Reopening a cold case: the December 2020 mass expulsions of Ethiopians from Al Fashaga
N.B this article is written in the first person and compiles second hand testimony and open source evidence surrounding events that took place in December 2020, in contested territories claimed by both Ethiopia and Sudan. As such, there are no established conclusions, and this is being written with the hope of encouraging journalists and human rights researchers to look into the matter and with the hope of one day establishing facts.
The escalation of the dispute over land in the Al Fashga triangle came against the backdrop of the breakout of civil war in Tigray, which would go on for two years and leave hundreds of thousands dead.
As things deteriorated in Ethiopia, clashes between Ethiopia and Sudanese militiamen in the disputed territories, resulted in Sudanese troops retaking the entirety of the 260 square kilometre contested area by the end of December 2020 and expelling thousands of Ethiopian farmers who had lived alongside Sudanese neighbours in the area for generations. Sudanese troops remain in control of the area today, despite that country being embroiled by internal conflict since April 2023.
Ethiopia’s then Foreign Ministry spokesperson Dina Mufti accused Sudan of capitalising on Ethiopia’s civil war to capture the disputed territory and claimed Sudan was intent on waging war against Ethiopia. Sudan denied this and claimed that it acted to counter aggression and Ethiopian militia attacks on civilians in the area.
While it’s difficult to determine what exactly happened, what both Ethiopia and Sudan agree to is that days before the war in Tigray broke out, Sudanese transitional leader General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan arrived in Addis Ababa, where he was told about the imminent war in Tigray and was asked to seal Ethiopia’s border with Sudan shut to prevent Tigrayan rebels from using it to funnel supplies.
General Al-Burhan told assembled press and officials in January 2021, that at the meeting, he had agreed with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to close the border, but that Ethiopia itself wasn’t doing anything to stop regional militias from launching attacks in Sudan.
But Ethiopian Foreign Minister Demeke Mekonnen disagreed. “Sudan had agreed to close its borders to prevent those being sought by the [Ethiopian] law from escaping to Sudan during our law enforcement operation,” he said in comments to state media, using a term the Ethiopian government initially used to refer to the civil war. “But instead within days, they unexpectedly invaded and captured Ethiopian territory.”
In addition to the fallout over land and Sudan’s apparent refusal to seal its border, the two countries were at odds over Ethiopia’s construction of a hydroelectric power dam on the Nile River. Upstream Sudan and Egypt have long opposed the project, expressing fears that the dam would cut into their own water supply. As tensions rose, both countries massed troops on their border, although diplomacy prevailed and all out war between the two was thwarted. It wasn’t enough to prevent the forced expulsions of Ethiopian farmers from the newly captured lands.
The manner of the expulsion of Ethiopian farmers from Al Fashga hasn’t been properly documented anywhere, and with details of civilian massacres beginning to emerge from Ethiopia, the removals hardly made anyone’s radar.
Between January and February 2021, journalists began amassing evidence and testimony highlighting the involvement of troops from neighbouring Eritrea in Ethiopia’s war, something vehemently denied by the Ethiopian government. In the midst of this, and my own investigation for VICE News into a campaign of ethnic cleansing in central Tigray that Eritrean troops were involved in, I first heard accounts of what happened to those who fled the Sudanese takeover of Al Fashaga in December 2021.
One man who resided in the Ethiopian town of Abdurafi, minutes from the border with Sudan explained to me that the town was full of displaced farmers who spoke of Sudanese military atrocities and killings of Ethiopian men accused of being spies for militia fighters who had attacked Sudanese civilians in the preceding weeks. The displaced farmers, all of whom were members of Ethiopia’s second largest ethnic group the Amhara, had lived and traded in both countries, toiling on the land and selling farming produce to communities on either side of the Ethiopian-Sudanese border, I was told.
