Ethiopian soldiers armed with machine guns, sniper rifles and grenades raided a hospital in Ethiopia’s war-torn northern Tigray region earlier this week in retribution, doctors say, for a CNN investigation that revealed Ethiopian and Eritrean troops were blocking humanitarian aid to patients there.
Medical staff at the University Teaching and Referral Hospital in the besieged city of Axum, in Tigray’s central zone, said that the soldiers stormed the hospital in the early hours of Sunday morning, raiding the student dormitory, doctors and patient wards, contaminating the operating room and stopping all surgical operations.
The troops returned again on Monday, after some medical staff and patients fled, searching for people they accused of “tarnishing the country’s image” in news reports, doctors speaking on condition of anonymity told CNN. The soldiers demanded a “list of the names of doctors who will not cooperate with the military’s investigation into the hospital.”
The international medical humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) confirmed the incident to CNN, saying that several soldiers went “ward by ward looking for patients, intimidating caretakers and threatening health staff.”
In spite of the threats, medical staff said they don’t regret speaking out. “I feel like I’m living on an isolated planet, with no law or order. The world must open its eyes that people in Tigray are living in anarchy,” staff at Axum University Teaching and Referral Hospital said in a statement.
CNN has reached out to the Ethiopian Prime Minister’s Office for comment.
In April, a CNN team reporting from Tigray with the permission of Ethiopian authorities witnessed Eritrean soldiers — some disguising themselves in old Ethiopian military uniforms — blocking aid to desperate populations more than a month after Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize winning leader Abiy Ahmed pledged to the international community that they would leave.
On April 21, after being thwarted repeatedly by Ethiopian and Eritrean troops, the team traveled from the regional capital Mekelle to the historic city of Axum, two weeks after it had been sealed off by the military. An aid convoy also made the seven-hour journey.
Inside the Axum University Teaching and Referral Hospital, CNN interviewed medical workers who detailed the disastrous effects of the blockade — essential supplies were so perilously low that some staff had begun donating blood. They asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, but requested that CNN identify the hospital so that people in the region knew they were still operating.
At the time, CNN also witnessed gun-toting troops roaming the corridors of the hospital, dropping off wounded soldiers and threatening medical staff, who were trying to treat a grim array of trauma from shrapnel, bullets, stabbings and rapes.
On Tuesday, after 48 hours of raids by Ethiopian soldiers, only a few patients — those who were unable to move — remained in their beds.
One doctor, who is still at the hospital, told CNN over text message they are living in fear of what will happen when the soldiers next return.
“Everyone in the hospital is now helpless, with either detention or death looming at any point in the future from now.”
The United Nations on Thursday confirmed that “blockades by military forces” had severely impeded the ability for assistance to reach rural areas of Tigray where the humanitarian crisis is worst. The report has also triggered condemnation in recent days from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and ratcheted up a bi-partisan push for the Biden administration to enact sanctions.
In a rare public statement on their activities in Tigray, Mari Carmen Viñoles, head of the emergency unit of MSF, told CNN the organization was “very concerned about the frequent violations of the neutrality of the medical mission by armed groups.”
👉 Selected Comments from CNN channel:
💭 Rebecca Mæd
“Even the stones cry out for their painful sorrows. Why must humans create such horrors? 😞 “
💭 Kristi Stevens
“May the ancestors and Gods help these people. Our hearts are with them.”
💭 Stanley Glover
„Thank you for bringing Ethiopia’s callous blood letting to our screens . My heart aches for these poor, defenseless , old and children being deliberately murdered by the evil regimes in Addis Ababa and Massawa😩😭”
💭 M Anderson
“This type of horrible crimes towards innocent people make you wonder just how awful human beings can be to one another. And why???“
💭 Redacted
„This is madness, one can only imagine the suffering off camera. Miss Elbagir and her team demonstrated bravery and empathy in the face of death; Exemplary journalists of the past would be proud.“
💭 Kristi Stevens
“Is there any way to help that girl? I would proudly foster her or any of the kids. How can we help????”
💭 SA Doherty
“You are one extraordinarily brave lady Nima, as well as your team–totally courageous, all of you. Massive props to all of you!!
And my God, the inhumanity is just brutal, devastating and absolutely heartbreaking. I pray for the Ethiopian people and victims of this cruel and murderous force. May they get what they deserve!!”
💭 Bb Sen
“Thank you for reporting this heartbreaking story for the whole world.”
💭 Daniel Hostetler
“The cruelty of man is limitless…truly heartbreaking! The World must respond!”
💭 Sylvia Carmichael
“Sorry for your losses my heart is with these people, I don’t understand how humans could do this to others, they are the ones who don’t deserve to exist.”
💭 Simon
“This piece deserves an Emmy!”
💭 Brook Tu
“The reporter, Nima Elbagir, is an incredibly brave woman. So calm, and polite, in the face of danger.
That’s one tough lady. And the story she presents is, both, enlightening and heart-breaking. She should get an award, even if it’s only ‘Employee of the Month’.”
