As rain waited to fall above downtown Burlington on Saturday, dozens of protesters held red and yellow Tigrayan flags up against the clouded sky.
Marching down Church Street, the group had come together to speak out against genocide in a northern region of Ethiopia called Tigray, which has killed over half a million people in just over two years and received strikingly little global attention.
The demonstration, co-led by Burlington High School graduate Meron “Alex” Segar-Reid and others, marked the third such event in Burlington since war in Tigray began on Nov. 3, 2020 — a moment at which much of the Western world was focused on the U.S. presidential election.
Since then, a staggering number of Tigrayans — members of an ethnic minority that make up some 7% of Ethiopia’s population — have been murdered at the hands of the Ethiopian government and allied Eritrean forces, experiencing a level of brutality that Human Rights Watch has said amounts to ethnic cleansing.
On Saturday, the protesters — primarily members of the Tigrayan diaspora — marched to condemn the violence. As the crowd made its way toward the base of Church Street, protesters’ voices grew louder, chanting, “Justice for Tigray” and “Independent investigation now.”
“Residents of Burlington, Vermont, I just wanna let you guys know there has been a genocide going on,” one protester, who said she goes by Makeda, declared into a bullhorn. “All of us marching here today have lost at least one family member.”
In an interview with VTDigger, the high school senior spoke about “the unimaginable things that have been done to people” in Tigray, where her family is from, describing the thousands of women and girls “as young as 4 years old, who have been murdered viciously from sexual assault.”
As a swarm of police cars gathered just yards away to respond to an unrelated shooting that had occurred down the street while protesters were speaking outside of City Hall, Makeda gripped her Tigrayan flag.
“I know that there’s other things going on in this world,” she said, “but this is such a hard hit for us. Everybody’s mental health within the diaspora has been so hard hit.”
Until recently, one of the protest’s lead organizers, Segar-Reid, who was adopted from Tigray by Burlington resident Alison Segar when she was 15 years old, didn’t know whether her brother, aunt, and other family members who had remained in Tigray were alive or dead.
“I’ve maybe talked to my brother 10 times (since the war began), and that’s lucky,” Segar-Reid said to VTDigger. “He’s been held twice by the Eritrean troops and tortured. At some point, we did give up, me and my mom, (and thought) he was dead, because there was no access to communication.”
Segar-Reid referenced a region-wide shutdown that occurred in Tigray during the war, cutting off Tigrayans’ access to electricity, banking, food, education and lifesaving medications.
In June 2021, U.N. humanitarian coordinator Mark Lowcock said Eritrean forces were “trying to deal with the Tigrayan population by starving them,” according to Reuters.
Segar-Reid was one of many speakers at the protest to describe friends or family members who died because they were intentionally deprived of resources and medical care. She spoke about a close friend who recently passed away while giving birth.
Abiy Ambaye, a physician who has worked at the University of Vermont Medical Center for the past 20 years, also spoke to VTDigger about loved ones who have died due to a lack of medical care in Tigray.
Ambaye told the crowd about “Health and Education Support for Tigray,” a new nonprofit organization that he and other Vermonters with ties to Tigray have been working to establish. Although a website is still in the works, the organization will offer a way for Vermonters to support neighbors affected by the devastation in Tigray, Ambaye said.
As protesters told stories of what their loved ones have experienced, they also called for political support and accountability.
Urged by the protesters’ previous demonstrations, former U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., issued a statement in 2021 recognizing the atrocities in Tigray as genocide, becoming one of the first public political figures to do so.
This year, Beth Awhaitey, a representative from the office of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., attended the protest for the second time since Segar-Reid and others began organizing them annually.
At the event, she expressed her support for the protesters, thanking them for inviting her on behalf of Sen. Sanders. Sanders has tweeted his concern about the crisis in the past.
Although Ethiopian officials reached a peace deal in November 2022, officially ending the war, 5.2 million people in the region remain in dire need of humanitarian assistance, according to the World Health Organization. Alison Segar said violence is continuing in Tigray, with over a third of Tigrayan territories still occupied by federal forces.
During a speech, Alison Segar called on Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian prime minister, to take accountability for the violence he has perpetrated as Ethiopia’s leader.
Ahmed, who ironically won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, has “so far escaped any consequences for his murderous behavior,” Alison Segar said at the demonstration.
“If the Ethiopian courts are deciding for themselves whether they have committed crimes against humanity, it is extremely likely that justice will not prevail,” she said, urging Vermonters to sign a petition to the U.N. Human Rights Council calling for an independent investigation into the Ethiopian government’s war crimes.
“Killing civilians is a war crime,” protesters shouted at the demonstration. “Killing children is a war crime. Raping women is a war crime.”
Despite the level of brutality in Tigray, multiple protesters remarked on the stunning lack of public attention that the genocide has received in comparison to other global tragedies, such as the war in Ukraine.
In 2022, the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is ethnically Tigrayan, told the Guardian that he wondered whether the lack of global engagement with the dire humanitarian crisis in his home region could be connected to “the colour of the skin of the people.”
In a Facebook post before the demonstration, Alison Segar wrote about Ethiopian efforts to keep journalists out of the Tigray region during the war, citing that as one reason for the lack of press.
“In my humble opinion,” she wrote, “the other reason is because the people of Tigray are black Africans, and when we think about who is most newsworthy and whose stories are more important to tell… it is not the people of Tigray. Please show up on Saturday to say that ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER… because they do.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated Sen. Bernie Sanders’ office’s response to the protest.