Monday morning around 10:30 there was a knock on my door. When I answered, I saw three men I did not recognize. They climbed in and hit me on the floor.
They did not introduce themselves; they did not provide any proof of identity or search warrants. They started looting my house.
For almost two years, I have been reporting on Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, where government forces launched an operation last November to overthrow the local ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF.
As an ethnic Tigrayan, I have roots in the region. But as a freelance journalist based in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, my motivation is to discover the truth of a war that is mostly unreported because the Ethiopian government breaks the line of communication and access to media and humanitarian access to much of Tigray since the start of its offensive in November.
I just submitted a story to the Los Angeles Times about a woman from Tigrayan who was gang-raped by Eritrean soldiers fighting alongside Ethiopian forces and held captive for 15 days with almost nothing to eat. The story is only published today, but it quickly becomes clear that the men in my house know about it.
They wore civilian clothes but wore guns. They asked me if I had any relationships with the TPLF. I told them that I had nothing to do with them and that I did not support any political group.
In the shadow of the war, Addis Ababa is nowadays a tense place for ethnic Tigrayans. In Reporters Without Borders in Tigray itself, at least six journalists were arrested in the first week of the fight.
Unidentified gunmen shot dead a reporter at a state-run TV station in Mekele, the regional capital, last month. The reporter, Dawit Kebede Araya, was previously detained by police and questioned about his coverage of the war.
The men in my house threatened to kill me if I kept going to stories about the situation in Tigray. They have also harassed me about my coverage in the past.
They took my laptop and a memory stick containing photos I got from a source in the city of Tigrayan Adigrat, which showed evidence of Eritrean soldiers in several villages. Ethiopia and Eritrea officially deny that the troops are in the country, but my reporting and many other reports indicate otherwise. The photos I received showed uniform Eritrean soldiers in their temporary camps in Tigray, including some in homes they had seized.
A few days earlier, a therapist who had treated the rape survivor, about whom I had written, had told me that the woman had also received a threatening call and warned her not to identify Eritreans as her attackers. The therapist told me to take care as much as possible with the safety of the woman and begged me to reveal little of her identity in the article.
Before the men left, they warned that things would be harder for me next time. The Ethiopian government issued a statement on Thursday stating that I was not a “legally registered” journalist, in an attempt to discredit my work.
I no longer feel safe here. I only have my Ethiopian passport, and it’s hard to leave the country anyway because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m worried the men might return, looking for more evidence of a war that Ethiopia was trying to keep quiet about.
Lucy Kassa is a special correspondent.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.