Displaced women in 2022 in the village of Silse, a hundred kilometers from Semera in the Afar region, where the war between the central government and rebels from the Tigray region had spread. EDUARDO SOTERAS / AFP
Fearing that their stories would disappear, Meseret Hadush has recorded the names of thousands of Tigrayan women who were victims of rape during the civil war in the northern Tigray region of Ethiopia, from 2020 to 2022. Her research has continued, more than a year after the peace agreement between the Ethiopian government and the Tigrayan insurgents of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was signed in November 2022.
After collecting almost 5,000 testimonies with her organization Hiwyet (“healing” in the Tigrinya language), she now fears an AIDS “epidemic” among these women raped by troops from the neighboring Amhara region and Eritrea. Some 15% of them are thought to have contracted HIV, according to her organization’s register of their stories. Read more