World Watches Ukraine While War In Ethiopia Rages On Unnoticed
The world is focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine just like international attention previously targeted the civil war in Syria, but another conflict has continued for decades, with deaths of millions of people from war, famine and sickness, and relatively little intervention or attention from western nations.
In contrast with the predominantly white victims in Ukraine and Syria, that other conflict has gotten scant attention though it has taken the lives of millions of black lives. It is the civil war in Ethiopia, the most populous landlocked country in the world with a 2018 population of 109.5 million. Over the last two years, violence and famine have killed as many as half a million people, a famine in the 1980s left one million dead and the United Nations chief has demanded an end to the bloodshed, saying “violence and destruction have reached alarming levels” and “civilians are paying a horrific price.”
Published reports show that both sides have conducted mass extrajudicial killings of civilians, 300,000 to 500,000 people have been killed and war rape is common, with girls as young as 8 and women as old as 72 being raped, often in front of their families.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday demanded an immediate end to hostilities and withdrawal of Eritrean forces fighting alongside the government. Guterres said that “violence and destruction have reached alarming levels” and “civilians are paying a horrific price.”
Guterres told reporters that Ethiopia’s “social fabric is being ripped apart” as civilians are being killed daily in indiscriminate attacks in residential areas while hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee their homes since hostilities resumed in August 2020.
The civil war has pitted the government of Ethiopia, aided by the Eritrean government forces against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a rebel group based in the Tigray section of Ethiopia. The fighting has been waged since 2020 and casualties from turmoil over the last two decades dwarf those in the current Russian war in Ukraine, the ongoing violence in Myanmar and the fighting in Syria and Yemen.
The roots of the current violence stem back to 1952, when the U.N. voted to federate the former colony of Eritrea under Ethiopian rule. Emperor Haile Selassie dissolved the federation in 1962 and annexed Eritrea, sparking the Eritrean War of Independence. Eritrea gained independence in 1991.
Eritrea has no functioning constitution, no elections, no legislature and no published budget and the president, Isaias Afewerki, controls the judiciary and military. The country is allied with Ethiopia and has one of the worst human rights records in the world. Reporters Without Borders found in 2021 that Eritrea had the overall worst press freedom in the world, even lower than North Korea.
A famine that lasted from 1983 to 1985 left one million dead and the devastation triggered insurrections against authoritarian rule particularly in the regions of Eritrea and Tigray. In 2018, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ended the 20-year-long conflict with Eritrea and was subsequently awarded the Nobel prize for peace.
Bloodshed however returned in in November 2020 after the Ethiopian government began a military offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in response to attacks on government army units stationed there. Thousands of refugees fled to neighboring Sudan while government forces killed more than 600 civilians in a massacre in the town of Mai Kadra on Nov. 9, 2020. As of March 2022, as many as 500,000 people had died as a result of violence and famine in the Tigray War.
The Ethiopian and Eritrean governments have been accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide of Tigrayans. The U.N. reports that an estimated 2.3 million children have been cut off from critical aid and humanitarian assistance. About 4.5 million people are in need of aid and about 1 million live in areas not accessible because of the war.
Officials in the U.S. and England have called on social media companies to cooperate to limit hate speech. U.N. officials had the same concerns in Ethiopia where the onslaught of hate speech is fueling the war.
“There is discourse often propagated through social media, which dehumanizes groups by likening them to a ‘virus’ that should be eradicated, to a ‘cancer’ that should be treated because ”if a single cell is left untreated, that single cell will expand and affect the whole body” and calling for the “killing of every single youth from Tigray” which is particularly dangerous, said a U.N. statement.
The Ethiopian government gets backing from Iran, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which has provided military support since the war, including Chinese-made Wing Loong II drones, which are capable of dropping bombs or launching missiles.
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is situated in the Horn of Africa, bordered by Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east and northeast, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west, and Sudan to the northwest. The country covers 420,000 square miles and is the 12th most populous nation in the world and the second most populated in Africa, behind Nigeria.
Ethiopia is considered the birthplace of coffee as cultivation began in the 9th century. The country produces more coffee than any other nation in Africa. Its main health problems are communicable diseases worsened by poor sanitation and malnutrition. More than 44 million people do not have access to clean water and there is a shortage of trained doctors and nurses and health facilities, according to reports.
Ethiopia maintains strong relations with China, Israel, Mexico, Turkey and India as well as neighboring countries. It is believed that anatomically modern humans emerged from modern-day Ethiopia and set out to the Near East and elsewhere in the Middle Paleolithic period.