When the Ethiopian long-distance runner Gotytom Gebreslase won the women’s marathon gold at the World Athletics Championships in Oregon this month, her jubilation was tinged with sadness: she had broken the championship record, but could not celebrate with her family.
“My mother and father would have been delighted,” she said in a brief interview with the BBC, before bursting into tears.
Three of Ethiopia’s four gold medallists at the championships, including Gotytom, are from Tigray. Their success has has shone a light on one of the world’s longest communications shutdowns, which a senior EU official in June called a “partial blockade”.
“The Tigrayan athletes have still not got the opportunity to contact their families,” said Derartu Tulu, head of the Ethiopian Athletics Federation, at a ceremony in Addis Ababa to welcome the return of the national athletics team on Thursday. “It is my expectation that our honoured president will surely solve this problem.”
Tigray’s links to the outside world were severed when war broke out between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the federal government in November 2020, with all phone and internet links cut. Phone services were mostly restored last year but were shut down again after the TPLF recaptured most of Tigray from federal forces in June 2021.
The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted millions from their homes. Most of it happened out of sight of the outside world, with human rights researchers and journalists later uncovering evidence of massacres and rape.
All sides have been accused of committing abuses as the conflict spread beyond Tigray last year.
Most Tigrayans living outside the region, such as Gotytom, have not been able to contact families for a year or more. The region is in the grip of a humanitarian crisis that has left 90% of its 5.5 million people in need of aid.
A Tigrayan now living in Arizona in the US, and who did not wished to be named, says she last spoke to her parents a week before the conflict began, in October 2020. They live in a rural area, 15 miles south of Axum, the site of a massacre by Eritrean troops during the early weeks of the war, which left hundreds dead.
“I worry about them, because you don’t know if they are alive. There is always a fear that something is happening,” she says. “Recently I had my second baby, and it’s hard not being able to share that with them.”
In February 2021 she read reports there had been a massacre near her family’s village. Days later she got a call from her brother, who had walked to the regional capital, Mekelle.
“He told me everyone was running away and a lot of people had been killed, but he wasn’t sure who. I kept listing names of relatives and friends to ask him if they were OK, but he didn’t know. I later found out that 50 people were killed. Many of them were my schoolmates, my neighbours, people I know.”
Mekelle’s phone network has since been shut down again, but people still manage to smuggle messages out of Tigray. A common method is to travel to towns bordering neighbouring states that get fleeting reception. Another is to send voice notes, via Bluetooth, to local staff of aid organisations who have rare satellite internet access. These are then shared with relatives over messaging apps.
Money is also sent to the region by Tigrayans living elsewhere through a network of middlemen and smugglers, who carry cash over the border. Commissions can be as high as 50%.
“It’s completely dependent on trust,” says Temesgen Kahsay, a Tigrayan academic in Oslo who last spoke to his parents in June 2021. “It can take more than two weeks, and there’s a risk: I know some people who sent money that didn’t arrive.”
Temesgen has not been able to sleep properly since the war started. “We worry every day about what is happening in Tigray,” he says. “My brother has sent me some WhatsApp messages through someone with internet, but it is very occasional. I don’t have any direct contact with my family.”
The Red Cross runs a service that allows people in Tigray to call family members for two minutes. It operates in two cities: Mekelle and Shire. About 600 people a day use the service, which relies on six satellite phones.
A Tigrayan civil servant in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, said his 68-year-old father tried to contact him in August through the Red Cross, but the call did not go through.
“I feel very bad about missing that call, he is old and he walked a long way to talk to me,” the civil servant says.
Around the world, 34 countries restricted internet access in 2021, according to the campaign groups Access Now and #KeepItOn. But the Tigray shutdown ranks as one of the world’s most severe, alongside recent blackouts in Pakistan, Kashmir and Myanmar.
The civil servant spent two weeks in prison last year as he was swept up in a nationwide crackdown that the national human rights commission later said appeared to target Tigrayans “based on ethnicity”.
“After the news reached my parents I [had been] arrested, for weeks they thought I might be dead. It was very bad for them,” he says.
The government declared a ceasefire in March and since then both sides have said they are prepared to negotiate, raising hopes that families will be able to talk to each other again.
The federal government sees the communications blackout as essential to disrupting the operations of the TPLF, which it has outlawed as a terrorist group.
After Gotytom won the marathon in Oregon, Voice of America’s (VOA) local language service broadcast an interview with the athlete’s mother in Tigray.
“Under these circumstances, when your people are suffering, when you can’t get in touch with your brothers and sisters, the fact that she was able to reach such levels is due to the power of God,” her mother told the broadcaster.
In a subsequent interview with VOA, after watching the clips of her mother, Gotytom said: “If the phone was working, I would have called my mother first … I [only] saw my mother because I won.”
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