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The unpublished results of rapid nutrition assessments in six locations accessible to the regional authorities, with UNICEF’s technical support, show that Global Acute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.
👉“There is evidence of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Western Tigray. If carried out with the intent of eliminating Tigrayans, it may be classified as genocide,” says Helen Clark, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand.
👉“Taken all together, the serious crimes being committed against Tigrayans, including massacres of civilians of all ages, may meet the definition of genocide,” Ms Clark added.
🔥 #TigrayGenocide: A ‘pathetic’ international reaction:
„The silence from key international actors has been deafening”
🔥‘አሳዛኝ’ ዓለም አቀፍ ምላሽለትግራኝ ጭፍጨፋ፤
“ቁልፍ ከሆኑ ዓለም አቀፍ ተዋንያን ዝምታው ያደንቁራል“
👉 Imagine The Outrage if The 150,000 Dead Tigrayan Ethiopians Had Actually Been Palestinian, and The Aggressors Israeli Troops. We’re observing this right now! Watch how the world reacts to the current escalated Fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants.
Six months into northern Ethiopia’s shadow war, its atrocities are becoming harder to hide
When the first American bombs crashed into Baghdad in January 1991, the nature of war fundamentally changed.
Images of the First Gulf War were bounced off satellites and broadcast live to tens of millions of homes around the world.
Everyone saw how Iraq was systematically taken apart blow by blow. Since then, war has become more visible – its crimes ever harder to hide. But one conflict in the far north of Ethiopia has bucked the trend spectacularly, defying the information age.
For the last six months, communications blackouts and appalling access for human rights researchers and journalists alike have shrouded a conflict raging across the Tigray Region in shadows.
But as tens of thousands of Eritrean and Ethiopian national army troops have battled forces loyal to the regional government of Tigray, information has slowly and surely leaked out.
Humanitarian reports, grainy mobile phone videos, refugees accounts and journalistic dispatches all point the same way: dozens if not hundreds of mass killings, a systematic campaign of rape, ethnic cleansing and starvation being used as a weapon of war.
Last week, another bombshell hit. A video smuggled out of the country shows the head of Ethiopia’s Orthodox Church Abune Mathias saying the Ethiopian state is committing a ‘genocide’ on the ethnic Tigrayan people.
Several senior independent observers horrified by the tepid international response to the Tigray crisis broke ranks to tell the Telegraph what they thought was happening.
“It is crimes against humanity. It’s the crime of extermination. It’s the crime of mass starvation. It’s certainly a lot worse than Darfur,” says Alex du Waal, one of the foremost international experts on the Horn of Africa.
“There is evidence of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Western Tigray. If carried out with the intent of eliminating Tigrayans, it may be classified as genocide,” says Helen Clark, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand.
“Taken all together, the serious crimes being committed against Tigrayans, including massacres of civilians of all ages, may meet the definition of genocide,” Ms Clark added.
How did it come to this?
Tigray is populated mainly by ethnic Tigrayans who make up a small part of Ethiopia’s myriad of more than 80 ethnic groups.
Despite their small size, the ethnic group has played a huge role in the country’s modern history. In the 1980s, the Tigrayan’s People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) led a rebel coalition to oust the Derg, Ethiopia’s Marxist dictatorship.
For the next three decades, the TPLF dominated Africa’s second-most populous nation, with Tigrayans holding key positions in the country’s government, armed forces and economy. But major TPLF abuses led to widespread hatred for the ethnic group.
Ethiopia’s current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed swept to power on a wave of anger at the status quo in April 2018. Mr Abiy moved to sideline the old Tigrayan guard and tried to increase the federal government’s power over regional governments.
Tigray openly resisted and held regional elections. An escalating war of words turned into an open conflict in November 2020. Mr Abiy accused the TPLF of attacking a major federal government military base and launched a massive offensive to oust the group.
Mr Abiy enlisted the help of Eritrea, whose dictator Isaias Afwerki is a longtime foe of the TPLF and axe-wielding ethnic Amhara militias, to crush Tigray’s battle-hardened fighters in a three-pronged attack.
But any hopes of a quick blitzkrieg offensive have evaporated. Instead, the conflict has descended into a guerilla war with the Tigrayan Defence Forces, and a vast humanitarian catastrophe spread across the region of six million people.
An estimated 1.7 million people were displaced across the region at the end of March, while 4.5 million people are in need of emergency aid, according to the United Nations.
