Talk:Mai Kadra massacre

Contested deletion

This article should not be speedy deleted as lacking sufficient context to identify its subject, because it is under construction and I am adding detail as we speak.--Varavour (talk) 21:55, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Premature assignment of blame

On reading the ingress, I was led to understand that the TPLF committed the atrocity, but reading further, I understood that this claim is disputed and that government forces have also been blamed. As a casual reader who knows nothing of this conflict, reading that ingress in an instant seemed to color the parties of the conflict very starkly in a way that on further reading, seems dubious. The ingress ought to be edited to reflect how unclear the information regarding this event still is.

Sincerely, Sanna A, Sweden 159.242.234.119 (talk) 21:07, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

Just because one party denied it doesn’t mean that they didn’t do it. There is enough evidence showing that they did do it for inclusion. Flalf^Talk 22:42, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

Unless I've misread them, the Thomson Reuters and Telegraph reports at most only have one witness with a discordant report for "Moya Khadra"; one case is for an unnamed town; some are for Humera. A separate article could be broken off for Humera massacre if the reports are serious enough. Boud (talk) 00:43, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

I concur with the concerns of Sanna A. The ingress until minutes ago was misleading in the context of the full article. This article covers a highly-controversial event related to an ongoing conflict; as such, editors should be vigilant about maintaining objectivity and clarity regarding assertions made and the nature of their sources.108.48.44.199 (talk) 02:48, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

There's no dispute about the principles of WP:NPOV for the WP:LEAD, which it can't hurt to call the "ingress" for the sake of this discussion. Feel free to discuss specific edit disagreements here. Boud (talk) 19:00, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

I added allegedly. Flalf^Talk 21:59, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

Most of the victims per Amnesty and EHRC; and Thomson Reuters

In the Amnesty International report I see:

• the Amhara regional government’s media agency AMMA reported there were around 500 victims, adding that they were primarily non-Tigrayan residents of the town.
• immediate sentence following: A man who is helping to clear the bodies from the streets told Amnesty International that he had looked at the state-issued identification cards of some victims, and most were Amhara.

EHRC preliminary report to media after a 6-day mission:

• hundreds of people they identified as ethnic “Amharas and Wolkait origin”,

So either "mostly Amharans" or "non-Tigrayans" seems to match the two sources.

The Thomson Reuters report has one witness interviewed by a journalist who said that Tigrayans were the victims: Barhat, 52, said she fled from Moya Khadra after people from the Amhara region, which borders Tigray and whose rulers back Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, attacked them. "They killed anyone who said they were Tigrayan."

Based on the depth of information in the various reports, I think that the Thomson Reuters refugee interviewee only counts as an "alternative" point of view, and does not override the Amnesty and EHRC reports concerning "most" of the victims, given the present sources that we have.

Boud (talk) 22:06, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

The EHRC preliminary report posted on GAFAMdocs (the EHRC presumably does not know that it should manage its own webpage independently) gives a lot more depth than the newspaper report. Boud (talk) 22:51, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

I would note that every indication suggests that the events described in the Reuters report and the Telegraph are also claimed to have taken place in Mai Kadra as opposed to another towns. In particular, the reference to a "town near Humera" should be clearly taken to mean Mai Kadra. Hence, the separation between events in Mai Kadra and "events in the region" would appear to be fallacious. I will add some things from reports from CNN and AFP which provide independent verification. As for the website I would not be so hard on the EHRC; they are grossly underfunded and hosting a reliable website in Ethiopia is a real pain. --Varavour (talk) 00:26, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

If you think the separation between Mai Kadra and Humera is misleading, then giving specific quotes here would probably be useful, especially given what has been verging on edit wars here, especially by IPs. I'm not saying that you shouldn't edit the article, but details here may help shortcut edit wars, and especially help editors aiming at NPOV (hopefully most, though a few need some time to learn). If federal forces went on a "vengeance" rampage on the way to and in Humera, then that info will hopefully be collected and published.

