For Tigray’s elites, the time to break silence is not later. It is now

February 16, 2025

Anatomy of the Credentialed Elites: Silence, Mis-prioritization and Path Forward

By Mulugeta Gebregziabher, PhD

Background

In every mass-atrocity crisis, there is the war itself and then there is the social architecture that allows violence to proceed with fewer obstacles than it should. In Tigray’s case, one of the most painful architectures has been elite quiet: the muting, hedging, and self-protective ambiguity of many elites, scholars, and professionals during the critical years 2018–2022 and in the fragile period since. That silence is not uniform, and it is not total. Some spoke with courage and clarity, often at high personal cost. But the pattern, especially among credentialed professionals in the diaspora and within institutions in Tigray, has been to whisper rather than testify, to hint rather than document, to outsource moral language to anonymous “burner” accounts rather than place one’s name and reputation on the record.

This is not merely a matter of disappointment. It is a strategic vulnerability.

One of the features of the war on Tigray was blackout and misinformation. The voices from Tigray were blocked and throttled through siege and blackout of telecom, internet and media services.  International media were hesitant to report on news that came from the field since it was not easy to verify on a timely basis. When verification is throttled, elites, especially scholars and professionals trained to write, measure, and publish become more important, not less. Yet too often, the space was filled by louder actors: propagandists, partisan entrepreneurs, and openly pro-war voices who were unafraid to defend the indefensible in public.

The elite bargain: career safety over civic duty

Why did some educated Tigrayans, especially many that benefited from the fruits of the 50 years of Tigray fight for freedom and self-independence, hesitate to speak openly, especially in the diaspora? The reasons are sadly selfish motives that ignore morality but accentuate complicity:

1. Fear of professional consequences (loss of job, stalled promotion, reputational targeting).
2. Fear for family and extended networks under regimes that punish association.
3. Protection of assets or property, livelihoods tied to a state’s discretionary retaliation.
4. Fear of surveillance or informal intimidation ecosystems in conflict contexts.

None of these fears are imaginary. But many were also exaggerated into a moral alibi. A professional risk is real; it is not morally equivalent to mass atrocity. At some point, elite silence becomes less “self-preservation” and more “abdication”, especially when one’s training and platform confer a unique capacity to document harm, explain law, and mobilize prevention.

War by bullets, omission and deception

There are wars fought with bullets and drones, and wars fought through the degradation of truth, by blackouts, denial, and the quiet disciplining of speech. In Tigray’s case, both occurred: a catastrophic armed conflict and a parallel struggle over who gets to name what happened, document it, and prevent its recurrence. This has not been a happenstance but rather a policy by the Ethiopian government since the lead to the 2020 war. This is confirmed in a major legal assessment by the New Lines Institute which concluded there is a reasonable basis to believe genocide was committed against Tigrayans, alongside crimes against humanity and war crimes, and it describes how region-wide blackouts disrupted communications, king, and daily life, conditions that also made documentation and verification harder.

In such conditions, the role of elites, politicians, media figures, scholars, and professionals, should become more consequential, not less. Yet, to some extent between 2018 and 2022, and largely in the fragile post‑Pretoria period, too many credentialed elites chose silence or half‑speech: muted public presence, whispered “analysis,” or burner accounts used to avoid reputational and professional risk while maintaining the comfort of plausible deniability. Meanwhile, elites aligned with Abiy Ahmed and Isaias Afwerki were often publicly active defending the war, minimizing atrocities, and filling the informational space that professionals should have anchored in evidence and ethics.

The elite bargain: fear, convenience, and the price paid by families

The reasons offered for diaspora silence are familiar: fear of job loss, social attack, surveillance or embassy harassment, and fear for family members, plus the quiet but powerful concern about investments and property inside Ethiopia that could be targeted through discretionary state retaliation.  These fears may be real, but too often they hardened into an alibi. A professional risk is not morally equivalent to mass atrocity; when the stakes are crimes against humanity and credible genocide findings, caution cannot become a substitute for conscience. 

And yet, to many, there is no shield from paying a price, whether we speak or not: the relentless stress of what is happening to our families and communities. Parents aging without care, siblings traumatized by war, children growing up amid deprivation, and institutions collapsing under prolonged disruption are not abstract policy problems; they are daily wounds that follow us into our homes, our work, our sleep, and our health. The humanitarian crisis is also a social and economic catastrophe, and it cannot be separated from the professional lives of clinicians, educators, economists, engineers, and researchers whose fields are directly implicated when public services, markets, and institutions are shattered. This lived, family-centered burden should not be hidden to sound “objective.” It is precisely why involvement becomes unavoidable. Professional detachment can be useful for analysis; it is not a moral license to disappear.

