Ethiopians who have escaped the intense fighting in their northern homeland of Tigray by fleeing into Sudan are safe, but the terrifying nightmare of what they witnessed continues to haunt them.
“I saw bodies dismembered by the explosions,” said Ganet Gazerdier, a 75-year-old sitting alone in the dust at eastern Sudan’s Um Raquba Refugee Camp, newly opened to cope with a sudden influx of more than 27,000 people fleeing airstrikes, artillery barrages and massacres in Ethiopia.
“Other bodies were rotting, lying on the road, murdered with a knife,” she added.
Photo: AFP
Distraught at having been forced to flee their homes, traumatized by becoming separated from family members in the mad rush and horrified after witnessing killings, refugees wander as if dazed in the camp.
“I lived with my three daughters,” said Gazerdier, dressed in a blue dress and white headscarf to protect her from the blazing sun. “When the shells started to rain down on our house, we all panicked and fled in the dark.”
The bombardment not only destroyed her house in Humera, the site of reportedly some of the heaviest fighting, but also separated her from her family.
Everyone scattered and she has yet to make contact with them.
She has found some help at the camp, 80km from the border, but conditions are rough, with only basic emergency relief set up.
For the Ethiopians who arrive, there is an initial sense of relief that they are safe.
However, for many, a sense of guilt soon kicks in, as they sit and wait in the hope that those they love might also turn up.
To escape, Messah Geidi split from his wife and four-year-old son — and he cannot forgive himself.
“I don’t know where they are, and if they are still alive,” he said.
Geidi comes from Mai-Kadra, where Amnesty International said last week that “scores, and likely hundreds, of people were stabbed or hacked to death.”
“I fled Mai-Kadra, because the army slaughtered the young people like sheep,” Geidi said.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that the border area faces an emergency.
“A full-scale humanitarian crisis is unfolding,” UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch said, adding that about 4,000 people were fleeing across the frontier each day.
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