On the EHRC and a website: it's not a question of funding and hosting a website necessarily locally; it's a question of knowledge: there are plenty of independent, well-reputed alternatives to GAFAM available, which would certainly be better than googledocs. Boud (talk) 00:46, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

• Please note that the Amnesty International article states that the perpetrators could not be independently verified. They are citing Amhara Government Media Agency and phone calls with people accompanied government forces, whilst the Tigrayan media and refugees say the exact opposite. Contact with the Tigray region is completely cut off, and the Ethiopian Government has refused to allow independent investigations. They have only allowed the Government headed EHRC to investigate so government backed reports should be taken with caution as they are unlikely to implicate the government themselves. A.y.187 (talk) 13:00, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

• @A.y.187: I see nothing in the Amnesty report about telephone calls. It's true that face-to-face interviews are more reliable than online (or only audio, e.g. telephone) interviews, but this is not a major argument against the reliability of the investigation. More importantly, the Amnesty report does not say that it is only citing Amhara Government Media Agency; it quite clearly talks about several interviews and gives a fair amount of details of its investigation. There are no particular reasons to expect Amnesty to be biased to one side or another here.

The FT article is new and reports info from a second refugee, that's significant.

Another point which is significant in the Amnesty report is the witnesses who were available for interviews: witnesses, who were providing food and other supplies to the Ethiopian Defense Forces (EDF). People who were attacked by the ENDF (= EDF) or ENDF-associated forces (Amhara militias) would probably be afraid to provide food to the ENDF; they would be more likely to be in hiding or have fled to Sudan.

The degree of independence of the EHRC from the government is an important point - please help develop the article Ethiopian Human Rights Commission - currently it says that a critic of the EHRC, Bekele, was appointed director in Feb 2019, so it appears that the EHRC is not as dependent on the federal government as it used to be. But the more sourced information we have, the better. Boud (talk) 16:10, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

• It seems that most of the international media don't have deeper knowledge what was happened and what was going on in the country. To understand this and figure out the right information, it is critical to understand the situation from the complexity perspective of the country and even it is important to have at least 30 years back history of the country. Unfortunately, most of the international media become victims (knowingly and/or unknowingly) of the strategic and systematic propaganda of the TPLF and its fabricated information. So it is important to differentiate between the fact and fake news (false information). Of course I have to acknowledge BBC that figured out the fake news of TPLF (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-54985545). The amnesty international and the independent Ethiopian human right commission have investigated the situation from the place and provided documents (reports) to the world, so I think, it is better to consider those information as source and to get the fact what happened in Mai Kadra. One thing that the international media, primarily Reuter and NYT, failed to investigate is that the TPLF had systematically deployed its supporters to Sudan and some of the so called "Samri" youth group who conducted this barbaric massacre had fled to Sudan, after the defeat of the TPLF loyal force by the Ethiopian army. These groups joined refuges camp in Sudan and disseminated false information to the international media and that is why I said above, it is critical to have a deeper knowledge of the situation, historical perspective and strategic agenda of TPLF. In fact there are also some clues that the WHO general, member of the TPLF, tried to pressure the Ethiopian government although he denied it (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/11/19/ethiopia-who-tedros-criminal-military-tigray/) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55001328.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.247.252.171 (talk • contribs) 10:08, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

References

Sources now suggest parallel massacres

This is just a reminder that this en.Wikipedia article cannot get closer to the truth than the reliable sources. The sources we have do not directly contradict each other. If all the witnesses have spoken truthfully and been accurately quoted/summarised by Amnesty, EHRC, Reuters, and the FT, then there have been successive, or partly simultaneous, massacres in Mai Kadra by Samri and the Amhara militias. (Sounds like the UN Security Council will need to get the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate, given that Ethiopia is not party to the Rome Statute of the ICC.) Boud (talk) 17:09, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I started the article Humera massacre, since the number of sources seems strong enough.

