 | | Tigrayan refugees in Sudan have at times waited hours to receive supplies in refugee camps. Many are turned away empty-handed. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times |
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As I’ve been reporting on the war that recently erupted in Ethiopia, where Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is leading a campaign against the defiant leaders of the northern Tigray region, I’ve thought a lot about the first war I covered in the same area just over 20 years ago. |
That fight started in 1998, on Ethiopia’s border with Eritrea, where a dispute between the two neighbors over a triangular patch of land escalated into a brutal conflict involving fighter jets, tanks and trench warfare that would eventually claim up to 100,000 lives. |
To many outsiders it seemed pointless. “Two bald men squabbling over a comb,” was the frequently invoked comparison. In fact, the war was rooted in a long, complicated history of distrust between the two countries, and it cost them dearly. |
My difficulty was that I couldn’t get even close to the action. |
When the Ethiopians launched a surprise offensive in May 2000, I flew to the capital, Addis Ababa, hoping to witness this major battle. Instead I kicked my heels in Addis for weeks, waiting for official permission to travel north. And when the Ethiopians finally loaded a group of impatient correspondents into a creaking, Soviet-era helicopter, and flew us to Zalambessa — a small mountain town at the heart of the fight — it was too late. Instead of a war, we got a victory parade. |
Whooping Ethiopian soldiers, who had just captured Zalambessa, jigged around a flagpole, their Kalashnikovs held aloft. Every building around them had been crushed. A jubilant government minder offered reporters an opportunity to fire his rifle into a hillside. I declined. |
In this latest war, Ethiopia’s government is fighting not a neighbor but its own people — specifically, the Tigrayan leaders whose party held power in Ethiopia for decades, and who led the campaign against Eritrea in the late 1990s. |
What’s not changed, though, is Ethiopia’s determination to shield the conflict from view. |
Within hours of the fight erupting in the early hours of Nov. 4, phone lines in Tigray were cut off and internet services severed. International aid workers fled Tigray, and journalists were barred from entering the region. |
A few foreign reporters who got close to Tigray were rounded up and dispatched back to Addis Ababa. Journalists outside Ethiopia couldn’t even make it to the capital. I applied for a visa in early November; I’ve yet to receive a reply. |
The blackout was remarkably effective. Even in the internet era, it seemed, it was possible to wage war in a region bigger than Switzerland, and nobody could see it. Even so, information dribbled out — accounts of bloody battles, massacres of civilians, widespread destruction. We scrambled to figure out how we might confirm those accounts. |
My colleague Abdi Latif Dahir headed for eastern Sudan, where refugees from Tigray were pouring across the border and into makeshift camps, bringing accounts of brutalities against civilians by pro-government militia fighters. I teamed up with Simon Marks, a freelance reporter in Addis Ababa, to look for reports from inside Tigray itself. |
We hit the phones, reaching out to usual sources — aid workers, experts, diplomats — but also new ones like medical workers and refugees. We scoured Twitter, Facebook and other social media. We tapped into the diaspora Ethiopians, who offered information smuggled out via their relatives on the ground. |
People inside Tigray found us, too. Two doctors in Mekelle, the regional capital, managed to get an internet connection and send reports of shellfire that killed civilians and dire shortages of medical supplies. |
Unable to see the fighting, we used satellite imagery to hunt for its traces. There had been a lot of fighting around Hitsats, a camp of 25,000 Eritrean refugees. In New York, Christiaan Triebert obtained satellite images showing extensive fire damage to fields and forests around the camp. |
We cross-referenced those images with accounts of Eritrean soldiers rampaging through the camp, and burning fields, at the same time. |
Our article, published on Dec. 28, offered a stark picture of the war in Tigray. But there’s little doubt that we’re just peeping through the keyhole, and that much more remains to be reported. |
Although Mr. Abiy has already proclaimed victory in Tigray, few believe him. The communications blackout has partly lifted, but access is severely restricted. Fighting continues. |
One aid worker told me he fears what he will find when he finally gets into Tigray. We hope that when that happens, we can see it for ourselves, too. |
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He was previously posted to Egypt, where he covered the Middle East, and Pakistan. He is the author of the 2020 book “The Nine Lives of Pakistan.” |
| THE UNFOLDING WAR IN ETHIOPIA | | | | |
Afghan War Casualty Report: January 2021 |
 | | Afghan security forces at the site of an attack in Kabul in December.Zakeria Hashimi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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At least 49 pro-government forces and 15 civilians have been killed in January so far, as peace negotiations reconvened in Doha, Qatar. [Read the report.] |
Here are four articles from The Times that you might have missed. |
 | | Within an hour of the storming of the United States Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Wednesday, Merriam-Webster reported that “sedition” was the top term being searched on its site, ahead of “coup d’état,” “insurrection” and “putsch.”Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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“Treason, traitor, terrorism, sedition — these are strong words with specific meanings that are often tossed aside in favor of their buzzword impact.” As a mob stormed the Capitol, the word “sedition” was on many people’s lips, and their keyboards. Its force is clear, but its echoes across American history are more complex and ambiguous. [Read the article.] |
“I simply cannot help worrying that, in the process of waging this war, we are corrupting ourselves.” Neil Sheehan, the reporter who obtained the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times, leading the government for the first time in American history to get a judge to block publication of an article on grounds of national security, has died at 84. [Read the article.] |
“The only tangible thing that has happened to Afghans under the peace process is that they used to know who their killers are, and now they don’t.” Assassins in Afghanistan are killing civil servants, media figures, rights workers and security force members. But no one has taken responsibility. [Read the article.] |
“We can use imagery in the past to inform the future.” Imagery from the Cold War’s Corona satellites is helping scientists fill in how we have changed our planet in the past half-century. [Read the article.] |
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