More than 60,000 refugees made it into eastern Sudan before Ethiopian forces sealed the border, preventing their very own Rohingya moment.
The situation is now so desperate that many women IDPs and refugees are selling sex for as little as £1, says the International Rescue Committee.
Breaking through the blackout
Only a handful of journalists have been granted limited access to Tigray. Their reports tell of horrifying suffering and abuses committed by all parties.
But most human rights analysts and reporters have had to investigate dozens of reported atrocities from a distance, calling up hundreds of survivors on encrypted lines to corroborate accounts and even trying to rent satellites to take pictures of mass graves.
Earlier this year, the Telegraph obtained the first video evidence of what appears to be a war crime carried out by the Ethiopian army. Around 40 bodies in civilian clothes can be seen in the video at Debre Abay in Central Tigray.
“You should have finished off the survivors,” the cameraman nonchalantly says as soldiers walk past a mortally injured man. One video analysed by CNN, the BBC, Amnesty and Bellingcat shows what appears to be Ethiopian soldiers killing dozens of men, then pushing their bodies off a cliff.
More recently, this paper published testimony from more than a dozen witnesses alleging that Ethiopian and Eritrean troops went from house to house in the Temben region of central Tigray, killing 182 people in the second week of February.
“I saw dead bodies scattered, bodies half-eaten by dogs. The soldiers did not allow anyone to get close to the corpses,” one 26-year-old man told reporters by phone at the time.
Almost every atrocity investigation has been hotly contested or flat out denied as fake news by the Ethiopian government in Addis Ababa. One Ethiopian ambassador has even insinuated journalists at this paper were paid up TPLF agents.
Yet observers say such abuses are probably just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. One team of researchers at the University of Ghent has documented almost 500 events where people were allegedly executed or massacred, mainly by Eritrean, Ethiopian national troops or militiamen.
After reporting extensively on the conflict for the last six months, Tsedale Lemma, the founder of the influential Addis Standard, believes ‘genocidal acts’ are being committed.
“Many people argue that because the number of people massacred may not be in its hundreds of thousands, it doesn’t qualify as genocide. What this argument misses is intent.”
“Intent, not just numbers, qualify acts of massacres as genocide. There are objectively corroborated reports of, for example, young men of fighting age being intentionally targeted and massacred.”
There are also reports of Tigrayans being forced to eat leaves to survive, displaced people turning up emaciated at ransacked healthcare centres and dying in their sleep of hunger.
One survey by a cluster of humanitarian groups found that half of all women surveyed were acutely malnourished. Experts have raised the alarm saying that starvation is being used as a weapon of war in the conflict.
The World Peace Foundation based in Boston released a report in April stating that food supplies were being destroyed and that the region’s elaborate food security system was being dismantled.
“There is a campaign that has been started to prevent farming. Regrettably, this campaign is being done by some of those tasked with law enforcement,” Abebe Gebrehiwot, deputy head of Tigray’s interim government, told Ethiopian state media on Monday.
A ‘pathetic’ international reaction
The silence from key international actors has been deafening. Over the last six months, the UN chief Antonio Guterres, the UN Security Council and the African Union have all refused to take any firm stance on the atrocities in Tigray.
Instead, they have spoken in muted tones about the need to get humanitarian access to the region. Part of the reason for this is Ethiopia’s considerable diplomatic heft — the African Union has its headquarters in Addis Ababa.
China and Russia have also blocked any serious attempt by Western nations in the Security Council to condemn the atrocities. Multiple critics said that part of the reason for Mr Guterres’ relative silence on Tigray was that he is up for reelection in January 2022 and needs African votes.
“UN Secretary-General António Guterres has abjectly abandoned his responsibilities. History will not judge him kindly even if he wins enough votes for reelection,” said Mr Waal.
Mr Guterres’ office said he was fully engaged in seeking an end to the conflict and “continues to call for all perpetrators of such violations to be held accountable and face justice.”
For Dr Mukesh Kapila, a former top UN official who raised the alarm about the ongoing genocide in Darfur in 2003, the situation is clear. “If you look at the pattern of killings and other incidents including sexual violence, use of starvation – there is a pattern of genocidal events. They’re taking place in close juxtaposition to each other. That points to a degree of orchestration.
