💭 I wouldn’t envy anyone fighting in that terrain against a tenacious, vigorous people defending their beloved homeland.
Tigray, Ethiopia’s most northerly region, makes its presence felt all the way down in Addis Ababa, about 430 miles to the south. Even before the current fighting, the prettiest beggars in the rambunctious and strangely endearing Ethiopian capital tended to be the Tigrayan single mothers. They made that daunting journey to escape a rural existence that struck me, during my trips around Tigray, as not dissimilar to European life during the Middle Ages.
When I lived in Ethiopia, I reported from all over Tigray on humanitarian projects, tensions with Eritrea and the influx of Eritrean refugees, even on a brave British expat who was trying to establish a milk farm. I developed a soft spot for the Tigrayans’ vigor and friendly boldness, a contrast to the polite but taciturn Amhara people in Addis Ababa. It’s Ethiopia’s equivalent to the ebullient Irishman versus the stiff-upper-lipped Englishman. The two-year-old daughter of the mother who begged on a street near where I lived in Addis personified Tigrayan spirit. Whenever I passed them in their dirty clothes, that wild little imp would be dancing to the music coming from the stores or running around like a dust devil while her mother smiled indulgently.
Last November, Ethiopia’s prime minister Abiy Ahmed launched a military offensive against Tigray’s regional government. Nine months of atrocious conflict followed. Numerous massacres included the killing of hundreds sheltering at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, a city that was once the hub of the Axumite Empire, a maritime trading power that at its apogee during the early Christian era was northeastern Africa’s greatest market.
The first time I visited Axum, I made a beeline for Our Lady Mary of Zion. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians claim it houses the Ark of the Covenant. In classic Ethiopian style (understated and underfunded), the church wasn’t much to write home about. The repository of this fabled treasure that has bewitched imaginations and inspired the first and arguably best Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was even blander: a small, dome-shaped side chapel guarded by a querulous old monk. My Indiana Jones pretensions deflating, I derived consolation from a nearby field of mysterious-looking and intricately carved memorial obelisks from the third to fourth centuries AD. The largest, some 108, lies wrecked where it fell, like Ozymandias.
At Addyegrat, a key city taken by federal forces as they closed in on the regional capital of Mekelle last November, I got to grips with ti’hilo, Tigray’s answer to Swiss fondue. Barley balls are pierced by twin-pronged carved sticks, dipped in a fiery-looking sauce and placed atop a large plate of injera, a giant gray spongy pancake-like bread whose rubbery surface serves as the platform for most Ethiopian meals. Like most meals in Ethiopia, a ceremony involving a comely young maiden attends this Tigrayan specialty: she sits by your table, rolling little balls of barley between her hands.
Federal troops also took the historic town of Adwa, the scene in 1896 of a climactic battle against the invading Italians, whose defeat made Ethiopia the only African country not to be colonized. The battle became a symbol of pan-Africanism and remains a source of enormous pride to Ethiopians. On its anniversary, I’ve seen drunken Ethiopians in the bars of Addis Ababa becoming so impassioned that foreigners take note of the nearest exit.
And then there is poor Mekelle. Many of its buildings are now pockmarked by bullets or smashed by artillery. Once lovely to visit, Mekelle’s wide, palm-lined avenues and cobbled central area of cafés and frisky bars had the feel of a laidback Mediterranean oasis. Its people embodied Garrison Keillor’s famous opening to his Prairie Home Companion radio show: ‘Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.’ Those Tigray women! So stylish and bold in delicate, ankle-length white dresses with brightly embroidered patterns down the center and edges, set off by gold jewelry, hair tightly braided from the forehead in neat parallel lines that frizz out explosively beneath a white netela shawl.
Not forgetting Tigray’s topography, let me tout the haunting mesas, intimidating escarpments and barren valleys that during antiquity helped keep out foreign intruders and meant, in the words of Edward Gibbon, that ‘the Ethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world, by whom they were forgotten’. Amid those cliff-top monasteries and rock-hewn churches I once visited there have now been further scenes of massacre. This formidable landscape, which provides endless mountain redoubts for the Tigrayan resistance, cannot be underestimated. Tigrayan forces have lately taken back the region. Having had my own crack at dealing with insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, I wouldn’t envy anyone fighting in that terrain against a tenacious, vigorous people defending their beloved homeland. But who knows what comes next?
