Culture
The harrowing reality of sexual violence as a weapon of war, in the conflict in Tigray, Ethiopia, and the stories that often go unheard. Follow the journey of Rita, a woman who, from thousands of miles away, became a powerful advocate for her people, documenting atrocities and challenging the global silence surrounding them.
Updated 01:35 pm EDT, August 26, 2025
Published 01:32 pm EDT, August 26, 2025
Photo Courtesy: Irob Anina
“I used to pray I would wake up in Adwa,” Rita tells me. “Every night as a child, I would close my eyes and hope I would be back home.” Born in the small town of Adwa, in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, and raised in the UK, Rita Alema Kahsay didn’t plan to become a witness to war.
She was studying engineering, focused on water solutions, not geopolitics. But when the region she loved was cut off from the world, and the world responded with silence, she did what too many refused to do: she spoke. Loudly, insistently, at cost.
War is never just fought on battlefields. For women, it almost always arrives in their bodies. Wherever there is conflict, sexual violence follows as a deliberate weapon. In Tigray, as in Amhara, Bosnia, Rwanda, and countless other wars, rape was used systematically to punish, humiliate, and erase. Yet when women speak of this violence, they are often met with doubt, denial becoming its own form of violence.
In November 2020, a war broke out in Tigray, a northern region of Ethiopia, between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The government called it a “law enforcement operation,” with support from neighboring Eritrea.
For the following two years, Tigray was sealed off: phone lines cut, internet shut down, journalists blocked. No aid in. No news out. The few reports that did escape painted a devastating picture: massacres, mass displacement, starvation, and the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
Thousands of women and girls were subjected to sexual violence by members of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces, Eritrean troops, and allied militias, according to reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The assaults were often carried out in public or in front of family members, with survivors describing the attacks as systematic and intended to cause lasting psychological and communal harm.
As the war raged, the silence deepened. Major international institutions, the UN, the African Union, Western governments, moved slowly, cautiously, or not at all. Survivors were left in the dark, and the violence was denied, minimized, or ignored altogether. What was happening in Tigray wasn’t just a military conflict. It was what scholar Judith Butler would call an example of “differential grievability,” a world in which some suffering simply doesn’t register.
The Unquiet Voice
But amidst the silence, a few voices refused to go quiet. Rita was one of them. She wasn’t a politician or a diplomat; just a woman from the Irob ethnic minority in Tigray, raised in Manchester by refugee parents, watching her homeland unravel from thousands of miles away. She was studying chemical engineering, dreaming about solutions to water contamination in Adwa.
In the UK, she had grown up in a house where giving was a way of life. Her parents housed asylum seekers, refugees, anyone in need. “Our baby sisters used to joke that our home was the Red Cross,” she says, laughing softly. “But to us, it was normal. It was instilled in us that we must serve our community beyond ourselves.”
When the war broke out, she was living in Italy, teaching English. “I was FaceTiming my family back in Tigray one day,” she says. “The next day, nothing. Everything shut down.” Panic set in. Her grandmother and other relatives were in Irob — a remote district in eastern Tigray, near the Eritrean border, home to the Irob people, an Indigenous minority long marginalized by both federal and regional authorities. The area’s isolation made it especially vulnerable during the war. Rita began searching online, calling family, trying to follow the few digital traces left. But instead of concern, what she mostly received was denial. “People would tell me that it is just propaganda by the TPLF. But for me, it was real. It was my family, my home, and I had to do something about it,” Rita tells me.
A Voice in the Void
With in-person protests blocked by COVID restrictions, Rita helped organize one of the first virtual protests for Tigray. It was small, six or eight attendees, but it grew. Soon, she was co-hosting UK Parliament briefings, helping launch a survivor-centered campaign, and speaking about sexual violence when few dared to say the words, including addressing the African Commission, speaking at side events at two UN Human Rights Council sessions, briefing the European Union, and organizing and presenting at three UK House of Commons events. “We wanted people to see what was happening, yes, the war in general, but also the war on women.”
Yet, the more she spoke, the more she realized the world didn’t want to hear. “I felt like a clown in their circus,” she says of speaking at international human rights meetings. “I would go, tell them all this pain, beg them to intervene. They would listen, nod, say ‘thank you for sharing,’ ‘poor you!’, and then let me walk out like nothing happened.” She pauses. “It was trauma-selling. That’s what it felt like. You go in, give them your pain, and they give you nothing back,” but she did not give up.
