Credible research puts the Tigray conflict’s death toll—from violence and famine—at 500,000, a number that eclipses the death toll from the war in Ukraine by many multiples. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center reported recently that conflict and violence displaced more than 5.1 million people within Ethiopia in 2021, triple the number reported in 2020 and the highest figure ever recorded for any country in any given year. (The previous record was 3.5 million in Syria in 2013.) If newspaper column inches were assigned in proportion to human suffering, Ethiopia would be all you ever read about. But like most of Africa, the conflict receives little news coverage.
Every year, the Norwegian Refugee Council analyzes crises that have caused more than 200,000 people to be displaced from their homes, then publishes a list of the world’s ten most neglected displacement crises. This year, for the first time, all ten of the most neglected crises were on the African continent. As they writ…