“The fact that these genocidal acts are taking place in repeated places – points towards an organisation, it points towards a strategy. That is why I think of what is going on in Tigray as a set of genocidal acts, which taken together point towards an overall genocide,” Dr Kapila says.
“People are talking about this privately. But it hasn’t caught on publicly because it’s a huge, huge business to accuse a state of genocide. If you declare genocide convention, you are obliged to act,” Dr Kapila claims.
The US is beginning to wake up to the crisis. The US special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, issued a stark warning saying that if the violence from Tigray spread across the nation of 110m it would make Syria look like “child’s play”.
Billene Seyoum, the spokesperson for the Ethiopian Prime Minister, hit back against the allegations of atrocities in Tigray.
“Whether from leading Ethiopian or international observers, such allegations need to be procedurally and thoroughly investigated on the ground and the results made public, which international and national human rights entities are doing,” she said in a statement.
“Anecdotal and unsubstantiated testimonies cannot count as fact and only serve to perpetuate a skewed narrative of a country. Ethiopia is making and realising commitment towards ensuring investigations take place.”
💭 A priest from the Catholic Eparchy of Adigrat in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray says killings, abductions and rape are still occurring. 😠😠😠 😢😢😢
❖ “Ethiopian troops and their allies of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Ethiopian forces, the Amhara region special forces and Eritrean soldiers continue to hold their positions, and there are no signs they will withdraw anytime soon.”
❖ “The targets for killings are men and boys, who are being eliminated by armed forces and their allies, and women and girls, who are being repeatedly gang-raped to weaken any resistance.”
❖ “They want to annihilate Tigray. By killing the men and boys, they are trying to destroy any future resistance. They want to make sure that nobody can question their actions in future.”
❖ “They are raping and destroying women to ensure that they cannot raise a community in future. They are using rape and food a weapons of war.”
❖ “They want to destroy the people of Tigray. I am not clear why they want to declare genocide on the people of Tigray.”. Abune Mathias
❖ “Churches & monasteries were destroyed in heavy bombardment. Relics have been stolen, items of worship have been burned, belongings of believers have been desecrated.”
❖ “Farmers are being barred from farming and seeds are being blocked from reaching the region”
❖ “Tigrayan men or boys don’t want to die of hunger or be killed like their peers. They are joining the rebels so that they can live,”
“They want to annihilate Tigray. By killing the men and boys, they are trying to destroy any future resistance. They want to make sure that nobody can question their actions in future,”
A priest from the Catholic Eparchy of Adigrat in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray says killings, abductions and rape are still occurring in the region where a military offensive launched in November.
The targets for killings are men and boys, who are being eliminated by armed forces and their allies, and women and girls, who are being repeatedly gang-raped to weaken any resistance, according to the priest.
The cleric’s allegations come as individuals and organizations accuse the Ethiopian troops and their allies of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Ethiopian forces, the Amhara region special forces and Eritrean soldiers continue to hold their positions, and there are no signs they will withdraw anytime soon.
“They want to annihilate Tigray. By killing the men and boys, they are trying to destroy any future resistance. They want to make sure that nobody can question their actions in future,” said the priest, who did not wished to be named to protect his safety. “They are raping and destroying women to ensure that they cannot raise a community in future. They are using rape and food a weapons of war.”
Earlier in May, Patriarch Mathias, head of the 36 million-member Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, urged international intervention in Tigray while alleging that the Ethiopian army and its allies were committing a genocide.
In a video statement reportedly recorded in April but released in May, Patriarch Mathias termed what happened in Tigray as the highest form of cruelty and brutality. He listed atrocities such as massacres, use of famine as a weapon of war and destruction of churches.
“They want to destroy the people of Tigray. I am not clear why they want to declare genocide on the people of Tigray,” he said in the widely quoted video statement.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali launched an offensive Nov. 3 to fight the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. He accused the leaders of the semi-autonomous region of attacking and looting weapons from a federal army base in Mekele, the capital.
Months on, the fighting is still continuing in at least three areas, according to the priest. He said Eritrean forces are carrying out most of the brutal acts, seemingly to exert revenge for the humiliation suffered during the 1998-2000 border war with Ethiopia.
Some of the documented atrocities include the cliff execution of young men near Aksum and the massacre of 160 people in Bora village in January. Hundreds of priests and thousands of believers were killed, the interreligious Council of Tigray said in February. Churches, monasteries and mosques were destroyed in heavy bombardment.
