Weaponizing Empathy: The Battle for Hearts in Ethiopia’s Wars

Narratives decide whose pain we see and whose we erase

A film about a drone strike left me with a knot in my chest, not because of the victim, but because of the drone operator.

In the scene, a woman lay writhing after being hit. The order came: “Neutralize her.” The operator obeyed. His face crumbled. I felt his pain.

Later I realized the unsettling truth: I had been guided into feeling more for the man who killed than for the woman who died.

The same happened watching a movie about a sniper in Iraq. His torment and PTSD were laid bare; his victims were shadows.

That is the power of framing. Films — and by extension, media — do not just tell stories. They decide whose humanity we are allowed to enter and whose we are trained to leave faceless.

Distorting Lenses

The 2020 war between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front was narrated in exactly this way.

At home, the government called it a “law enforcement operation.” The phrase itself framed federal soldiers as professionals performing a duty, reluctant, heavy-hearted, but necessary. Civilians caught in the middle were reduced to abstractions: “collateral damage,” “junta supporters,” “humanitarian spillover.”

Abroad, many international outlets flipped the lens. They lingered on images of starving children, displaced families, and desperate voices in Tigray, while the federal state became a faceless aggressor: all bureaucracy, no humanity.

Neither frame gave a full picture. Each carefully rationed empathy, spotlighting one face while erasing another.

Recurring Patterns

Today, as tensions resurface between the same actors, the pattern repeats.

Pro-government outlets highlight the “burden of sovereignty” and the leaders’ difficult duty to hold the country together. Local channels and some foreign media focus on persecution, displacement, and fear. Both are real dimensions of the story, but each comes framed to direct compassion in only one direction.

And once again, ordinary people are flattened into numbers: casualties, displaced, humanitarian situation. Meanwhile, leaders and state actors are given names, faces, and visible burdens. Just like the drone operator’s anguished expression, these are the images we are told to linger on.

What this reveals is deeply uncomfortable: empathy is not always organic. It is managed. It is rationed.

Through repetition and selective access, media teaches us whose pain is narratable and whose pain is disposable. The soldier’s anguish is personalized; the victim’s suffering is anonymized. And the cruel trick is that misdirected empathy feels righteous. We defend it. We mistake it for morality.

That is how wrong becomes right, and how right is stripped of voice.

Reclaiming Compassion

If there is a responsibility here, it begins with reclaiming the freedom to decide where our empathy lands. It means asking:

Whose face am I being shown, and whose is hidden?

Whose pain is being narrated for me, and whose is being silenced?

The war over Ethiopia’s future is also a war over empathy. If we let ourselves be guided only by the narratives handed to us — whether from state media, opposition channels, or international press — we become spectators in someone else’s script.

But if we choose to humanize beyond the frames, we resist. We remember that every statistic — every “casualty” or “displaced family” — is a child, a farmer, a teacher, a lover. As real, as complicated, and as human as the soldier whose anguish fills the screen.

The question is not whether empathy should exist. It already does. The question is: who gets to direct it, and for whose purpose?

Until we reclaim that choice, we remain characters in a narrative designed to make us feel deeply, but not necessarily feel justly.

Query or correction? Email us

While this commentary contains the author’s opinions, Ethiopia Insight will correct factual errors.

Published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. You may not use the material for commercial purposes.