Underused power: professional platforms that travel farther than hashtags

The tragedy is not only silence, but also the underuse of platforms. Professionals sit on faculty senates, professional associations, conference panels, editorial boards, and advisory committees. These are not “partisan” spaces. They are the spaces where humanitarian access, civilian protection, public health collapse, economic strangulation, and environmental damage are supposed to be discussed in credible, policy-relevant language. Existing international humanitarian and human rights laws as well as the Pretoria Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA) explicitly provide protections of civilians, unhindered humanitarian access, cessation of hostilities (including airstrikes), and restoration of essential services within agreed timeframes. If those obligations are strained by renewed violence, restrictions on cash flow, disrupted transport, or blocked commodity movement, professional voices should be among the first to insist that these aggravating actions stop before the region slides back toward war. 

Professional platforms shouldn’t be seen as a substitute for activism; they are a force multiplier. Peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, policy briefs, and expert commentary create records that decision-makers can cite, and accountability processes can preserve. This is especially vital in conflicts marked by denial, disinformation, and documentation gaps.  This is not denying the very heroic few who used all these different platforms to become voices against injustice, violence and for peace and justice.

The moral contradiction inside Tigray: silent locally, urgent globally

Tigray experience the deadliest war of the century. Credible reports from several international institutions and the Commission for the Inquiry of Tigray Genocide (CITG) have documented the war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleaning and case for genocide. This would normally call for loud voices from the elites in harms-way. Unfortunately, the most disturbing silence is from many elites inside Tigray. Many scholars and professionals living and working in Tigray remain publicly muted even as the peace framework is tested and civilians remain vulnerable. Yet those same individuals are often the first to use their access to reach out to diaspora colleagues when crises deepen, begging for aid, fundraising, recommendation letters to pursue life or education outside of the country, or emergency connections.

This is a profound contradiction. If one can call abroad to ask for resources, one can also use local voice and standing to demand the minimum conditions of civilian safety and agreement compliance. The failure of many scholars in the higher education institutions and professionals in civil service offices in Tigray, to speak out against and even some to advance the interests of the genocidal regime in Ethiopia, is disturbing and unacceptable. The CoHA is explicit about humanitarian access, civilian protection, and service restoration; these are not radical demands, they are baseline commitments.  Silence does not protect civilians; it normalizes their endangerment.

Tigrayan Media’s Credibility Gap

Tigrayan media face a profound credibility and ethical crisis when they attempt to understand and “solve” Tigray’s political, security, and social challenges by privileging Oromo, Amhara, or Eritrean analysts, amplifying social‑media posts from non‑Tigrayans, and platforming individuals who were part of, or enablers of the genocide, while systematically marginalizing Tigrayan voices. This practice strips analysis of historical depth and lived experience, replaces rigorous, published perspectives with fragmented online takes, and normalizes narratives advanced by actors with no vested interest in Tigray’s survival or recovery.

Rather than fostering clarity or consensus, it produces distortion, re-traumatization, and strategic misdirection, ultimately serving algorithms and YouTube viewership more than sustainable solutions for Tigray. The danger is structural: policies, reconciliation efforts, and future political choices shaped by external or compromised voices risk reproducing the very dynamics that led to catastrophe. Two immediate solutions are essential.

1. Tigrayan media must adopt a binding editorial principle that centers Tigrayan scholars, professionals, survivors, and community leaders as primary analysts, using external voices only as clearly contextualized secondary inputs.
2. They must shift from reactive social‑media commentary to commissioned, evidence‑based analyses authored by Tigrayans, with ethical gatekeeping that excludes or transparently flags contributors implicated in past atrocities. Only by re‑centering Tigrayan knowledge and accountability can media contribute to durable, people‑owned solutions rather than spectacle.

Post‑Pretoria fragmentation and “bothsideism” as moral laundering

Post-war politics can invite elite capture: curated media narratives, weekend meetings, carefully selected presenters, and “commentary” by senior figures to legitimize pre-set conclusions. When such ecosystems are funded, directly or indirectly, by resources meant for displaced and suffering communities, the moral harm compounds. This was enabled, championed by Tigray elites during the first Tigray Region Interim Administration (TIRA#1) led by the currently ousted leaders serving the genocidal regime. The public’s capacity to distinguish analysis from manipulation deteriorates, and unity forged under existential threat becomes easier to fracture. War and siege wouldn’t selectively leave these elites though they think they have better situations right now.

