NONE OF THE PEOPLE
I PHOTOGRAPH ARE VICTIMS.
THEY’RE SURVIVORS.”
—Lynsey Addario, National Geographic
photographerStaff writer Rachel Hartigan most recently wrote for the
magazine about the crisis in Ethiopia with Lynsey Addario.it’s the push to remake the country
into a conservative Islamic state. In
Myanmar, it’s the military’s unwill-
ingness to cede power. In Israel and
the Palestinian territories, to put it
simplistically, it’s about who can live
where. In Ethiopia it’s the combustion
of years of political resentment. In the
United States it’s about who has the
right to power and safety, as well as
the dangers of misinformation.
But the tactics employed in the veryworst of the conflicts are similar: wide-
spread violence, starvation, and rape.
Lynsey Addario has been photo-graphing conflicts for more than 20
years in a dozen countries. Rape, as
a weapon, is something she has seen
throughout the world. The act itself
is horrifying, and the fallout destroys
communities. That’s what it’s intended
to do. In some places, parents and hus-
bands cast out women who have been
raped, and their families are broken.
In Tigray, Eritrean and Ethiopianforces have systematically and brutally
raped Tigrayan women. When Addario
arrived in May to cover the effects of
the war on civilians, she found women
who’d escaped from their captors, or
been released, and made their way to
the shelter of a hospital in the state’s
capital city of Mekele, then under the
national army’s control.
“People who have not experiencedwar may not realize that in every con-
flict there are moments of peace—little
sanctuaries of not quite safety when
people can find some rest,” Addario
says. “These women were in that
moment, which gave them the strength
and resilience to tell me what had hap-
pened to them.”
Addario cried as she listened.
“I could not ease their pain,” shesays. “The only way I could help them—
or any of the people I’ve photographed
through the years—is by bringing their
stories to the wider world.”
In the midst of these women’s anguish and grief, Addario tried
to capture their beauty: “It might seem strange in those circum-
stances, but beauty invites readers to linger, to try to understand.
And it conveys my experience that none of the people I photograph
are victims. They’re survivors.” Her portrait of one of the survivors
is on the next page.
The effects of conflict last long after the fighting is over. Scars
are left on bodies; frightening memories, in minds. The Tigrayan
women Addario photographed will never forget their losses. Neither
will anyone else caught in the relentless gears of armed conflict.
Even those separated from conflicts by time or distance still
reel from them. Consider two painful remembrances in 2021: the
20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the centennial
of the Tulsa Race Massacre, when a prosperous Black community
in Oklahoma was destroyed by its white neighbors.
As a country, the United States is still reckoning with the after-
shocks of these two harrowing events—and with acts of violence
throughout the nation’s history. Monuments to slave owners who
took up arms against the United States in the Civil War—such as
Robert E. Lee—are now coming down. The remains of Native
American children who died at the boarding schools they were
forced to attend are only now being returned to their communities.
But consider too that the moments of stillness between conflict
and strife leave room for reflection. How did this happen? How do
we stop this from happening again? What more could we have done?
Maybe someday we’ll get it right. jYEAR IN PICTURES: CONFLICT