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sarcasm
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Despite peace deal, Tigray still cut off from world as internet shutdown persists (The Globe and Mail)

Post by sarcasm » 05 Dec 2022, 17:38

More than a month after a much-publicized Ethiopian peace agreement, six million people in war-ravaged Tigray are still largely cut off from the world. Their voices have been silenced by one of the world’s most prolonged internet shutdowns, and there is still no end in sight.

The shutdown, including phones as well as internet access, has left many Tigrayans struggling to learn the fate of their families in the devastated region in northern Ethiopia, where a brutal war erupted in November, 2020 as the national army tried to crush a rebellion by the regional government.

“My entire family, my father, aunts and uncles, are all trapped in Tigray,” said Maebel Gebremedhin, a Tigrayan activist in the United States. “I’ve been unable to speak to them. I don’t know who’s alive and who’s not.”

The ceasefire agreement between Tigrayan and Ethiopian officials, signed in Pretoria on Nov. 2, includes a commitment by the Ethiopian government to restore basic services in Tigray. But most services are still not functioning today, and only a small flow of humanitarian aid has resumed.

Teklehaymanot Weldemichel, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has been unable to talk to his parents in Tigray for the past 18 months. Even indirect messages, through a relative, have stopped since August.

“Imagine the pain of hearing about killings, kidnappings, looting and destruction in the area and not knowing the whereabouts of your family members,” he told The Globe and Mail.

“The separation, and the feeling of being lost, being disconnected from people that you care about and that you would do anything to be with – it’s painful.”

The shutdown has affected the powerful as much as the impoverished. Even the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is Tigrayan, has said that he cannot reach his family members in Tigray.

Despite the internet shutdown in Tigray and more than 20 other internet suspensions across Ethiopia over the past seven years, the United Nations chose to go ahead with the annual meeting of its Internet Governance Forum last week in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. More than 5,000 participants from 170 countries attended the forum, which was officially dedicated to “universal” access to the internet.

Several Ethiopian officials gave speeches at the forum, declaring the importance of digital technology but failing to make any mention of the Tigrayan stoppage.

Continue reading https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/a ... -internet/