By Rasmus Sonderriis, Ethiopia correspondent for media in Chile and Denmark since 2004 and author of “Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong”.
It passed for publication never mind that it portrays Africans as beasts, because it was penned by two Ethiopian academics for the affable-sounding magazine “The Conversation”. It reads like standing up for good against evil. But this is a deceit, explains a veteran observer of how the propagandists of Ethiopia’s various militias spew hate in human-rights language.
The headline sums up the message: “Starvation as a weapon of war: how Ethiopia created a famine in Tigray” published in The Conversation on November 2, 2025. The only clue to the context is “the Tigray War”, but all genres have their tacit conventions for the audience to orientate themselves. Thus, this genre of true-story African horror is set in a dark continent of big men whipping up tribal frenzies for their killing sprees.
Yet even that name, “the Tigray War”, could mislead, as the killing fields were not just in the small northern region of Tigray, but across the entire northern half of Ethiopia. In the main, it pitted Ethiopia’s multiethnic federal government, including some Tigrayans such as the Minister of Defence, against the ethnically exclusive Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), not coincidentally the leading party in Ethiopia’s authoritarian regime from 1991 to 2018. What is also absent from The Conversation, and in general from the work of the authors, Teklehaymanot G. Weldemichel and Birhan Mezgbo, is that the 2½-year escalation process was marked by the TPLF old guard holding on to its grip on the national military, and sheltering fugitives from its disgraced reign of cruelty and corruption. Fighting broke out on November 3, 2020, when the TPLF raided federal army bases, killing thousands of soldiers. Less than a week later, a TPLF-affiliated youth group committed the first and the biggest ethnic massacre of the war in the town of Mai-Kadra. After that, war crimes were indeed committed by both sides, as extremists joined in the fray. In October and November 2021, the TPLF marched on the capital, and were widely hailed as victors. The US Special Envoy warned of a looming “bloodbath situation”, as Western embassies were hastily evacuated. However, this spurred a campaign of mobilization throughout this country of 130 million people. Soon after, the TPLF had to retreat, and, one year of bloodshed later, town after town in Tigray was falling to the federal army. This is when the voices predominant in big media insisted that Tigrayans would “fight to the death”, because, as had long been claimed, the Ethiopian war aim was the literal extermination of every Tigrayan man, woman and child. Instead, the TPLF’s battlefield collapse enabled the Pretoria Peace Agreement on November 2, 2022.
Of course, no amount of exposing the TPLF’s propaganda pretexts for violence would ever justify using starvation as a weapon of war against Tigrayan civilians! But just these three omissions should set dishonesty alarm bells ringing:
- On July 15, 2022, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) declared that famine in Tigray had been averted. Intense fighting made it impossible for humanitarian aid to get through the frontline after August 26, 2022, yet as late as November 1, 2022, one day before the signing in Pretoria, the WFP boasted of mass distribution from its warehouses in Tigray.
- The TPLF war machine systematically confiscated the relief-aid trucks. The first 400-or-so trucks had gonemissing by September 2021. By mid-2022, the Ethiopian Disaster Risk Management Commission (EDRMC) said that, out of 3,297 trucks entering Tigray, 1,128 had not been returned. This UN capital stock aimed at saving lives was repurposed by the TPLF to take lives.
- In a must-read book from late 2022, Dr Steven Were Omamo, WFP Country Director during the first half of the war, the man responsible for negotiating humanitarian access with both sides, paints a picture of the TPLF diverting relief aid to war, contrasted with a fully cooperative Ethiopian federal government, notwithstanding its existential priority of winning the war, which included imposing a military but not a humanitarian blockade on Tigray. He also stated categorically that Tigray suffered profound food insecurity but nothing like a famine. Finally, he leveled jaw-dropping accusations against senior UN figures of hogging the limelight with incendiary lies and of politicizing the famine issue at the expense of food insecure people.
None of this is included in The Conversation. The authors are accomplished academics at Western universities, but in their work on Ethiopian victimology, they are but crude propagandists. Nowhere do they address any view contrary to their own, not even to debunk it. The absence of discussion is another convention of the horror in Africa genre, which plays on cultural memes about African savagery. After all, why deign to listen to enthusiasts for starvation, sexual assault and massacre?
Demonizing political adversaries so as to ignore their points is the antithesis of conversation. I have taken the opposite approach in my book “Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong”. A minor part sets out how I and like-minded analysts saw the war. The bulk is dedicated to a painstaking review of materials from sources presented uncritically as truth witnesses by, for instance, these two authors in The Conversation. Because I do not shy away from the conversation, but tackle head-on all sorts of publications about Tigrayans being hunted down, raped and killed for their ethnicity. This literature is gathered under #TigrayGenocide. Notice that a very similar output exists in which the victims’ ethnicity is either Amhara or Oromo, located under #AmharaGenocide and #OromoGenocide. Among Ethiopians, the use of each hashtag marks you out as supporter of a particular insurgency. Among many things that the keyboard warriors of these irregular armies have in common is that they hate to be likened to one another. Yet all three of them get moral backing, and possibly material support, from the “North Korea of Africa”, namely Eritrea on Tigray’s northern border, whose regime has little interest in ethnic grievance ideologies, but links its own chances of survival to plunging Ethiopia into warlordism. As with different religions, not more than one can be true. You have to pick one ethnicity as the victim. Because the point is not actually to seek truth, but to fuel ethnonationalist war.
Unfortunately, the Pretoria Peace Agreement left Tigray in the iron grip of the TPLF. After fierce infighting, it has ousted its moderate wing, whose leaders have fled Tigray to other parts of Ethiopia, along with an exodus of ordinary Tigrayans who fear getting served up as cannon fodder for yet another fratricidal war. Because the TPLF has still not disarmed and demobilized as required under the peace deal, and has just staged an armed foray into the neighbouring region of Afar. This renewed tension explains the real agenda behind the article in The Conversation, which is to keep stirring the pot of hate and to undermine peace-minded Tigrayans’ bid for reconciliation.
Follow Rasmus Sonderris on Twitter: @RasSonderris
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