Ethiopia: Genocide in the shadows

Your Saturday deep dive.

A surprising thing happened this week when I posted a thread about Ethiopia on Twitter (I will never call it X). It went viral, drawing more than a million views.

It’s surprising because usually I go viral when posting about Gaza. But stories from other places — DR Congo, Sudan, Bangladesh, etc. — are much harder to get noticed. Often, no matter how significant, they sink without trace.

To be fair, I guilt-tripped my followers a little, directly asking them not to continue scrolling just because this was not a post about Gaza. And I said that what I was about to highlight was the near certainty that genocidal acts were carried out during Ethiopia’s 2020 - 2022 Tigray war. The other near certainty, as it stands, is that there will be no accountability, or justice for the survivors.

And, worryingly, there are signs that war could be about to return.

So I think it’s also worth writing about here today. At this point, I need to issue a strong trigger warning for sexual violence. Because what happened was a horror.