War tore Ethiopia’s diaspora apart. Peace activists are stitching it back together.
| Washington
Three years ago, civil war broke in Ethiopia’s northernmost region, Tigray. Soon, tensions spilled over into the country’s vast global diaspora.
The war “very much fragmented the social fabric amongst Ethiopians,” says Meaza Gidey Gebremedhin, an anti-war activist from Tigray who lives in the Washington, D.C., area. “You see people associating with their ethnic group and forming their own private and smaller community centers, rather than a bigger Ethiopian community.”
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onCivil war in Ethiopia led to tensions in the country’s vast global diaspora as well. Now, peace activists are determined to rebuild trust.
People closed ranks around their communities partly in response to the appalling violence against civilians on both sides of the war, including mass rape and murder. But the tension and mistrust was also deepened by disinformation.
In response, a small but determined group of Ethiopians in the diaspora began to push back. From peace conferences to podcasts, they began working to heal their fractured communities however they could.
“The vast majority of people are at peace with each other,” says Moges Teshome, an Ethiopian Ph.D. student living in Vienna. He has a popular podcast about politics and peace in Ethiopia called “Buffet of Ideas.”
“The social fabric has not been totally torn apart,” he says. “The trust is deteriorating, but [it] is still there.”
On a warm spring day in March 2021, the Queen of Sheba restaurant in Los Angeles’ Inglewood neighborhood got an unexpected visit from the city’s health department. It was the first surprise visit by health officials in the restaurant’s seven-year history.
Soon, things got even stranger. Over the next few months, officials showed up unannounced again and again. Salem Mengesha started to ask questions.
“When we asked why they were visiting so many times, they said that they were receiving [anonymous] calls” complaining that the restaurant was unclean, says Ms. Mengesha, whose sister owns Queen of Sheba, and who has worked there on and off since its opening.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onCivil war in Ethiopia led to tensions in the country’s vast global diaspora as well. Now, peace activists are determined to rebuild trust.
While all this was happening, Ms. Mengesha noticed another troubling trend. Once charmed by Queen of Sheba’s commitment to promoting their culture through food, Ethiopians had mostly stopped patronizing the restaurant.
The reason could be traced to a civil war happening more than 9,000 miles away, in the Mengeshas’ homeland. The family’s origins are in Ethiopia’s northernmost region, Tigray, where fighting had pitted the local community against the national government.
“As soon as the war broke out,” the restaurant’s non-Tigrayan Ethiopian clientele “completely stopped coming,” Ms. Mengesha says.
More than three years later, even though fighting in Tigray has formally ended, violence continues in other parts of the country, and divisions like this linger in communities across Ethiopia’s global diaspora. However, even as misinformation continues to fuel mistrust, a small but determined group of Ethiopians are pushing back. From peace conferences to podcasts, they are working to heal their fractured communities however they can.
A torn social fabric
For nearly three decades, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was Ethiopia’s ruling party. As a result, although Tigrayans make up just 6% of Ethiopia’s 110 million people, they dominated the country’s politics, military, and economy. Resentments built, and in 2018, other parties from the ruling coalition unseated the TPLF and chose a non-Tigrayan prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, for the first time.
The TPLF was incensed, tensions grew, and eventually a TPLF assault on government military bases in November 2020 sparked a civil war. To date, as many as 600,000 people have died as a result of the conflict, and 5 million more have been displaced. Now, fighting has mostly ended in Tigray itself, but violence has broken out elsewhere and Tigray remains in the midst of a devastating hunger crisis that aid agencies warn could become famine.
Over the past three years, the war’s tensions have also spilled over into the diaspora. Ms. Mengesha began experiencing them just months after fighting started, when she attended rallies calling for a cease-fire and protection of civilians in Tigray, where her extended family still lives. Immediately, she says, she began to receive social media comments from strangers calling her a spy and saying her community “deserved” violence.
The messages rattled her, but she didn’t think her trolls would go further. That is, until the barrage of unfounded complaints about Queen of Sheba’s hygiene levels began.
The war “very much fragmented the social fabric amongst Ethiopians,” says Meaza Gidey Gebremedhin, an anti-war activist from Tigray who lives in the Washington, D.C., area. “You see people associating with their ethnic group and forming their own private and smaller community centers, rather than a bigger Ethiopian community.”
In part, people closed rank around their communities in response to the appalling violence against civilians that occurred on both sides of the conflict. International observers have found substantial evidence that both Tigrayan and Ethiopian forces have committed war crimes, including the mass rape and murder of civilians.
Repairing trust
But the tension and mistrust was also deepened by disinformation, many say.
“I saw the media – the diaspora media, the church media – everyone was warmongering,” says Getachew Assefa, a professor of architecture at the University of Calgary with Tigrayan roots. “That shocked me to the core.”
In response, he decided in mid-2021 to start a news platform devoted to spreading accurate information about the war in Tigray and advocating for an end to the killing of civilians on both sides. UMD Media – short for “understanding, measuring, doing” – publishes articles and hosts panel discussions. Today, it reaches more than 30,000 subscribers of multiple ethnicities, faiths, and countries on YouTube, and sometimes broadcasts by satellite into Ethiopia and Eritrea as well, Dr. Assefa says.
“The vast majority of people are at peace with each other,” says Moges Teshome, an Ethiopian Ph.D. student living in Vienna. Like Dr. Assefa, he believes amplifying these voices is the only way forward. “The social fabric has not been totally torn apart,” he says. “The trust is deteriorating, but [it] is still there.”
About a year ago, Mr. Teshome, who studies ethnic conflicts at the Vienna School of International Studies, began recording a podcast to support this message. “Buffet of Ideas,” which focus on politics and peace in Ethiopia, now has more than 40,000 subscribers on YouTube.
There are other flickers of hope too. Last July, diaspora members from different Ethiopian ethnicities came together for a peace conference in San Diego. In October, a coalition of diaspora groups in the United States published a list of demands aimed to bring fighting across Ethiopia to an end, including the release of political prisoners and a national dialogue.
“The scar of war is still there,” says Mr. Teshome. But “there is hope. There is a possibility for dialogue and possible reconciliation.”
