The War No One at School Knew About

Editor's note: This is a placeholder article illustrating the personal voice format planned for Foreign Affairs.

When the Tigray war started in November 2020, I was in ninth grade in Addis Ababa. My classmates abroad — the ones I knew from a summer programme — sent me messages asking if I was okay. I said yes. I didn't know how to explain that in my neighbourhood, life looked almost entirely normal, while four hundred kilometres north, something I could not yet fully understand was happening.
That distance — physical, psychological, political — is one of the things I think about most when I try to explain the conflict to people here in Norway.
The outside coverage was stark. War crimes, famine, a government blocking humanitarian access. All of that was real. But so was the version I heard from my father, who is from Amhara and who saw the TPLF as an organisation that had held the country's political system hostage for thirty years. So was the version my friend Tigist never talked about at all, because her family was in Mekelle and the phones were down for months.
There was no single Ethiopian experience of that war. There still isn't. What I've found at UWC is that the students who come from places in the news are almost never asked to complicate the story. They're asked to confirm it.
This column isn't going to confirm stories. It's going to sit with the parts that don't fit.