Glimpses of a forgotten war: the women of Tigray

Photographs by Cinzia Canneri

In 2017, Cinzia Canneri quit her job as a psychologist to pursue a career as a photographer. Her previous work had involved helping people overcome deep mental trauma. As a photographer, she documents the humanity of people forced to endure some of the world’s most extreme environments.

“I don’t see these two professions as separate, but rather as a continuation of one another,” she says. “People, their stories, and the pursuit of values centred on human rights have always been – and continue to be – my passion.”

Her first project focused on the plight of Eritrean women fleeing the regime of dictator Isaias Afwerki, whose policy of indefinite military conscription has brutalised the small east African country of about 3.5 million people and forced hundreds of thousands to flee abroad. The first seed was an old black and white photograph, taken when Eritrea was still a colony of her home country and showing a 12-year-old girl who had been “bought” by an Italian colonialist. “When I saw it, I was emotional and I was angry,” says Canneri.

The outbreak of war in 2020 in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray, which borders Eritrea, expanded her focus. Eritrean troops stormed into Tigray, fighting alongside Ethiopia’s federal military to stamp out a rebellion. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of recent times. About 600,000 people were killed and nearly 10% of women in Tigray between the ages of 15 and 49 were raped. Eritrean soldiers were responsible for the worst of the abuses.

As a reporter living in Ethiopia, I met women who had survived almost unspeakable cruelties: a woman who could hear the cries of her young child as she was raped; another whose pelvis was broken as she was gang raped; a third who was kept as a sex slave in a storeroom by Eritrean officers.

On each occasion, I was struck by the resilience of these survivors. These qualities are also at the fore of Canneri’s collection of photographs of Eritrean and Tigrayan women, some of whom bear the scars from bullet wounds inflicted to prevent them bearing children.

Other images are of women who signed up to fight in the rebellion, rather than stay at home where they risked being raped. One shows a group of young women in fatigues gripped by laughter as they share a joke while lying together on a mattress in a military camp.

“Before this moment, they were crying,” says Canneri. “Then one of them said something and they all smiled. For me, it shows the possibility of living different emotions at once. They are really vulnerable, but they also support each other.”

Canneri’s work on the project spanned eight years, involving six trips to the Horn of Africa that each lasted several weeks. Along the way she was threatened by people smugglers on the Sudanese border and detained by Eritrea’s secret police in 2018, when the country briefly opened up as frosty relations with Ethiopia thawed.

The conflict in Tigray was shrouded in darkness. Apart from a few brief months, Ethiopia barred journalists from entering and cut the region’s phone and internet, subjecting Tigray to an almost total communication blackout.

In contrast to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, it took weeks or months for rumours of atrocities to seep out. Some are yet to be unearthed. US and European officials, meanwhile, have dampened their calls for accountability and started normalising relations with Ethiopia, a key strategic partner that is also on friendly terms with Russia and China.

“I wanted to show a war that was hidden from the world,” says Canneri. “Few people talked about what was happening. Ethiopia’s prime minister even received the Nobel peace prize for making a peace agreement with Eritrea [a year before the war].” She adds: “I’m also a woman, and I consider it necessary to talk about gender-based violence, together, in a global way.”

Canneri worked closely with Eritreans and Ethiopians living abroad while documenting the horrors in their home countries. She donated the money from sales of her pictures to an organisation that helps the women in Tigray and founded a group that brings together women from Italy, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan. “We are trying to build a collective, inclusive project,” she says.

All photographs courtesy of Cinzia Canneri/Panos Pictures