💭 As much of the world’s attention is focused on the bloodshed in Ukraine, the head of the World Health Organization saya there is ”nowhere on earth where the health of millions of people is more under threat” than Ethiopia’s Tigray region..
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the situation in Tigray from where he hails was “catastrophic,” saying the region had been “sealed off from the outside world” for about 500 days.
“No food aid has been delivered since the middle of December,” Tedros told a press briefing, adding that about three quarters of health facilities assessed by WHO in the region had been destroyed. He said there was no treatment for about 40,000 people with HIV in the region.
“Yes, I’m from Tigray and this crisis affects me, my family and my friends very personally,” Tedros said. “But I, the director general of WHO, I have a duty to protect and promote health wherever it’s under threat,” he said. “And there is nowhere on earth where the health of millions of people is more under threat than Tigray.”
Tedros said the U.N. health agency had now documented 43 attacks on health care workers and facilities in Ukraine since the Russian invasion began last month.
WHO has now opened supply lines to many cities in Ukraine, but some access challenges remained. The agency continued to call for attacks on health workers and facilities to stop.
But Tedros said the crisis in Ukraine was “far from the only crisis to which WHO is responding,” citing ongoing problems in Yemen, Syria and Ethiopia.
Earlier this year, the government of Ethiopia sent a letter to the World Health Organization, accusing Tedros of “misconduct” after his sharp criticism of the war and humanitarian crisis in the country.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 15, 2021
This is the story behind how Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, won a Nobel Prize for making peace with his country’s longtime enemy — and then used the alliance to plan a war.
Secret meetings with a dictator. Clandestine troop movements. Months of quiet preparation for a war that was supposed to be swift and bloodless.
New evidence shows that Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, had been planning a military campaign in the northern Tigray region for months before war erupted one year ago, setting off a cascade of destruction and ethnic violence that has engulfed Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country.
Mr. Abiy, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate seen recently in fatigues commanding troops on the battlefront, insists that war was foisted upon him — that ethnic Tigrayan fighters fired the first shots in November 2020 when they attacked a federal military base in Tigray, slaughtering soldiers in their beds. That account has become an article of faith for Mr. Abiy and his supporters.
In fact, it was a war of choice for Mr. Abiy — one with wheels set in motion even before the Nobel Peace Prize win in 2019 that turned him, for a time, into a global icon of nonviolence.
The Nobel win stemmed largely from the unlikely peace deal Mr. Abiy struck with Isaias Afwerki, the authoritarian leader of Eritrea, within months of coming to power in 2018. That pact ended two decades of hostility and war between the neighboring rivals, and inspired lofty hopes for a transformed region.
Instead, the Nobel emboldened Mr. Abiy and Mr. Isaias to secretly plot a course for war against their mutual foes in Tigray, according to current and former Ethiopian officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals or protect family members inside Ethiopia.
In the months before fighting erupted in November 2020, Mr. Abiy moved troops toward Tigray and sent military cargo planes into Eritrea. Behind closed doors, his advisers and military generals debated the merits of a conflict. Those who disagreed were fired, interrogated at gunpoint or forced to leave.
Still dazzled by Mr. Abiy’s Nobel win, the West ignored those warning signs, the officials said. But ultimately it helped to pave the way to war. “From that day, Abiy felt he was one of the most influential personalities in the world,” Gebremeskel Kassa, a former senior Abiy administration official now in exile in Europe, said in an interview.
“He felt he had a lot of international support, and that if he went to war in Tigray, nothing would happen. And he was right,” he added.
Mr. Abiy’s spokeswoman, the information minister of Eritrea and the Norwegian Nobel Committee did not respond to questions for this article.
Recently, the pendulum has swung back, with government forces retaking two strategic towns that had been captured by the Tigrayans — the latest twist in a conflict that has already cost tens of thousands of lives and pushed hundreds of thousands into famine-like conditions.
A Country at War With Itself
Here’s a look at why the war in Ethiopia started and how Tigray became a flash point.
Analysts say that Mr. Abiy’s journey from peacemaker to battlefield commander is a cautionary tale of how the West, desperate to find a new hero in Africa, got this leader spectacularly wrong.
