimony was consistent with what other eyewitnesses said about the same incident .
Amhara militia and Fano youth destroyed the remains of bodies buried in another part of Humera, witnesses have said.
“The bodies belonged to civilians who were paraded from detention camps. There were around 100 bodies buried en masse behind the land of the public office of the Humera Agricultural Institute,” said another witness.
“They took the remains to the compound of the institute and turned them into ash using wood, fire, and chemicals that we don’t know. As they were doing that their faces were covered by masks and they wore gloves.”