Addis Abeba — From the very beginning of the genocidal war on Tigray in November 2020, the international community adopted the language of Abiy Ahmed's regime and its allies. This language was deliberately weaponized against the Tigrayan people. It was designed to blur the truth and control how the world described what was happening in Tigray while it was under a total communications blackout. Instead of naming the war for what it was, many international organizations, humanitarian agencies, global media outlets, and even some foreign governments reduced the war to a vague "conflict in northern Ethiopia" or "civil war in northern Ethiopia." The implication was that Tigray was merely an indistinct corner on a map rather than a constitutionally recognized state with its own people, rich history, and proud Tigrayan identity.
This was neither a minor stylistic choice nor a matter of careless wording. It was a calculated narrative strategy that amounted to complicity. Even major humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), adopted this phrasing in reports, press statements, and maps, often erasing the name Tigray altogether. They repeatedly referred to Tigray only as "northern Ethiopia" in their reports and press statements. International media followed a similar pattern, repeating this language and reinforcing the erasure of Tigray and Tigrayan identity.
What might appear to be a small choice of words, in fact, eroded the political and legal identity of Tigray itself. By obscuring that identity, international aid organizations and media outlets helped legitimize the destruction of a people under continuous attack, provided cover for mass atrocities by presenting them as a "regional conflict," and eroded the political will of the international community to stop the genocide against Tigrayans. How was it that this narrative impacted the course of the war and its consequences?
An obvious example was OCHA's repeated use of maps and public statements that described Tigray's constitutionally defined borders as "contested" or "disputed." This choice of words explicitly undermined Tigray's territorial integrity and helped legitimize the forced mass expulsion of Tigrayans.
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This practice of distorting Tigray's borders continues today. On 06 October 2025, the Tigray Interim Administration accused Ethiopia's Ministry of Agriculture of "deliberately misrepresenting" Tigray's boundaries in a Facebook post that labeled Western Tigray's Welkait-Tsegede-Setit-Humera district as part of the Amhara region. The Interim Administration denounced it as "a covert political game" aimed at annexing Tigrayan land and warned it would pursue legal action if the federal government failed to correct it.
Similar formal complaints were already raised on 18 July, 2023, when the previous Tigray Interim Administration accused the Ministries of Health and Education of deliberately issuing reports that placed parts of Tigray under the Amhara region. This manipulation of maps and language is part of a continuing effort to legitimize the annexation of Tigrayan territories.
These incidents are not bureaucratic mistakes but a deliberate strategy led by Abiy Ahmed's regime to reinforce the illegal annexation of Tigrayan territories. The federal authorities control the institutions issuing these misrepresentations, and their refusal to reverse them shows they are not neutral actors but the chief architects of the ongoing dispossession of Tigray.
Humera, Welkait, and Raya were internationally recognized areas as part of Tigray before the war. After Tigrayans were massacred or forced to flee, the areas were illegally occupied by the expansionist militias from the Amhara region allied with Abiy Ahmed's regime. Instead of being described as occupied land, they began to appear in updates and news stories as "contested areas" or "disputed territories." Such language obscured and, in effect, helped legitimize the ethnic cleansing campaign that had taken place. The result was to make it seem as if this was land in an unresolved border dispute rather than the violent dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Tigrayans.
Ethnic Cleansing in Western and Southern Tigray
Calling Humera, Welkait, and Raya "contested" rather than "Western and Southern Tigray" helped justify the violent and forcible mass expulsion of Tigrayans from their homes and ancestral land. Tigrayans from these districts were forced to flee, were killed, or were rounded up and detained en masse until they were required to register as members of the Amhara ethnicity to survive, thus renouncing their Tigrayan identity. Those who fled to Sudan or to other parts of Tigray still cannot return home. Many Tigrayans who remain in the displacement camps have been told that if they return, they must register as "Amhara" or be denied the right to return at all. Ethiopia's federal system requires that every citizen's identity card list their ethnicity, so being forced to re-register as "Amhara" meant legally renouncing their Tigrayan identity.
....OCHA, other UN agencies, and many global media outlets consistently adopted language that minimized the scale of the atrocities in Tigray."
