In attacks designed to destroy fertility, foreign objects such as these nail clippers, were inserted into women’s wombs, usually following rape. Photograph: Ximena Borrazas
Warning: this article contains extremely graphic and distressing testimony and images
Tens of thousands of Tigrayan women report brutal wartime abuse by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers, such as gang-rape and the insertion of objects into their uteruses. But justice seems a distant prospect
For two years, Tseneat carried her rape inside her. The agony never faded. It attacked her from the inside out. The remnants of the attack stayed in Tseneat’s womb – not as a memory or metaphor, but a set of physical objects:
Eight rusted screws.
A steel pair of nail clippers.
A note, written in ballpoint pen and wrapped in plastic.
“Sons of Eritrea, we are brave,” the note reads. “We have committed ourselves to this, and we will continue doing it. We will make Tigrayan females infertile.”
The objects, revealed by X-ray and surgically extracted by doctors more than two years later, were forced inside Tseneat as she lay unconscious after being gang-raped by six soldiers. Read more…