Instead, she took a year off and went to Sudan, abandoning everything to document stories of survivors who had fled across the border. Rita was based in refugee camps throughout the Tigray conflict, where she supported the growing community pouring in from Ethiopia, helping survivors access essential services, including medical care, while also documenting the atrocities they had endured. With no big organization backing her, she travelled from one camp to another in the back of trucks, sometimes with no money, sometimes with no plan.
I ask her whether being a woman made her work more difficult in the camps. She tells me it actually did the opposite. “There is power in being seen as a miskeen little woman,” she says, miskeen loosely meaning pitiful, helpless, or naïve. “No one sees you as a threat, so they let you in. I could move through camps, sit with survivors, ask the questions others couldn’t. If I had been a man, I don’t think I would have been able to do this work in the same way.”
The Seeds of Justice
Then the Sudan war broke out. Rita had a British passport. She could leave; the embassy told her to evacuate, but she chose to stay. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave the people who had shared their homes with me. Who had fed me, who had nothing, but gave anyway. I had this paper, this passport, that gave me safety, but it also gave me guilt. They were being left behind only because I had a different piece of paper. I couldn’t live with that. So, I stayed.”
With the evidence she collected in Sudan, she and her colleagues published a book: In Plain Sight, a collection of stories on conflict-related sexual violence in Tigray. The proceeds go to supporting women-led grassroots groups like Monalisa, which now operates in refugee camps, helping women access psychological care, safe housing, and even the ability to grow food.
“We asked the women what justice looked like to them, and most of them didn’t talk about courts or jail time. They said, ‘I want my land back. I want to grow food. I want a safe home. I want mental and psychological help. The rest can come later.”
That reframed everything for Rita. “Justice, for them, was about dignity and being okay.” So, when I ask her about resistance, she recoils.
“I really struggle with that word. Because it puts pressure on survivors to perform strength and bounce back. But what about the ones who didn’t?”
She speaks of women who took their lives after being raped by Eritrean soldiers, shunned by families, and abandoned by communities. “Were they not brave? Did they not resist enough?” She sees the way the world rewards resilience but ignores the devastation that makes resilience necessary in the first place.
“We shouldn’t have to resist. We should be protected. We should be believed.” Still, she does resist, whether she claims the label or not.
“Joy is resistance,” she tells me. “So is documentation. So is helping women register a business and feel like they have agency again.”
Today, Rita lives in Tigray, where she has been for the past two years. She is the Executive Director of Irob Anina, a nonprofit civil society organization established in 2021 to advocate for the Irob ethnic minority people. Since then, the organization has expanded its focus to support all Tigrayan victims of the conflict, particularly survivors of sexual violence and those from marginalized social groups.
A Girl from Adwa's Burden
“I love London. I miss my family. But here, I feel at peace. It’s where I am meant to be right now,” she tells me. She is honest about the toll. The work is exhausting, unsustainable at times, but she is clear-eyed about what the institutions she once looked to can or cannot deliver. “No government is going to come and fix this. What we need is support, not for people to show up with their own solutions, but to fund ours. To help us build what we already know we need.”
She speaks often about the responsibility that comes from simply being human. “All of it, human rights, gender rights, the fight to attain them completely is a fight that is forever. And it’s a fight that everyone, as a human being, can be involved in, no matter what your profession is. It is something I will continue to do until my last breath.”
“We should all be pursuing this, and we have to remember that before anything, before we are anything, we are human. And whenever there’s oppression anywhere in the world, we have to oppose it and respond. Eventually, it knocks on our doors.” The more I listened to Rita, the more complicated the word “resistance” started to feel. It is not always empowering; it’s also lonely, unsustainable, and unfair. It is not about the word itself, but about what people like Rita make of it, even when they wish they didn’t have to.
As we close our conversation, I ask her what she wants to be remembered for. She replies, “I was a girl from Adwa. I studied engineering so my grandmother could have clean water. She died before I could make that happen. But she was the most generous, most noble woman I knew. I want to carry her essence and live in a world that gives.”
A tireless seeker of knowledge, an ambivert, a feminist, and, coincidentally, a writer. She is a psychology graduate pursuing her writing passion by working as a communication manager in Ethiopia. Writing is a wall she built around herself to hide her other personalities, and words. When not writing, Pomy loves to sit alone and wander in her imaginative mind.
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