The Plough and the Kalashnikov: Ethiopia After the Elections - and Tigray

'The population is being moved out of here, and here,' the UN officer pointed out on a map of Ethiopia's northernmost Tigray region, speaking just days before the June election. 'Western Tigray is being extensively depopulated,' he said, tapping the location of the now ghost town of Humera, once an important regional agricultural centre. As the last Ethiopian city south of the border with Eritrea and Sudan, it is considered a strategic gateway to Sudan. 'What we are seeing,' he notes, 'is that Tigrayans are being "encouraged" to abandon their homes and lands in large areas of the southern part of eastern Tigray as well. What we hear repeatedly,' he adds, in echoes of the former Yugoslavia, 'is the need to "clean the bloodlines" of Tigray'.