NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – “Many, many serious cases of malnutrition” are being reported in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, Red Cross officials said on Wednesday, as 80% of Tigray’s 6 million inhabitants are inaccessible in the fourth month of struggle and “emaciated” Women and children occupy IDP camps.
Reports of people already starving it can be difficult, but “after a month, there will be thousands”, warned the president of the Ethiopian Red Cross, Ato Abera Tola. After two months, he said, it will be tens of thousands.
Fighting continues between the Ethiopian and allied forces and those of the now fugitive Tigray government, which dominated the country’s leadership for almost 30 years.
The conflict broke out just before the harvest in the predominantly agricultural region and in the midst of an outbreak of locusts. A large part of Tigray’s population has lived off all the resources it has had since the beginning of November, and many people are fleeing, leaving their belongings behind.
Nearly 3.8 million people in Tigray need help, said Abera.
He described seeing women and children displaced in the northern city of Shire, who were “all emaciated … their skin is really on the bones” and these are the people who managed to escape to the fields, he said.
Once humanitarian workers reach the rural areas of Tigray, “there we will see a more devastating crisis,” said Abera. “We have to prepare for the worst, I’m saying.”
Tigray’s regional capital, Mekele, “is, paradoxically, a very lucky place,” added Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. It now hosts 250,000 displaced people.
Rocca described a “very difficult visit” to Tigray in which affordable hospitals “barely work”, without medication, without food for patients and without psychosocial support – “something surreal” after being looted or damaged.
“I have never seen a place where a single antibiotic was not present,” he later told the Associated Press in an interview, expressing shock at “the systematic assault on health facilities.”
The vaccines have expired. There are no drugs for HIV or tuberculosis. “This is unacceptable,” said Rocca. In IDP camps, “there is a high risk of an outbreak of cholera or other diseases”.
And it is “ridiculous” to speak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when about 30 displaced people are forced to live in a classroom, he said.
Rocca repeated the call for more access for aid workers. “Gradually, support is coming, but it is still not enough,” he said.
Asked what will be needed for the conflict to end, he told the AP that “I think it will take too long. The wounds of this conflict are very deep, that’s what I feel. … Given the complexity of the crisis and the presence of other actors on the ground, it is really difficult to predict how it will end and how long it will be prolonged. “
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This version corrects the second reference to the president of the Ethiopian Red Cross at Abera.