The TPLF is seizing Tigrayan boys at gunpoint to fight beside their families’ killers.
They come for them at the street corner, at the minibus stop, at the public transit areas where a boy stands waiting to get to work or to class. Witnesses told The Guardian that men and boys between 15 and 65 are being taken at gunpoint, that the heaviest pressure falls on those 15 to 40, and that the medical exemptions mean nothing. Solomon, 52, fled to Addis Ababa and described what he saw first: “I have seen the armed group of the TPLF rounding up people as young as 15 and 16 at gunpoint from the streets and public transportation areas.” Parents who went down to the office with a doctor’s certificate got nowhere. “The officers don’t care whatever internal disease you have,” Solomon said. “They forcefully recruit anyone whose hands, eyes and feet work.”
That last sentence is the whole recruiting pitch, and you do not need a background in strategy to read it. A boy whose hands and feet work is a body the command can use. Gezu, 34, who fought in the last war, got the call and turned it down: “I responded to them to kill me rather than ever force me back to the horrors of the battlefield.” So they stopped asking. “When they saw no one would join their army willingly, and people fleeing to the capital city, they started rounding up people from the streets.”
In Ephrem’s house, the fear is not a policy argument. He is 40, a father of three, and his children have learned the sound of his boots at the door. “Every time I go outside the house, my wife and the kids are anxious,” he said. “The kids cry fearing that I will be rounded up from the street.” The family with cash to hand an officer buys its boys back. Everyone else waits.
That is the part I want to put on the counter where a customer can see it, because it is the part that connects Mekelle to any town in this country. The federal government in Addis Ababa froze the bank accounts across Tigray without warning, then reopened them with a daily withdrawal limit of 2,000 birr. That is about nine pounds. Nine pounds is a sandwich and a coffee in most American towns. In Mekelle, with food prices climbing, it is what an entire family is allowed to draw from its own savings in a whole day. Negus, an elderly man in Mekelle, put it the way a man at a parts counter would: “A daily withdrawal limit of 2,000 birr can hardly afford to buy the skyrocketing food prices. It is impossible to leave this embattled region. There is no way for relatives outside to send medicine or cash.”
So here is the squeeze, in plain terms. One government freezes the money and closes the roads and the flights. Another cut the internet and phone lines on its own orders until this past week, so a mother cannot even find out whether her son is alive. And in between, at the bus station, an armed man takes your boy because his hands and feet work, unless you pay him. Food prices, a nine-pound limit, a bribe at the corner: that is not geopolitics, that is what it looks like when working people are treated as inventory.
I signed my own enlistment papers in a strip-mall office in 2002, and I will tell you the difference is not complicated. A kid who signs up because the recruiter’s office is the only road to college is making a hard choice with his eyes open. A kid pulled off a minibus at gunpoint is not choosing anything at all. This is what happens when the bosses, of any flag, treat people as ammunition: you spend them, and when you run short, you go take more.
Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars is built on a rule a working man can hold in one hand. The fight belongs to the people who picked up a rifle. The people who did not are not materiel for either side, and starving them, freezing their money, and grabbing their children off the street does not become acceptable because both armed sides have decided the civilians owe them something.
Both armed sides have decided exactly that. The TPLF is now fighting alongside the Eritrean Defence Forces and Amhara fano militias it battled through the 2020-22 war. The UN International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia found that the Ethiopian army, Eritrean forces, and fano militias committed atrocities against Tigrayan civilians amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity during that conflict, and Amnesty International documented atrocities by Tigrayan forces as well. Those findings are about armed commands and what those commands did, not about the Amhara or Eritrean or Tigrayan people, who did not order any of it. The harder point stands: Tigrayan boys are now being handed to the same commands that did that, in the same region, four years later, under a peace agreement signed in Pretoria in November 2022 that both governments have stopped honoring. The federal side stands accused of indiscriminate drone strikes, and opposition forces have attacked positions close to Addis Ababa. Every side in this has found the same shortcut, which is the civilian.
The 2020-22 war killed an estimated 300,000 to 800,000 civilians, by the British government’s estimate. The money is frozen again. The phones are cut again. The airport changed hands in a single day in September, stranding people who were trying to leave, and flights are still not running the way a family needs them to run.
Negus in Mekelle says he is hoping it all ends soon. That is the entire offer on the table for him: stand in a queue, withdraw nine pounds, and hope. The men with the guns on both sides have a different plan, and it runs through the bus station. Freeze the money, close the phones, take the boys. A record like that does not get to call itself defense, and it does not get to be described politely. The people doing it should be named, the families should be able to reach their money and their medicine, and no 16-year-old should be standing on a minibus platform deciding whether to run.