While Americans awaited the result of the 2020 presidential election with glib accusations about the collapse of civilization, half a world away the people of the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia experienced it.
On November 4, security forces taking the side of the dominant ethno-nationalist political party in Tigray attacked a military command center in Mekelle, the capital of the region. This seems to have been in response to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s attempts to merge Ethiopia’s long-standing but uneasy coalition of regional and ethnic political factions into a single party representing the entire nation. The result has been a civil war, one that has been all but invisible in the United States.
