I think probably the best way to explain, in a nutshell, is that this is essentially a conflict for power, between the TPLF, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, who were the dominant party and the ruling party in Ethiopia for almost 30 years, and Abiy Ahmed, who was swept to power when demonstrations toppled that ruling coalition. So, you have an understandable conflict, an existential conflict, between these two once-upon-a-time allies.
But what is happening is that the way that the ethnic numbers break down in Ethiopia, Tigrayans are a minority, but you also already have all these different, disparate groups kind of together in this centralized process. That centralization is what is currently falling apart, because when you bring in militia from other regions — and that’s what the doctor was talking about, about Amharization — when you bring in Amhara ethnic militia, that historically have enmity with Tigray, then that’s what you see. You see ethnic cleansing taking place of a basis of a competition for power. And that is perhaps the problem, is that the world has seen what’s happening in Tigray through that aperture of a competition for power, and has been slow to realize that, as Dr. Tedros says, many people believe that it is now genocidal, that what is a political intent to destroy is becoming now an intent to destroy, in whole or part, a people, Amy.
NIMA ELBAGIR: Well, the heartbreak is that many of the women don’t actually feel able to come forward. When we spoke to Dr. Tedros, I asked him how many women had been able to tell him that they had been raped, and he said five — all five of them because they thought they were pregnant. And I asked him, “Well, how many did you suspect, based on the trauma and on the injuries that they presented with?” And he said thousands.
So there are thousands of women who have been through that camp or are still in that camp who are not getting the treatment and the support that they deserve and need, because rape is such an act of psychological and intimate violence, but it’s also an act of communal violence. That’s what the women say, is that they feel that this rape has kind of isolated them within their communities because of the shame and the stigma.
So, for a lot of these
— source democracynow.org | Apr 05, 2021