Yeshialem Gebreegziabher, 27, holds her daughter, Kalkidan Yeman, 6 months old, who is suffering from malnutrition at Aby Adi Health center in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, on Monday, June 7, 2021.
Courtesy: Alex de Waal
“…why is it that we need to see children dying of hunger before we believe that it is happening?”
The reason why the official numbers are unchanged is because the United Nations leadership has chosen not to follow commonsense and its own expert opinion that the food crisis must by now be at very high risk of major famine. They can be blind because the information blackout is so complete.
When the last great famine struck Ethiopia 37 years ago, a senior NGO official lamented “that rather curious phenomenon that people will not believe a famine until they see it.” It took a BBC film of mass starvation for embassies, the United Nations, and the general public to become aware of that famine.
Earlier this week, Associated Press published the first pictures of the starving in Tigray in the famine of 2021. The pictures are all from Mekelle, many from Aydaer Referral Hospital in the city, where Tigrayan doctors and aid workers are trying to save the lives of severely malnourished children without outside help.
The pictures should shock the conscience of the world. They should compel humanitarians to ask why it has taken so long for us to see these realities, and to demand that we know what is happening in remote rural areas where conditions are worse. And they should compel us to ask, once again, why is it that we need to see children dying of hunger before we believe that it is happening? Are the last thirty years of professional study and institutional commitment to create early warning and monitoring systems for food security crises all for naught?
Solemn Commitments
Over the last few years there have been numerous high-level commitments to preventing food crises, especially when related to conflict. United Nations Security Council resolution 2417 of April 2018 specifically, in paragraph 12
“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.”
Ten months after the first warnings of conflict-related food insecurity were sounded, this has not happened. Doubtless, the UN Secretary General would argue that any effort on his part to fulfil that obligation would have run into opposition from countries such as China and Russia. Doubtless there is truth in that. But is the job of the leader of the UN to pre-emptively give way to every self-interested political objection that he might anticipate, or to provide moral leadership, reminding member states of their solemn commitments undertaken?
A few weeks before the conflict erupted on November 3-4, the World Food Programme received the Nobel Peace Prize “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.” The W E P’s actions in Tigray since that date have not fulfilled the promise indicated that perhaps premature award.
In March this year the Secretary General himself established a High-Level Task Force on Preventing Famine. This followed a Call to Action to Prevent Famine the previous month by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and the W E P, which included an appeal to ensure the commitment of all food security actors to support and strengthen scenario planning, independent analysis, real-time monitoring and the use of early warning mechanisms to track changes and anticipate crisis, to ensure the scaled-up action and the advocacy required to prevent a deteriorating situation.
This was followed by the G7 famine prevention and humanitarian crises compact of May 2021 which included explicit calls for collecting the data necessary for improved action, but also “we will not let lack of data be a barrier to timely action to save lives.”
Early Warnings
From November 2020 to June 2021, the data and maps provided by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs show a steadily deteriorating situation, culminating in the estimate of 400,000 people being in “category 5” of the Integrated food security Phase Classification I P C system. Category 5 is “catastrophe” or, when certain criteria for the threshold of populations in specific areas are met, “famine.” Having that number of people in that condition is a famine under anything except the most hair-splitting technical definition. But the UN food security diagnosis and response system demands technical precision.
Hence the Famine Review Committee, an independent but UN-activated and coordinated body and the analysts-of-last-resort when the politics of famine take over was convened. The FRC issued a report with four scenarios in May 2021 based upon an analysis done at the request of the IPC Global Support Unit, an FAO body. The scenarios cover a period from June until the end of September, with projections into a second period after that. We are now at the end of period 1. The worst-case scenario is number 4, identified as:
Intensity of conflict: Conflict escalation, spreading outside Tigray region;
Humanitarian supply lines, access and level of operations: No access within and into Tigray and no influx of humanitarian supplies;
Private sector and informal supply lines and availability of commercial goods and services: Extremely limited communication services, banks closed, no cash available, no commercial supply chain, no basic services.
This is the scenario we are currently in, with the sole difference that humanitarian access within Tigray has become much easier. This progress is offset by the blockade that prevents aid getting into Tigray. The UN estimates that approximately 100 trucks of relief supplies are needed each day. In the last 90 days, 482 trucks have been permitted to travel, along with a limited supply of assistance by air. This total is less than 6 percent of assessed need.
