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The current prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, was elected in 2018 on a wave of optimism following nearly three decades of repressive minority dominance by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in the ruling coalition. (The Tigrayan ethnic group makes up only 6 percent of Ethiopia’s population.) Under its leadership, the country had economic growth, but the T.P.L.F. brutally suppressed political opposition and free speech, leading to festering resentment among Ethiopians from other ethnic groups. Abiy, who is Oromo, the country’s largest ethnic group, which has been historically underrepresented in national leadership, removed Tigrayans from their government posts and later referred to the T.P.L.F. as a “cancer” and as “weeds” that needed to be eradicated.
Tigray’s leaders balked at ceding power. After they held regional parliamentary elections in 2020, in defiance of Abiy’s orders, Abiy severed relations with the state. The T.P.L.F. then attacked an Ethiopian military camp in Tigray, claiming it was a pre-emptive strike before the federal government’s planned invasion. Abiy immediately sent more troops into Tigray.


The efforts to weaken the T.P.L.F. extended to the Tigrayans as a people. Radio stations were no longer banned from broadcasting hate speech directed at them. Fighters and civilians alike were labeled “junta” by people in the federal government and Ethiopians of other ethnicities. Tigrayans were regarded as traitorous, unwilling to participate in the hopeful and unified country of Abiy’s promises.

A study by Kiros Berhane, a biostatistician at Columbia University, found that more than 100,000 women in Tigray may have been raped by Ethiopian soldiers. When they raped them, they told them that they came to destroy their wombs so that Tigrayan women will not give birth to Tigrayan children,” Yirgalem Gebretsadkan, who heads the research center on gender-based violence for the Tigray government’s Commission of Inquiry on Tigray Genocide, told me. More than 80 percent of the women who reported being raped told the commission they had been gang-raped.

During most of the war, the federal government didn’t allow foreign journalists to enter Tigray. Afterward, the world seems mostly to have forgotten about what happened there. But earlier this year, the photographer Malin Fezehai and I, together with an Ethiopian guide and translator, visited Tigray to witness a crisis that never really ended. And in the neighboring state of Amhara we saw a new and related war breaking out


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/maga ... rimes.html

"The town of Ab’ala, just over Tigray’s border in the mostly Muslim state of Afar. Ab’ala had been ethnically mixed: Almost 70 percent of its people were Tigrayan Christians; the rest were Muslim Afars. In December 2021, several thousand Tigrayans in Ab’ala suddenly had to flee their homes when their Afar neighbors turned on them and killed hundreds of people.

The refugees told me that Afar residents went around town marking the houses that had Tigrayans living in them. Roving civilian militias, working with the Afar Special Forces, then went to these houses, killing Tigrayans and looting their possessions. Tigrayan churches were set on fire. “It was like hell — there were heavy artillery sounds, there were mortar sounds,” an elderly man named Hailu told me. “They killed my cousin with his two family members. I barely escaped, jumping over their dead bodies.” He said he had come to Mekelle with nothing.

A 55-year-old doctor named Hagos, whose eyes frequently teared up, told me he was at home in Ab’ala with his wife and children when intruders came, seven of them, with guns and machetes. “You can’t describe the shock,” he said. Until that day, he said, Christian Tigrayans and Muslim Afars lived side by side: “We farmed together, we were working together, and we were together at funerals and weddings.”

Hagos recognized some of the intruders. Even the local police seemed to be helping as the group forced him outside. As his abductors led him away, past dead bodies on the street, they ran into an Afar man he knew. “He asked them where they were taking me, and they replied, ‘We are going to kill him,’ ” Hagos recalled. “He argued with them, and I survived.”

Hagos and his wife and their six children ended up in a detention camp in Semera, Afar’s capital. They were detained there for nine months. He said the guards beat them and gave them barely any food; a package of biscuits had to last for days. “You don’t know whether you are alive or not,” he said. “You don’t think anything.”

Eventually, after aid organizations pressured the Ethiopian government over the camp’s conditions, many of the detainees were released. Their relief at returning home to Ab’ala was short-lived. “After we were there for four days,” Hagos said, “they started killing. They started it again.” He and his family sought refuge in Mekelle. More than a year after the war’s end, he was too afraid to return home, unable to stop thinking about “the things they have done to us.” The people who did those things still moved around freely. Another man told me, “Our killers come to Mekelle and go as they please.” In Ab’ala, bodies were abandoned on the streets, in bushes, in empty houses and in mass graves. They were eaten by dogs.

Afar residents told me they were not the perpetrators of such violence. They claimed to be victims of the Tigrayans. Ali, a 45-year-old civil servant who is ethnic Afar, said that once the Tigrayan forces entered Ab’ala after the original massacre, they burned one of his family houses and then looted his possessions. “They slaughtered the Afar people,” Ali went on, visibly upset. He estimated that dozens were killed in revenge. “They burned Afar houses and religious places.”

Ali denied that townspeople had participated in the violence against Tigrayans. “The killers are not from us,” he said. They came from other parts of Afar, he said, and they had been motivated by grudges against the former Tigrayan-led national government. A local religious leader and businessman named Mohammed also told me that the killers were not from Ab’ala. Both men claimed that more Afars had been killed than Tigrayans. “We are not like before,” Ali said. “There is a lot of tension.” Mohammed added, “There are still dead bodies everywhere.”