The cultural heritage of these Tigrayan communities has been systematically erased. Their mass graves were exhumed, burned, and deliberately destroyed to erase evidence and deny accountability. One of the most harrowing scenes reported by international media outlets, including CNN, the BBC, the Associated Press, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera, was the sight of the bodies of Tigrayans from Western Tigray floating down the Tekeze River toward Sudan, a gruesome reminder of the ethnic-cleansing crimes committed in Western Tigray.
What followed after these mass atrocities, extrajudicial killings, and forcible expulsions was a calculated effort to repopulate the emptied land. This mass resettlement had a second purpose: Abiy Ahmed's regime and Amhara authorities aimed to change the demographic reality of Western Tigray before organizing an illegal "referendum" to claim the land, knowing that the rightful Tigrayan residents who survived the mass killing remain trapped in displacement camps in Sudan or elsewhere in Tigray. To carry out this plan, the vacant homes and farmlands were seized and given to hundreds of thousands of settlers brought in from different parts of the Amhara region and from Oromia. These ethnic Amhara settlers now live as legal residents in the occupied Tigrayan homes. Any such referendum, conducted after the rightful residents have been violently removed, would be nothing more than an extension of ethnic cleansing under the guise of a legal process outlined in the constitution.
The international community must reject attempts to disguise annexation as a "border commission" process or a local referendum. It cannot recognize the outcome of any sham referendum held over mass graves and empty homes of those violently uprooted.
Language matters. For the international community, describing these lands as "contested" or "disputed" has only made the injustice against Tigrayans worse. Such deliberate wording makes the Tigrayan survivors seem like outsiders trying to claim someone else's land, when in reality they are the rightful inhabitants, violently uprooted en masse by Abiy Ahmed and his allies. Even the dead are denied recognition: families whose loved ones lie in mass graves hear them described as "casualties of an internal conflict" rather than victims of a genocidal campaign to destroy their people.
Humera, Welkait, and Raya were internationally recognized areas as part of Tigray before the war."
Imagine losing your family, your home, and your community, and then hearing the international community speak as if you never existed there at all. This is not just about terminology. It is about denying the humanity and history of the Tigrayan people. Genocide does not end with mass killing; it continues through silence, denial, and the rewriting of names and maps. Through narrative and naming, words become another weapon to erase a people from history. That is exactly what is happening in Tigray, mainly in Western and Southern Tigray, under the full watch of the international community today.
International Complicity and Silence
International humanitarian organizations, including OCHA and other UN agencies, and many global media outlets consistently adopted language that minimized the scale of the atrocities in Tigray. By describing the genocide as "a conflict in northern Ethiopia," the ethnic cleansing as "ethnic clashes," and the occupied districts as "contested" or "disputed," they blurred the reality of forcible removal and annexation and gave political cover to the perpetrators. This choice of words muted public outrage, allowed donor governments to delay decisive action by downplaying the war crimes and crimes against humanity, and left survivors feeling silenced and unseen. Because Tigray was under a total communications blackout during the war, international agencies like OCHA became the primary sources of information for the outside world, which only amplified the damage done to truth and accountability by propagating the narrative promoted by Abiy Ahmed's regime.
Inside Ethiopia, there was no single counter-narrative to challenge Abiy Ahmed's framing of the genocidal war on Tigray. All domestic media, whether state-controlled or nominally independent, repeated the regime's language, calling it a "law-enforcement operation" or a "conflict in northern Ethiopia." This alignment was not limited to the press. Most major religious institutions, especially the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, amplified the regime's framing and helped legitimize the war on Tigray in the eyes of the public. None openly questioned this dangerous narrative, allowing the regime's propaganda to dominate the public space. This complicity at home made it even more important for international media and humanitarian agencies to tell the truth. Their failure was therefore even more damaging.
This failure is not new. History shows that such tactics in language are not unique to the Ethiopian regime of Abiy Ahmed. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, early UN reports and media statements referred to the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis as a "civil war" and "internal conflict" rather than genocide, thus allowing the international community a pass on honoring their obligation of intervention under the genocide convention. In Bosnia during the 1990s, atrocities in Srebrenica were for years described as "ethnic clashes" before being recognized as genocide. Similar patterns appeared in Darfur in the early 2000s and in Myanmar's 2017 Rohingya crisis, when UN agencies softened their language in the name of neutrality to preserve access for aid delivery.