The open border was a result of an agreement Ethiopia and Sudan penned in 2008, in which the two countries acknowledged the Al Fashaga territory as falling under Sudanese jurisdiction, but permitted residents of both nationalities to till the land and co-exist alongside each other. The deal was condemned by Ethiopian political opposition groups who accused the then Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of ceding Ethiopian land and bowing to pressure from his counterpart, Sudanese former President Omar Al Bashir.
Over the next decade or so, the odd crossborder attack and clashes between the communities would be reported, but were never a serious flashpoint in diplomatic ties between the two states.
Regime changes on either side of the border had shaken things up and by late 2020, both Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed were keen on presenting themselves as capable of repelling security threats. With the Sudanese military action, the agreement of 2008 was abandoned and with it went the joint open border policy.
After learning about what had happened, I tried reaching out to eyewitnesses and survivors of the alleged massacre at Al Fashaga. I chased after rumours and data that could further piece together what happened. Snippets of information from aid workers and Ethiopian journalists pointed to Sudanese troops engaging in possible crimes against humanity in its mass expulsion of ethnic Amhara families from Al Fashaga.
The UK based Vigil Monitor organisation, which had worked with me extensively throughout the war also came across information from their own sources and shared with me that a considerably large number of displaced people said to have fled a Sudanese military onslaught in Al Fashaga were by January 2021, sheltered in camps in the Ethiopian town of Mai Kadra.
Despite a two year communications shutdown plunging much of the war-impacted areas of Tigray into darkness, Mai Kadra still had very limited phone accessibility that made it reachable for journalists keen on investigating the massacre of civilians that took place there on November 9th 2020.
Unfortunately, by the time I was aware of the presence of former Al Fashaga residents in Mai Kadra, movement to certain areas of the town became restricted without a permit. A number of local and international journalists had been able to visit the town after obtaining a press pass from Ethiopia’s media authority. But my contact in the town was a local who worked informally and remotely with international press to amass info and data. Being caught would have led to accusations of espionage, and likely death. The same month, another local journalist, Dawit Kebede Araya, was shot dead by Ethiopian troops in the city of Mekelle.
As such, I was never able to connect with those sheltered at Mai Kadra. Last year, I came into contact with an aid worker who says he managed to. He spoke of women and children who ran for their lives after being shot at and who witnessed soldiers looting their homes. Two years on, the war has ended and those who had been sheltering at the town’s camps have long dispersed.
Much of what we would have to build an investigation on is thus circumstantial and testimony has been largely obtained through second hand source. Open source data, including low resolution imagery obtainable from the likes of Sentinel Hub, appears to depict destruction and fires that correspond with the timeline of the Sudanese military entry into Al Fashaga. However, these hold no water on their own and would be insufficient to rule out other causes of destruction, especially as military clashes in the area were reported throughout December 2020.
However, they do indicate that in addition to the destroyed homes, which are hardly visible in the low resolution imagery, swathes of nearby and surrounding farmland were set ablaze between December 20th and December 30th 2020.
In 2021, as the war raged on, both international and local media staff in the country were heavily restricted from doing any hard hitting reporting. Forty six local media workers were arrested over the course of 2021. Twenty one of those detentions were reported during a forty eight hour period following the June 2021 recapture of much of Tigray by rebel forces. Others faced endless harassment by Ethiopian authorities, whose forces stood accused of committing the bulk of the abuses.
But in the case of the crimes that allegedly took place in December 2020 at Al Fashaga, there is nothing alleged that would have proven damaging to the Ethiopian government. It would be up to the Sudanese military to refute allegations that its forces were engaged in a weeks’ long campaign of forced expulsions of hundreds and possibly thousands of people that could amount to ethnic cleansing.
The Ethiopian military and their allies were in control of the areas that Al Fashaga’s former Ethiopian residents were reported to have taken shelter in, Mai Kadra and Abdurafi. They were thus privy to what had transpired.