For anyone thinking of an overview article, the sources we have now point to:

• Humera Airport massacre - 70 victims - date could be sometime before 10 November when the ENDF arrived; or could be by the ENDF/Amharans after they arrived and before 29 November when the one source (Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation, repeated in multiple media) reported it, attributed to TPLF by anonymous military person;
• Mai Kadra massacre - 700 or more victims - 9-10 November - Amnesty + EHRC say by Samri (Tigrayans) against Amharans; two refugees say by Amharans against Tigrayans;
• Humera massacre - 20 or more Tigrayan victims - has to be sometime before/on or around 12 November, the day when the ENDF officially took over Humera; three Western mainstream media sources interviewing refugees;
• ethnic murders taking place "on the road" - dates, locations unknown, interviews with refugess in Western mainstream media.

I don't see any point creating Humera Airport massacre with only one source that has very little information (one human body per grave? forensic analysis to estimate dates of deaths? independent human rights investigation team/prosecutors' team invited to investigate?). A probably uncontroversial title for an overview article could be Human rights violations during the Tigray conflict. This could have more details of the cases at unidentified locations and dates. Boud (talk) 00:36, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Amnesty International 12 Dec 2020 (ref name="AP_Shadowy_massacre", currently ref [12],): Amnesty researcher Fisseha Tekle told an event on Tuesday as fears grow about atrocities elsewhere in Tigray. "Other credible allegations are emerging ... not only in Mai-Kadra but also" in the nearby town of Humera, the town of Dansha and the Tigray capital, Mekele. Tuesday = 8 December. So that makes: Humera Airport massacre (if we get enough sources); Mai Kadra massacre; Humera massacre; Dansha massacre (if we get enough sources); Mekelle massacre (if we get enough sources); "on-the-road" massacres. AFP visited Dansha, which was one of the locations of the 4 November Northern Command attacks, and didn't report any testimonies of killings of civilians, it only reported on the 4 November lethal battle between soldiers/militias and an apparently calm aftermath. AFP doesn't seem to have interviewed Tigrayans in Dansha - they might have fled or might have felt at risk giving interviews. Boud (talk) 23:29, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

References

The incident at Mai Kadra with 600 victims seems to dwarf all the later incidents. May I ask what is your motivation for wanting so badly a separate special dedicated article for every possible alleged incident of ten or twenty people dying in wartime, in this particular war? And there are at least three other conflicts going on now in the world. KZebegna (talk) 14:55, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

I think you missed the words (if we get enough sources). This is an encyclopedia.

• Check out List of massacres in Syria for a precedent. I count about 22 individual pages of massacres there with the median number of victims per massacre article being somewhere around 50 or so, and most in the 20-200 range. There are about 8 massacres listed without dedicated Wikipedia pages.
• Another example: List of massacres in France#Post-War: about 24 massacres; 23 have individual articles, only 1 (the most recent) does not. The number of victims per massacre has a median of something like 5 to 7. There's a high-number tail with a few massacres of over 100.

Is there any reason why massacres in Ethiopia should be less covered in en.Wikipedia than massacres in France? Are massacres of Ethiopians less notable than those of French people? Are massacres of Syrians less notable than massacres of French people?

Regarding "wartime": militarily unjustified killings of civilians have been illegal since nearly a century ago; these are not part of legally permissible military actions.

Regarding other conflicts: you are welcome to edit articles for those other conflicts. Boud (talk) 00:41, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

No they aren't - I have to say you made your point quite well. I didn't realize so many smaller events in Syria and France were so listed, but now that you've shown me that they are, carry on with what you have been doing by all means! KZebegna (talk) 00:53, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Issues raised by 89.247.252.171

Here I put quotes like this with {{tquote}} and respond.

