Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Teklehaymanot G. Weldemichel, Lecturer in Environment and Development, University of Manchester

Famine – the extreme scarcity of food – devastated Ethiopia’s Tigray region during and after a two-year war that began in November 2020. Yet, the famine’s impact is one of the least documented crises of recent years.

Despite the enormous scale of suffering and the far-reaching consequences of the 2020-2022 war, there hasn’t been enough attention paid to all aspects of the disaster, or to aid to enable the region to recover.

The famine dimension of the conflict – how starvation was used as a weapon of war and continues to shape the region today – has largely failed to garner the global and domestic attention it demands.

We have closely followed and extensively written on the Tigray crisis since 2020 as researchers and firsthand witnesses. In a recent article published by the World Peace Foundation – a research institution focused on understanding and preventing conflict, particularly in Africa – we argued that the famine in Tigray was deliberately produced and deliberately obscured. In a recent journal article, too, one of us examined how the Ethiopian government and its allies created a “zone of invisibility” around the Tigray war.

In our view, famine was used as a weapon in a campaign of destruction in Tigray. Our research draws on humanitarian reports, testimonies, satellite imagery and conflict data to reconstruct how deprivation unfolded. We studied who was affected and why global famine detection systems failed to recognise the scale of the crisis.

The lack of reliable data caused by government restrictions, international inaction and structural blind spots in global famine monitoring systems hid the scale of one of the deadliest wars of the 21st century.

Famine in Tigray was not an outcome of war. It was the result of policies – a siege, economic blockade and obstruction of aid – designed to destroy civilian life.

Failure to document the famine has serious implications. It distorts global understanding of what happened in Tigray, limits accountability for war crimes and leaves the international community unprepared to respond to future politically induced famines.

When famine goes unrecorded, the suffering of entire populations is erased from the world’s moral and political map. It also weakens the mechanisms designed to prevent such atrocities elsewhere.

As a result, modern famines driven by political violence – in places like Tigray, Sudan and Gaza – are missed, downplayed or denied until it is too late.

Background: war and siege

The Tigray war broke out in November 2020 between the regional leadership, Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and the central government.

From the earliest days it was marked by large-scale and systematic destruction and looting of social and economic infrastructures. Industries, farms, irrigation systems, food stocks, crop fields, orchards, food storage facilities and businesses across Tigray were looted and destroyed.

Beyond the physical damage, occupying forces actively obstructed farmers from tilling and planting their land. Within six months, this had driven Tigray – home to about six million people at the time – into mass starvation.

In famines caused by natural calamity and economic crisis, poorer communities or those in remote locations are often the worst hit. In Tigray, places along roads were devastated because they were accessible to invading forces.

The destruction and looting of infrastructure was followed by a siege that lasted more than two years. The Ethiopian government and its allies imposed a full-scale blockade on Tigray.

Banks were shut down. The bank accounts of ethnic Tigrayans – both within the region and nationwide – were frozen. The movement of people, goods and humanitarian aid to and from the region, and within Tigray, was brought to a near complete halt.

Communications and access to the media were shut down. The multilayered siege left Tigray almost entirely cut off from the world. Commercial and humanitarian supplies were deliberately obstructed for most of the period.

This resulted in widespread deprivation, suffering and death, much of which has received little documentation or recognition.

The conflict is now described by some studies as a genocide and the deadliest conflict of the 21st century. An estimated 800,000 people were killed through massacres, enforced disappearances and starvation.

Even after the 2022 African Union-brokered ceasefire, hunger and deprivation persist, especially in the western zones and areas bordering Eritrea that remain under occupation. Urban populations whose livelihoods and workplaces were destroyed have yet to rebuild.

The implications

The Tigray famine reveals deep flaws in how global institutions – including the UN and international humanitarian agencies – measure and classify famine.

The siege prevented humanitarian access and data collection. This made famine difficult to measure and easier to deny.

International famine frameworks rely on indicators like market food prices and malnutrition rates among displaced people. They look at crop failure, loss of livestock and disrupted rural livelihoods. Not at urban households, civil servants or small traders – groups who were among the worst affected in Tigray. They don’t capture urban forms of deprivation, such as banking exclusion or a sudden loss of salary or assets.

Agencies’ dependence on official government data led to a system failure. The absence of data was treated as an absence of suffering.

Famine in Tigray was a deliberate effort to weaken and humiliate a population. The implications go beyond Ethiopia. They expose how global systems remain unfit for documenting or responding to politically induced famine.

What must change

To prevent future famines from being erased, there needs to be a transformation of global famine detection and humanitarian response systems.

• First, the UN and humanitarian agencies must reform famine assessment metrics and systems to account for politically induced starvation. They must include urban and middle-income groups in their analyses. This will help identify and expose deliberate starvation strategies early.

• Second, human rights bodies should investigate famine as an intentional act of war rather than as an unfortunate by-product. This is a step in the direction of holding perpetrators to account for policies such as sieges, blockades and aid obstruction.

• Third, donor governments and humanitarian organisations must insist on accountability and transparency in their engagement with states that obstruct humanitarian access to populations in need.

• Finally, scholars and human rights advocacy organisations should continue documenting how famine functions as a tool of genocide. This would ensure that invisibility does not shield perpetrators from scrutiny. In an age of global connectivity, the absence of data should trigger investigation.

