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sarcasm
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51st Year Anniversary of Ona & Beskdira Massacre by Ethiopian Army in Eritrea

Post by sarcasm » 02 Dec 2021, 10:04

51 years ago, December 1, 1970 #Ethiopia’ army committed the biggest massacre in #Eritrea’s history 1000 people were burned alive in the villages of Beskdira & in Ona on the outskirts of Keren. I was a witness to their burial, the charcoal turned bodies of babies still haunts me

Mohamed Kheir Omer





Ona massacre

By Simon Weldemichael


Many villages suffered devastating losses during the 30- year war of the Eritrean liberation. Following the dictum of their emperor that “it’s Eritrea’s land that we want, not its people”, successive Ethiopian governments committed untold atrocities to exterminate the Eritrean people. The Ona massacre was one of the numerous atrocities committed against Eritrean civilians by the Ethiopian colonial army.

In Ona, a village two km from Keren, and surrounding villages, the colonial army killed the inhabitants, looted their properties and burned their houses in retaliation of the killing of Major General Teshome Ergetu, commander of the second division that was stationed in Eritrea. The commander of the Ethiopian army in Eritrea was shot on 20th November 1970 at a place between Balwa and Habrenbeqa, and on Tuesday morning, 1st December 1970, the Ethiopian army got off their vehicles in Ona and started shooting indiscriminately. No one was spared. Human beings and animals were targeted. Families melted like plastic in flames in their homes. Ona turned into a hell on earth. The blood of the defenseless civilians covered the ground and the sky turned dark with smoke. More than 800 people died, including pregnant women, children and elders.



Residents of Keren watched the tragedy at Ona unfold. Keren was completely overwhelmed by the atrocity. Some people ran away from the town and some went to the mosque and the church seeking protection. The elders of Keren, led by Sheik Abdulahi Said Bekri and many other notables, went to meet the commander of the Ethiopian army in Keren. When they met him, Sheik Said Abdullahi courageously said, “We will not shake your hand because your hand is not clean. The blood of the innocent people is in your hand. We came to ask for permission to bury our brothers and sisters.” The commander gave them half a day, and on Wednesday, 2nd December 1970, the people of Keren went to Ona, buried the dead and took the injured to hospital. Eye witnesses said 20-50 dead bodies were buried in one pit.



Before Ona, on 30th November 1970, Besikdra, located 20 kilometers north east of Keren, was targeted by the Ethiopian army for a mass killing. On that day, the army opened fire at the village mosque and killed 120 people who had sought sanctuary in what they thought was the safest place. Overall, 220 Eritreans of all ages were killed in the village.

The aim of the mass killing in Ona, Besikdra and surrounding villages was to terrorize and demoralize the people. It was a pattern for Ethiopian leaders and their army to intensify attacks on defenseless civilians after every defeat on the battleground. Emperor Haile Selassie burned villages after ELF and EPLF forces challenged his presence in Eritrea. The Derg also followed the same strategy of turning the gun on civilians after every military defeat. The TPLF, too, inherited the political legacy of its predecessors. After it declared war against Eritrea and was defeated by the Eritrean defense forces on the battleground, it turned to civilian Eritreans who lived in Ethiopia and deported them, separated them from their families and confiscated their properties.



The ordeal of the Eritrean people during the struggle for independence from the brute colonization of Ethiopia was numerous. Under Ethiopian colonial occupation, the Eritrean people faced oppression and destruction. Successive Ethiopian governments intensified genocidal acts in an attempt to crush the armed resistance of the Eritrean people and pursued a scorched earth technique of destruction and terror to impair the fighting spirit of Eritreans. In his book ‘The Red Tears’, Dawit Woldegiorgis, an Ethiopian colonial officer in Eritrea, admitted the brutality committed by the Ethiopian army. He wrote, “The army … did not concentrate on attacking the guerrillas directly; instead it devastated the villages suspected of harboring them.” The military strategy of successive Ethiopian regimes did not differentiate between the military and civilians. Your Eritrean identity was enough for the army to attack you.

The Ona massacre is commemorated by Eritreans every year in December in honour of the victims, and many poems and songs have been dedicated to it. Last week, the 50th commemoration event was held in Ona and was attended by government officials and survivors of the atrocity and their relatives. Fifty years after the massacre at Ona, the psychological wound left by Ethiopian colonizers is still felt today and may need more time to heal. But the people and government of Eritrea have chosen not to dwell in the past believing that focusing on the future is the way to peace and development.

https://shabait.com/2020/12/05/ona-massacre/

sarcasm
Senior Member
Posts: 10186
Joined: 23 Feb 2013, 20:08

Re: 51st Year Anniversary of Ona & Beskdira Massacre by Ethiopian Army in Eritrea

Post by sarcasm » 02 Dec 2021, 20:06

We are still burning’ – survivors of Beskdira and Ona massacre

Fifty years ago, Beskdira and Ona witnessed two of the worst massacres in Eritrea’s colonial history when unarmed civilians were brutally massacred by Ethiopian colonial troops. While Beskdira is a small village about 20 kilometres northeast of the city of Keren, Ona is located just at the outskirts of the city. Both villages were burned to ashes, one after another, in a matter of two days by the colonial army in retaliation for the killing of Ethiopian Major General Teshome Ergetu. In this reflexive blog, I provide an insight into what happened in these villages fifty years ago and highlight survivors’ stories.