According to the FRC, unless there is new data demonstrating otherwise, the risk of famine during July-September is “medium to high” rising to “high” for October onwards. Under the less pessimistic scenario 3, Tigray would still be at high risk of famine in the coming three months.
In any other emergency, a report such as this would set the alarm bells ringing and lead to not only intensified humanitarian action but also intensified information gathering so that the agencies knew what to supply, where and to whom. And indeed a whole page of recommendations in the FRC report is devoted to data gathering and analysis. Among other things, the FRC also called for weekly monitoring, regular analysis updates, and another IPC within assessment within three months. In short, the world’s leading food emergency experts said that Tigray needed especially close monitoring.
Meanwhile the FAO and W E P’s August-November 2021 “Hunger Hotspots Analysis” highlights Ethiopia as one of two countries (with Madagascar) at greatest famine risk globally. The report calls for: “Support a full food security and nutrition survey in all areas of Tigray, especially among IDPs.”
No Data, No Comment
None of the promised UN action has happened. There are no new surveys, no data, no pictures.
Why have the United Nations and its specialized agencies not collected the data? On June 28, the Tigray Defense Forces defeated the Ethiopian army and expelled it from most of Tigray. This was followed by the withdrawal of the Eritrean Defense Forces. All of the major towns and roads, with the exception of western Tigray, came under the control of the TDF. Roadblocks vanished. The soldiers who had been obstructing access, stealing food, and killing, raping, and intimidating Tigrayan civilians ran away. A few days later, the UN OCHA update noted that most of Tigray had become accessible for humanitarians. To be precise, once a team had arrived in Mekelle it could travel freely and safely to the great majority of places and conduct activities, such as distributing assistance, conducting surveys and collecting information.
The UN OCHA humanitarian access map is unique. It shows no difficulty of access within Tigray, but also that the region is ringed by areas in which access is impeded or impossible. In short, the problem for the humanitarians was getting into Tigray in the first place. The Ethiopian government has systematically obstructed this access.
This prohibition of data and images keeps the starvation in Tigray away from the headlines, just as the Ethiopian government intends.
This week’s AP article contains information, known to every humanitarian worker and UN official in Ethiopia, but not hitherto made public:
“humanitarian workers boarding rare flights to the region have been given an unusual list of items they cannot bring: Dental flossers. Can openers. Multivitamins. Medicines, even personal ones. The list, obtained by the AP, also banned means of documenting the crisis, including hard drives and flash drives. Photos and video from Tigray have disappeared from social media since June as aid workers and others, facing intense searches by authorities, fear being caught with them on their devices.”
This prohibition of data and images keeps the starvation in Tigray away from the headlines, just as the Ethiopian government intends.
There has been no public protest from the UN about its inability to conduct the required information gathering.
Commonsense tells us that a region in which food supplies and other objects indispensable for the survival of the civilian population have been systematically destroyed, leaving 400,000 in “catastrophe” status and more than 5 million dependent on food aid, where no harvest can be gathered and neither commercial nor humanitarian food is allowed in, would be reduced to starvation. The FRC report puts that commonsense on an expert footing.
If the necessary data are not collected on a timely basis across the stricken communities, it is possible for localized famines to strike and then pass unnoticed—passing because the hungry people die and because the survivors move away before they can be enumerated. Which means that the data proving the famine lie in those graves.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has insisted that there is no hunger in Tigray. His advisor, Deacon Daniel Kibret has said that future researchers studying the TPLF “shouldn’t find anything about them, except after digging the ground.”
Speaking at the G7 roundtable in the UK on June 10, U.S. Special Envoy Jeff Feltman warned, we “should not wait to count the graves” before declaring the crisis in Tigray what it is: a famine. That was a warning.
But the Ethiopian government strategy works: the UN appears to operate on the principle that what cannot be seen and cannot be counted can be ignored safely. Addis Ababa has successfully intimidated the UN from making the now-inevitable call that the situation in Tigray represents “famine”—a designation that will hang around the neck of the Ethiopian Government as a badge of eternal shame.
Unless the UN starts to reveal what it knows, then by its silence it is contributing to the death by starvation of tens of thousands of people, most of them children, in Tigray. It too will be eternally shamed.
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