Thursday, July 01, 2021

Ethiopia's Humanitarian Disaster w/ Vanessa Tsehaye

 

Subscribe at Patreon for $5 a month and get an extra episode per week and access to a backlog of premium content including interviews with Killer Mike, Andrew Yang, Ice Cube, Boots Riley, Ralph Nader, Marianne Williamson, Heather McGhee, Eddie Glaude, & more: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode... This week, we cover the crisis in the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, where civil war has been raging since last November. The conflict has led to what may become the worst humanitarian crisis in the region in decades, with 350,000 Ethiopians facing famine conditions, and reports of sexual violence and ethnic cleansing. Briahna Joy Gray spoke to Swedish-Eritrean human rights advocate Vanessa Tsehaye about the origins of the conflict, and why theories about the root of the conflict are so controversial on social media. Why does one political camp cast the Tigray People's Liberation Front as "terrorists," while another views the Ethiopian Federal Government as enabling and denying genocide? Vanessa attempts to explain how ethnic conflict, federalism, and colonialism are affecting the dispute, and how the American left should weight calls for humanitarian intervention against concerns about US imperialism.