When The Ethiopian State Made Eritrean Civilians the Enemy

By Dawit Gebremichael Habte

There are wounds a nation carries not because it refuses to heal, but because the world refused to remember what happened. Eritrea’s long struggle against Ethiopian colonization is often reduced to the language of rebellion, border disputes, or regional rivalry. That language misses the most important truth. For generations, successive Ethiopian rulers did not merely fight Eritrean armed movements. They turned Eritrean civilians into targets, treating ordinary families, villages, elders, women, children, students, and workers as enemies to be punished.

Under Emperor Haile Selassie, Eritrea’s peaceful demands for dignity and self-determination were met with force. Protesters were fired upon. Activists were rounded up, tortured, and executed in public squares. The message was unmistakable: Eritrea’s political awakening would be answered not with dialogue but with bullets.

The logic of collective punishment was made plain in a June 21, 1969 letter from Asrate Kassa, the governorate general of Eritrea and representative of Emperor Haile Selassie, to Major General Teshome Ergetu, commander of Ethiopia’s Second Infantry Division. The letter declared that a “bandit” was not only someone carrying a weapon but also anyone accused of feeding, hiding, sheltering, supporting, or spreading the message of the fighters. In effect, the line between civilian and combatant was erased. A mother who gave bread, an elder who refused to betray his village, a young person suspected of sympathy, all were treated as armed combatants.

Accordingly, in 1967, Ethiopian forces killed 3,000 civilians, burned 173 villages in the Western lowlands part of Eritrea, and forced more than 30,000 people to flee into Sudan. In November 1970, after General Teshome Ergetu was killed in an ambush by the Eritrean Liberation Front, Ethiopian forces retaliated against civilians. They lined up and killed 115 residents from Rjba, Wara, Engeyta, Anqer, and HabremgeQha. Then they gathered the people of Ona in the village center and killed more than 800 innocent people with machine guns and tanks. These were not battlefield casualties. They were civilians punished for being Eritreans that refused to kneel.

The Derg, later personified by Mengistu Haile Mariam, inherited this cruelty and deepened it. In 1975, Asmara came under siege. The official curfew was from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., but Ethiopian soldiers began killing civilians at sunset, before the curfew even officially started. On January 31, 1975, Ethiopian security forces massacred more than 1,000 civilians in an overnight operation. Bodies were left in the streets to “teach the city a lesson.” Families were later ordered to identify their loved ones and carry them away for burial. The next day, Ethiopian soldiers killed another 110 civilians in Weki-duba and Adi-Habteslus. This was part of a wider campaign of terror that followed Eritreans from city streets to rural villages, from homes to marketplaces, and from the highlands to the lowlands. The Ethiopian military’s message was unmistakable: there would be no distinction between civilians and armed combatants. In Akordat, 289 civilians were killed. In Omhajer, 90 people were killed and 300 homes burned. In Hirgigo, 200 people were killed and thousands were displaced..

The cruelty reached into the villages with the same cold purpose. In March 1975, British human rights activist Mary Dines testified before the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal about the massacre in Woki. Ethiopian soldiers first rounded up villagers and shot thirty-seven dead. The next day, they returned and slaughtered nearly five hundred people. Women, children, and old men were bayoneted. Pregnant women were slit open. Livestock were killed. Houses were burned. The killing had no military necessity. It was terror for its own sake, meant to break a people by breaking the village.

The Ethiopian Air Force applied the same doctrine from the sky. Colonel Bezabih Petros, an Ethiopian pilot captured by Eritrean freedom fighters, later admitted what the policy meant in practice: “We definitely know civilians will get hurt. But, knowing that the people sympathize with the rebels, the order is to bomb everything that moves.” He had flown missions over liberated areas where Eritrean women, children, people with disabilities, hospitals, mobile clinics, schools, cultural centers, and workshops were part of daily life. To the Ethiopian state, these were not communities. They were the sea in which the “fish” of resistance swam, and Mengistu’s infamous answer was to dry the sea.

Years later, under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the language changed, but the wound reopened. Between 1998 and 2000, Ethiopia deported more than 80,000 Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean origin. Among them were elderly people, people with disabilities, children, professionals, business owners, and women, many of whom had been born and raised in Ethiopia and had never set foot in Eritrea. They were stripped of homes, businesses, citizenship, and dignity, then forced to cross landmine-infested front lines.

Then came the bombs. On June 5, 1998, Ethiopian warplanes bombed Asmara’s international airport. In May 2000, Ethiopia launched attacks across multiple fronts. The Ethiopian Air Force bombed the civilian airport in Asmara, struck the power-generating plant in Massawa, and bombed historical churches and monasteries along the border. Ethiopian forcestargeted farm industries, hospitals, government buildings, bridges, power stations, and other civilian infrastructure.

Across these eras, the names of Ethiopia’s rulers changed, but the pattern remained. Haile Selassie criminalized sympathy and unleashed imperial violence. The Derg and Mengistu made collective punishment a doctrine of terror. Meles Zenawi used deportation, aerial bombardment, and invasion to punish a people whose independence he could not undo.

This is why Eritrean memory is not abstract. It is carried in burned villages, in mass graves, in mothers who searched for sons, in children who crossed borders, in elders who watched homes turn to ash, and in families who learned that survival itself could become an act of resistance.

Remembering these atrocities is not an invitation to hatred. It is rather an obligation to truth. A people cannot build a just future by pretending their dead were never targeted, their villages were never burned, their children were never bombed, and their elders were never forced to bury the innocent. Eritrea’s independence was not born from romantic nationalism. It was born from the hard knowledge that a state willing to treat civilians as armed combatants had forfeited any moral claim to rule them.

The lesson is painful, but clear. When a government makes civilians the enemy, it may spread fear for a season. But it also plants something deeper. In Eritrea, every massacre, every burned village, every deported family, and every bombed neighborhood became part of the nation’s resolve. Ethiopia tried to break Eritrea by brutalizing its civilians. Instead, it proved why Eritrea had to be free.

References

1. Dawit Gebremichael Habte, Roots of Grace: Family, Community, and the Untold Story of Eritrea, Rodin Books, 2026.

2. Eritrea Research and Documentation Centre, Asmara, Eritrea, letter from Asrate Kassa to Major General Teshome Ergetu, June 21, 1969

3. Netsereab Azazi, Ona and Besik-Dira: The Massacre in the Villages of Senhit, 1970-1971, Hdri Publishers, 2024.

4. International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, “Ethiopian Repression of Eritrea,” Proceedings of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, Milan, May 24-26, 1980

5. Alemseged Tesfai, “On Gloating over a Hollow Victory: A Report from the Merb-Setit Front,” Eritrea Profile, March 13, 1999