💭 Gods Vibes
“God Please Send Heavenly Support to These People 💟, Your Children Heavenly Father. Remove the Anger from my Heart towards these Evil Men. I Send the Parents and Children My Unconditional Love.
Mankind will never learn what Love is until we love all people on the planet.”
Today, between 4.5 million and 5.2 million people of Tigray’s total population of 5.7 million are in need of immediate humanitarian assistance. Famine is probably occurring already, and without doubt in the coming months Tigrayans will be starving on a scale rarely witnessed in the modern world. Except that, because the Ethiopian government prefers to keep Tigray in darkness, few outsiders will be there to witness it. We may later get to count the graves of the children who perished.
The unpublished results of rapid nutrition assessments in six locations accessible to the regional authorities, with UNICEF’s technical support, show that Global Acute Malnutrition rates among children under five years of age of 23.8-34.3 percent. This takes us into the range where we must speak about phase 5 of the Integrated food security Phase Classification (IPC)—‘famine.’
Most of the Tigray region is not accessible to survey teams, due to government restrictions and fighting. Conditions elsewhere are almost certainly worse. The situation is deteriorating week-by-week as food stocks run out. Longer term prospects are even more dire: the planting season has arrived and most farmers are unable to plough their fields and plant and tend this year’s crops. Recent reports speak of Eritrean soldiers arriving in villages where farmers have been able to prepare their land, destroying the seedlings and telling villagers, you will not plant, you will not harvest, and if you try you will be punished.
It is hard to think of a more systematic use of starvation as a weapon of war since the Nazi Hungerplan of eighty years ago.
Before the outbreak of war on 3/4 November 2020, Tigray was relatively food secure. Once the epicentre of Ethiopia’s infamous famine of 1984/85, thirty years of internal peace and development meant that today’s generation of Tigrayans were, for the first time in history, living without the threat of hunger due to drought or locusts. Agriculture was still a marginal enterprise with low yields on stony soils, but a combination of rehabilitating watersheds and building small dams for irrigated horticulture and orchards, and subsidized fertilizers—enhanced by micro-credit services—enabled modest harvests. Local incomes were supplemented by seasonal labouring opportunities on commercial farms in fertile western Tigray, and employment in new industries such as textiles and marble cutting, artisanal mining of gold and cobalt, and tourism to the region’s historic churches. Further, a ‘productive safety net programme’ designed and funded by the government and international donors kicked in whenever food insecurity threatened.
As detailed in the World Peace Foundation report Starving Tigray, which draws upon scores of open-source reports along with eyewitness testimonies up, the coalition of Ethiopian National Defence Forces, Eritrean Defence Forces and Amhara militia have destroyed, removed or rendered useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. They have burned food stores, looted food, and killed domestic animals from cows to baby chickens. They have slaughtered plough oxen, smashed ploughs, cut down fruit trees. They have ripped up the water pipes and pumps in towns and villages and ripped out domestic plumbing. They have looted and vandalized the great majority of the region’s clinics and hospitals. They have closed banks and frozen the 450,000 accounts in the region’s micro-finance institution, essentially confiscating the savings of the peasantry. They have pillaged and burned factories, ransacked hotels, looted shops and stores, and even broken open the little boxes used by shoeshine boys to steal the brushes and polish. By expropriating and ethnically cleansing the fertile lowlands where sesame is grown for export, they have eliminated Tigrayans’ single largest source of seasonal migrant work, a crucial source of income.
Evidence for widespread rape and shocking sexual violence—torture, sexual slavery and mutilation—has emerged. Rape is a crime. Rape perpetrated as part of a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population is a crime against humanity. That threshold is met in Tigray, with participation of uniformed state forces in rape and sexual violence.
Rape in these circumstances is also a starvation crime. A survivor of rape may be unable to care for herself and her children, because of physical injuries, trauma, and life-long stigma. A woman who is gang raped in her own home may never want to return to what was once a place of safety, but is now indelibly associated with pain, terror and attack on her familial and social identity. Fear of rape means that women and girls do not venture out to go to the market, go to fetch water or firewood, go to their farms or gardens, or seek assistance. With many men killed, in hiding, or joining the armed resistance, women are often the sole adult carers for their children—breadwinners in a land with no bread.
Not only has the Ethio-Eritrean coalition massively reduced the food available to Tigrayans, but they have systematically reduced the region to a state of destitution. Should this destruction, dispossession and expulsion be permitted to stand, the future is a geographically truncated Tigray, deprived of every source of income save subsistence farming, utterly dependent on welfare handouts. The scorched earth campaign means that the numbers in need will not reduce even if the conflict ends. Ethiopia and Eritrea have posed a horrible dilemma to the humanitarian community. Should donors pay the bill for the human consequences of this destruction or be complicit in what is emerging as a systematic hunger plan?
The humanitarian effort is reaching fewer people and providing them with less assistance than in any comparable circumstances in the world today. Most of what is given is food. There is some health care, but almost no agricultural aid. Much of that aid is stolen by the coalition forces—some of it wholesale, some of it when soldiers raid a village where there has been a distribution and take it at gunpoint.
