A story of the genocidal rape (by Sesina Hailou published on Global Citizen, Dec. 12, 2022

Melat* (not her real name) is 22 years old and from Irob, an Indigenous community in Tigray. She grew up in a place called Adigrat, a couple of hours drive from Mekelle. Up until the war started, she led a normal life with her husband and her two-year-old daughter and was studying accounting on the side while working as a retailer. 

“When the war started my life was broken into pieces,” Melat told me. She remembers the beginning of the war, and how, not long after war broke out, Eritrean soldiers entered the city and the violence began.

After Adigrat was bombed, it wasn’t safe to stay any longer. I took my baby and joined seven girls to escape to a neighbouring village called Haraze, and then Eritrean soldiers caught us.

“For two weeks, they gang-raped me. For 14 days they wouldn’t stop, despite my pleas to at least breastfeed my daughter. They told me they would kill her too. 

“All of us were raped, they would take turns and rape us as a group of three while saying ‘we are cleansing your wombs, now you will have clean babies that are not Woyane’ [a word used to refer to Tigray’s fighters]. 

Me and three other girls managed to escape when the soldiers were doing a post-shift. We met an old man who joined our journey. Soldiers killed him right in front of our eyes but somehow they let us go. 

“I wasn’t able to get the treatment I needed to heal, but, as I had gotten pregnant, I was able to get a pill to abort it at a hospital. 

“Because my husband worked for the government and my life was under constant threat, I had to send my daughter with a stranger, so they could give her to my mom in another village as I knew there was no way they would let us both live if we were caught again.”

Melat left Tigray on Aug. 8, 2021, and is currently living at a refugee center (of undisclosed location due to safety reasons). 

“After I left the country, I managed to get to a refugee center. During my journey, I was raped several times by soldiers and human traffickers. 

“I managed to reach the refugee center alive, and I have now been here for a while but there are no proper medical facilities. I haven’t received any help and I have unbearable pain in my womb. There aren’t even proper places to stay or sleep. We sleep in a camp with no door. I can’t sleep because I am scared someone will attack me at night.

“There is no food, but there are a few Tegaru [people from Tigray] who help us and give us food. We can’t leave the refugee center to go to the shops because, when we go out, we are constantly harassed.

“I haven’t gotten any justice, and I don’t know what the future looks like for me. It takes up to 10 years to get through the process to leave. 

“I want the world to hear my story and Tigray’s women's story. Hear our cries, we need medical assistance urgently. There is so much stigma against victims of rape from the conflict. It is not our fault. Help us seek justice."