On 13 May 2019 Africanews reported that Ethiopia maintained a grim global lead in the number of people internally displaced by conflict across the country.
The IDP peak followed Gedeo-West Guji clashes, Benishangul-Gumuz and Amhara border killings, and other communal wars that emptied villages while Abiy Ahmed’s early reform brand still dominated foreign headlines.
Displacement counts are contested and change with returns, secondary flight, and government access bans. Even so, the 2019 global-leader framing is a baseline outsiders often forgot once newer wars began.
Kept as humanitarian archive, the Africanews report files the uncomfortable fact that Ethiopia’s conflict displacement crisis was already world-scale before Tigray’s later catastrophe.
Sources: africanews