The perpetrators of these starvation crimes are the Ethiopian federal forces, the Eritrean army, and Amhara forces. Clues to the Ethiopians’ motives can be deduced from the public rhetoric of political groups now setting the agenda of the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Amhara regional state concur in demonizing the Tigrayans. They claim that during the years in which the TPLF was in power, Tigrayans ‘looted’ the Ethiopian state, taking an unwarranted share of development funds, and are therefore ‘thieves’ and ‘daylight hyenas.’ Confiscating Tigrayan property was a slogan of political parties now supporting the government. In a recent panel on France 24, Neamin Zeleke, Executive Director at Ethiopian Satellite Televison and Radio (ESAT) which has been a fulcrum for inciting hatred against Tigrayans, toned down his rhetoric for an English-speaking audience but his intent to enact ‘revenge’ was clear. The campaign targeting ethnic Tigrayans for removal from employment, residence and rights across Ethiopia has the disturbing signature of eradicating them from the Ethiopian polity altogether.
The Amhara leadership claims that when provincial boundaries were redrawn in 1991-94, at the time of adopting a federal system based on ethnicities, Tigray took over historically Amhara lands, which they should now reclaim. (As with almost all such territorial disputes the history and the basis for the claims are controversial.) The U.S. State Department calls it ‘ethnic cleansing.’ That is the correct term: the boundary is being redrawn by force and Tigrayans are being forcibly removed or eliminated. Ironically, the FEWS NET maps this area as ‘food secure’: its methods are not designed to take account of the removal of the previous inhabitants and their replacement by new settlers.
The Eritrean president has long blamed the TPLF—and by extension all Tigrayans—for his country’s international ostracism and poverty and sought to eliminate it as a threat. Eritrea is a despotism, with no constitution, parliament, independent judiciary or free media. Its main institution is its vast army; its soldiers are forcibly conscripted from high school, brutalized and required serve indefinitely. The UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea, which reported in 2016 found a shocking record of abuse by the state against its own citizens. The Special Rapporteur, Sheila Keetharuth, laments that her recommendations, including that Eritrea be referred to the International Criminal Court, were wholly ignored.
The shut-down of internet and phone communication has been effective in minimizing reporting of atrocities including starvation, thereby allowing official denials to pass without refutation. International humanitarian workers are compelled to remain silent for fear of being expelled; the situation for national staff is worse. After the TPLF was declared a ‘terrorist’ organization, communication with them is prohibited.
Culpability for the outbreak of hostilities in November is shared among the four belligerents: the Ethiopian federal government, the TPLF, Eritrea and the Amhara regional forces.
Culpability for the famine lies entirely with the Ethio-Eritrean coalition. To the extent that there were pre-existing food security difficulties, on account of poverty and a locust plague, those show only that the perpetrators of the starvation crimes were aware of the vulnerability of their intended victims. A prosecutor seeking to investigate the situation in Tigray would have good reason to consider a case for crimes against humanity and genocide against the coalition military and political leaders.
2417 on conflict and hunger was designed to ensure that grave circumstances such as these would not be permitted to develop. Paragraph 12 reads:
‘[Council] Further requests the Secretary-General to report swiftly to the Council when the risk of conflict-induced famine and wide-spread food insecurity in armed conflict contexts occurs, and expresses its intention to give its full attention to such information provided by the Secretary-General when those situations are brought to its attention.’
The resolution doesn’t specify what the UNSC should do after giving ‘its full attention’ to the crisis. But it’s clear that it shouldn’t do nothing.
On current performance, Tigray is set to join the catalogue of genocides and crimes against humanity in which the world failed to act on warnings, and responded with hand wringing only after the event. The UNSC discussed the situation in Ethiopia under ‘any other business’ on 24 November and 14 December 2020, and held a closed session on the humanitarian crisis on 3 February 2021. Emergency Relief Coordinator and head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs briefed Council, with increasing candour and alarm, over subsequent weeks, with an extremely frank and alarming report on 15 April. No formal session was held and only a pallid press statement was issued on 23 April.
The countries that pushed for action were Ireland and the U.S., supported by other European countries. The immediate reason for deadlock at the UNSC was the threat of a veto by China and/or Russia, on the grounds that the conflict was a domestic matter for Ethiopia and not therefore a legitimate agenda item. This threat was possible because the three African members of the Council (Kenya, Niger and Tunisia) were not ready to support an assertive position pushed by western natitons. The African Union, despite its elaborate norms, principles and institutions designed precisely to prevent and manage a crisis such as this, was silent—rebuffed and intimidated by its host country Ethiopia.
Six months after Ethiopia and Eritrea launched their campaign of starvation and mass atrocity, the UNSC has been a bystander. The UN Secretary General has abdicated his responsibilities. The African Union has failed. On its third anniversary, resolution 2417 provides only the draft for the apology that might one day be forthcoming.
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