‘We Are Not Protesting Peace. We Are Demanding It’
Displaced Tigrayans call for the return to lands they never chose to leave, and a peace they’ve yet to see
The morning sun rose over Mekelle to find them already there—displaced, grieving, but still standing. Along the city’s main streets, where life once moved to the quiet rhythms of daily routine, came a sea of protest: mothers with photographs and flags, men holding silence like mourning, children chanting words they could barely understand.
“Return us home,” they called out.
For three days beginning June 18th, Mekelle transformed into a living testimony of loss and longing. On Friday alone, nearly 100,000 people filled the streets in what can be described as the largest peaceful protest in Tigray since the war began—ten times the turnout of the previous two days combined.
The demonstration was spearheaded by the Tsilal Civic Society of Western Tigray. Protesters included students, religious leaders, war survivors, mothers, elders, and children—many of them among the estimated millions forcibly displaced from Western and Eastern Tigray during the two-year conflict.
At the heart of the march stood Senait, who asked to be identified only by her first name. She has not seen her daughter in more than four years.
They were separated in the chaos of the war’s first week. Armed men stormed their home in Gulomahda, in Tigray’s eastern zone. Her husband was beaten. She was dragged one way; her 10-year-old daughter, another.
For days, Senait wandered from village to village, clutching only a scarf and her daughter’s name. Eventually, she arrived in Mekelle, hollowed by fear and disbelief.
“It took us more than four years to learn she was alive,” she said in a whisper. Fellow Tigrayans fleeing the violence had found her daughter alone and brought her to a refugee camp in Sudan.
A reunion, however, remains elusive. Their village is reported to have beenstill under the control of Eritrean forces, which the Reporter could not independently verify. The toys Senait’s daughter once played with remain buried under dust—and silence.
For Senait, peace is not a signature inked in Pretoria. It is a door still locked.
The protest was not a rejection of peace—but a demand that its promises be honored.
Signed in November 2022, the Pretoria Agreement between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) pledged a return to constitutional order in Tigray. It called for the disarmament of Tigrayan forces, the withdrawal of foreign troops, and the restoration of basic services.
But more than 18 months later, nearly 40 percent of Tigray’s territory—most notably all of Western Tigray and parts of the Eastern zone—remains outside the control of the regional administration.
The federal government has offered little explanation.
The Tigray Interim Administration, charged with overseeing the transition, remains largely silent, preoccupied with internal power struggles between the TPLF and federal authorities.
“We are not protesting against peace,” said Muez Berhe, deputy director of the Tsilal Civic Society and one of the protest organizers. “We are demanding that peace be fulfilled—not just declared.”
He, too, is displaced.
Before the war, Muez was director of the Humera Agricultural Research Center, supervising more than 50 researchers. He had just begun work on his PhD thesis when the first bullets flew. On the second day of the conflict, he fled—alone—walking nearly 90 kilometers to reach AdiGoshu near Mekelle.
But safety remained out of reach.
“We met federal troops,” he recalled. “They forced us to return to Humera.”He hid there for 35 days before escaping into Sudan with a group of elderly villagers and orphaned children.
In the camp, his academic degrees meant nothing. Hunger was the only credential that mattered.
“We waited in line for days for food rations that never came,” he said. “There were no parents for many of the children. No medicine. And eventually, no words left for our suffering.”
After two years in the camp, Muez found a way out—first to Uganda, where he completed his PhD, and then to China, where he resumed academic work interrupted by the war. Despite the trauma and the exile, he completed a second advanced degree.
But his heart remained in Tigray—with those who could not leave.
In exile, he and other displaced professionals founded the Tsilal Civic Society. “We didn’t want to only survive,” he said. “We wanted to build something that could outlast war.”
Now, after five years, Muez has returned. He reunited with his parents just three months ago. They remain, like so many others, strangers in their own homeland. Their house in Humera is still occupied. Their lives, still suspended.
There are an estimated 700,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Mekelle alone. Spread across 13 makeshift camps, they live under tarpaulins sagging with rainwater, where food is scarce and waterborne diseases flare with every seasonal shift.
For many of these families, this marks their fifth rainy season in tents.
What makes the question of their return so fraught is that the land they fled is not merely geography. It is memory. It is history. And under Ethiopia’s 1995 Constitution, it is a right.
Article 39 of the Constitution guarantees every “Nation, Nationality and People” the right to self-determination—including the right to administer their own affairs within legally recognized borders. For Tigrayans, those borders include the Western and Eastern zones—now held by Amhara regional forces and Eritrean troops.
While the 2022 Pretoria Agreement remains vague on the matter of territorial control, it reaffirms the supremacy of the Constitution and the territorial integrity of Ethiopia. In practice, however, these principles have not been enforced.
“The law promises return,” Muezsaid. “But politics delays it.”
The protesters who flooded Mekelle’sRomanat Square and filled the surrounding streets knew the power of restraint. They did not march in anger, but in defiance of despair. No stones were thrown. No slogans incited violence. Only the resolute rhythm of footsteps, and the silent weight of tears.
Their demands were direct.
They called on the Tigray Interim Administration to either begin facilitating the return of displaced Tigrayans—or to publicly admit its inability to do so.
They urged the federal government to uphold its own agreement.
And they appealed to the international community to move beyond words and toward action. Their chants echoed through the doors of every monitoring mission, every aid office: We are not just statistics.
“We are people who have lost everything but our voices,” said one elderly man, speaking to The Reporter.
The Tsilal Civic Society has since submitted a formal letter to the Office of the Prime Minister, outlining the demands of displaced communities and requesting immediate intervention.
But in the camps, hope has begun to harden into something else—a quiet ultimatum: return us, or watch us die waiting.
As the third day of protest drew to a close and the sun sank behind the scarred hills of Tigray, there was no applause, no spectacle. Only stillness!
Some returned to the camps. Others lingered, holding hands. Holding on.
“The people of Tigray are not asking for war. They are not asking for revenge,” said Million Yared, a resident of Mekelle. “They are asking for the right to return to homes they never agreed to abandon.”
In a country where law and identity so often collide—where politics has long oscillated between denial and delay—the message was clear.
We belong. We remember. We return.
Whether anyone in power was listening remains uncertain.
