NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Life for civilians in the plagued Tigray region of Ethiopia has become ‘extremely worrying’ as hunger and fighting continue to be an obstacle to reaching millions of people with aid, the United Nations said in a statement. new report.
The conflict that shook one of Africa’s most powerful and populous countries – a key ally of American security in the Horn of Africa – has killed thousands and is now in its fourth month. But most of Tigray’s 6 million people do not know much about the situation, as journalists cannot access, communication is unstable and many aid workers struggle to gain access.
One challenge is that Ethiopia may no longer have control up to 40% of the Tigray region, the UN Security Council was told in a closed session this week. Ethiopia and related fighters have been pursuing the now-defunct regional government of Tigray, which had previously dominated the Ethiopian government for nearly three decades.
Now Eritrean soldiers is deeply involved on the part of Ethiopia, even though Addis Ababa denies their presence. Eritrea on Friday rejected “false and alleged allegations” after the US embassy issued a statement on the need for Eritrean forces to leave.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was the latest to put Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed directly under pressure on Thursday and called on the 2019 Nobel laureate in a call for “immediate, full and unhindered” access to Tigray. before more people die.
Abiy’s brief statement on the call does not mention Tigray. His statements on the calls this week with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel as European countries also do not express concern about one of the world’s latest crisis areas. Neighboring Sudan and Somalia could be sucked in, experts warned.
The new UN humanitarian report released late Thursday, contains a map indicating most of the Tigray region marked as “inaccessible” to humanitarian workers. It is said that the security situation remains ‘erratic and unpredictable’ for more than two months after Abiy’s government declared victory.
The aid response remains ‘drastically inadequate’ with little access to the large rural population of the highways, the report said, even though the Ethiopian government said more than 1 million people in Tigray had been reached with aid. Some aid workers have reported having to negotiate access with a range of armed actors, even Eritreans.
Civilians suffered. “Reports of on-site aid workers indicate an increase in acute malnutrition across the region,” the new report said. “Only 1 percent of the nearly 920 nutritional treatment facilities in Tigray are accessible.”
Hunger has become a major source of concern. “Many households are expected to have already depleted their food supplies, or are expected to deplete their food supplies in the next two months,” according to a new report published Thursday by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, funded and managed by the usa
According to the report, more parts of central and eastern Tigray are likely to enter emergency phase 4, a step under famine, in the coming weeks.
Health care in the region is ‘worryingly limited’, with only three of Tigray’s 11 hospitals functioning and almost 80% of the health centers not being functional or accessible, the UN report said. Aid workers said many health centers were looted, hit by artillery fire or destroyed.
Large parts of two camps that once housed thousands of refugees from nearby Eritrea have been systematically destroyed, according to satellite imagery analysis by the nonprofit DX Open Network. About 5,000 of the refugees who made their way to the Shire community “live in appalling conditions, sleep a lot in an open field on the outskirts of the city, without water and no food,” the UN report said. .
Filippo Grandi, visiting UN refugee chief, this week called on Ethiopia to allow independent investigators to investigate alleged widespread human rights violations, calling the general situation in Tigray ‘extremely serious’.