Tigray regional state announced on Friday, 21 June 2019, that it was pardoning 2,004 prisoners. The state administration said in a press statement that the group, including 55 women, had met the legal requirements for release. The pardon was timed for Tigray Martyrs’ Day, which falls on 22 June.
That day remembers an air attack on people at the market in Hawzen on 22 June 1988. Forces of then president Mengistu Haile Mariam carried out the raid. Hawzen was at the time under the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which later became the region’s ruling party. The attack is remembered as one of the worst episodes of the civil war that ran from 1975 to 1991.
The war ended on 28 May 1991, when the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, a rebel coalition dominated by the Tigray front, took Addis Ababa and Mengistu’s government fell. The 2019 pardon used that memory as the occasion for a present-day release. More than 2,000 people, 55 of them women, were to leave prison because the region said they had met the legal test, and because the calendar had reached the Hawzen anniversary. Families across Tigray were the people most directly affected. The press statement fixed the number, the number of women, the legal condition, and the date. It placed a routine-sounding pardon on one of the region’s hardest anniversaries, the market bombing of June 1988.
Residents mark 22 June for the people killed when aircraft struck the Hawzen market in 1988, and the regional administration set this pardon for the day before that anniversary. The 2,004 prisoners include 55 women. The administration said each of them had met the legal requirements for release. The statement also recalled that Hawzen was then held by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and that the civil war ended when that front’s coalition entered Addis Ababa on 28 May 1991.
Sources: Xinhua