More recently, a second tactic has grown: “bothsideism,” the creation of false equivalence between those who aligned with the architects and defenders of mass atrocities and those who, however imperfectly, insist their first choice is peaceful resolution while maintaining a defensive posture. They even try to equate Tigray’s quest for restoring people to people relationship in its borders with the acts of Abiy’s regime to create a militia to fight against Tigray in the Afar region under the guise of Tigray Peace Force.

This flattening of accountability contradicts the way serious human rights reporting differentiates responsibility. For example, the U.S. State Department has formally determined that multiple actors committed war crimes during the conflict, and it also described crimes against humanity by certain forces and referenced ethnic cleansing in western Tigray.  The New Lines Institute similarly argues genocide indicators and intent-based patterns merit urgent accountability pathways, while also recognizing war crimes committed by multiple parties. Moral clarity is not “partisanship.” It is evidence-based differentiation.

Moral call- as MLK said silence is not neutrality

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke directly to the educated and the institutionally sheltered, those tempted to confuse caution with virtue. In his 1967 Riverside Church address, he declared: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”  He went further in framing silence as complicity: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting it is really cooperating with it.”  And he warned that history would judge the quiet of the “good” as its own form of violence: “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” 

The most widely circulated line that I have placed in my e-mail signature and used it in my writings since 2020, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”, remains urgent for Tigray’s credentialed class: silence corrodes integrity and enables recurrence.

Practical ways professionals can speak out and influence policy without sounding partisan

1. Collective institutional action that travels:
   Write collective statements through professional bodies (medical associations, faculty councils, scholarly networks) that focus on nonpartisan minima: civilian protection, humanitarian access, restoration of services, and prevention of renewed war, explicitly grounded in the CoHA’s commitments.  Collective letters reduce individual vulnerability, increase legitimacy, and reach decision-makers more effectively than isolated social media posts. 
2. Evidence-to-policy translation (briefs, metrics, and gatekeeper engagement):
   Translate suffering into your discipline’s language, public health (excess mortality, malnutrition, trauma burden), economics (market collapse, cash-flow restriction impacts), education (institutional destruction, generational loss), environment (resource depletion and land degradation). Then deliver it where policy forms: donor briefings, humanitarian coordination meetings, conference keynotes, editorial pages, and expert consultations. This approach builds an auditable record and equips external actors to condition aid, demand monitoring, and push for compliance and accountability. 
3. Primary evidence for the Tigray crisis should be scholarly work of Tigrayans: A deeply concerning trend over the past five years has been the elevation of citing Western analyses and external commentaries above the work produced by Tigrayan scholars themselves. Many individuals invited to speak on critical issues, such as Tigray’s security, freedom, and right to self‑determination, often have no published academic work to substantiate their presentations. Consequently, they rely heavily on “imported scholarship” that lacks contextual grounding in Tigray’s sociopolitical and historical realities. Invoking names from Harvard, Berkeley, or Cambridge has increasingly become a form of intellectual signaling rather than evidence‑based engagement. In many cases, it is unclear whether these works have been read comprehensively or are being selectively quoted for rhetorical effect. Recommendations and conclusions are frequently presented without reference to empirical studies, data, or analyses conducted by the speakers themselves. This pattern is harmful. It marginalizes Tigrayan knowledge production, obscures local expertise, and inhibits the development of sustainable, context‑appropriate solutions. A crisis as complex as Tigray’s cannot be understood or responsibly addressed through fragmented citations of Western texts or monographs. Elevating authentic Tigrayan scholarship is essential for accurate representation, meaningful advocacy, and the pursuit of lasting resolutions.
4. A more grounded approach to Tigray’s quest for self‑determination: this requires shifting attention from idealized models such as Israel, the United States, or Switzerland, to cases that more closely mirror Tigray’s socioeconomic realities, political constraints, and historical trajectories. While these aspirational examples are frequently invoked by Tigrayan elites and social‑media activists, they offer limited practical guidance due to their distinct institutional histories, geopolitical contexts, and economic capacities. In contrast, more instructive and pragmatic parallels can be found among states and regions whose experiences align more closely with Tigray’s current conditions. South Sudan, Somaliland, and Eritrea represent cases where low-income, conflict‑affected societies navigated the complexities of secession, nation-building, and international recognition. Similarly, Greenland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong illustrate models of asymmetric sovereignty and negotiated political status, offering insights into how contested regions manage varying degrees of autonomy within or in tension with larger sovereign states. Their experiences shed light on the legal, economic, and diplomatic mechanisms through which disputed or semi‑settled political arrangements evolve over time. Taken together, these cases present a more relevant analytical framework for Tigray: one rooted in comparable historical grievances, resource constraints, geopolitical pressures, and the practical challenges of transitioning from de facto to de jure statehood. By studying these trajectories, Tigrayan scholars can develop a more realistic and evidence‑based roadmap for its own pursuit of self-determination.