• It seems that most of the international media don't have deeper knowledge what was happened and what was going on in the country.
  • That's quite possible. But we can only use information based on external sources.
• To understand this ... most of the international media become victims (knowingly and/or unknowingly) of the strategic and systematic propaganda of the TPLF and its fabricated information.
  • Again that's possible, but we should not be Manichean. International mainstream media may partly be duped, but they do do some forms of fact-checking themselves and do tend to word their reports carefully.
• So it is important to differentiate between the fact and fake news (false information).
  • Ideally, yes. So the question is how? Do we only choose the mainstream reports with which we agree personally?
• Of course I have to acknowledge BBC that figured out the fake news of TPLF (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-54985545). The amnesty international and the independent Ethiopian human right commission have investigated the situation from the place and provided documents (reports) to the world, so I think, it is better to consider those information as source and to get the fact what happened in Mai Kadra.
  • Well yes, we do use BBC and Amnesty International sources.
• One thing that the international media, primarily Reuter and NYT, failed to investigate is that the TPLF had systematically deployed its supporters to Sudan and some of the so called "Samri" youth group who conducted this barbaric massacre had fled to Sudan, after the defeat of the TPLF loyal force by the Ethiopian army. These groups joined refuges camp in Sudan and disseminated false information to the international media
  • That's quite possible. But it's also possible that Reuters and FT (in this case) were aware of the likelikhood of Samri refugees being responsible for the Mai Kadra massacre and lying; and that the news agencies' reporters did their best to judge this by all the usual ways that journalists try to judge the truth.
• and that is why I said above, it is critical to have a deeper knowledge of the situation, historical perspective and strategic agenda of TPLF.
  • For this particular article, we already have a subsection mentioning the claim that refugees might be people responsible for war crimes who have fled and pretended to be victims. But we cannot use that information to ignore the reports by Reuters and FT. The reader of this Wikipedia article has to judge for him/herself which information to believe based on the reports. We give as much detail as we can. Generally, the more information is provided, the easier it is to detect (or find hints of) falsifications.
• In fact there are also some clues that the WHO general, member of the TPLF, tried to pressure the Ethiopian government although he denied it (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/11/19/ethiopia-who-tedros-criminal-military-tigray/) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55001328.
  • Wikipedia articles can only give information based on sources. If you can find sources that show that the particular Reuters and FT articles that we currently have are based on refugees who lied, then please provide that source. For a source (newspaper) that is normally accepted as "reliable", it would be unlikely that we remove the source; instead, we add the other sources that have counterclaims.

In any case, if you make an edit and someone reverts it, then that's a good moment to discuss the specific edit here on the talk page and search for consensus. If you want to make an edit that removes information sourced to Thomson Reuters (name="Reuters_11_12_2") or the Financial Times (name="ft_9_12"), then please propose that here, and then we can see if there is consensus to remove the information on the grounds that Reuters and FT might have been fooled by the TPLF. I'm going to fix one error that I see: the "Reuters_11_12_2" refugee only refers to Amharan militias, not to the ENDF. This correction is based on matching the sources to our Wikipedia article, without interpretations related to TPLF propaganda. Boud (talk) 13:33, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Re "we should not be Manichean" - I agree wholeheartedly that "Manichean" is what we should not be, and in fact exactly what we should always reject, especially as an encyclopedia - but what does that word mean to you? Could you please clarify the context of saying that here? KZebegna (talk) 14:18, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Well, in this context, the Manichean point of view seems to be "federal government = good + honest; TPLF and all ethnic Tigrayans = bad + lying" and to associate all formal and informal armed forces and witness statements strictly within one of these two categories. If by "context" you mean the editorial context, then see this edit, this edit, or this edit, which have in their edit summaries: Any report based on refuges from Tigray is highly suffering from strategically fabricated information of the TPLF. Removing the word "Any" and adding a qualifier such as "may" or "might" would have made the statement a lot less Manichean. Boud (talk) 23:04, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Lol, OK, thanks for explaining. Yes, I agree with that. 'Manichean' can mean so many generally unsavory or sinister things with different people, as they were actually a crypto sect with secretive rituals! KZebegna (talk) 23:45, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Edits of IP 37.116.65.226