In each case, the refusal to call atrocities by their proper name shielded perpetrators, muted outrage, and slowed decisive action. In Palestine today, decades of military occupation and forced displacement are still often described as "disputed territories," a language that obscures Palestinian peoplehood and sovereignty and frames occupation as if it were merely a border disagreement.
If the international community is serious about delivering justice and accountability in Tigray, it must start by calling things by their real names. Tigray is not "northern Ethiopia." Humera, Welkait, and Raya are not "contested" or "disputed" areas. They are parts of Tigray whose people were violently expelled en masse in one of the worst cases of ethnic cleansing in recent African history.
It took years before international bodies began to call what happened in Western Tigray by its real name. Even the United States, usually careful with its political language, eventually acknowledged the mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing. In a 2022 press statement, the U.S. State Department expressed its "grave concern over continuing reports of ethnically motivated atrocities committed by Amhara authorities in western Tigray, including those described in the recent joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International." That joint report, released under the title "We Will Erase You From This Land," documented a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayans in Western Tigray. The U.S. State Department added, "In particular, we are deeply troubled by the report's finding that these acts amount to ethnic cleansing."
When Tigrayan survivors managed to get their stories out despite the communications blackout, their accounts were often dismissed as partisan claims, while the narrative shaped by the perpetrators dominated global headlines. Tigrayans who tried to tell the story of their people were frequently asked by editors to remove certain words and replace them with supposedly "neutral" terms that favor the talking points of Abiy Ahmed's regime. This practice, carried out in the name of media neutrality, silenced victims yet again and continues today. It must stop. As the African proverb often attributed to Chinua Achebe reminds us, "Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."
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The Pretoria Agreement, signed in November 2022 to end the war on Tigray, required that these illegally occupied territories be returned to Tigray under the status quo ante. Nearly three years later, however, this has not happened. Instead, the "contested area" label has given Abiy Ahmed political cover to deliberately delay justice and continue the silent annexation of Tigrayan land, using these territories as bargaining chips to hold on to power by keeping the Amhara authorities on his side.
These distortions conceal the true nature of events on the ground and have consequences. What happened in Tigray was not merely a regional "conflict." It was a genocide, and history will remember it as such, whether the powerful nations that shaped the UN response, including the United States and other Security Council members with strategic interests in Ethiopia, choose to acknowledge it or not. Even though naming it for what it is will not undo the immense suffering of our people, it is the first step toward acknowledging it. It is how we honor the innocent civilians who were massacred and gang-raped before and after the peace deal, solely because of their ethnicity. It is also how we stand with the survivors still suffering in displacement camps and how we prevent the international community from siding with the perpetrators.
Recognizing genocide, whether in Tigray, in Rwanda, in Srebrenica, in Darfur, in Myanmar, or in Palestine, is not a political gesture; it is a legal and moral duty. The 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocidedefines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. That is exactly what happened in Tigray. International humanitarian agencies and journalists must stop using words that erase victims and instead center the voices of survivors. Reports and maps that reflect the narratives of perpetrators will only deepen the harm and delay justice and accountability.
The significance of language cannot be overstated. Language shapes the narrative, and the narrative shapes the response or, in the case of Tigray, the lack of response from the international community. Today, Abiy Ahmed is preparing for yet another round of war against Tigray. The international community must not fall again for the false narratives that are going to be deliberately propagated by his regime. AS
Editor's Note: Desta Haileselassie Hagos (PhD) is a Lecturer of Computer Science and AI/ML Technical Lead Manager at Howard University, Washington, DC, USA. In addition to his academic role, Desta has been documenting Tigrayan civilian mass atrocities since the outbreak of the genocidal war on Tigray in November 2020. He manages https://tigraygenocide.com and can be reached at [email protected]
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the writer's and do not necessarily reflect the editorial of Addis Standard.
