wowjili Ethiopia’s Agony: ‘I Have Never Seen This Kind of Cruelty in My Life’
Before war broke out in Ethiopia, in late 2020, Mehari could take the bus home from her work as a doctor at a public hospital in Axum, a town in the country’s northern region Tigray. But then fighting between its ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and Ethiopia’s federal government shut down public transportation, and Mehari was forced to walk 40 minutes between home and the hospital. After federal troops took the town and imposed a 6 p.m. curfew, Mehari would leave the hospital at the last possible moment, staying as long as she could to care for her patients. “I had to run from work to home almost every day,” she recalled. She was afraid soldiers would find her alone after curfew. “Maybe being killed could be the easiest thing that happens to you,” she said.
Listen to this article, read by Janina EdwardsMehari, who was 25, lived with friends at the time and worked in her hospital’s department of internal medicine. “I was on duty the day the war broke out,” she told me earlier this year, when we met in Mekelle, Tigray’s capital. “In the middle of the night, there was a blackout, and patients started coming. It was shocking. At my age, I’ve never seen war, so it was my first time seeing somebody who’s been hit by a bullet.” She was used to treating the victims of traffic accidents. The stories her patients told her of relatives and neighbors killed by soldiers and airstrikes, of fleeing the violence in their villages and seeking refuge in Axum, were “too much to process,” she said. “It was chaos. It wasn’t clear at first what was going on.”
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It was the beginning of a civil war. Ethiopia is a vast and diverse country, with dozens of distinct ethnic groups, many of which want some degree of autonomy. 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. Only a year earlier, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for normalizing long-hostile relations with Eritrea, on Tigray’s northern border. Now the Ethiopian government was able to enlist the help of Eritrean troops, as well as thousands of fighters from the security forces of other Ethiopian states.
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