The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, US Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), is calling for the prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Devin Nunes joins a growing list of Congressmen and women who are calling for the arrest of Tony Fauci. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has finally admitted to funding controversial gain-of-function virus research in Wuhan, China. This research was formerly banned in the United States, but was later off-shored by Dr. Fauci through Dr. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and expounded upon by Dr. Ralph Baric.
Fauci’s arrest and prosecution nears
Fauci has repeatedly denied his involvement in gain-of-function virology research, lying to Congress multiple times during sworn testimony. When Fauci went before the U.S. Senate, Senator Rand Paul provided detailed evidence about Fauci’s dangerous gamut of gain-of-function virology research. Dr. Paul questioned Dr. Fauci on the controversial research, holding him to account. Fauci repeatedly denied the allegations, as he tried to cover up his leading role in the bioweapons research. Fauci committed perjury, while denying the very essence of the research he authored.
Fauci’s crimes against humanity are plainly visible
Senator Rand Paul has been calling for Fauci’s resignation for months. He is now joined by Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty and California Rep Doug LaMalfa, who are now calling out Fauci’s unlawful actions. LaMalfa said, “We have incontrovertible proof that he [Fauci] has been intentionally lying to Congress.” “Dr. Fauci must resign and should face prosecution for perjury,” he said.
As a longstanding director at the NIH, Fauci oversaw multiple gain-of-function studies, and even approved research that attached baby scalps to rodents to study immune responses. Fauci is culpable for inhumane human experimentation and is responsible for the development of bioweapons and chimeric viruses that are designed to exploit human immune systems. Under the watch of the Chinese Communist Party, this research can be used for even more nefarious ends.
One of the stated goals of this research is to develop new vaccine technology that transcribes properties of the bioweapon into human cells, interfering with how the cells read their own genetic instructions. This forceful genetic experimentation is currently being carried out on populations that have been locked down and restricted, civil liberties threatened, and freedoms stolen. Fauci has been at the forefront of this global terror experiment, issuing decrees of medical tyranny that are delegated by governments for the complete subjugation of people’s minds and bodies
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 13, 2021
Week after week, the Ethiopian government blockade of Tigray prevents aid agencies from moving life-saving relief of food, medicine, shelter items, fuel, and cash necessary to stop famine that continues to grow virtually uninterrupted. Today, almost a million people in northern Ethiopia are experiencing famine conditions.
Here’s what you need to know this week:
Ethiopia’s blockade of Tigray continues…
Despite protestations, the blockade put in place on June 27 continues to prevent relief assistance from entering Tigray. From September 5-7, 147 trucks of humanitarian supplies arrived in the northern Tigray region via neighboring Afar, bringing the number of humanitarian trucks that entered Tigray since July 12 to 482—a far cry from the estimated 100 trucks needed every day, or 8,700 trucks since the blockade came into effect. In addition, the blockade denies many critical supplies, including communications equipment, cash, and fuel, without which humanitarian operations cannot continue. Even personal phones, hard drives, can-openers, and multivitamins are restricted from being brought in by aid workers who manage to travel.
…and is driving and human suffering and famine.
On September 16, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released a weekly humanitarian update, providing the latest information on the impact of Ethiopia’s blockade on Tigray. Virtually every sector was forced to suspend activities, as new reports of starvation deaths have emerged.
Food relief aidremains suspended for a lack of supplies, cash, and trucks. Since March 27, the UN and NGOs nearly completed a three-month distribution for 5.2 million people, and with reduced supplies reached 1.4 million people in a second round. This roughly translates to four months of food for a population denied the ability to access communications, banking, or markets to support themselves.
Access to potable watervia trucking was reduced to 25 percent coverage due to shortages in cash and fuel. Insufficient or unpotable water drive disease outbreaks, particularly for those weakened by malnutrition.
Health servicesare only partially functioning, with supplies for only 20 percent of the population at a time when disease outbreaks continue to rise. The European Union initiated Humanitarian Air Bridge arrived in Tigray with nutrition supplies, and the World Health Organization (WHO) airlifted supplies from Dubai for 150,000 people. While these massively expensive innovations are welcome, that they are necessary in the first place speaks volumes about the brutality of the blockade and the lengths to which the world is going to find solutions.
Nutrition assistancefor children under five was suspended for children in outpatient and in-patient care due to shortages in cash, fuel, and supplies. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) was quoted as saying 30 percent of children under five and 80 percent of pregnant and lactating mothers now suffer from malnutrition. This is double international emergency standards for malnutrition in children and more than 5 times emergency thresholds for nursing mothers.