A call to peers and leaders: prevent the second catastrophe

Tigray does not need perfection from its elites. It needs moral and professional seriousness: to name harms, document violations, insist on civilian protection, and warn against the return to existential war. The CoHA provides the framework; the international record provides the basis for accountability; professional platforms provide the reach. 

If another round of war erupts, history will not primarily ask what ordinary people did. Ordinary people were surviving. History will ask what the credentialed did, those trained to document, those positioned to advise, those able to convert pain into evidence and prevention. As King warned, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” 

For Tigray’s elites, the time to break silence and to be louder voices against war and injustice is not later. It is now. 

References

1. New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. Genocide in Tigray: Serious Breaches of International Law and Paths to Accountability (Summary for Policymakers). 2024. 
2. African Union/IGAD. Agreement for Lasting Peace through a Permanent Cessation of Hostilities between the Government of Ethiopia and the TPLF (Pretoria CoHA). 2022. 
3. U.S. Department of State. 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Ethiopia (includes determination of war crimes and crimes against humanity). 
4. U.S. Department of State. Reports of Mass Atrocities in Western Tigray (references ethnic cleansing finding). 8 Apr 2022. 
5. OHCHR. International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE): mandate and reports page. 
6. Amnesty International. Ethiopia: The Massacre in Axum. 26 Feb 2021.
7. Mulugeta Gebregziabher (2025). Abiy’s War Script: Déjà Vu for Tigray, Ominous for Ethiopia. https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2025/07/29/abiys-war-script-deja-vu-for-tigray-ominous-for-ethiopia/
8. Mulugeta Gebregziabher (20225). Peace-through-diplomacy-desperately-needed-in-the-horn/ Peace Through Diplomacy Desperately Needed in the Horn. https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2025/03/12/peace-through-diplomacy-desperately-needed-in-the-horn/
9. Mulugeta Gebregziabher (2024). https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2024/09/16/tigrays-squabbling-leaders-should-honor-meles-legacy/
10. Mulugeta Gebregziabher (2022). Tigray’s squabbling leaders should honor Meles’ legacy. Ethiopia Insight. https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2022/01/22/the-us-is-pushing-for-peace-in-ethiopia-but-it-needs-to-do-more/
11. Mulugeta Gebregziabher, Lyla Mheta, Patrick Wight. Op-Ed: Global action needed to stop the unfolding famine in Tigray. Global action is needed to stop the unfolding famine in Tigray. https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2024/01/25/global-action-is-needed-to-stop-the-unfolding-famine-in-tigray/
12. Mulugeta Gebregziabher. Meles Zenawi’s Legacy: Lessons for Ethiopia’s current leaders and beyond. Addis Standard. August 2025. https://addisstandard.com/meles-zenawis-legacy-lessons-for-ethiopias-current-leaders-and-beyond/.
13. Mulugeta Gebregziabher (2026). The long game that demands patience, grit and courage. https://martinplaut.com/2026/01/19/the-long-game-that-demands-patience-grit-and-courage/
14. Mulugeta Gebregziabher. Proceedings of the International Symposium for Peacebuilding and Justice for Tigray: Path Forward. January 28, 2024. https://umdmedia.com/proceedings-of-the-international-conference-on-peace-building-and-justice-in-tigray-the-path-forward/
15. Phillips JF, Roy CM, Gebregziabher M. The international humanitarian response to famine in Tigray, Ethiopia: lessons from the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970. Glob Health Action. 2022 Dec 31;15(1):2107203. doi: 10.1080/16549716.2022.2107203. PMID: 36106597; PMCID: PMC9481073. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36106597/
16. Emnet Negash, Charlotte Touti, Almaz G, Mulugeta Gebregziabher, Jan Nyssen. Whitewashing weaponized rape in Conflict and Health. Submitted to Journal of Conflict and Health. April 2024 published (researchgate.net). 

About the Author

Mulugeta Gebregziabher (PhD) is a Peace Laureate of the American Public Health Association and a tenured professor at the Department of Public Health Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, USA. He is a peace and justice advocate who also contributes viewpoint articles on the current crisis in the Horn of Africa with a focus on Ethiopia. Disclaimer: the views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of his employer. Mulugeta can be reached at mulugeta.gebz@gmail.com or @ProfMulugeta