In May 2019 the Financial Times reported from southern Ethiopia that ethnic violence had displaced almost three million people nationwide, among the world’s largest internal displacement crises at the time.
The dispatch described Gedeo families waiting in mud after fleeing Guji areas of Oromia, with shelters failing in rain and return looking unsafe even when officials talked of peace.
Displacement numbers from that year sit beside later Tigray and Amhara wars, and they remind readers that Abiy Ahmed’s early reform period already carried mass flight from communal fighting.
Kept as displacement archive, the FT’s nearly-3-million figure is a major dated reference for Ethiopia’s 2018–19 IDP emergency.
Sources: Financial Times