Senior figures have urged Eritrea to leave the region, saying mass atrocities were being committed and millions of people could go hungry without assistance.
Category: Weaponized Starvation
aljazeera: UN alleges war crimes in Ethiopia’s Tigray, urges Eritrea exit
The United Nations on Thursday alleged possible crimes against humanity in Ethiopia’s Tigray region including by Eritrean troops, as it urged a withdrawal by the neighbouring country, which denies involvement.
The UN also warned of potentially catastrophic hunger as it pleaded for urgent humanitarian access, but divisions at the UN Security Council stopped the international community from showing a united front.
msn: UN aid chief calls for Eritrean forces to leave Tigray
U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock warned Thursday that “a campaign of destruction” is taking place in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray province, saying at least 4.5 million people need assistance and demanding that forces from neighboring Eritrea accused of committing atrocities in Tigray leave Ethiopia.
Irish Times: Ireland must speak up for the starving in Tigray
The world’s newest humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. The stories of desperate human tragedy and heartless political leaders are both familiar and shockingly fresh.
For those of us old enough to remember Bob Geldof’s Band Aid in 1984, Tigray and the next-door province of Wollo were the epicentre of the famine that the generals who ruled Ethiopia at the time tried so hard to conceal from the world. As many as a million died of starvation in those years, victims of a war fought without mercy and a government too proud to beg for help.
Fox News: Ethiopia’s secret war in Tigray region: Ethnic killings, rapes, near-starvation reported
Many women have “conclusively and without a doubt” been raped in the Tigray region, home to Ethiopia’s secretive conflict – which may have left tens of thousands of civilians dead – the country’s minister for women said Thursday in a rare government admission of its fallout.
More than 100 women in the largely remote northern region have reported being raped amid the four-month-long conflict between Ethiopian forces and allied fighters – including Eritrean fighters whose presence is denied – and the fugitive former leaders of Tigray who long dominated Ethiopia’s government.
The rape allegations have come out despite women having few police or health facilities for reporting alleged crimes.
Fox News: Ethiopia’s secret war in Tigray region: Ethnic killings, rapes, near-starvation reported
Many women have “conclusively and without a doubt” been raped in the Tigray region, home to Ethiopia’s secretive conflict – which may have left tens of thousands of civilians dead – the country’s minister for women said Thursday in a rare government admission of its fallout.
More than 100 women in the largely remote northern region have reported being raped amid the four-month-long conflict between Ethiopian forces and allied fighters – including Eritrean fighters whose presence is denied – and the fugitive former leaders of Tigray who long dominated Ethiopia’s government.
The rape allegations have come out despite women having few police or health facilities for reporting alleged crimes.
LA Times: A rape survivor’s story emerges from a remote African war
Mehrawit, 27, was separated from her sister and locked in a room with only a thin, dirty mattress. For two weeks, she said, the Eritrean soldiers gang-raped her repeatedly, fracturing her spine and pelvis and leaving her crumpled on the floor. One day, she counted 15 soldiers who took turns sexually assaulting her over eight hours, her cries of agony punctuated by their laughter.
“I was numb,” she recalled from a hospital bed in the regional capital, Mekele, days after she escaped. “I could see their faces. I could hear them giggle. But after a while, I was no longer feeling the pain.”
Her account is one of few emerging from the murky conflict in Tigray, where human rights groups say pro-government forces are sexually abusing civilians in a remote highland region far from the world’s gaze.
France24: Ethiopian Red Cross says 80 percent of Tigray cut off from aid
The Ethiopian Red Cross said Wednesday that 80 percent of the country’s conflict-hit Tigray region was cut off from humanitarian assistance and warned tens of thousands could starve to death.
The grim assessment underscores fears of a humanitarian catastrophe three months after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel Peace laureate, announced military operations aimed at toppling the region’s former ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
“Eighty percent of the Tigray is unreachable at this particular time,” the president of the Ethiopian Red Cross Society, Abera Tola, told a press conference.
ABC News: ‘Emaciated’ survivors hint at worse in Ethiopia’s Tigray
“Many, many severe cases of malnutrition” are being reported in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region, Red Cross officials said Wednesday, as 80% of Tigray’s 6 million people are unreachable in the fourth month of fighting and “emaciated” women and children fill displacement camps.
Reports of people already starving to death might just be a handful, but “after a month it will be in the thousands,” warned Ethiopian Red Cross president Ato Abera Tola. After two months, he said, it will be tens of thousands.
Fighting continues between Ethiopian and allied forces and those of the now-fugitive Tigray government that had dominated the country’s leadership for nearly 30 years.
Encyclopedia: Food As A Weapon Of War
Many countries have adopted a “scorched earth” policy (destroying anything that might be of use to an invading enemy) to prevent an invading army from living off the land. Both attackers and defenders in conventional wars and guerrilla struggles have used this strategy.
Since, as Napoleon is quoted as saying, “An army marches on its stomach,” procuring enough food to support an army in the field is a paramount concern for all commanders. Although weapons, clothing, and shelter are of the greatest immediate importance to soldiers, logistical support to provide food and material is often the decisive element in winning wars. Soldiers often had to truly “live off the land” even when in permanent garrisons or semipermanent encampments during lengthy sieges.
