The invisible crisis in Ethiopia

More than a million people have been displaced almost overnight. Does anyone in the U.S. realize it?

Tigray people.
(Image credit: Illustrated | AP Images, iStock)

While Americans awaited the result of the 2020 presidential election with glib accusations about the collapse of civilization, half a world away the people of the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia experienced it.

On November 4, security forces taking the side of the dominant ethno-nationalist political party in Tigray attacked a military command center in Mekelle, the capital of the region. This seems to have been in response to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's attempts to merge Ethiopia's long-standing but uneasy coalition of regional and ethnic political factions into a single party representing the entire nation. The result has been a civil war, one that has been all but invisible in the United States.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.