“The West needs to make up for its mistakes in Ethiopia,” said Alex Rondos, formerly the European Union’s top diplomat in the Horn of Africa. “It misjudged Abiy. It empowered Isaias. Now the issue is whether a country of 110 million people can be prevented from unraveling.”
The Nobel Committee Takes a Chance
Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2019, Mr. Abiy, a former soldier, drew on his own experience to eloquently capture the horror of conflict.
“War is the epitome of hell,” he told a distinguished audience at Oslo City Hall. “I know because I have been there and back.”
To his foreign admirers, the soaring rhetoric was further proof of an exceptional leader. In his first months in power, Mr. Abiy, then 41, freed political prisoners, unshackled the press and promised free elections in Ethiopia. His peace deal with Eritrea, a pariah state, was a political moonshot for the strife-torn Horn of Africa region.
Even so, the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee knew it was taking on a chance on Mr. Abiy, said Henrik Urdal of Peace Research Institute Oslo, which analyzes the committee’s decisions.
Mr. Abiy’s sweeping reforms were fragile and easily reversible, Mr. Urdal said, and the peace with Eritrea centered on his relationship with Mr. Isaias, a ruthless and battle-hardened autocrat.
“My partner and comrade-in-peace,” Mr. Abiy called him in Oslo.
Many Ethiopians also wanted to believe in Mr. Abiy’s promise. At a gala dinner for the new prime minister in Washington in July 2018, Dr. Kontie Moussa, an Ethiopian living in Sweden, announced to applause that he was nominating Mr. Abiy for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Back in Sweden, Dr. Kontie persuaded Anders Österberg, a parliamentarian from a low-income Stockholm district with a large immigrant population, to join his cause. Mr. Österberg traveled to Ethiopia, met with Mr. Abiy and was impressed.
In selecting Mr. Abiy, the Nobel Committee hoped to encourage him further down the path of democratic reforms, Mr. Urdal said.
Even then, though, there were signs that Mr. Abiy’s peace deal wasn’t all it seemed.
Its initial fruits, like daily commercial flights between the two countries and reopened borders, were rolled back or reversed in a matter of months. Promised trade pacts failed to materialize, and there was little concrete cooperation, the Ethiopian officials said.
Eritrea’s spies, however, gained an edge. Ethiopian intelligence detected an influx of Eritrean agents, some posing as refugees, who gathered information about Ethiopia’s military capabilities, a senior Ethiopian security official said.
The Eritreans were particularly interested in Tigray, he said.
Mr. Isaias had a long and bitter grudge against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which dominated Ethiopia for nearly three decades until Mr. Abiy came to power in 2018. He blamed Tigrayan leaders for the fierce border war of 1998 to 2000 between Ethiopia and Eritrea, a former province of Ethiopia, in which as many as 100,000 people were killed. He also blamed them for Eritrea’s painful international isolation, including United Nations sanctions.
For Mr. Abiy, it was more complicated.
He served in the T.P.L.F.-dominated governing coalition for eight years and was made a minister in 2015. But as an ethnic Oromo, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, he never felt fully accepted by Tigrayans and suffered numerous humiliations, former officials and friends said.
Tigrayans fired Mr. Abiy from his leadership position at a powerful intelligence agency in 2010. In power, he came to see the Tigrayans, still smarting from their ouster, as the biggest threat to his burgeoning ambitions.
A Spy Chief Among the Singers and Dancers
Mr. Abiy and Mr. Isaias met at least 14 times from the time they signed the peace deal until war broke out, public records and news reports show.
Unusually, the meetings were mostly one-on-one, without aides or note-takers, two former Ethiopian officials said.
They also met in secret: On at least three other occasions in 2019 and 2020, Mr. Isaias flew into Addis Ababa unannounced, one former official said. Aviation authorities were instructed to keep quiet, and an unmarked car was sent to take him to Mr. Abiy’s compound.
Around that time, Eritrean officials also regularly visited the Amhara region, which has a long history of rivalry with Tigray. Crowds thronged the streets when Mr. Isaias visited the ancient Amhara city of Gondar in November 2018, chanting, “Isaias, Isaias, Isaias!”
