As chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, US Congress representative Karen Bass (Democrat-California) has the tricky task of threading the needle on the proper congressional response to the conflict in Tigray. She also represents part of Los Angeles, home to the nation’s second-largest Ethiopian diaspora community after Washington, DC.
As if things weren’t complicated enough, many of her Ethiopian-American constituents who have long supported the congresswoman’s almost two-decade political career are no longer on speaking terms with each other.
Those tensions were apparent on a Friday afternoon in late July as the fractured community clamoured for a say in Bass’s pending House resolution condemning the violence.