One is a renowned musician in the region, the other is a nurse at the public hospital. Like all Tigrayans, a minority which represents 6% of the Ethiopian population, their lives changed overnight, with the start of the war in November 2020.
For two long years, between 2020 and 2022, while the fighting pitted Tigray against the Ethiopian and Eritrean armies, another weapon, silent and insidious, was used: rape, committed on a completely unprecedented, almost unthinkable scale.
At least 120,000 women were raped during the first eight months of the conflict alone… or one in ten women. These crimes were committed in complete silence, behind closed doors, far from the gaze of the international community.
Today, they are fighting, each on their own, to help the thousands of women around them, sexually abused by soldiers and militiamen. Physical but also psychological care, awareness against the rejection of an entire society, quest for justice… The road to healing will be long, accompanied by this nagging question which haunts them and sometimes exhausts them: “the world has… Did he forget?”
