Today marks two years since one of the most gruesome massacres in modern Ethiopian history. The Mai Kadra massacre took place November 2020, in the early days of the war between the Government of Ethiopia and the TPLF, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front rebels in the Tigray region. Hundreds, if not more than a thousand people were killed, mostly ethnic Amhara. The Ethiopian Government says the perpetrators were members of a youth gang that went by the name of “Samri.”
It was a stunning act of violence that left behind physical and emotional scars on many Ethiopians. To complicate the grief, in the months following the gruesome killings, much of corporate media in the West was wrongly claiming that ethnic Tigrayans were the targeted victims.
Last November, during worldwide rallies of the #NoMore Global Movement, Nebiyu Asfaw, co-founder of the Ethiopian American Development Council said about Mai Kadra, “For the whole year, the narrative was a false narrative, it was all about the TPLF. The people that were committing the crime were being seen as victims. and the victims that were being killed, massacred, like these names that you are holding from Mai Kadra were being seen as the aggressors.”
Journalist Hermela Aregawi speaks to Asfaw about the two year commemoration of the chilling Mai Kadra massacres.