“Relics have been stolen, items of worship have been burned, belongings of believers have been desecrated,” said the interfaith group, which includes the Catholic Church. “Religious sisters and nuns have been violated and raped, mothers and daughters have been gang-raped.”
The priest said killings and torture are breeding nationalism among Tigrayans. He said men or boys who cannot attend school due to the war and can’t find food or fear being executed were joining the rebel ranks in droves, angry over the atrocities.
“They don’t want to die of hunger or be killed like their peers. They are joining the rebels so that they can live,” he said.
At the same time, farmers are being barred from farming and seeds are being blocked from reaching the region, according to an official from Tigray’s interim authority.
Abebe Gebrehiwot Yihdego, deputy head of Tigray’s interim government, told state-run Tigray TV that preventing farming and seeds from reaching the people would result in hunger.
“These two incidents that looked to supplement each other have no other message but to let the people of Tigray die,” Gebrehiwot said in an interview May 10.
Meanwhile, the Association of Member Episcopal Conference in Eastern Africa has issued a humanitarian appeal for the Catholic Eparchy of Adigrat. Zambian Bishop Charles Kasonde, AMECEA chairman, said Catholic Bishop Tesfaselassie Medhin had requested urgent humanitarian assistance for the people of Tigray.
Kasonde said Medhin had informed the conference that many people had been displaced from their homes and were forced to live in camps inside and outside Ethiopia.
“The people in the affected communities need food, medication, shelter, water, and health and sanitary items,” Kasonde said. “The church in Ethiopia and its Caritas partners are doing their best to assist the suffering communities with the meager resources they have.”
The bishop said with the increasing number of needy cases, the local church was getting overwhelmed.
The army of dictator Esayas Eritrea & that of Fascist Abiy Ahmed intentionally destroyed Samre Health Center, Tigray. Here is the situation of the pharmacy of the center at the moment. All medical supplies were taken by those evil forces.
👉 Tigrayans get less humanitarian relief compared to those facing the impact of conflicts in northern Nigeria, Afghanistan, or Central African Republic.
‘A restrictive government, combined with insecurity and active fighting, can completely hamstring the aid response for months.’
People in northern Ethiopia get less humanitarian relief compared to those facing the impact of conflicts in northern Nigeria, Afghanistan, or Central African Republic, an independent poll released today by research group Humanitarian Outcomes found.
Fewer than half the conflict-affected people in Ethiopia’s Tigray region had received help since the conflict began in November, the survey revealed. Those that did said it wasn’t enough, and 79 percent overall believed aid was not reaching the areas most in need. A quarter said government and military groups were blocking or taking aid. Compared to respondents in other conflict zones who answered the same questionnaire, Tigrayans are less sure of the reasons for uneven aid provision; the report suggests that limited telecommunications and media coverage could be a contributing factor.
The survey of 614 people in Tigray was conducted by phone from late February to early March, despite on-and-off power and mobile network connections. The sample included people across the major regions of Tigray, but few displaced people.
The survey provides new evidence to gauge the reach of humanitarian aid in a tense debate between the government and the international community over the scale and seriousness of the fall-out from Ethiopia’s five-month conflict.
The conflict began in November, when federal government forces clashed with armed insurgents supporting the regional political party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Other Tigrayan militia, the Eritrean military, and forces from the neighbouring Amhara region are also involved.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has said the government campaign is a necessary assertion of national legitimacy, as the country is faced with an armed rebellion. His government has regained control of major towns in Tigray and installed a provisional administration.
But military clashes continue, and massacres, forced displacement, sexual violence, looting, halting of trade and communications, and disruption of daily life mean most of the estimated six million people in the region are negatively affected, and millions need some kind of help.
The UN’s humanitarian office calls the situation “extremely dire and far from improving”.
EU envoy Pekka Haavisto is visiting the country this week, the latest in a series of diplomatic efforts to contain the conflict that threatens to destabilise the whole country and the wider region.
The report notes that compared to other crisis situations monitored by the overarching project on the “Coverage, Operational Reach, and Effectiveness of Humanitarian Aid”, “Tigray has the highest numbers of people in need as a percentage of the population, the lowest numbers of organisations responding, and the lowest percentage of people in need reached by aid.”
Researcher Abby Stoddard said the report “shows that a restrictive government, combined with insecurity and active fighting, can completely hamstring the aid response for months.”