IP user 37.116.65.226 made several recent edits such as this one at 23:08, 11 December 2020, with the edit description "the reference articles of Reuters and the financial times do not state the involvement of the Ethiopian Federal army or the Amhara Militia to the massacre". Here are quotes from the sources:

• Reuters Barhat, 52, said she fled from Moya Khadra after people from the Amhara region, which borders Tigray and whose rulers back Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, attacked them. "They killed anyone who said they were Tigrayan. They stole our money, our cattle, and our crops from our homes and we ran with just the clothing on our backs," she said.
• Financial Times But those fleeing the violence give accounts of brutality on all sides, including by Ethiopian federal forces, Amhara special forces and irregular Amhara militias. They say people had their throats slit, were shot in the neck, execution style, or attacked with machetes, and dogs were seen feeding on dead bodies.
• FT: ... Tigrayan student Abrahaley Menasew gingerly touched the stitches in a wound on his head as he lay on a rickety bed. He said the injury was inflicted by an axe after he was dragged from his home in Mai Kadra by Amhara militiamen. His neck and wrist were slashed with a machete, he said, and he almost lost his hand.

Boud (talk) 01:17, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

NPOV complaints in the whole article, including LEAD

Hello everyone, this page has many NPOV issue, against Tigrayans and Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

• Let us start from the first sentence in the LEAD:- It is not only Thomson Reuters and the Financial Times that attritubed responsibility to the Amhara militias, it is all the below listed media outlets' articles. They include CNN, The Guardian, Yahoo! News, BBC, The New York Times, NBC News, Sky News, Associated Press (AP), The Sydney Morning Herald and even more. Listed are the exact reference from these outlets, that attribute responsibility to the Amhara militias (Abiy Ahmed ailed forces). Let us not try to promote the other side and discredit the Tigrayans victims and TPLF.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/dec/02/tigray-war-refugees-ethiopia-sudan
2. https://sports.yahoo.com/amphtml/escape-massacre-ethiopians-recall-tigray-092740037.html
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/world/africa/ethiopia-tigray-sudan.html
4. https://www.nbcnews.com/video/refugees-from-ethiopia-mass-in-sudan-border-from-conflict-in-tigray-96440901567
5. https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-ethiopia-conflict-sudan-bombings-idUKKBN27T1OL
6. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w172x2z2d5prcjz
7. https://us.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/12/07/ethiopia-tigray-tensions-refugees-sudan-eritrea-horn-of-africa-elbagir-pkg-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn
8. https://www.smh.com.au/world/africa/ethiopia-may-be-on-the-edge-of-genocide-20201122-p56gum.html
9. https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN28A1M7

• Furthermore, media outlasts like Associated Press (AP) have reported that Amnesty International (Amnesty) has changed its position; that is, even Amnesty is now saying that both Tigrayan ethnic and Amhara ethnic were possibly targeted. This is the exact quote from the below more recent AP article link:- It’s possible that civilians from both ethnicities were targeted in Mai-Kadra, Amnesty now says.

1. https://apnews.com/article/sudan-ethiopia-massacres-d16a089f8dcb0511172b5662b9244f78

• The communication blackout that is withholding from international journalists from documenting the Tigrayan victims stories in Tigray is not mentioned well . (I'm talking about the internet, phone, mobile, electricity that has been disconnected to Tigray region during this war. Even running water has been disconnected.) We know Abiy Ahmed's government cuts communication whenever. According to Human Rights Watch and NetBlocks, politically motivated Internet shutdowns have intensified in severity and duration under the leadership of Abiy Ahmed despite the country's rapid digitalization and reliance on cellular internet connectivity in recent years. In 2020, Internet shutdowns by the Ethiopian government have been described as "frequently deployed". Access Now said in a statement that shutdowns have become a "go-to tool for authorities to muzzle unrest and activism." His government will the cut internet as and when, "it's neither water nor air" have said Abiy.

Loves Woolf1882 (talk) 07:40, 22 December 2020 (UTC)