But aside from issuing statements accusing Sudan of seizing an opportunity with Ethiopia distracted, Ethiopian officials did nothing to shine a light on the specific plight of the displaced residents. There is a reason for that, according to a former diplomat I spoke to recently.
“What I know is that after Sudan lost a few soldiers in initial skirmishes, Sudanese soldiers seeking revenge went on a rampage and targeted any and all Ethiopian inhabitants of Al Fashaga. Many were killed,” said the diplomat who was willing to speak to me on the condition of anonymity.
“From what I understand, those incidents weren’t brought up publicly because it wouldn’t have been suitable for domestic political consumption. If the Ethiopian public became aware that a large number of Ethiopian civilians were killed by Sudanese forces, there would be demands for action to either retake the Al Fashaga territory, or at least avenge the dead. We were in no position to do either. [Prime Minister] Abiy didn’t want to appear to be weak and unable to defend his people. So the decision was made to ignore it.”
The diplomat did say however, that at some period in 2022, Ethiopia privately brought up the issue of Al Fashaga’s former residents with Sudanese officials who promised to raise the issue with superiors who would “investigate” the claims and punish any perpetrators. The diplomat expresses doubt that anything of the sort ever took place.
While federal and regional authorities were well aware of what had occurred, concealing it from the public became easier, the diplomat says, after a TPLF incursion into the Amhara region disrupted life in much of the region and displaced hundreds of thousands.
Sending a journalist to the Al Fashaga area to possibly authenticate some of the claims was out of the question, even prior to the April 2023 breakout of all out war in Sudan. The border area remains heavily militarised and the odd flare up that would take place from time to time, made the region extremely volatile and unpredictable.
In June 2022, after Ethiopian militiamen reportedly executed seven captured Sudanese soldiers, another bout of serious fighting between Sudanese and Ethiopian forces at Al Fashaga broke out. Diplomacy eventually prevailed and calm was restored.
On April 19th, four days into the war between the Sudanese military and Rapid Support paramilitary forces, the Al Sudani newspaper reported that Ethiopian forces launched an attack on Sudanese positions in the Al Fashaga, believing those forces to be vulnerable as a result of fighting in Khartoum. The attack was reportedly repulsed, but Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed denied involvement of his forces in any attack.
By January 2022, Google Maps had updated its satellite imagery for certain areas along the Ethiopian Sudanese border for the first time in years. I found out perhaps four or five months later. It prompted me to look back at notes I had compiled when first looking into the expulsions over two years ago. The man I had spoken to in early 2021 in the town of Abdurafi, had explained how some of the displaced had fled a massacre and the razing of a village that was only a short drive away from the town of Abdurafi.
Located on the Sudanese side of the internationally recognized border near the Angereb River, and some 15 km or so from the town of Abdurafi, barren and desolate land with visible charred white markings indicating residue of fire destruction.
By cycling through historical imagery for the location, one can find visible signs of civilian residential dwellings and a farming community that appears to have thrived and grown in population from 2014 until the breakout of hostilities in 2020.
The collection of some fifty or so humble metal sheet roof capped structures and tukul homes that are very common across farming communities in the Horn of Africa are clearly visible. The updated imagery from January 2022 meanwhile, clearly shows that all of the residential structures in the unidentified village have since been obliterated.
Properly analyzing the pictures would require an expertise in imagery forensics that I lack. However, as journalists were forced to work remotely to cover a civil war that was fought under the cover of an information blackout, the use of satellite imagery became crucial to unearthing information on atrocities that would emerge days, weeks, sometimes months later. The massacre of hundreds of men and boys in the town of Axum took place in late November 2020, but only became widely known when Amnesty International published a detailed probe backed by satellite imagery analysis and eyewitness testimony, in February 2021.
