“I only have the clothes you see here,” she says. “I can’t even cook for myself as I don’t have any utensils. I don’t even own a blanket. At one point I was given four bedsheets by local people, but I gave them to the pregnant women. We feel forgotten by the international community and the Ethiopian government. Nobody reaches us. Even after such a long time, we have nothing.”
Category: Humanitarian Crisis
reliefweb: UNHCR Regional Update #14: Ethiopia Situation (Tigray Region), 16 March – 7 April
On 18 March, UNHCR and partners were able to access Shimelba and Hitsats refugee camps for the first time since November 2020. The mission confirmed the destruction of all infrastructure and the absence of refugees in the two camps. The mission was able to briefly visit Sheraro where they received reports of both IDPs and refugees in and around the town. A follow-up mission to Sheraro is planned.
the irish times: War in Tigray threatens to end Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed’s dream of unity
“They put a gun in my mouth,” he adds, before stabbing him and leaving him for dead in the street.
Abiy himself conceded recently that the war had dragged on much longer than he expected. TPLF fighters, he said, had dispersed “like flour in the winds”. He added that the federal army was fighting a guerrilla war on at least eight separate fronts across the country.
minnpost: Thousands of Falash Mura, caught up in violence in Ethiopia, seek entry into Israel
Ethiopia is in turmoil. In November 2020, fighting in the Tigray region erupted between Ethiopian government troops and militias in Tigray known as the TPLF. The violence has been horrific.
Crimes reportedly include genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, rape and other sexual violence, and crimes against humanity. At least 2.2 million people have been displaced, many of them women and children, and an estimated 60,000 people have fled into neighboring Sudan. The need for food, water, shelter, and medical aid is at catastrophic levels, while access to those in need is either limited or nonexistent. U.N. watchdogs have been denied observation. The internet has been shut down since November, and journalists have been arrested.
INTERNATIONAL POLICY DIGEST: Is Ethiopia at Risk of Genocide?
Over the course of six days in November 2020, Ethiopian government forces and allies executed two hundred civilians in Adi Hageray, a town in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. Eyewitnesses report indiscriminate house-by-house killings, with victims ranging from children to ninety-year-olds.
Standing alone, this atrocity deserves international outrage – but in reality, the Adi Hageray massacre is just one tragedy within an ongoing war that has killed over 50,000 civilians and involved over 150 mass killings since November.
xinhuanet Africa: Ethiopia reports 1,739 new COVID-19 cases
ADDIS ABABA, April 11 (Xinhua) — Ethiopia registered 1,739 new COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 227,255 as of Saturday evening, the country’s Ministry of Health said.
According to the ministry, Ethiopia currently has some 55,069 active COVID-19 cases, of which 933 are said to be under severe health conditions.
Famine in Tigray: ‘I have never documented anything as relentless & systematic as what we’re seeing’
Of all the 5.7 million people in Tigray, should the offensive continue, at least 4.5 million people will face deadly shortages of food, medicine and water, Alex de Waal, executive director of the WPF tells The Africa Report.
But this can be stopped if the majority of the Tigrayan people, many of whom are are smallholder farmers, are able to farm in time for the rains in June.
Ethiopia’s other conflicts
Analysts fear the conflict in Tigray could fuel violence in other parts of the country.
The conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region has cost hundreds of lives and sent tens of thousands of people fleeing to Sudan over the past three weeks. But the region is just one of several in the country experiencing violent unrest amid a fraught political transition.
Some analysts fear the conflict in Tigray – which pits the northern region’s heavily armed leadership against the authority and forces of the central government – could fuel conflict in other parts of the country, which is divided into 10 ethnically-based regions. Armed violence may increase due to opportunism or a heightened sense of grievance.
World Peace Foundation: Ethiopia and Eritrea using starvation as weapon in Tigray
A new report issued this week by the World Peace Foundation (WPF) exposes the use of starvation as a war weapon in the Ethiopian region of Tigray and speaks of an emergency situation that will worsen through September if the conflict is not resolved.
The 66-page report published by WPF, an affiliate of Tufts University in Massachusetts, calls for urgent humanitarian attention to the crisis in Tigray.
Ethiopia’s Perilous Propaganda War
Efforts to Control Information Are Only Hardening the Country’s Divisions
Late last month, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed finally admitted the worst-kept secret in Africa: that soldiers from neighboring Eritrea are fighting alongside Ethiopia’s military in the Tigray region of the country. For the last five months, Abiy’s government has waged a military offensive there against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which once dominated Ethiopia’s government and regarded Eritrea as an enemy. Numerous eyewitness and media reports had documented Eritrean involvement in the war, which erupted less than a year after Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize for his historic rapprochement with Eritrea. Yet the Ethiopian prime minister had been reluctant to acknowledge Eritrea’s role, both because it would open him up to accusations of compromising Ethiopian sovereignty and because he has gone to great lengths to portray the conflict as a necessary, proportional, and swiftly resolved military action against a recalcitrant regional government.