Almost all respondents said they needed help, and 43 percent said they had received at least some. The most common form of aid requested, and received, was food. Healthcare, clean water, and sanitation services were the services next most in demand. However, electricity and telecommunications topped the answers to an open-ended question on what people needed most.
Only two percent of respondents said they had received any help other than food. Some 31 percent said they “don’t know” the main obstacle to accessing aid, but 23 percent blamed government restrictions and 21 percent a lack of safety. Non-government military were to blame, according to 16 percent.
“Mobile phone surveys will always be limited by the degree of phone ownership and coverage, and in this case we had to pause it a couple of times due to power outages,” explained Stoddard. “Respondents tend to skew more urban and educated as a rule… in this case we mainly reached people who were still in their home districts.”
Limited access
According to the international aid community, government restrictions as well as insecurity and fighting have been preventing sufficient relief aid from getting through. The government has relaxed some of its restrictions on media and aid groups following sustained international lobbying. Significant volumes of food aid are being delivered to the region by the government, the UN, and NGOs.
Addis Ababa insists progress is being made to normalise the situation and deliver help, and to investigate rights abuses. However, the UN’s latest map of humanitarian access shows only small pockets of the region are fully open to relief aid provision.
Asked about which aid agencies were most active, respondents mentioned the Relief Society of Tigray (REST) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). REST, formerly affiliated to the now rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front, is the final link in the chain for a large food aid operation serviced by NGOs, including Catholic Relief Services.
Food and ‘starvation crimes’
Even as larger volumes of aid are being sent into the region, aid agency heads interviewed anonymously as part of the survey don’t have full confidence in where it’s going: “Although humanitarian organisations are doing their best to monitor distributions, some are worried about possible discrimination and exclusion in deciding who gets aid, and about the degree of control that authorities and armed actors are exerting over processes of targeting and distribution.”
The latest update by the UN humanitarian office, OCHA, reports an “extremely concerning malnutrition situation.”
A new report by The World Peace Foundation, whose authors include Horn of Africa and famine analyst Alex de Waal, states that “Ethiopian and Eritrean belligerents in the war in Tigray have comprehensively dismantled the region’s economy and food system.”
The report continued: “Regardless of who is responsible for the outbreak of hostilities, the sole reason for the scale of the humanitarian emergency is that the coalition of Ethiopian Federal forces, Amhara regional forces, and Eritrean troops are committing starvation crimes on large scale.”
Prior to the outbreak of war in November, the Tigray region had mostly achieved food security, the report noted. But in March, the US-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) classified at least 20 percent of the population of both central and eastern Tigray, in addition to several sections of northwestern and southeastern Tigray, as experiencing emergency levels of food insecurity.
Based on those figures, the report stated, there are now 50 to 100 excess deaths every day, and if the food security situation is not stabilised, it will lead to “mass starvation and a risk of famine” in the coming months.
🔥 Almost 60,000 have sought refugee status in neighbouring Sudan.
The majority here have made a hazardous journey from western Tigray. Some have been forced to flee their homes, others have been banished by militias from the neighbouring region of Amhara.
🔥 When the feared Amhara militia called ‘Fano’ turned up, they took everything the family possessed.
🔥 “Since registering here on 28 January I haven’t received a thing. My children are dying of hunger. We’ve had nothing so far.
🔥 “People are getting sick because they’re hungry. People are dying.”
🔥 His government declared the “law and order operation,” launched against the people who ran Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a success in late November and it is not clear why it has been so slow to offer aid organisations access.
The delay raises important questions – has the central government been trying to hide serious human rights violations conducted by Ethiopian troops – as well acts committed by allied soldiers from Eritrea and Amhara region of Ethiopia?
Alternatively, does this foot-dragging reflect the fact that Ahmed’s administration has failed to bring large parts of the region under its control?
UN officials say between 50,000-60,000 arrivals have turned up at one refuge in the past few weeks alone.
The Tssa hi Elementary School in Sheerae, Ethiopia, offers some sort of sanctuary, a place of refuge for people on the run.
But there is not much here to keep them alive.
A human tide of 300,000 Tigrayans are now camping in this beleaguered city at six schools, a local college and any number of half constructed buildings which dot the city.
A senior UN official told Sky News that 50,000-60,000 arrivals have turned up in the past few weeks alone.
