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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – In parts of the Tigray region of Ethiopia, people now only eat green leaves for days. At a health center last week, a mother and her newborn baby who weighed just 1.7 pounds died of starvation. In every district of the more than 20 in which an aid group works, residents have starved to death.
The United Nations has been warning of famine in this disputed corner of northern Ethiopia for months, calling it the worst hunger crisis in the world in a decade. Internal documents and witness reports now reveal the first deaths from hunger since the Ethiopian government imposed what the United Nations called a “de facto humanitarian aid blockade” in June.
Forced starvation is the latest chapter in a conflict in which ethnic Tigrayans have been massacred, gang raped and displaced. Months after crops were burned and churches stripped, a new kind of death set in.
“You’re killing people,” recalled Hayelom Kebede, the former director of Tigray’s flagship Ayder Referral Hospital, in a phone call to the Ethiopian Ministry of Health this month. “They said, ‘Yeah, OK, we’ll forward it to the Prime Minister.’ What can I do? I’m just crying. “
He shared photos with The Associated Press of some of the 50 children who were being “severely cared for” because of malnutrition, the first such images to appear in Tigray for months. In one, a small child stares directly into the camera with frightened eyes, a feeding tube in its nose, a protective amulet in its pronounced throat.
The medication was almost used up and hospital staff had not been paid since June, Hayelom said. Elsewhere, the conditions for the 6 million inhabitants of Tigray are often worse.
The blockade and the associated hunger mark a new phase in the ten-month war between the Tigray troops and the Ethiopian government and its allies. Now the US has issued an ultimatum: take steps to stop the fighting and let aid flow freely, or another wave of sanctions could come within weeks.
The war began as a political dispute between the Prime Minister, 2019 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Abiy Ahmed, and the Tigrayans, who had long dominated the repressive national government of Ethiopia. Since November, witnesses have said that Ethiopian troops and soldiers from neighboring Eritrea have looted food sources and destroyed health centers.
In June the Tigray fighters retook the region and the Ethiopian government declared a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds. Instead, the government has sealed off the region more than ever, fearing that aid will reach the Tigray troops.
More than 350,000 tons of food aid are stationed in Ethiopia, but very little of it can get to Tigray. The government is so cautious that humanitarian workers boarding infrequent flights to the region are given an unusual list of items they cannot bring: dental floss. Tin opener. Multivitamins. Medicines, including personal ones.
The list received by the AP also banned any means of documenting the crisis, including hard drives and flash drives. Photos and videos of Tigray have disappeared from social media since June as aides and others who have been subjected to intensive searches by the authorities feared they would be caught on their devices with them. Tigray has returned to the dark with no telecommunications, no internet, no banking services and very little help.
Ethiopia’s prime minister and other senior officials have denied that Tigray is hungry. The government blames the Tigray troops and the insecurity for the problems in providing relief supplies. It has also accused humanitarian groups of assisting or even arming the Tigray fighters.
Prime Minister’s spokeswoman Billene Seyoum did not say when the government would allow basic services to the region. The government has “opened access to aid routes by reducing the number of checkpoints from seven to two and creating airlifts for humanitarian flights,” she said in a statement. However, on the first flight over the European Union Airlift, medical supplies were removed during the government inspection and such flights cannot carry the large amount of food aid needed.
In the largest ever report on the toll of the blockade, an AP humanitarian worker said that “every single” district of the more than 20 districts in Tigray where an aid group is operating have reported deaths from starvation. The group had run out of food aid and fuel. Like others, the worker spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“There are currently devastating reports from every corner,” the aid group wrote to a donor in August, according to the AP. “If an urgent solution is not found, we will lose many people to starvation.”
In April, before the current blockade was imposed, the same group wrote to the donor that “reports of malnutrition are rampant” and that 22 people in a subdistrict had died of starvation.
“People’s skin color began to change due to hunger; they looked emaciated with protruding skeletal bones, ”wrote the aid organization.
