NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – “Many, many severe malnutrition cases” are reported in the controversial Tigray region of Ethiopia, Red Cross officials said Wednesday, as 80% of Tigray’s 6 million people are unreachable by the fourth month of fighting and “emaciated.” Women and children fill refugee camps.
Messages from people who are already starving maybe a handful, but “after a month there will be thousands,” warned Ethiopian Red Cross president Ato Abera Tola. After two months, he said, there will be tens of thousands.
Fighting continues between Ethiopian and Allied forces and that of the now fugitive Tigray government, which has dominated the country’s leadership for nearly 30 years.
The conflict erupted in the largely agricultural area just before harvest and in the midst of a locust outbreak. Much of the Tigray population has been living off the resources they have since the beginning of November, and many are on the run, leaving their belongings behind.
Nearly 3.8 million people in Tigray are in need of assistance, Abera said.
He described seeing displaced women and children in the northern city of Shire who are “all emaciated … their skin is really on their bones.” And these are the people who managed to escape to the camps, he said.
Once humanitarian workers are able to reach the rural areas of Tigray, “we will see a more devastating crisis there,” Abera said. “We have to prepare for the worst, is what I mean.”
Tigray’s regional capital, 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 operate” with no medicines, no food for patients and no psychosocial support – “something unreal” after being looted or damaged.
“I’ve never seen a place where a simple antibiotic isn’t present,” he later told The Associated Press in an interview, shocked at “the systematic aggression against health facilities.”
Vaccines have expired. There are no medicines for HIV or tuberculosis. “This is unacceptable,” said Rocca. In the camps for displaced persons “there is a high risk of outbreaks of cholera or other diseases”.
And it is “ridiculous” to speak of the COVID-19 pandemic when some 30 displaced people are forced to live in a classroom, he said.
Rocca reiterated the plea for greater access for humanitarian workers. “Slowly, slowly support is coming, but it is still not enough,” he said.
When asked what it takes to end the conflict, he told the AP, “I think it will take a long time. The wounds of this conflict are very deep, this is my feeling. … Given the complexity of the crisis and the presence of other actors on the ground, it is very difficult to predict how this will end and how long it will last. “
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This version corrects the second reference to Abera, the president of the Ethiopian Red Cross.