For nearly five years, Tigrayans from Western Tigray have endured a calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing, orchestrated through brutality, violence, displacement, and occupation. Yet despite the scale and brutality of the crimes committed, Western Tigray continues to be described casually and dangerously as “contested” or “disputed,” and worse, as the object of a so-called “fight over sesame.”
These terms are not only misleading they are an assault on truth itself. They constitute a deliberate, strategic mischaracterization of a crisis that has involved mass killings, systemic rape, the forced expulsion of civilians, the obliteration of local identity and the permanent redrawing of demographic lines through violence.
The issue of Western Tigray is not a border disagreement. It is not a two sided conflict and it is certainly not about a crop.
Language as a Weapon of Obfuscation
To understand how this false narrative has endured, one must begin with the language itself. The term “contested” implies two parties with equal claims. It implies the existence of legitimate grievances on both sides.
But there is no symmetry here. One side was ethnically cleansed. One side was expelled, their homes looted or burned, their lands seized, their existence criminalized. The other side now administers the area by force, with full impunity and growing normalization.
Since 2020, Western Tigray has been militarily annexed by the Amhara forces and is still under the control of the Amhara regional government and the vigilante Fano militias.
Tigrayans were systematically expelled from Western Tigray in what human rights organizations and the U.S. State Department described as a coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Entire towns were emptied. Men were executed and detained. Women were raped and survivors displaced across makeshift camps in different parts of Tigray or sent fleeing toward the Sudanese border, carrying nothing but memory and grief.
To continue calling such a place “contested” is to participate in a deception. It is to turn a crime scene into a policy debate.
The narrative of “contest” is not neutral, it is the language of the occupier. It serves to launder illegality into legitimacy, making permanent what was meant to be temporary, and concealing force behind the illusion of rivalry.
The Sesame fixation: Commodifying brutal ethnic cleansing
Parallel to this, an equally grotesque framing that has gained currency is the idea that the violence in Western Tigray is somehow rooted in economic motives, specifically a struggle over sesame, one of the most lucrative cash crops.
In this framing, the crisis is reduced to a resource dispute, as though the forced removal of an entire ethnic population is equivalent to a land competition between rival farmers. This narrative, too, is not accidental. It flattens political violence into economic logic. It replaces the moral clarity of injustice with the convenience of market rationality.
But no one rapes women or burns down churches to plant sesame. No one imprisons young men or razes entire neighborhoods for the sake of harvest quotas. The campaign in Western Tigray was not agricultural it was annihilative. It sought not only to take land, but to erase the people to whom it belonged.
The economic explanation is a cover story. A convenient fiction designed to allow outside actors, governments, NGOs, investors to continue engaging with the region without confronting the truth of what made that access possible.
A crime hidden in plain sight: The media’s failure and International complicity
Western Tigray has not been a silent tragedy. The expulsions, the massacres, the mass rapes, the destruction of villages, and the cries of survivors all have been visible, documented, and at times even acknowledged. And yet, despite the mountain of evidence and the clarity of these horrors, a disturbing pattern has continued to be chosen by both local and international media outlets, Humanitarian NGOs and international organizations. The persistent and deliberate mischaracterization of the area as “contested.”
This framing is not just inaccurate, it is profoundly irresponsible. It transforms a campaign of ethnic cleansing into a border disagreement. It flattens war crimes into a policy dispute. And it enables those responsible to continue their project under the cover of legitimacy, while the world debates maps instead of justice.
News organizations, some of the most trusted names in journalism, have repeatedly defaulted to vague, euphemistic language that fails to convey the scale and intent of what has happened. Articles speak of “territorial disputes,” “Amhara-Tigray tensions,” or “competition over fertile land,” as though what’s unfolding is a bureaucratic misunderstanding rather than a violent erasure of a population.
This editorial hedging is not neutrality, it is cowardice masked as balance. And it has consequences. By failing to name the crimes for what they are, the media has played a role in shaping global perceptions that excuse inaction. By presenting the aggressors and victims as equivalent stakeholders in a “contested” space, the press has elevated the narrative of the perpetrators and buried the voices of the displaced.
International humanitarian organizations are equally culpable. They continue to repeat the term “contested.”
This language is not benign. It is not technical. It is a political act. To describe the horrors of Western Tigray as “contested” is to rewrite history in real-time.
International organizations know what happened in Western Tigray. They are staffed with experts. They have access to the data, the reports, the testimonies. And yet, they choose language that prioritizes political access over moral clarity. Whether out of fear of offending the Ethiopian government, or in an effort to maintain a working relationship with regional authorities, the result is the same: truth is sacrificed at the altar of diplomacy.
The use of “contested” is not a clerical error. It is complicity.
When a UN agency or international NGO publishes a report referring to Western Tigray as “contested,” it validates the claim of those who seized the land and drove out its people. It rewrites a brutal military takeover as a misunderstanding between neighbors. It tells the world—without saying it out loud—that ethnic cleansing is negotiable.
This is more than just terminology. It is an act of moral abandonment. It abandons the displaced, the raped, the grieving, the disappeared. It leaves them not only without justice, but without recognition. It pushes their suffering into the footnotes of geopolitics.
Words shape policy. Words inform funding, humanitarian response, legal strategy, and diplomatic positioning. To call Western Tigray “contested” is to make future return less likely. It is to allow time to harden facts on the ground. It is to pretend that both sides should be heard—when only one side has been silenced by force.
If international organizations are serious about justice, about peace, about non-recurrence, they must begin with language. That means calling things by their rightful names.
Western Tigray is not contested. It is occupied. The violence was not spontaneous, it was systematic.
Anything less is a lie dressed up in the language of diplomacy.
Why This Matters Now
Five years on, the danger of this narrative is greater than ever. The longer the language of “dispute” prevails, the more permanent the occupation becomes. The more the story is told as a fight over land or crops, the further the world drifts from recognizing that what happened in Western Tigray was a deliberate dismantling of an ethnic community’s right to exist in its own homeland.
What is at stake is not just justice for past crimes, but the foundation of any possible peace. A peace that begins with silence, erasure, and lies is no peace at all—it is the prelude to recurrence.
The people of Western Tigray deserve to return not only to their land, but to their names, their history, and the full recognition of what was done to them. That cannot happen as long as the world insists on calling war crimes a “contest” and ethnic cleansing a “dispute over sesame.”
Truth as a Prerequisite for Justice
The truth is simple. Western Tigray is not contested, it is occupied. The conflict is not about sesame, it is about the violent removal of a people from their ancestral land. And the ongoing denial of these facts is not ignorance, it is complicity.
History is watching. The survivors are still speaking. And the record must be corrected while there is still time to do so with integrity.