In 1994, as 800,000 mostly Tutsi people were beaten, hacked to death or shot dead in a 100-day bloodbath in Rwanda, the United States hesitated to call it genocide, eventually using the watered-down phrase “acts of genocide.”
The United States has instead spoken of “ethnic cleansing” in Myanmar, and more recently in Ethiopia’s Tigray region
A statement issued Monday by Doctors Without Borders, know by its French initials MSF, said “treatment structures in the Ethiopian region of Tigray were looted, vandalised and destroyed in a deliberate and generalised manner” according to its observers in the area.
The group said it had visited 106 sites between mid-December and early March, and that 70 percent had been looted.
Only 13 percent “functioned normally”, the French-language statement added.
“One health establishment in five visited by MSF teams were occupied by soldiers. In certain cases, this occupation was temporary, while in others, it continued during the visit,” the group said.
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.