In Beskidira, on 30 November 1970, the colonial army savagely killed over 120 defenceless unarmed civilians. In fact, the residents of Beskdira had gathered together to welcome the Ethiopian soldiers hoping that a welcome gesture would deter them from burning the village. Following an initial deceitful indication of a peaceful meeting, however, the heavily armed soldiers took the terrified villagers hostage for a couple of hours while waiting for the final orders as to what to do with them. After they received information from their commanders, the armed soldiers attempted to separate the inhabitants of the village into groups of Christians and Muslims. The villagers, however, courageously refused to be separated and explained their preparedness to die together rather than being divided on religious grounds. When asked whether they were Christians or Muslims, Meriem (not her real name) recalled the villagers’ response as follows:

We are both Christians and Muslims. But, above all, we are sisters and brothers… We are the same people: our blood and flesh are the same. We attest our innocence and beg you not to annihilate us, but if the choices you offer are between death and division, we are prepared to die together.

Unhappy with the uncompromising response, the troops ordered all the villagers (Christians and Muslims, men and women, adults and children) to gather inside a mosque and then indiscriminately massacred them with their semi-automatic guns; over 120 people were viciously killed, many were seriously wounded, and infants were left clinging to the [ deleted ] of their dead mothers. The massacre was one of the most brutal in the history of the Ethiopian colonisation of Eritrea. For readers of the Tigrigna language, the list of the murdered civilians and details about the atrocity can be found here.

A day after the carnage in Beskdira, Ona became the next target. The village was subjected to overnight artillery shelling and then, during the day, on 1 December 1970, armed troops came to the village on their military cars and aimlessly bombed the entire village. In minutes, Ona was turned to ashes and its inhabitants to charred bodies; over 800 unarmed civilians were either burned inside their houses or brutally shot to death. The people of the surrounding villages and the city of Keren watched in horror at what was unfolding in front of their eyes. Survivors’ stories of the human depravity are beyond imagination. Jabaraya Media has a recently salvaged comprehensive account of survivors’ stories and histories on its Facebook Page.

Talking on social media, the survivors appealed to the young generation to honour the victims. Among other things, they suggest three things that we can do to honour the victims’ ideals. First, we must recognise their untold suffering and salvage what is left of their stories of misery. Those survivors who were found nipping at their dead mothers in the wake of the tragic incident and who grew up hearing the tragic stories should not be left feeling abandoned and that the promises of their generation are being ignored. This is not to underestimate the work that has been done so far by Eritrean professional and researchers. In fact, we must acknowledge and celebrate the enormous work of preservation that has already been done and build on it. In this digital era, creating a documentary and conducting a salvage ethnography are some of the viable options of preserving the untold stories of the past generations.

Second, we must address the survivors’ fear that the historical sites, which still bear traces of the enormous human suffering to which they bore witness, will soon become ruins. As you can see in the image below, for example, every brick of the mosque where the massacre was perpetrated in Beskdira represents a forgotten history of human anguish. The names and stories of the victims are written on the walls by those who bore witness to the tragedy, along with blotches of the victims’ blood where it splashed and the holes created by the enemy’s bullets. Discoloured by the blood of those who suffered the barbaric cruelty, the dirty floors of the mosque in Beskdira and burned stones of Ona represent a personalised, ritualised and memorialised history of the Blin people of Eritrea. Fifty years later, however, the survivors are watching as the historical site and its monuments collapse before their eyes. It is now our turn to preserve these historical sites before they have reached a point where we can no longer maintain the monuments intact.

Last, but not least, we can embrace our ancestors’ collective aspirations of respecting one another and living together in harmony. If our ancestors stood together with one another in the worst of times, healing should not divide us. Social solidarity, community cohesion and resilience are some of the preconditions for us as a people and nation to heal ourselves from the collective trauma of the dark past. The carnage of Beskdira and Ona can only afford us a snapshot of the colonial devastation, so we must broaden our efforts to reconstitute what was left destitute by successive colonial powers.

In the end, we must never forget the charred bodies, the burnt villages and the visceral pain of the survivors. The apocalyptic imagery of the destruction of the village and the human suffering of the inhabitants still remain fresh in the minds of the survivors. As Haile (not his real name) articulated, the survivors assert: ‘We have not forgotten the pain even for one second… We are still burning and will die burning in honour of those who died before us’. Our history as a people and a nation is built on the ashes of those burnt villages, the blood of the human victims and engrained trauma of the survivors. Barbaric acts of violence such as the Beskdira and Ona massacres were orchestrated to instil fear of not only the cruel colonial army but also life itself. The colonised subjects were relegated to a form of ‘life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself’ (Agamben, 2000, p. 3). Yet, they have never succumbed to fear and violence. Instead, they yearn for the freedom to breathe free. They put their lives on the line for freedom from oppression and the incessant violence they were subjected to. In doing so, they hoped for a better future for their children, the generations to come and their country. As a society, we must rediscover these deferred hopes and dreams and pursue them.


Photo credit: Gherghishu Awte

Author
Hyab Yohannes

https://www.blinashama.org.uk/we-are-st ... -massacre/

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