After four months of warfare between Ethiopia’s national defence force and fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), more than 500,000 Tigrayans have lost their homes.
Almost 60,000 have sought refugee status in neighbouring Sudan.
The majority here have made a hazardous journey from western Tigray. Some have been forced to flee their homes, others have been banished by militias from the neighbouring region of Amhara.
The US government, amongst others, has condemned the violence and declared these evictions ‘ethnic cleansing’.
At Tssa hi Elementary, buses and trucks piled up with people’s basic possessions, stop outside the school’s front gate every few minutes.
We stopped one woman called Letay Teweldebrehan who had arrived in Sheerae with her daughter just before nightfall.
“It must be a difficult time for you,” I said.
“Yes, very much, I cannot explain it. We came because of the war. We have been robbed of our things and our animals were taken.”
She told me she was a civil servant from a city called Humera and I asked why she felt she had to leave.
“I work in water development but I have not received my salary for the last four months. We don’t have water, no electricity or medicines. Life is not possible.”
As she readied herself for the night ahead I asked where she thought we was going to sleep.
“I don’t know where. I have left my bed behind.”
There is no space left in the classrooms and the school playground is packed with families wrapped in blankets or balanced on bits of school furniture.
But if Ms Teweldebrehan does find a few square feet she will struggle to find anything else on offer.
Atsede Kidane, a mother of three, has been camping at the school for the past six weeks and she says the interim administration which now runs this region has not provided the residents with a single item of food.
“Since registering here on 28 January I haven’t received a thing. My children are dying of hunger. We’ve had nothing so far.
“People are getting sick because they’re hungry. People are dying.”
Humanitarian organisations could not get into Sheerae until early March and although Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has now given them “unfettered access” in Tigray they must operate in the region at their own risk.
His government declared the “law and order operation,” launched against the people who ran Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a success in late November and it is not clear why it has been so slow to offer aid organisations access.
The delay raises important questions – has the central government been trying to hide serious human rights violations conducted by Ethiopian troops – as well acts committed by allied soldiers from Eritrea and Amhara region of Ethiopia?
Alternatively, does this foot-dragging reflect the fact that Ahmed’s administration has failed to bring large parts of the region under its control?
These matters are no concern of a priest called Teklehaimanot, who has brought his family of eight to Tshaye Elementary School.
His 28-year-old son, Fitsum, contracted a mental illness in the third year of university and his parents have found him difficult to control in the camp. They have decided to chain him to a wooden beam.
“It’s very difficult, we cannot sleep. At night, he tries to go out and he bothers the children, so we have to chain his hands and legs.”
Priest Teklehaimanot said they could not flee their home in a town called Tesgede because they could not leave Fitsum alone.
When the feared Amhara militia called ‘Fano’ turned up, they took everything the family possessed.
“This is my son, because of son, I cannot go anywhere. I don’t even have clothes.
“This is what I have. Everything has been taken, this is it.”
It was Friday, Jan. 8, the day after Genna, the Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas. Around 2 p.m., Kidane Tesfay heard gunshots near his family’s home and thought of his two brothers, ages 17 and 20, walking outside.
“When I looked through the door’s peephole, I saw them on the ground, their blood spilling out,” he said in an interview. He also saw soldiers wearing mud-flecked green camouflage gear striding up to the door.
“I had to escape,” Tesfay said. “Luckily our house has another entrance. I ran out the back.”
What followed was an hours-long killing rampage, according to accounts from 10 survivors, including Tesfay, as well as from victims’ relatives and friends and activist groups. Ethiopian soldiers went from house to house in Bora, a town in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, and executed more than 160 people.
Done killing, the soldiers stopped families from taking their dead. Only on Sunday — two days after the slaughter — were gravediggers allowed to set about their grim task; one of them buried 26 corpses in the graveyard of the Abune Aregawi Church, survivors said.
“The town was filled with corpses. The bodies of our friends and neighbors started to smell,” said Girmay Hagos, a 30-year-old real estate agent and survivor. “We kept our grief to ourselves — the soldiers didn’t allow us to cry.”
The massacre in Bora is another deep stain on Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s months-long war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, which began in early November after the ruling faction there, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, attacked a government military base. Abiy retaliated with what he called a “law-enforcement operation,” which killed tens of thousands of people, estimates say, and displaced hundreds of thousands more. More than 60,000 Tigrayans have fled to neighboring Sudan alone, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Behind those numbers has been a brutal, ethnically driven campaign of punishment against the 5.4 million people living in Tigray and the TPLF, which had ruled Africa’s second-most populous country for almost three decades before Abiy’s ascension to power in 2018.