As such, open source experts who worked independently, or alongside organisations such as Bellingat, the DFRLab and Vigil Monitor worked with journalists to decipher, archive and analyse all kinds of content. With the staff of Vigil Monitor I had the chance to collaborate with experts who had ample experience accumulated from work on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. For their own safety, I’m not naming them but I’m grateful in particular to one stalwart who shared much of his own expertise and enhanced my knowledge considerably.
Their analysis of imagery often proved crucial for fact checking counter claims, including that the August 2021 razing of a farming community by rebel fighters in Ethiopia’s Amhara region might have been caused by an airstrike. These claims were easily debunked by the pattern of the flames and destruction, which suggest that actors on the ground deliberately set residential homes ablaze.
With the updated imagery from Al Fashaga, we have the luxury of very high resolution Google Imagery, far easier to work with than much of the openly sourced material that we can use. I still wouldn’t try my hand at identifying cratering marks, which experts can sometimes use to identify if a location was struck by heavy weaponry, such as an artillery shell.
But what I will add here is the layman’s analysis, in which one could rule out the possibility of the destruction being caused by a wildfire, both due to the fact that analysis of Sentinel Imagery show that the blaze didn’t spread beyond the village and farming soil adjacent to it. The trees and bush shrubs that dot the homes and properties in the village appear to have been spared, suggesting the perpetrators took precautions to avoid setting them alight and instead of setting them on fire, may simply have stripped the roofs and walls for their parts.
Had the destruction been caused by a wildfire, the trees circled in yellow wouldn’t have been left unscathed.
Publicly available NASA Firms fire data shows that part of the destruction was caused by a fire on December 26th 2020, in the midst of the Sudanese military campaign to cleanse the area of Ethiopian inhabitants. The inferno rendered the entire village inhospitable, preventing any touted returns of displaced former inhabitants. Having studied hundreds of high and low resolution images depicting ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, the images from Al Fashaga share the same unmistakable pattern that indicate something horrifying occurred on December 26th 2020.
Similar systematic destruction elsewhere across the Al Fashaga region dating back to December 2020 is visible with Google’s image updates.
The compiled evidence suggests war crimes took place, but the evidence remains circumstantial without locating a considerable number of survivors or eyewitnesses who can corroborate, without being led on or without coercion, some of the findings. On their own, these images and some of my accompanying notes may provide guidance for journalists and human rights researchers, but additional work would be required to establish with certainty that crimes against humanity took place.
The November 2022 signing of the Pretoria agreement ended the war and saw the warring factions agree to among other things, the setting up of a transitional justice mechanism that has the mandate of addressing the litany of abuses and war crimes that took place over the past three years.
The prospects of an Ethiopian led judicial inquiry holding powerful Ethiopian military and government officials accountable for war crimes were already considered scant when Ethiopian news magazine Addis Standard reported earlier this week that the African Union which had mediated the Ethiopian peace process, quietly ended its own investigative initiative into the war, and deleted a webpage it had set up for the probe.
There is an ongoing United Nations probe into human rights abuse allegations ordered in late 2021, but diplomatic sources have suggested to Reuters that the probe won’t be renewed for another year when its mandate expires later this year. The developments reveal that the international community, preoccupied with Ukraine, has little stamina or willingness to continue to look into a conflict that it is widely (and erroneously) referred to as resolved and ended.
The likelihood is that the grand majority of war crimes allegations related to Ethiopia’s various wars will go unmentioned and unaddressed, even by the yet to be published final UN report. It will be up to local journalists, activists and human rights researchers to provide scarred communities across the country with answers.
This article on what occurred at Al Fashaga is written with the hope that those with greater access or more information, can build on it or use it as a starting point for investigations of their own.
I had initially decided against producing this article, believing that I had to compile something far more complete and thorough for public consumption. Instead, I passed the data on to several media outlets that I felt were better placed to pursue answers. In the end, I went ahead with putting this together, arguing that even half complete, it was preferable to put it out there, as with the years going by and the breakout of newer conflicts, by keeping it under the wraps we risked burying a dark chapter of our collective history.
