Leaders in Africa and around the world give lip service to addressing
underlying causes of terrorism, violent internal conflicts, criminal violence and other threats. In practice,
they prioritize militarized responses that are not only
abusive of human rights but also ineffective and counter-productive.
African conflicts are most often seen in terms of simplistic
narratives and applied to the entire continent. But each country
is distinct. Most are at peace, afflicted not by war and warlords,
but by the less visible kinds of violence that prevail around the
world: violence against women or the everyday violence of crime and
discrimination against immigrants.
Editor s Note
It feels strange to write about a humanitarian crisis in this day and age with barely any pictures, videos or witness testimonies from the ground. But that is what the situation in Ethiopias Tigray region has come to. Since the conflict between the federal government, led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, and the regional governments ruling party, the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), began in November 2020, access to the region has been extremely limited. Internet and telephone connectivity was cut off as soon as the fighting began, disconnecting about 5 million people. Months later, the internet remains down and telephone communication has only been restored in a few main towns. Journalists and human rights monitors are still denied entry and cannot report to the world the full scale of the violence which has left at least hundreds of people dead and more than 470,000 displaced, according to the UN. - Vanessa Tsehaye, Amnesty International