Some 45 days ago, UNICEF noted, “This malnutrition crisis is taking place amid extensive, systematic damage to the food, health, nutrition, water and sanitation systems and services that children and their families depend on for their survival.” It is usually children, pregnant women, and other vulnerable groups that bear the brunt of famine. Yet, since this warning from UNICEF, it bears repeating – less than 10 percent of the needed supplies to keep people alive have been allowed entry to Tigray, months after empirical evidence proved famine conditions.
Hunger and alleged atrocities are spreading beyond Tigray.
The conflict now risks expanding into a wider civil war that threatens Ethiopia and regional stability. As the war spreads, so does hunger with the UN estimating that 1.5 million more people are food insecure in the areas where the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF) has advanced in neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar in recent weeks. Their advance includes fresh accusations of atrocities that warrant independent investigation alongside alleged crimes committed in Tigray. Active conflict has prevented UN and NGOs teams from accessing conflict-impacted areas. Historically, these areas were some of the poorest subsistence communities in the region and will require assistance in addition to the 5.5 million people FEWSNET defined as ‘in crisis’ and ‘without assistance will descend into famine’ in Tigray.
Western donors have given generously to Ethiopia for decades, pouring tens of billions of dollars into Ethiopia’s economy, heavily subsidizing Ethiopia’s budget. All told, western donors contribute at least 37 percent of Ethiopia’s budget through humanitarian, development, security, and other support. Yet their efforts to raise alarm at the avalanche of credible atrocities including war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide have been met with outright rejection by Ethiopia and at the UN Security Council—with China blocking efforts to put the crisis on the Council’s agenda. Even the role of perhaps the most destructive force in this conflict—Eritrean forces (EDF)—has not been addressed by the Council. Clearly, the status quo much change.
The Biden administration is stepping up the pressure.
In the face of continued violence that continues to spiral out of control, U.S. President Biden issued an Executive Order that paves the way for a sanctions regime that can target any party responsible for prolonging the conflict in northern Ethiopia, those that commit human rights abuses, and those obstructing humanitarian access including Ethiopia’s blockade of Tigray. Given the challenges facing the population, this is a step in the right direction but must be implemented and not an idle threat to be effective.
Famine will continue to grow as the blockade impedes food aid, medical and nutrition supplies, fuel, and cash. There needs to be an immediate ceasefire and end to the blockade to ensure assistance is possible to those affected in Tigray, and now in Amhara and Afar.
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.
The UN’s migration agency has put its Ethiopia chief on administrative leave, citing “unauthorised interviews” in which she complained of being sidelined by UN higher-ups she claimed were sympathetic to Tigrayan rebels.
The departure of Maureen Achieng, confirmed in a letter dated Monday and seen by AFP, risks further undermining an aid response still shaken by Ethiopia’s decision last month to expel seven other senior UN officials for allegedly “meddling” in its affairs.
It comes more than 11 months into a brutal war in northern Ethiopia that, according to UN estimates, has driven hundreds of thousands of people into famine-like conditions.
Last week, multiple recordings surfaced online of Achieng and another senior UN official granting a lengthy interview to Jeff Pearce, a writer who has published multiple articles defending the government’s conduct of the war against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
In the recordings, Achieng, the International Organization for Migration’s Chief of Mission to Ethiopia, tears into colleagues who “descended on” Addis Ababa after the war broke out last November and, in her telling, sidelined officials on the ground.
She also calls the TPLF “dirty” and “vicious”.
At one point she accuses the rebels of plotting to have Tigrayan migrant workers facing deportation from Saudi Arabia sent to Rwanda.
“And then you don’t know what guerrilla movement starts from Rwanda. I mean, it’s dirty,” she says.
She also vows never to return to Tigray.
In an internal note to colleagues last week, also seen by AFP, Achieng said she was “deeply disturbed and disappointed” by the audio, which she said had been “surreptitiously recorded and selectively edited.”
However at several points during the interview the participants openly discuss that it is being recorded.
On Monday Antonio Vitorino, director general of IOM, wrote a letter distancing the agency from Achieng’s comments.
“The opinions attributed in the audio recordings to the staff member do not correspond to IOM’s principles and values and should not in any way be considered as expressing IOM’s positions,” it said.
The letter, which does not refer to Achieng by name, says she was “immediately recalled” and “put on administrative leave” pending an investigation.
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