‘Finish Them Off’: Aid Workers, Found on Battlefield, Executed by Soldiers

Three employees of Doctors Without Borders set out to rescue the wounded in a war zone in northern Ethiopia. Their fate shows the treacherous path for many aid workers in conflict zones.

By Simon Marks and Declan Walsh @ NYTimes.com, March 17, 2022

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

As the fight intensified in northern Ethiopia in June last year, three aid workers from Doctors Without Borders jumped into their four-wheel drive and raced across the battle-scarred landscape, searching for casualties.

Hours later they vanished. The aid workers stopped answering their satellite phone. A tracking device showed their vehicle making a sudden U-turn, then stopping. Colleagues frantically tried to locate them.

The next day they were found dead, their bullet-riddled bodies sprawled on a dusty roadside near their burned-out vehicle: María Hernández, a 35-year-old Spaniard and conflict veteran, in a bloodstained white bib with the Doctors Without Borders logo; Yohannes Halefom, a 32-year-old Ethiopian medic, face down in the dirt; and their Ethiopian driver Tedros Gebremariam, 31, lying on the road about 300 yards away.

Doctors Without Borders, widely known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières, immediately denounced the killings as “brutal murder” but did not identify any culprit. Now, one is coming into view.

Investigators, senior aid officials and Ethiopian soldiers interviewed by the Times said the three aid workers were gunned down by retreating Ethiopian government troops on the orders of a commander who was infuriated to find them in an active combat zone.

“He said, ‘Finish them off’,” said Capt. Yetneberk Tesfaye of the Ethiopian National Defense Force, who said he heard the command over the radio.

 

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Capt. Yetneberk Tesfaye, of the Ethiopian National Defense Force's 31st Division, said that he witnessed the Ethiopian army’s killing of three aid workers in the Tigray region.Credit...The New York Times

 

The aid workers had their hands over their heads when they were shot, according to another soldier who witnessed the killings.

The brutal slaying in the northern region of Tigray, where a feud between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the leaders of the northern region of Tigray erupted into war in November 2020, attracted relatively little attention. It was yet another senseless atrocity in a bitter conflict that has been accompanied by reports of massacres, sexual assault, ethnic cleansing and other likely war crimes.

The atrocities are not just in Tigray. A gruesome video that circulated recently showed Ethiopian security forces burning alive three men, believed to be ethnic Tigrayans, in the western region of Benishangul-Gumuz. The Ethiopian government pledged to bring the perpetrators to justice.

But the killing of the three Doctors Without Borders employees underscored the specific perils facing aid workers in Ethiopia, where hunger and dislocation threaten millions even as the government seems to treat aid groups as enemies rather than allies.

Since last July, when Tigray fell into rebel control, respected aid groups have been accused of running guns to rebels, senior United Nations officials have been expelled from Ethiopia, and the government imposed a punishing blockade on the region that has cut off food supplies to five million needy people, the U.N. says.

Ethiopia is the world’s deadliest country for aid workers, with 19 deaths in 2021, more than in Afghanistan, Syria or Congo, according to The Aid Worker Security Database, a compilation of data on attacks. Local employees bear the greatest risk: of the 129 aid workers who died around the world last year, only three were international staff, including Ms. Hernández.

Immediately after the Doctors Without Borders team was killed, the Ethiopian government blamed their deaths on Tigrayan rebels. The offices of Ethiopia’s prime minister, attorney general and military spokesman did not respond to questions for this article.

The mission comes first

When the team from Doctors Without Borders set out on June 24 from their base in Abiy Adiy, in central Tigray, the war had taken a dramatic turn.

Two days earlier, [....]