Ethiopia Is Burning Its North and the World Keeps Looking Away

The United Nations says it is "gravely concerned." Gravely concerned is what diplomats write when they have run out of words for what they are watching. Across northern Ethiopia, fighting is spreading across multiple fronts, and the people caught in it are the ones who pay: farmers who cannot reach their fields, mothers who cannot reach clinics, children who cannot reach food. Aid convoys are being blocked and aid workers are being pushed back. Ask yourself how many more fronts must open before "concern" becomes action.

We have seen this film before, and we know how it ends if no one stops it. Between November 2020 and November 2022, the war between the federal government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front killed Tigrayans, Amharas, Afars, and Ethiopian soldiers in numbers that researchers still struggle to pin down. Estimates run into the hundreds of thousands. Credible rights investigations, including those by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, documented massacres, sexual violence used as a weapon, deliberate starvation, and the blocking of food and medicine to millions. Eritrean forces fought alongside the federal army, despite Addis Ababa's denials, and the Ethiopian state cut the region off from telecommunications, banking, and the press. The Pretoria Cooperation Agreement, signed in November 2022 under African Union mediation, was supposed to end the killing. It ended the big war. It did not end the violence, and it did not deliver the accountability that the dead were owed.

Then the fire moved. Since August 2023, the Amhara region has been torn by a rebellion led by the Fano militia, a conflict that has seen the state respond with airstrikes, drone attacks, mass detentions, and internet shutdowns. Drones made in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates now sit in Ethiopia's arsenal, sold by governments that speak the language of partnership and development while their hardware circles the skies over civilian villages. Somewhere in the Oromia highlands, the Oromo Liberation Army continues its own insurgency. Meanwhile, Addis Ababa's leaders talk openly about sea access to the Red Sea, a rhetoric that alarms Eritrea and destabilizes an already fragile Horn. Every front feeds the next. That is the pattern the UN is describing, whether or not the phrase "war" appears in its statement.

Here is what we must say plainly, because too many analysts hide behind the word "complex." Complexity explains the causes. It does not excuse the outcome. Ethiopia's federal government owes its citizens an end to indiscriminate force and an open account of who ordered the strikes that killed civilians. The TPLF leadership, which has fractured and clashed with its own former allies, owes Tigrayans an honest reckoning with its own abuses. Eritrea's president owes the region an explanation for the troops that crossed into Ethiopian territory, and the outside powers that sold weapons and drones owe the victims the same scrutiny they would demand of any rival. The new scramble for Africa does not look like the colonial partition maps of the nineteenth century. It looks like arms contracts, port deals, and loans, and its beneficiaries are rarely the people living under the bombs.

We are told that these are internal affairs. Ethiopia is a sovereign state, and it is. But sovereignty is not a license to starve your own citizens. The African Union's founding charter speaks of respect for human rights and the rule of law, and the AU's own Constitutive Act rejects unconstitutional change and grave violations of human life. If those words mean nothing when a federal government shells its own provinces and a regional government fights for survival, then they are decoration on a wall at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, a city that should be ashamed of the irony.

So what must change? Start with the Pretoria agreement, which must be publicly reviewed, not quietly managed. The AU Peace and Security Council should publish an independent assessment of implementation, including disarmament, the release of detainees, the return of displaced persons, and the reopening of banks and telecoms in Tigray. IGAD must stop treating the Horn as a series of disconnected emergencies and start treating it as a single regional security problem. The UN Security Council should demand unhindered humanitarian access in writing, with named consequences for obstruction. Ethiopia's own National Dialogue Commission, established in 2021, must be given real political space and protection from the security services, not reduced to a stage for ceremony.

Africa already knows what better looks like. Botswana built a prosperous, stable democracy on diamonds by insisting on transparent revenue management and an independent judiciary. Mauritius rose from a sugar economy to a diversified, rule-of-law financial centre by protecting property rights and competition. Ghana and Senegal have proven that power can change hands peacefully through the ballot box when institutions are allowed to work. These are not perfect countries, but they show that strong courts, a free press, and accountable security forces are not Western luxuries. They are the foundations of prosperity, and the absence of them is what turns ethnic and regional grievances into wars.

To the citizens of Ethiopia, the Tigrayans, Amharas, Oromos, Afars, and every other community that has buried its dead in the last five years: demand more than statements. Demand the names of the commanders responsible for each strike. Demand that journalists and aid workers be allowed in. Demand that every drone purchase be disclosed to parliament. To the AU, the UN, and every government that calls itself a friend of Ethiopia: stop speaking in the passive voice. Name the actors, name the weapons, name the victims, and then act. And to the rest of us across this continent: when a neighbour's house is on fire, silence is not neutrality. It is complicity with the arsonist. Ethiopia's north is burning. The question is no longer whether we know. The question is whether we will finally refuse to look away.

Based on reporting by UN-NEWS