But even as calm has been mostly restored to Tigray, the northern region at the centre of Ethiopia’s two-year war, heavy fighting has spread across Amhara, a neighbouring region that is home to the country’s second-largest ethnic group. In early August, Amhara militias known as Fano swept into towns and cities, briefly taking over several of them. They attacked police stations and garrisons, freed prisoners and intermittently took control of the airport of Lalibela, Ethiopia’s most popular tourist town. Local officials fled. The government responded by sending in the army, shutting down the internet across the region and declaring a state of emergency.Now there's a phrase I hadn't expected to encounter: "Ethiopia's most popular tourist town". (Now that I think about it, though, Lalibela is the home of those amazing underground stone churches that Bobbi and I saw in an episode of of Cities of the Underground, so it stands to reason that it'd get some tourism.)
Ethiopia was one of the few parts of Africa that had enough of a long-established government that it was able to resist Euro colonizers in the Nineteenth Century, but when Mussolini rolled in in the 1930s, it seemed to permanently jinx the place and it's been a mess ever since.
There's been a pretty steady stream of refugees fleeing across the Bab-el-Mandab Strait into Yemen, hoping to eventually make it to Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States. (You know things in Ethiopia are bad if people are fleeing towards Yemen, which is one of the world's foremost hot messes at the moment.)
Anyway, if the world had an armpit, it would probably be located somewhere along the Saudi-Yemeni border, which is a godforsaken mess of mountains and desert and mountainous desert. And when the Ethiopians get to it, hoping to slip across into Saudi Arabia...they're apparently getting machine gunned and mortared in droves.
Border guards in Saudi Arabia have regularly opened fire on African migrants seeking to cross into the kingdom from Yemen, killing hundreds of men, women and children in a recent 15-month period, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Monday.
The guards have beaten the migrants with rocks and bars, forced male migrants to rape women while guards watched and shot detained migrants in their limbs, leading to permanent injuries and amputations, the report said.
