Twenty-two-year-old Abeba Amdu has seen some of the best years of her life consumed by war – and she has no wish to see another conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, which some fear could be about to break out. She went to the front lines in 2020 as a Tigrayan soldier to fight in the civil war against the federal army and remains deeply traumatised by her ordeal more than three years after the end of the brutal conflict. Before the war, Abeba had been a rising football star.
Playing since the age of seven, she eventually became a striker for the 70 Enderta female football team at 17. She saw herself as a feminist, taking on traditional attitudes about women’s participation in sport. The teenager was also an outstanding student, studying IT in Tigray’s main city of Mekelle, and had a clear vision for her future.
Then the world she knew halted abruptly. First there was the coronavirus pandemic, leading to the suspension of her studies. Then war broke out.
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“I was not a believer in war, because I knew what my parents went through,” she says. Abeba was referring to the fact that her mother and father bore the scars of the long and brutal war that finally ended in 1991 with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) overthrowing Ethiopia’s then ruler Mengistu Haile Mariam. The TPLF went on to dominate the federal government until 2018, when current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office following huge demonstrations against its repressive rule. The TPLF then retreated to its stronghold of Tigray, and had a massive fall-out with Abiy over the future direction of the country.
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