NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – ‘Many, many serious cases of malnutrition’ are being reported in Ethiopia’s Tigray region in Ethiopia, Red Cross officials said on Wednesday. Women and children fill relocation camps.
Reports from people who are already hungry may be just a handful, but ‘after a month it will be thousands’, Ethiopian Red Cross President Ato Abera Tola warned. After two months, he said, it would be tens of thousands.
The fighting continues between Ethiopian and allied forces and those of the now-fleeing Tigray government that has dominated the country’s leadership for nearly 30 years.
The conflict erupted just before the harvest in the largely agricultural area and amid a locust outbreak. A large portion of the Tigray population has been living off the resources they have since early November, and many people are on the run and leaving possessions behind.
Nearly 3.8 million people in Tigray need help, Abera said.
He described how women and children are seen in the northern city of Shire who are ‘all emaciated … their skin is really on their legs’. And these are the people who were able to escape to the camps, he said.
Once humanitarian workers are able to reach Tigray’s rural areas, ‘we will see a more devastating crisis,’ Abera said. “We have to be prepared for the worst, is what I say.”
The regional capital of Tigray, Mekele, ‘is a paradox to say a very happy place’, added Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. It now houses a quarter of a million displaced people.
Rocca described a “very difficult visit” to Tigray in which accessible hospitals “barely work” without medicine, no food for patients and no psychosocial support – “something surreal” after being looted or damaged.
“I have never seen a place where a simple antibiotic does not occur,” he later said in an interview with The Associated Press, expressing a shock at “the systematic aggression in health care facilities.”
Vaccines have expired. There are no HIV or tuberculosis drugs. “This is unacceptable,” Rocca said. In the camps for displaced persons, there is a high risk of an outbreak of cholera or other diseases. ‘
And it’s ridiculous’ to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic when about 30 displaced people are forced to live in a classroom, he said.
Rocca reiterates its plea for more access for humanitarian workers. “Slowly, slowly, support is coming, but it’s still not enough,” he said.
Asked what it would take before the conflict ended, he told the AP: ‘I think it will take a long time. The wounds of this conflict are very deep, that’s my feeling. … Given the complexity of the crisis and the presence of other actors on the ground, it’s really difficult to predict how it will end and how long it will last. ‘
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This version corrects the second reference to the Ethiopian Red Cross president to Abera.