Coloured wars

The lead editorial in Monday's Guardian was about the war which has been going on in the Tigray region of Ethiopia for a couple of years now. This being just one war among the various wars past and present in and around the Sudan and Ethiopia.

A map of the relevant part of Africa. Note how Djibouti owns Ethiopia's access to the sea. But Ethiopia does include the source of the Blue Nile, lots of mountains (central) and some deserts (north and east).

A map of the relevant, northernmost region of Ethiopia, that is to say Tigray.

I have not yet been able to find out what the war is about, although it seems that the Eritreans to the north and the Ethiopians to the south are pitted against the Tigrayans in the middle. About all that there seems to be agreement about is that this war has done a huge amount of damage: many people killed, many more damaged (this last involving a lot of sexual violence) and many more still hungry. Estimates of deaths so far look to range up to about half a million, mostly starvation rather than violence.

Given the amount of coverage of the war in the Ukraine and that this war in Africa is nearly invisible in UK media, and I dare say in most other western media, it would be understandable if people of colour living (say) south of the Mediterranean, thought that the west only cared about carnage when it involved white people and was near enough home to be threatening. Why should we care about them? Just a lot of white folk hell bent on destroying each other again. Let them get on with it. And if we get some cheap gas, oil and wheat from Russia along the way, then great.

To be fair, our record in the west on fixing other peoples' problems is not good. But we might take a bit more interest than we appear to be.

References

Reference 1: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/09/1127481. September 2022. 'Ethiopia’s people are once again “mired…in the intractable and deadly consequences” of conflict between Government troops and forces loyal to Tigrayan separatist fighters, who are all likely responsible for war crimes, top rights investigators said on Thursday'.

Reference 2: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129572. October 2022. 'Ethiopia: UN chief ‘gravely concerned’ by escalation in fighting across Tigray'.

Reference 3: Report of the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia - Human Rights Council - 2022. A/HRC/51/46. Written in the dense language of big international organisations. But there is a lot of information here.