Desta Haileselassie sits at his desk in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday, Oct. 18, 2021. Cut off from Tigray due to a communications blackout, Desta has been compiling a list of Tigrayan victims of war. He is one of many in the Tigrayan diaspora who have waited for months to know whether loved ones are alive. They’re in the handwritten lists of names smuggled out of a region cut off from the world by war.
It is slow, difficult work. Almost all communication with Tigray has been cut off, and foreign media is banned. Many in the diaspora have waited for months to know whether loved ones are alive, terrified to receive messages from home even as they yearn for news. “There are days when I end up crying the whole evening,” Desta says softly. “A very, very hard job to do, but I have to do it ….This is the least I can do to help my people.”of the dead. The Associated Press has verified 30 of them chosen randomly, speaking with families and friends.Victim Number 2,171 was Gebretsadkan Teklu Gebreyesus, shot dead by soldiers in the presence of his two young sons, the AP confirmed.
under an Ethiopian government blockade. To emphasize the shattered connections, he often mentions when a victim is a parent, or is killed alongside one. The word “mother” appears 43 times.Desta too has lost loved ones, 19 of them. The self-contained 36-year-old gently deflects questions, saying every victim on his list is like family.
Relatives in neighboring Eritrea told Angesom that family members in Zalambessa were fine. But Angesom knew that in their culture, the death of a loved one usually wouldn’t be shared over the phone. The distance was made worse by fears that Ethiopian authorities were monitoring phone calls. You could only ask loved ones vaguely if they were OK and had food and water, Angesom says.
His brother told him that on Dec. 2, Eritrean soldiers had forced their relatives to do manual labor while they stripped down a glass factory and carted the pieces away, part of widespread looting. Then the soldiers killed them. But as they slipped back into daily conversations, he hit “record” each time, and saved the digital files.Victim Numbers 333 and 334: Meaza Goshu and Kalayou Berhe. “Killed a few days after their wedding.”
Spagat, an economics professor, calls the work ahead in Ethiopia “challenging in the extreme.” With communications links severed, it’s impossible to conduct even a standard sample survey of households to estimate the dead.
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Typical AP exaggerated news story .....
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