THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 39
cies. “They deliberately destroyed our
social fabric, built up over millennia,
making everyone suspicious of one an-
other,” he said. “They are the original
troublemakers. We are unlucky, brother.”
I
n April, the U.S. State Department
released a dire statement on the on-
going siege in Tigray: “We note with
the utmost alarm that thousands of
Ethiopians of Tigrayan ethnicity re-
portedly continue to be detained arbi-
trarily in life-threatening conditions.”
Abiy insisted that the Americans had
it all wrong. “I am a real peacemaker,”
he said. “I love peace. But the outsid-
ers, they don’t understand what hap-
pened to us.” Throughout Ethiopia,
Abiy’s allies contended that the
T.P.L.F.—“the junta”—had hood-
winked the West into believing that
Tigrayans were the real victims of the
conflict. They argued that the T.P.L.F.
had victimized the Ethiopian people
for twenty-seven years, and was plot-
ting to retake control of the country.
In early July, I flew to the Afar re-
gion, a wedge of desert that adjoins
Eritrea and Tigray. Afar, the country’s
most inhospitable corner, had become
one of the battlegrounds of the con-
f lict, with local militias joining the
fight against Tigray, and the T.P.L.F.
striking back.
My escort was the main federal em-
issary to the region, Hassen Abdulkadir,
a tall man with a commanding presence.
He brought me to meet Afar’s leaders
in Semera, the regional capital—a clus-
ter of flat-roofed brown buildings set in
a bleak landscape of thornbushes and
dunes, where the Awash River f lows
past in a muddy channel. On the edge
of town, camel herders camped in small
groups, avoiding the heat of the day,
when temperatures climbed above a
hundred and ten degrees.
The head of Afar’s disaster-relief ef-
fort, Mohamed Hussen, complained that
his people were being neglected: “When-
ever we have international visitors, they
ask us how we can support Tigray, but
they don’t ask us about our needs.” An
ongoing drought and recent flooding
had combined with a locust blight to
displace more than half a million of the
Afar people, Mohamed said; the T.P.L.F.’s
military incursions had displaced six
hundred thousand more. Mohamed ac-
cused the T.P.L.F. of destroying health
facilities and water systems, as well as
hundreds of schools and homes. In a
truce accord declared in March, the
Tigrayans had agreed to withdraw from
Afar, but, regional officials maintained,
they were slow to comply; hundreds of
thousands of people were living in dis-
placed-persons camps. As in other re-
gions stricken by the conflict, a major-
ity of Afar’s residents were in urgent
need of humanitarian assistance.
To discuss the situation, I met the
president of Afar, Awal Arba, at his
palace, a boxy modern building the color
of sand. There was trash strewn around
the grounds, but his offices had been
given an Abiy-style makeover; in an
air-conditioned conference room, a
gleaming white table was surrounded
by white leather chairs.
Awal, wearing a safari suit and a pat-
terned fez, thanked me for “coming to
hear from the Afar people directly,
rather than just relying on hearsay.”
Then he began to rail against the
T.P.L.F. “When they were in power
and had the ability to loot from the na-
tion, they called themselves Ethiopi-
ans,” he said. “Now, having taken all
the heavy weapons with them to the
north, they call themselves Tigrayans.”
Awal alleged that the T.P.L.F. had at-
tacked women and children, and he
showed me gruesome pictures of vic-
tims with severed limbs, or with their
guts spilling out. In Afar, he said, “we
may attack each other, but never do we
attack women and children.”
This spring, the federal government
had agreed to allow food convoys
through to the besieged Tigrayans in
Mekelle, and Afar became the primary
corridor for relief. Awal and his men
cast the agreement as an act of gener-
osity toward their aggressors, calling
their region “the humanitarian center
of gravity.” But the senior U.S. official,
who helped negotiate the deal, said,
“We had to convince the Afar to let the
relief through,” while “dramatically in-
creasing our food assistance to Afar and
Amhara.” Awal warned that even this
contingent arrangement might not last.
“The T.P.L.F. are still preparing for war,”
he said. “And, if a single bullet is fired,
the humanitarian access stops, and
they’ll be the ones responsible.”
News of the war passed through the
region via a word-of-mouth network
called the duga, Awal explained: “The
Afar know everything through the duga
system, even if they don’t have the In-
ternet.” Now, he said, I had been brought
“ You ever notice how heavy your head is?”
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