Later, a troupe of Eritrean singers and dancers visited Amhara. But the delegation included Eritrea’s spy chief, Abraha Kassa, who used the trip to meet with Amhara security leaders, the senior Ethiopian official said. Eritrea later agreed to train 60,000 troops from the Amhara Special Forces, a paramilitary unit that later deployed to Tigray.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in February 2019, Mr. Abiy advocated an effective merger of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti — a suggestion that dismayed Ethiopian officials who saw it as straight from the playbook of Mr. Isaias.
Aides also saw the remarks as further proof of Mr. Abiy’s impulsive tendencies, leading them to cancel his news conference during the Nobel ceremonies in Oslo 10 months later.
Irreconcilable Visions Lead to War
Mr. Abiy viewed the Tigrayans as a threat to his authority — perhaps even his life — from his first days in power.
The Tigrayans had preferred another candidate as prime minister, and Mr. Abiy told friends he feared Tigrayan security officials were trying to assassinate him, an acquaintance said.
At the prime minister’s residence, soldiers were ordered to stand guard on every floor. Mr. Abiy purged ethnic Tigrayans from his security detail and created the Republican Guard, a handpicked unit under his direct control, whose troops were sent for training to the United Arab Emirates — a powerful new ally also close to Mr. Isaias, a former Ethiopian official said.
The unexplained killing of the Ethiopian military chief, Gen. Seare Mekonnen, an ethnic Tigrayan who was shot dead by a bodyguard in June 2019, heightened tensions.
The rift with the Tigrayans was also driven by profound political differences. Within weeks of the Nobel Prize decision, Mr. Abiy created the Prosperity Party, which incarnated his vision of a strong, centralized Ethiopian government.
But that vision was anathema to the millions of Ethiopians who yearned for greater regional autonomy — in particular the Tigrayans and members of his own ethnic group, the Oromo.
Accounting for about one-third of the country’s 110 million people, the Oromo have long felt excluded from power. Many hoped Mr. Abiy’s rise would change that.
Against this tumultuous backdrop, the slide toward war accelerated.
Ethiopian military cargo planes began to make clandestine flights at night to bases in Eritrea, said a senior Ethiopian official.
Mr. Abiy’s top aides and military officials privately debated the merits of a war in Tigray, the former official said. Dissenters included Ethiopia’s army chief, Gen. Adem Mohammed.
By then the Tigrayans were also gearing up for war, searching for allies in the Northern Command, Ethiopia’s most powerful military unit, which was based in Tigray.
In September the Tigrayans went ahead with a regional election, in open defiance of an order from Mr. Abiy. Mr. Abiy moved troops from the Somali and Oromia regions toward Tigray.
In a video conference call in mid-October, Mr. Abiy told governing party officials that he would intervene militarily in Tigray, and that it would take only three to five days to oust the region’s leaders, said Mr. Gebremeskel, the former senior official now in exile.
On Nov. 2 the European Union foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, publicly appealed to both sides to halt “provocative military deployments.” The next evening, Tigrayan forces attacked an Ethiopian military base, calling it a pre-emptive strike.
Eritrean soldiers flooded into Tigray from the north. Amhara Special Forces arrived from the south. Mr. Abiy fired General Adem and announced a “law enforcement operation” in Tigray. Ethiopia’s ruinous civil war was underway.
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.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 8, 2021
💭 Record-breaking vocalist and songwriter inducted into ‘WFP family’ at special ceremony in Los Angeles
Award-winning Canadian singer The Weeknd, who holds the record for the longest-charting single in the US, has joined with World Food Programme (WFP) as a Goodwill Ambassador.
“The UN World Food Programme is doing urgent and important work to change and save lives on a daily basis and I feel passionately about addressing world hunger and helping people in need,” he said, accepting the honour at a special ceremony in Los Angeles yesterday (7 October).
The Weeknd has been a passionate advocate and generous supporter of humanitarian causes throughout his career, donating more than US$3 million to various organizations in the past year alone. Most recently, he gifted US$1 million to WFP’s relief efforts in Ethiopia following months of deadly violence.
As the son of Ethiopian immigrants to Canada, the conflict deeply affected him, he has said, and ultimately this moved him to deepen his relationship with WFP. “Our partnership is an authentic extension of all our efforts and intentions to help those in need and bring an end to so much suffering,” said The Weeknd (born Abel Tesfaye).
