40 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
into the duga, and he urged me to spread
word of what was happening there. But
there were limits to what the Afar
wanted conveyed.
After the meeting, I was riding with
Hassen, Abiy’s emissary, when he
stopped the car and pointed out a
fenced-in encampment, guarded by sol-
diers. Inside were a few hundred tents
in a dusty field, where children and
women clustered around cook fires. They
were Tigrayans, who had lived in rural
areas of Afar. When the war began, the
authorities had brought them to the
camp, ostensibly to protect against at-
tacks by what Hassen described as “peo-
ple sent by the T.P.L.F.” I asked Has-
sen if we could go inside and talk to
them, but he rejected the idea. “All they
will do is complain, and that will be un-
pleasant,” he said.
I
n mid-September, I talked with the
T.P.L.F.’s primary spokesman, Ge-
tachew Reda. The conversation didn’t
last long; soon after picking up, Ge-
tachew said that it wasn’t safe for him
to be on the phone. After he had made
a call a few days earlier, a drone strike
targeted his home in Mekelle. “It was
a direct hit,” he said. “I don’t know how
I survived.” Afterward, he tweeted about
the attack, and a second strike quickly
followed. “It destroyed what was left of
my house and killed more people, in-
cluding security men and some of my
neighbors.” Nine people had died in all.
Other Tigrayans were more forth-
coming. Mulugeta Gebrehiwot is a for-
mer senior member of the T.P.L.F. who
left the party over political differences
but has advised Tigrayan forces in the
field. From Mekelle, he told me he be-
lieves that Abiy and the Eritreans in-
tend to “conquer” Tigray, with conse-
quences that are “too horrific to imagine.”
The ordinary people of the region had
no choice but to fight back, Mulugeta
said: “Left with no options other than
survival, even a donkey can kill a hyena.”
Most of the international observers
I spoke with believe that Abiy’s soldiers
and the Eritreans have committed vi-
olence on a greater scale than the Tigray-
ans, but none of the partisans in the
conflict seem to have avoided brutality.
A recent U.N. report described war
crimes and human-rights violations on
both sides. In addition to the widespread
starvation caused by the siege, Abiy’s
forces and allies had killed and raped
civilians, and carried out scores of air
strikes on civilian targets, including one
on a displaced-persons camp in which
some sixty civilians died. The Tigrayan
forces, the report said, had committed
“large-scale killings of Amhara civil-
ians, rape and sexual violence, and wide-
spread looting and destruction of civil-
ian property.” The senior Western
official told me, in disgust, “They’re all
as bad as each other.”
On one of my trips with Abiy, he
brought along his predecessor, Haile-
mariam Desalegn, and I pressed him
on the war in Tigray. Hailemariam
chose his words carefully, describing
the conf lict as “complicated.” The
T.P.L.F., he argued, was like other lib-
eration movements that had seized
power and held it: “They can’t con-
ceive of not being in control anymore.”
Hailemariam suggested that the be-
sieged Tigrayans had no way out but
to fight: “Eighty per cent of their peo-
ple depend on the government for sup-
port, and there is a lack of food. The
youth are turning to banditry, robbing
trucks. The T.P.L.F. don’t have any re-
sources to help the situation.” He added,
“What the Tigrayans do have is a big
army, and a lot of people willing to die.
Dying is their only solution.”
For Abiy, Hailemariam was perhaps
his most significant link to the previ-
ous government. Yet Abiy disparaged
him, over lunch at the palace: “He never
expected to be P.M. He was picked be-
cause he was from a minority, and both
the Tigrayans and the Amhara wanted
someone without a constituency they
could control.”
With the conflict deepening, Abiy
also seems to lack a substantial con-
stituency of his own. Abraham Belay,
a Tigrayan who is Abiy’s defense min-
ister, said that he had struggled to ne-
gotiate with both sides. “I have been
trying my best to become a middle-
man,” he said. But the Amhara extrem-
ists rejected him for being a Tigrayan,
and the Tigrayan hard-liners called
him a banda, a traitor. “There are peo-
“I have an umbrella. I just don’t want to carry around a wet umbrella.”
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