Famine is imminent in Ethiopia’s war – torn Tigray region and the north of the country, which means hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of death, the UN’s humanitarian chief warned on Friday.
Mark Lowcock said that the economy has been destroyed along with companies, crops and farms and that there are no banking or telecommunications services.
“We are already hearing about starvation-related deaths,” he said in a statement.
“People need to wake up,” Lowcock said. “The international community really needs to take the step, even by providing money.”
No one knows how many thousands of civilians or combatants have been killed for months by political tensions between Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed’s government and the Tigray leaders who once dominated Ethiopia’s government exploded into war in November last year.
Eritrea, a longtime Tigray enemy, cooperated with the Ethiopian neighborhood in the conflict.
In late May, Lowcock painted a bleak picture of Tigray since the war began, with an estimated 2 million people displaced, civilians killed and injured, rapes and other forms of “heinous sexual violence” widespread and systematic, and public and private infrastructure crucial to civilians destroyed, including hospitals and farmland.
“There are now hundreds of thousands of people in northern Ethiopia in famine,” Lowcock said. “It is the worst hunger problem the world has seen in a decade, since a quarter of a million Somalis lost their lives in famine there in 2011. This now has terrible echoes of the colossal tragedy in Ethiopia in 1984.”
During the catastrophic famine of 1984-85, about 2 million Africans died of starvation or famine-related diseases, about half of them in Ethiopia.
“There is now a risk that life will lose hundreds of thousands or worse,” Lowcock said.
He said it was very difficult to get food and other humanitarian aid to everyone in need.
The UN and the Ethiopian government have in recent months helped about 2 million people in northern Ethiopia, mainly in government-controlled areas, he said.
But Lowcock said there are more than a million people in places controlled by Tigray’s opposition forces and “there have been deliberate, repeated, persistent attempts to prevent them from getting food.”
In addition, there are places controlled by the Eritreans and other places controlled by militia groups where it is extremely difficult to deliver aid, he said.
“The availability of aid workers does not exist because of what men with weapons and bombs do and what their political masters tell them to do,” said the Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.
Lowcock said all blockades must be rolled back and the Eritreans, “who are responsible for much of this need to withdraw”, so that aid can pass through to those facing famine.
“Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed must do what he said he would do and force the Eritreans to leave Ethiopia,” he said.
Lowcock said leaders of the seven major industrialized nations – the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Italy and Canada – must put the humanitarian crisis and the threat of widespread famine in northern Ethiopia on the agenda for their June 11 summit. -13 in Cornwall, England.
“Everyone must understand that if there were a colossal tragedy of the kind that happened in 1984, the consequences would reach far and long,” he said.
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