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.
Category: Refugee Crisis
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.
‘Leave no Tigrayan’: In Ethiopia, an ethnicity is erased
The atrocities have been seared into the skin and the minds of Tigrayans, who take shelter by the thousands within sight of the homeland they fled in northern Ethiopia.
They arrive in heat that soars above 38 C (100 F), carrying the pain of gunshot wounds, injured vaginas, welts on beaten backs. Less visible are the horrors that jolt them awake at night: Memories of dozens of bodies strewn on riverbanks. Fighters raping a woman one by one for speaking her own language. A child, weakened by hunger, left behind.
EU’s Ethiopia envoy warns of looming Tigray refugee crisis and radicalisation
The “turbulence and crisis” in Ethiopia’s Tigray region risks leaving a vacuum for extremist groups to spread unless the world works together to resolve it, the EU’s special envoy to the conflict said on Tuesday.
Hundreds of thousands were displaced inside Ethiopia and across the border into Sudan as the government launched an offensive in November.
Ethiopia Accused of Using Rape as a Weapon of War in Tigray as New Evidence Emerges of Massacres
The Biden administration has been pressuring the Ethiopian government to end its military offensive and for Eritrea to withdraw its forces. Biden recently sent Senator Chris Coons to meet with the Ethiopian prime minister, who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.
Rape has also been used as a weapon of war in the Tigray region by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. CNN’s Nima Elbagir recently spoke to one Ethiopian woman who fled to Sudan after being raped.
Ethiopia: 1,900 people killed in massacres in Tigray identified
List compiled by researchers of victims of mass killings includes infants and people in their 90s
Almost 2,000 people killed in more than 150 massacres by soldiers, paramilitaries and insurgents in Tigray have been identified by researchers studying the conflict. The oldest victims were in their 90s and the youngest were infants.
The identifications are based on reports from a network of informants in the northern Ethiopian province run by a team at the University of Ghent in Belgium. The team, which has been studying the conflict in Tigray since it broke out last year, has crosschecked reports with testimony from family members and friends, media reports and other sources.
Sky News: Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict: A human tide of refugees – with little to keep them alive
A human tide of 300,000 Tigrayans are now camping in this beleaguered city at six schools, a local college and any number of half constructed buildings which dot the city.
A senior UN official told Sky News that 50,000-60,000 arrivals have turned up in the past few weeks alone.
BBC: Ethiopia’s Tigray crisis: A rare view inside the conflict zone
Shire has seen a huge influx of people over the past four months, and it was ill prepared.
Its schools and a university campus have become theatres of suffering.
Aid agencies estimate some 200,000 people are currently living in the city’s makeshift camps. Many of them are women and children.
The first arrivals came back in November when fighting broke out. They mostly came from the southern and south-western lowlands of Tigray that were hotbeds of the fighting in the early days.
NRC: Ethiopia: Hunger and disease rife among displaced as aid workers gain access to new parts of Tigray
“The situation in Sheraro is beyond dire. Despite families arriving every day, no aid has been delivered for weeks. Food, water and medicine are running out fast. People could die unless they get humanitarian aid now,” warned Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
“People have told us that they fled sexual violence, killings and widespread violence in Tigray, only to arrive in Sheraro and find a desperately helpless situation. We also heard accounts of refugees hiding in remote villages scared to be identified, which puts them at the risk of being cut off from any assistance. Lactating mothers also told us that they have been unable to produce milk for their babies,” he added.
Progress Online: There is a genocide in Ethiopia but the world is standing by
The world is standing by, allowing a genocide to unfold in Tigray, Ethiopia. After all the promises of “never again”, there’s a deafening silence over the outrages taking place in one of the west’s “go-to” partners in Africa.
At a recent 24-hour global lobby on the crisis, one of the young Tigrayan presenters broke down on air. The cause was social media footage of yet another massacre. Young Tigrayan men, already gunned down by forces from their own country’s government, were being finished off and having their bodies thrown over cliffs by federal soldiers shouting racial abuse.