Children look at books in the library of an elementary school that was damaged by the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. Photograph: Eduardo Soteras/AFP/Getty Images
On 4 November 2020 the world was occupied with the results of the US election. For myself and many others with family and friends in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, however, that day marked the beginning of a year-long nightmare. And it’s one which the world has, for the most part, ignored.
When on that day the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, a Nobel peace prizewinner, announced a military offensive in Tigray, it was hard to predict the scale of the human suffering that would ensue. But almost instantly Tigray, a region in the far north of the country that is home to more than 7 million people, was cut off from the world: phone lines were shut down, the internet was cut off, banks were closed and journalists were barred from the region.
For many with family in Tigray, including myself, we braced ourselves, waiting to hear what had become of our family and friends. Now, a year on, we have a manmade humanitarian catastrophe that USAID has called “one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world”. UN relief chief Martin Griffiths said last week that “Tigray is probably the worst place to live in the world right now”. Read more…