NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – The Ethiopian government has privately told officials in the Biden administration that its Tigray region has “returned to normal”, but new eyewitness reports describe terrified Tigray residents hiding in bulleted houses and a wide area where the effects of fighting and food shortages are still unknown.
The conflict that began in November between Ethiopian forces and those in the Tigray region, which dominated the government for nearly three decades, remains largely in the dark. Some communication links are cut, residents are afraid to give details over the phone and almost all journalists are blocked. Thousands of people died.
Ethiopian Deputy Prime Minister Demeke Mekonnen and his colleagues reported on a private meeting organized by the think tank Atlantic Council on Friday. They said that nearly 1.5 million people in Tigray were reached with humanitarian aid and expressed discomfort over “false and politically motivated allegations” of mistreatment of refugees from neighboring Eritrea, state agency Fana Broadcasting Corporate reported. He said Biden administration officials attended the meeting.
Refugees are targets of Eritrean soldiers, who fight alongside Ethiopian troops against Tigray’s forces. The Biden government pressured Eritrea to withdraw “immediately” them, citing reliable reports looting, sexual assault and other abuses.
Despite Ethiopia’s latest claims, its recently appointed administrators in Tigray estimated that more than 4.5 million people, or almost the entire population of the region, need emergency food aid and some people have started to die from hunger. This is according to documents that were leaked at a crisis meeting between the government and aid workers in early January.
And a new report by the emergency coordinator of Médecins Sans Frontières in Tigray, Albert Vinas, says “we are very concerned about what may be happening in rural areas”, with many places inaccessible because of fights or difficulties in obtaining permission.
“But we know, because the elderly in the community and the traditional authorities have told us, that the situation in these places is very bad,” he said in a report published online on Friday.
He described the Tigray residents handing out pieces of paper with phone numbers to their colleagues and asking for help in contacting their families, whom they had not heard from in weeks.
“We saw a population locked in their homes and living in great fear,” he wrote after visiting the city of Adigrat and the cities of Axum and Adwa in late December.
In Adigrat, one of the largest cities in Tigray, “the situation was very tense and the hospital was in very bad shape,” added Vinas, “without food, water and money. Some patients who were admitted with traumatic injuries were malnourished ”. A woman had been in labor for a week.
In addition to hospitals, up to 90% of health centers between the capital Tigray, Mekele, and Axum, northwards towards Eritrea, were not working, he said. “There is a large population suffering, certainly with fatal consequences. … there was no vaccination in almost three months, so we fear that there will be epidemics soon. “
In a separate report published by the World Peace Foundation on Friday, former Ethiopian officer Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe in a telephone interview from rural Tigray told director Alex de Waal that “famine among peasants is weakening” in neighboring areas of Eritrea after Eritrean forces burned or looted crops just before harvest.
“We may soon see a huge humanitarian crisis,” said Mulugeta.
Eritrean officials did not answer questions or confirm the involvement of their soldiers and Ethiopia denied their presence, despite reports by witnesses.
The food situation in Tigray was already “extremely bad” before the fighting started because of an outbreak of locusts and the COVID-19 pandemic, Oxfam director in Ethiopia, Gezahegn Kebede Gebrehana, told the Associated Press.
“When the fight happened, many people fled to the bush. But when they returned, most found their homes destroyed or all belongings looted, ”he said after an assessment in southern Tigray, according to some reports the most accessible part of the region. “Food is a very, very prominent need, from what we’ve seen.”
International pressure continues in Ethiopia to allow unrestricted humanitarian access to Tigray, now a complicated patchwork of local officials, but Gezahegn warned against suspending aid to the government like the European Union recently.
“The donor community may think it will put pressure on the Ethiopian government, but the Ethiopian government will never surrender,” he said. He acknowledged “good intentions”, but said that “it is people who suffer”.