Lowcock said he had received a report earlier on Thursday that 150 people had died from hunger in Tigray and warned that “starvation as a weapon of war is a violation.”
“There is no doubt that sexual violence is being used in this conflict as a weapon of war,” Lowcock said, adding the majority of rapes were committed by men in uniform, with accusations made against all the warring parties.
ADIGRAT, Ethiopia (Reuters) – The young mother was trying to get home with food for her two children when she says soldiers pulled her off a minibus in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, claiming it was overloaded.
It was the beginning of an 11-day ordeal in February, during which she says she was repeatedly raped by 23 soldiers who forced nails, a rock and other items into her vagina, and threatened her with a knife.
The U.N. humanitarian chief is warning that the grave humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region is deteriorating, with no sign of Eritrean troops withdrawing and alarmingly widespread reports of systematic rape and other sexual violence mainly by men in uniform.
“Cases reported have involved Ethiopian National Defense Forces, Eritrean Defense Forces, Amhara Special Forces and other irregular armed groups or aligned militia,”
4.5 MILLION People in Tigray Requiring Humanitarian Assistance UN – March 2021
4 MILLION Estimated Number of People in Urgent Need of Food Assistance Food Security Cluster – January 2021
62,383 Ethiopian Refugees Arriving in Eastern Sudan Since November UNHCR – April 2021
“Starving Tigray: How armed conflict and mass atrocities have destroyed an Ethiopian region’s economy and food systems and are threatening famine”
Regardless of who is responsible for the outbreak of hostilities, the sole reason for the scale of the humanitarian emergency is that the coalition of Ethiopian Federal forces, Amhara regional forces, and Eritrean troops are committing starvation crimes on large scale.
Some women were held captive for extended periods, days or weeks at a time, said Dr Fasika Amdeselassie, the top public health official for the government-appointed interim administration in Tigray.
“Women are being kept in sexual slavery,” Fasika told Reuters. “The perpetrators have to be investigated.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
