The Violation of Amhara Womanhood
To be an Amhara woman today is to carry wounds too deep for words. It is to live with a history of violation that does not end. It is to inherit the pain of the women before us, mothers raped in front of their children, young girls taken and never returned, pregnant women whose wombs were cut open because they carried the next generation of Amharas. Our bodies have been turned into battlefields.
It is to be told your suffering does not matter. That when an Amhara girl is kidnapped from her university, when her body is brutalized beyond repair, the world will turn away. It is to watch an entire generation of women be broken and know their destruction is not incidental but planned.
To rape an Amhara woman is to defile not just her, but the spirit of an entire people. It is a strategy of domination not just over the individual body, but over a nation. From Welkait to Wollega, from Benishangul-Gumuz to Mai Kadra and Ataye, the message is the same you are meant to suffer. You are meant to be erased.
This is what genocide looks like not just killing Amharas, but the destruction of women through rape, forced impregnation, and mutilation. The Rwandan genocide showed us this. Tutsi women were raped in mass numbers, forced to bear the children of their killers. The destruction of a woman’s body is the destruction of a people’s future.
After singer Hachalu Hundessa was killed, mobs in ‘Oromia’ went on a rampage against Amharas. A pregnant Amhara woman was disemboweled, her unborn child ripped from her body. This wasn’t random violence, it was a ritual of genocide.
For decades, Amhara women have been forced to bear the weight of a system that seeks to erase us. Whether through rape, forced sterilization, or the murder of our children, the goal has always been the same to make Amhara women hate their own existence.
What does it mean to live with this history? It is knowing that Amhara women have been made to suffer in ways that go beyond death. That the war against us is not just fought with bullets, but with the destruction of our bodies, and the violation of our dignity.
And yet, Amhara women endure. Even with this level of suffering with genocide waged against our bodies and our existence, we will survive.
The girl who was taken from Dembi Dollo University and held captive for over a year still breathes. She still speaks. She bears witness. The mother whose child was cut from her womb still lives in the memories of those who will not forget her.
To every girl still held captive, to every woman brutalized and left to suffer, there are those who stand, who fight, who refuse to let your dignity be erased. While they may wound the body, they will never kill the warrior spirit of the Amhara people.
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