WFP Executive Director David Beasley said: “We are thrilled to welcome The Weeknd to the WFP family. His compassion and commitment to helping the world’s hungriest people is truly inspirational.”
Beasley added: “Every night, 811 million people go to bed hungry, and another 270 million are marching toward starvation. This is just not right and we have got to speak out and act today to save lives. We need everyone to come join our movement to end hunger – it is all-hands on deck to avoid a global catastrophe.”
The Weeknd, known for hits such as ‘Starboy’ and ‘Take My Breath’, joins an international roster of ambassadors including Kate Hudson and Michael Kors, who lend their voices to support WFP’s mission to end hunger. The organization provides lifesaving food assistance to more than 100 million people in 80 countries.
WFP USA chief Barron Segar said: “Whether he is performing or speaking out about global hunger, The Weeknd’s voice is powerful and inspiring, only matched by his dedication to helping people around the globe. We are honoured that he has joined our mission. He will undoubtedly inspire the next generation of humanitarians in the fight to ensure no man, woman or child goes to bed hungry.”
WFP said via a press release: “The continuous record-breaking of charts, sales and streams, headlining the biggest festivals and stadiums in the world including this year’s Super Bowl, and his ever-mysterious public persona, have combined to establish The Weeknd as one of the most compelling and significant artists of the 21st century.”
💭 Nobel Laureate vs Nobel Laureate | Blocking of Food Distribution in Ethiopia
👉 Originally posted on December 10, 2020
👉 ከዓመት በፊት በቀድሞው ቻነል የተላከ
👉 Nobel Peace LAfrican Unionreate Abiy Ahmed
Using Hunger as a Weapon.
No Word about it from Oslo & Rome
👉 Noble Peace Prize = License for Genocide
👉 የኖቤል የሰላም ሽልማት = ለዘር ማጥፋት ወንጀል ፈቃድ
Last year’s Nobel Peace LAfrican Unionreate Abiy Ahmed Ali is blocking this year’s Nobel Peace LAfrican Unionreate’s The World Food Program’s (WFP) food relief in Ethiopia.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 8, 2021
No Favours For Nobel Peace Laureate Mass Murderer
Rep. Michael McCaul is the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs committee. He calls for a bipartisan response to possible war crimes in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia is Deliberately Starving its Own Citizens. The World Should Apply Whatever Pressure it Can to Force it to Stop
💭 My Note: Evil Abiy Ahmed Ali Seems increasingly paranoid and erratic. Yes! A leader of a country starving his citizens because they are not Oromos, Muslims or Pentecostals, rather Tigrayans and Orthodox Christians. And Orthodox Russia is embracing this evil monster! Mind-Boggling, very Sad! Isn’t it?!
➡ From The Economist
Abiy, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2019 for ending a long conflict with Eritrea, seems increasingly paranoid and erratic. But to do anything less would be to stand by as mass murder is taking place. To avert a calamity, Western governments must pull every lever they have.
It is almost a year since Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, launched a “law enforcement” operation against the government of the northern region of Tigray, which he accused of rebellion. Since the beginning, the ensuing conflict has been marked by war crimes. Late last year in the city of Accsoom, for instance, Eritrean troops fighting alongside Ethiopian forces murdered hundreds of civilians, mostly men and boys. Some were lined up and shot in the back. Others were gunned down as they came out of church or murdered while lying in bed in hospital. And the Tigrayans have been accused, among other atrocities, of raping and killing Eritrean refugees in un camps.
Horrifying as these crimes are, they are now being eclipsed by an even more heinous one: a deliberate attempt by the Ethiopian government to starve its own citizens. Since the fighting broke out Tigray has suffered an increasingly restrictive blockade by government forces. Since July it has received only a fraction of the food needed to keep its 6m inhabitants alive, hardly any fuel and no medical supplies at all. More than 5m people do not have enough to eat. Some 400,000 of those are facing what aid agencies call “catastrophic” hunger—the last step on the path to mass starvation. Aid workers compare the crisis to Ethiopia’s famine of the 1980s, when 400,000-700,000 died.