Much of the war remains opaque because the government imposed a communications blackout Nov. 4, largely sealing Tigray from the wider world. Still, consistent reports have emerged in recent weeks of “extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, looting of property, mass executions and impeded humanitarian access,” the U.N.’s Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide said in a statement last month.
On Monday, medical charity Doctors Without Borders said that 70% of clinics it visited in Tigray “were looted, vandalized and destroyed in a deliberate and generalized manner.” Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that government forces — which include the Ethiopian army, soldiers from neighboring Eritrea and state-sponsored militiamen from the Amhara region — had committed acts of “ethnic cleansing.”
One of those skirmishes, Bora residents say, happened the morning of Jan. 8 in the Ajale mountains, an area about 10 miles north of the town. After the fighting, soldiers descended upon Bora.
Hagos, the real estate agent, had gone to stay in Bora with his mother and sister, seeking safety there after hearing rumors that Ethiopian soldiers were killing civilians in the Tigrayan capital, Mekele, where he lived. With the sound of gunshots getting closer, his mother covered him with a blanket and told him to pretend he was ill.
“I lay down and acted as if I were sick and old,” Hagos said. “When the Ethiopian soldiers came to the house, they looked in and saw two women and what appeared to be a useless patient. They cursed at us and left.”
Others weren’t so lucky. Hagos said he personally knew 20 victims of the slaughter, including his 15-year-old brother, Yared; his childhood friend, Kalayu Negus, a popular barber in the town; and Alemu Amare, a neighbor who had gone out to get typhoid medicine for his daughter.
All the witnesses interviewed for this story insisted that the TPLF had no presence in the area after Nov. 26, and that there had been no provocation or warning before the soldiers began their rampage.
“Farmers. Farmers and youngsters,” one woman says over and over as she cries over the body of a family member in a video provided by Seb Hidri, an NGO in Tigray that supports Tigray’s independence. Corpses of men wearing civilian clothes lie strewn on the ground, one in a pool of blood, as other women shout and weep.
Local sources said the accents of the women, their clothing and the terrain in the video are consistent with its having been filmed either in or near Bora, but the Los Angeles Times could not independently verify the footage.
Seb Hidri says it has documented 170 killed in the town. Tghat, a news site run by pro-TPLF activists, reported on the Bora killings Jan. 12, along with another alleged massacre that took place in an area called Debre Abay.
Other instances of alleged human rights abuses have been mostly blamed on Eritrean troops or militias working alongside Ethiopian government forces.
But Hagos and other survivors insist that Ethiopian army soldiers were behind the bloodletting in Bora, based on their uniforms and the fact they spoke Amharic. Analysis by independent media outlets of videos emerging from the Debre Abay massacre suggests that Ethiopian soldiers carried out that attack as well.
Guiomar Pau Sole, spokeswoman for the U.N.’s regional Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Nairobi, said the U.N. had received “alarming reports of civilians being injured and killed during fighting in rural areas of Tigray, and violations against civilians, including sexual violence.”
“However, the verification of this information was, and remains, extremely challenging,” Pau Sole said.
In its statement Saturday, Ethiopia foreign ministry insisted that “the government has demonstrated its readiness to engage positively and constructively with all the relevant regional and international stakeholders in responding to the serious allegations of human rights abuses and crimes.”
On Wednesday, the U.N.’s human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, agreed to a request by the government’s human rights commission for for a joint investigation in Tigray.
Witnesses in Bora accuse the soldiers of trying to purge ethnic Tigrayans from the area.
“They killed men and boys. They came and terrorized the women, asking them where their husbands and sons are,” said Birhane Halefom, 32, a day laborer who escaped to Mekele, the regional capital, during the massacre. He added that Ethiopian troops had burned crop fields and urinated in stores to despoil the grain kept there.
Mersa Tshaye, an 18-year-old high school student, said his survival might owe to the fact that his family’s home is small and unobtrusive.
“That could be the reason why the soldiers did not notice or bother to enter — I don’t know. But maybe it was just luck,” Mersa said. “No one is left of my friends. Perhaps it was not my day to die.”
