The European Commission on Thursday warned that the Tigray region of Ethiopia could be approaching a famine, as the country’s three-month-long conflict continued.
The European Commission on Thursday warned that the Tigray region of Ethiopia could be approaching a famine, as the country’s three-month-long conflict continued.
The region is largely cut off from the world as fighting enters a fourth month.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – “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.
GONDAR, Ethiopia – “When you think about your future, you never plan to be uprooted from the comfort of your home and find fragile safety in a tent,” said 24-year-old Hiwot* from Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray Region.
Yet this is exactly where she found herself in early December, while she was seven months pregnant. Fighting intensified around her neighbourhood, forcing her and her husband to flee.
The unfolding crisis in northern Ethiopia bears all the hallmarks of a human rights and humanitarian catastrophe. Since November, more than 6 million people have been trapped between the guns of Ethiopia’s military forces, marauding Eritrean troops, Amharan militia, and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The vast majority are now in urgent need of assistance. Yet the Ethiopian government continues to present a narrative that all is well in the north while effectively blocking relief aid. The Biden administration will need to move quickly to avoid further devastation in Tigray.
World Council of Churches (WCC) interim general secretary Dr Ioan Sauca sent letters to Ethiopian prime minister Dr Abiy Ahmed Ali as well as to WCC member churches in Ethiopia expressing serious concern over alarming reports of conflict, massacres and other human rights abuses, particularly in the Tigray and Beninshangul-Gumuz regions, over the last months.
“The few humanitarian organisations that have managed to reach conflict-affected areas in the Tigray region are reporting a dire situation in which millions are at risk of hunger, severe child malnutrition and a looming famine, in the midst of a new desert locust infestation,” wrote Sauca to the prime minister. “They are also indicating large displacement of populations, especially in the rural areas, as well as reports of sexual violence and abuses of women and girls.”
![Sudanese army soldiers in Sudan on 31 August 2019 [EBRAHIM HAMID/AFP/Getty Images]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Sudanese-army-soldierS.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)