Failing to learn from Tigray will leave the world just as blind to the next famine.

– Starvation as a weapon of war: how Ethiopia created a famine in Tigray
– https://theconversation.com/starvation-as-a-weapon-of-war-how-ethiopia-created-a-famine-in-tigray-268395

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Dan Paget, Assistant professor, University of Sussex

In Tanzania, something snapped this year. Protests followed the 29 October 2025 elections. They are unprecedented in their scale, national breadth and political content since the country’s independence in 1961.

But the repression unleashed by newly re-elected President Samia Suluhu Hassan has also been unprecedented. She has gone further than her autocratic predecessors in closing off the political space and silencing opposition figures.

By putting her main rival Tundu Lissu on trial for treason and barring others from contesting the presidency, Hassan has crossed autocratic thresholds that other leaders have not. Activists have been arrested, brutalised or disappeared.

The protests spread across a series of major cities and towns in Tanzania. However, an internet blackout created a fog of war in which details are difficult to ascertain.

I am an assistant professor of politics at the University of Sussex. I have dedicated 11 years to studying Tanzania’s anti-authoritarian struggle.

Amateur and professional coverage found its way through the internet blackout. What I see in this footage is anger and tragedy running through these protests, and the struggle of the anti-authoritarian movement at large. However, at least fleetingly, there has been hope as well.

The anger is directed at the regime. It simultaneously focuses on Tanzanians’ material circumstances and what they see as the political sources of those circumstances. The hope comes from a changing sense of what is possible – the regime long seemed invulnerable. The protests have thrown its authority into doubt.

The protests

The immediate trigger for the public protests was the sham general election.

The protests turned violent. Protesters set police stations and other buildings ablaze, hijacked police and ruling party vehicles, and ransacked polling stations.

The regime responded with force. Police met civilians with gunfire and teargas.

Two people were reportedly killed and several others injured on election day. Media sources, who include opposition leaders and diplomats in Tanzania, put the number of those killed over three days of protests in the hundreds.

The triggers

Tanzanians have plenty of reasons to be angry at the government.

The causes are many. About 72% of citizens work as street vendors, motorcycle taxi drivers and in other informal jobs. Yet Hassan’s neo-liberal government suppresses the demands of these constituencies.

Under Hassan’s rule, young people in particular have been neglected. Tanzania is a youthful country, with more than half of the population below the age of 18. They have especially suffered from Tanzania’s under-investment in education and health relative to its regional neighbours.

While Hassan has presided over an economy that has continued to steadily grow, it has remained deeply unequal. More than 66% of Tanzanians remain poor.

The anger is not just about policy, but politics too.

The ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), has deep roots. It has ruled Tanzania in one form or another since the country’s independence from Britain in 1961. For years, CCM has used autocratic measures to tip the playing field in its favour.

Since 2014, under former president John Pombe Magufuli, it has been steadily extending those measures. By 2020, the playing field had become all but closed.

Protesters are directing their anger against the regime. They have torn down posters of Hassan. They are demanding constitutional reform, a truly independent electoral commission, and free and fair elections.

Unprecedented protests

These people’s-power protesters, in short, are defining their cause in terms of democracy.

There is no precedent for protests like this in Tanzania. There have been many vigorous protests over the year. However, they have been localised protests against the forced eviction of the Maasai from ancestral lands, extraction by transnational gold mining corporations and exclusion of the public from the proceeds of natural gas extraction.

In semi-autonomous archipelago Zanzibar, electoral manipulation has been consistently protested for three decades,

Yet, Zanzibar aside, protests against the regime itself have always remained anaemic, until now.

It is not for want of trying.

The main opposition party Chadema has steadily turned to protest since 2016. It called for nationwide protests in the wake of the apparent rigging of the 2020 elections. Yet, few turned out to join them.

Chadema, and the opposition at large, has struggled in the face of a violent state apparatus to draw protesters beyond a cadre of committed activists to its banner. Until now.

What’s different

Until days ago, the sort of protests unfolding across Tanzania seemed like a fool’s hope. The CCM regime, and its security apparatus, would never allow them. Protesters were arrested, brutalised, abducted or killed. Resistance, it seemed, was futile.

The 2025 protests have thrown all of this into doubt.

As political scientists Adam Branch and Zachariah Mamphilly observe, in protests, what seems possible can change profoundly and suddenly. Whenever protests gather momentum, the dynamics of their formation and repression change. Security personnel can seem hopelessly outnumbered. Protests can seem unassailably large.

In this context, protesters have created spaces in which they – rather than the regime – rule, at least temporarily. The footage of protesters making off with ballot boxes, tearing down posters and saying the previously unsayable shows moments that have an air of emancipation.

The exuberance may not last. Tanzania’s regime has not endured for 64 years for nothing. If the crackdown hardens, and the death toll climbs, the streets may clear quickly. If, in contrast, the police are unable to contain the protests and the military refuse to support them, they may quickly lose control.

Whatever follows, Tanzania has changed almost overnight. One way or another, the change is almost certainly not yet over.

– Tanzania: President Samia Hassan’s grip on power has been shaken by unprecedented protests
– https://theconversation.com/tanzania-president-samia-hassans-grip-on-power-has-been-shaken-by-unprecedented-protests-268849