Lenin Ndebele
Tigray war amputees pose before a rehabilitation exercise at a center in Mekele.
Ximena Borrazas
- Humanitarian agencies are ramping up efforts to educate the public about abandoned explosives in Tigray.
- Since the start of the conflict, more than 280 civilian deaths have been linked to explosives.
- Ethiopia was urged to ratify and implement the CCW 1980 and its fifth protocol.
A seven-year-old Ethiopian boy in Tigray picked up what he thought was an interesting toy, something he had never seen, and ran home to show his mother.
He ran, perhaps like a footballer in celebration, caring about the bragging rights rather than the fact that he had found the object on a grave.
When he arrived home, his father tried to take it away from him, and it detonated.
“My husband was killed by an object that my son brought home. He was trying to collect it from the boy when it exploded, killing him and injuring our three children,” Beyenesh Mesfin, the boy’s mother who survived the explosion, told investigators of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Ethiopian Red Cross Society.
Mesfin is from Tabya Fithi, in Seyemti Adyabo Woreda, Tigray, one of the areas hardest hit by the Ethiopian civil war, where the story is all too familiar.
The war saw the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and government forces, as well as the Eritrean army, in a brutal two-year-long armed conflict, which was stopped by the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement, signed in Pretoria, South Africa, in November last year.
READ | Immediate cessation of hostilities, unfettered humanitarian access to dominate Ethiopian peace talks
This week, the European Union launched a Multiannual Indicative Programme with Ethiopia for the period 2024-2027.
The cooperation will focus on three priority areas: a green energy deal, human development and governance, and peacebuilding.
This is despite civil society at the ongoing United Nations Human Rights Council arguing that “all of the common risk factors for atrocity crimes are present in Ethiopia”.
In rebuilding Tigray, assisting victims of explosive remnants of war and keeping people safe from the deadly legacy of the conflict are among the main programmes.
Vasanth Kanags, the ICRC’s weapons contamination specialist, said that, while the guns had been silenced, civilians were now being affected by the after-effects of war through abandoned arms and ammunition.
“It’s an absolute tragedy for someone to be killed or to lose a limb due to the detonation of unexploded weapons, even more so after the end of a conflict,” he said.
As such, the ICRC said they were ramping up their campaign to educate the public about the dangers presented by objects, such as abandoned explosives.
Tigray rebels start handing over weapons to the Ethiopian army
“It’s urgent that we inform communities of this danger, especially children, who naturally want to play with new, interesting-looking objects,” said Kanags.
Maybe Desta Arbra’s son and wife would be alive today if they were aware that what they thought was scrap metal was an explosive.
Arbra, from Freweyni in eastern Tigray, told investigators that her son “died from an explosion, together with his wife, after attempting to cut an object into pieces for sale as scrap metal, not realising it was an explosive remnant of war.”
According to the United Nations Mine Action Service, “explosive Ordnance Risk Education has been provided to humanitarian personnel from 28 organisations, and more than 50 000 at-risk populations have been reached in Northern Ethiopia”.
Since the start of the conflict, more than 280 deaths linked to explosives have been reported in Northern Ethiopia. However, not all of these cases have been confirmed, and it is also thought that many more accidents go unreported.
According to preliminary statistics, youngsters account for an alarming majority of fatalities (57%).The ICRC said Ethiopia could help reduce the threat of abandoned arms of war and explosives by signing, ratifying, and implementing the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW 1980) and its fifth protocol on explosive remnants of war.
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