Forgotten Ethiopian war destroys women's lives through rape.

2 hours ago7 min read1 comments

The stark report from BBC Global Women revealing thousands of women systematically raped in Ethiopia’s Amhara conflict is not merely a statistic; it is a deliberate, brutal strategy of war, a familiar and devastating pattern where women’s bodies become the battleground. This conflict, a vicious flare-up in a nation still reeling from the trauma of the Tigray war, demonstrates with chilling clarity how ceasefires on paper do not halt the silent, intimate violence waged against women, a violence that destroys lives, shatters families, and poisons the social fabric for generations.We have seen this script before, from the Bosnian war to the ongoing horrors in Sudan—where rape is weaponized not as a byproduct of chaos, but as a calculated tool to terrorize populations, dismantle community bonds, and assert total dominance. In Amhara, where federal forces and regional militias are locked in a brutal struggle, these acts are committed with a pervasive sense of impunity, leaving survivors to navigate a landscape stripped of functional healthcare, psychological support, or any semblance of justice.The personal testimonies are harrowing: women speaking of assaults in their own homes, of being targeted for their perceived ethnicity or family affiliations, their trauma compounded by the societal stigma that often blames the victim, silencing them and isolating them further. This is a profound failure of the international community’s repeated pledges, from UN Security Resolution 1325 to the countless declarations at high-level forums, which ring hollow when met with such systematic, on-the-ground atrocities.The long-term consequences are a demographic and social catastrophe—a surge in unwanted pregnancies, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and the creation of a generation of children born of conflict, often ostracized, while the mothers face lifelong physical and psychological scars. Without urgent, concerted pressure on the warring parties, robust funding for survivor-centric aid programs that offer medical care, psychosocial counseling, and economic pathways to recovery, and a genuine international push for accountability that treats these acts as the war crimes they are, we are complicit in allowing this forgotten war to perpetuate its most intimate and destructive cruelty.

#featured

#Ethiopia

#Amhara conflict

#sexual violence

#human rights

#war crimes

#BBC investigation

#women

#forgotten war

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