Ethiopia’s government insists it is doing all it can to help the hungry in Tigray and, in particular, that it is letting aid pass through its blockade. Data from the UN tell a different story.
Aid agencies reckon that 100 trucks of food and medicine must enter the state each day to avert famine. Only about a tenth of that is being let through by the government and its allies. Instead of asking international agencies for help to feed its citizens, the government is impeding their efforts. It has suspended the work of two of them, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Norwegian Refugee Council, and has also expelled seven senior un officials, accusing them of “meddling” in its internal affairs.
America and the European Union have taken a few steps to press Ethiopia and the Tigrayans to stop the war and end abuses, including halting the sale of weapons and withholding some bilateral aid. America has also threatened to impose financial sanctions on people implicated in war crimes or in fanning the conflict’s flames.
But the impact has been negligible. To replace arms previously supplied by France, Germany and Israel, Ethiopia has turned to Turkey and Iran, among others. To make up for the reduction in aid, it has asked the IMF for a bail-out and its creditors for forgiveness of some of its $30bn in external debt.
It would take an arms embargo by the UN to stop the government getting hold of deadly weapons. Yet China and Russia are preventing the UN Security Council, which on October 6th discussed the conflict in Tigray for the tenth time, from even condemning the expulsion of UN officials, much less imposing strict sanctions.
Fortunately, Western countries still have considerable leverage. The emergency loan that Ethiopia wants from the IMF and the forbearance it is seeking from creditors depend on the acquiescence of America and Europe. They should not yield until the blockade ends. Trade is another point of pressure. Ethiopia exports about $250m a year to America under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a duty-free scheme. Each country eligible to take part is reviewed by the American authorities every year. They should remove Ethiopia from the list unless Tigray is fed.
These steps may not work. Abiy, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2019 for ending a long conflict with Eritrea, seems increasingly paranoid and erratic. But to do anything less would be to stand by as mass murder is taking place. To avert a calamity, Western governments must pull every lever they have.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 7, 2021
💭 My Note: „could sanction?„ – Feels like they are all buying more time until all ancient Christians of Tigray are starved to death. Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis. Humanity is doomed! 😠😠😠 😢😢😢 But Judgment Day is upon us!
The Biden administration has described a CNN report that Ethiopian Airlines shuttled weapons to Eritrea as “incredibly grave” and warned that it was prepared to impose sanctions on Ethiopia and any other parties who prolonged the conflict in Tigray.
On Wednesday CNN revealed that Ethiopia’s government used its state-owned commercial carrier to move weapons to and from neighboring Eritrea during the first weeks of the conflict. It is the first time this weapons trade between the former foes has been documented during the nearly year-long war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.
Reacting to the investigation, a senior US administration official said: “These allegations are incredibly grave; not only could they constitute a potential violation of the Chicago Convention [on international civil aviation]. The use of civilian aircraft to ferry military hardware upends norms and endangers passenger craft around the world.”
The official added that the US would not hold back from using all the tools at its disposal to put an end to a conflict that has triggered famine and left millions in desperate need of aid — including the sanctioning of officials responsible for drawing out the conflict.
“We have the ability to impose sanctions and are prepared to use them and other tools at our disposal against those prolonging the tragedy in Tigray,” the official said.
A separate senior administration official told CNN that the White House was looking into the allegations detailed in its report. “If true, they would be deeply concerning, as Ethiopia is seriously risking the reputation of its national airline by enlisting it in military operations that have unleashed one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises,” the source said.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 7, 2021
➡ Courtesy: Democracy Now!
Amid the mounting humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian government has been using the commercial airline Ethiopia Airlines to shuttle weapons and military vehicles from neighboring country Eritrea since the beginning of their civil war, according to a new CNN investigation. This comes as the United Nations estimates more than 5 million people in the country’s Tigray region are now in need of humanitarian assistance in order to survive, but U.N. officials say Ethiopia’s government is blocking the movement of medicine, food and fuel into Tigray. In response, Ethiopian officials expelled seven senior U.N. officials from Ethiopia last week, giving them just 72 hours to leave the country. We look at the latest developments with Nima Elbagir, award-winning senior international correspondent for CNN, and also air her full report documenting ethnic cleansing.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 