The Tigray war, famine and genocide are almost forgotten or invisible in international discourse. Despite the enormous scale of suffering and the far-reaching consequences for Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa of the war waged between 2020-22, there has been little international attention to the disaster, and even less aid to enable the region to recover. The survivors feel they have been violated twice, first in the acts of violence and deprivation themselves, and second in the erasure that has followed.
Within this overall muting of voices on Tigray, there is a story that has been silenced entirely. That is the story of urban hunger. The realities of starvation among Tigray’s city-dwellers, previously people who were middle-class, did not register in stories, images or statistics.
Tigray’s townspeople—its salaried civil servants, its skilled workers, its professionals, its intellectuals, its pensioners—went hungry during the war and famine. We don’t have the data for food insecurity, malnutrition and mortality to be able to assess whether they did better or worse than those who are conventionally most at risk during food crises, such as poor villagers and internally displaced persons (IDPs). And if we did have the data, the numbers would not speak to one of the most important elements of the experience of starvation, which is humiliation. The loss of dignity, the collapse of reputation and self-respect, the feelings of dehumanization, are not incidental to the experience of famine. They are central to it. And this experience was inflicted, in a deliberate, sustained and even celebrated manner, by the leaders of the Federal Government of Ethiopia.