In August, another worker visited a community in central Tigray and wrote that the number of people at risk of starvation “is growing exponentially” in both rural and urban areas. In some cases, “people just eat green leaves for days”.
The worker described talking to a mother who said her family had been living on borrowed food since June. For the past month they had only eaten bread with salt. She worried that they would die in the coming days without food aid.
“Eventually we stopped asking her because we couldn’t bear to hear additional somber news,” the agent wrote. “The administrator of the (subdistrict) also told us that there are many families who live in similar conditions.”
At least 150 people died of starvation in August, including in camps for displaced persons, the Tigray External Affairs Office claims. The International Organization for Migration, the UN agency that supports the camps, said: “Unfortunately we cannot speak on this issue.”
Some toilets in the overcrowded camps are overcrowded because there is no money to pay for their cleaning and thousands of people are prone to disease outbreaks, a visiting worker said. Anyone who ate three meals a day now only eats one. The camp residents rely on the charity of the host communities, who often struggle to feed themselves.
“The people got by, but hardly,” said the helper. “It’s worse than the subsistence level, let’s put it that way.”
Food security experts estimated months ago that 400,000 people in Tigray are at risk of famine, more than the rest of the world combined. However, the blockade means that experts cannot collect the necessary data to make a formal declaration of famine.
Such a declaration would be deeply embarrassing for Ethiopia, which drew world attention in the 1980s with a famine that was so severe, also through conflict and government neglect, that around 1 million people were killed. Since then, Africa’s second most populous country has been a success story, pulling millions out of extreme poverty and developing one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
Now the wars are eroding the economy and stomachs. The rate of malnutrition is almost 30% in children under 5, the UN World Food Program announced on Wednesday, and almost 80% in pregnant and breastfeeding women.
If the war spreads, hunger could also suffer. Tigray troops have invaded neighboring Amhara and Afar regions in recent weeks, and some residents have accused them of retaliatory measures, including blocking supply routes. The Tigray troops deny this and say they want to pressure the Ethiopian government to lift the blockade.
The UN Human Rights Bureau says human rights violations have been committed on all sides, although testimony shows that the most widespread atrocities were against Tigra civilians.
Little help comes. According to the UN, at least 100 trucks with food and other relief supplies must arrive in Tigray every day to meet the needs of the people. But by September 8, fewer than 500 had arrived on the only accessible road into the region since July. No medical supplies or fuel have been delivered to Tigray in more than a month, the US says, blaming “government harassment” and rulings, not the fighting.
In mid-September, the UN published the first report of its kind, which shows in red the days remaining before running out of cash or fuel for important humanitarian measures such as treating Tigray’s most severely malnourished people. Often times this number was zero.
A number of aid trucks were attacked and drivers were intimidated. In August, a UN team attempting to pick up employees from Tigray was turned over by armed police officers who “ordered drivers to significantly exceed the speed limit while they cursed, harassed and threatened them,” according to a UN Report.
Major international aid organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council have been suspended for spreading “misinformation” about the war. Almost two dozen helpers were killed, some distributing food. Some helpers are forced to ration their own food.
“It is an everyday reality to see human suffering and hunger,” wrote the Catholic Bishop of Adigrat, Abune Tesfaselassie Medhin, in a September 3 letter passed on to the AP, appealing to partners abroad for help and assistance warned of disaster ahead.
The need for food will continue well into next year, says the UN, because the limited harvests that are grown in the midst of the fighting should only bring in between a quarter and at most half of the usual harvest.
Grim as they are, the starvation reports only reflect areas in Tigray that can be reached. A humanitarian worker from Tigrayan pointed out that most people live or seek shelter in remote places such as rugged mountains. Others are in inaccessible areas on the border with enemy Eritrea or to the west of Tigray, which is now controlled by authorities from the Amhara region blocking the route to neighboring Sudan, a potential route for the aid deliveries.
When food and resources to find it ran out, the humanitarian worker said, “I am sure the people who are dying from this man-made starvation are far more.”
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Ethiopia coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/ethiopia-erasing-ethnicity
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