The blog below includes a video which is circulating on Twitter. The video is very disturbing, showing the dead, with one of those who were killed identifief.
It is so close up that the area that is being filmed cannot easily be seen.
I believe that the Tigrinya that is spoken is from the area and that the stones shown appear to be the same as in the square outside the Mariam of Zion church complex.
The allegation that 750 civilians were massacred by Ethiopian forces and Amhara militia is so serious that we must be cautious about making it. It would be a war crime.
When further information becomes available, I plan to publish it.
Source: TGHAT
A footage of Aksum residents identifying one of the 700 massacred
A gruesome massacre was committed by the invading forces at Aksum’s Maryam Tsion church. The massacre took place when the people who were taking refuge in the church tried to defend the lotting of The Ark of the Covenant. Some say it is committed by the Ethiopian troops and others by the Eritrean troops.
In the footage below, residents are seen moving the body of one of the more than 700 massacred people. The residents are heard saying “what a devastation, this has happened to Aksum?”. The people are also seen identifying the victim by his id card: Gebrehiwot Gebrekidan, CBE employee.
Banks are the first targets for Eritrean soldiers to loot. People who are bank employees are therefore shot first. This particular victim might have been killed in a branch of a commercial bank, not part of the ones massacred in the church.
[email protected]
In the beginning, Italian Fascist Military officers committed atrocities in a monastery and killed the Abun. Decades later the Derg, which hailed from the barracks, killed the head of the Ethiopian Tewahdo Orthodox Church (in the late seventies.) The latest successors of the Derg, who pride themselves on having arrived from the bushes; marched back to Axum and allegedly committed massacres (in the oldest holy places in the land.) In their endless fight for political power, the political elite labeled their opponents as fascists. Is something wrong with modern Ethiopia’s elite? Has fascism endured Mussolini in Ethiopia into the twenty-first century?
Why does the word “elite” exist in Ethiopia? You can’t have a multi ethnic country where a small fraction consider themselves as “elite” and wants to control the country. It will be caos forever. If this continues Ethiopia should disintegrate and each ethnic group should form their own country.
What better term would suit them better then? Will you propose to Abiy Ahmed to share the title of “Moses”, with all his rivals in the country? What ever the inadequacy of the word I used, apocalypse isn’t on the horizon; it has arrived in Ethiopa !!