NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – The Ethiopian government has privately told Biden administration staff that its Tigray region has “returned to normal,” but new eyewitness accounts describe horrified Tigray residents hiding in bullet-ridden houses and -a vast rural area where the effects of fighting and food shortages are still unknown.
The conflict that began in November between Ethiopian and Tigray forces that have dominated the government for nearly three decades continues largely in the shadows. Some communication links are broken, residents are scared to provide details over the phone and almost all journalists are blocked. Thousands of people died.
Ethiopia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Demeke Mekonnen, and his colleagues briefed a private meeting hosted by the Atlantic Council think tank on Friday. They said nearly 1.5 million people in Tigray had been contacted with humanitarian aid and expressed concern over “false and politically motivated allegations” of ill-treatment of refugees in neighboring Eritrea, state-affiliated Fana Broadcasting Corporate reported. . It was said that Biden administration staff attended the meeting.
The refugees were targeted by Eritrean soldiers fighting alongside Ethiopian troops against Tigray forces. Biden administration pressures Eritrea to withdraw “immediately” them, citing credible accounts robberies, sexual assaults and other abuses.
Despite Ethiopia’s latest claims, its recently appointed administrators in Tigray have estimated that more than 4.5 million people, or almost the entire population of the region, need emergency food aid and some people have begun to die. of hunger. According to documents released at a crisis meeting of government workers and assistance in early January.
And a new account from Tigray’s Borderline Emergency Coordinator Albert Vinas says “we are very concerned about what might happen in rural areas”, with many places inaccessible due to struggles or difficulties in obtaining permission.
“We know, because the elders of the community and the traditional authorities told us that the situation in these places is very bad,” he said in the account posted online on Friday.
He described Tigray residents handing his colleagues pieces of paper with phone numbers and asking for help to reach their families, whom they had not heard from in weeks.
“I saw a population locked in their homes and living in great fear,” he wrote after visiting the town of Adigrat and the towns of Axum and Adwa since the end of December.
In Adigrat, one of the largest cities in Tigray, “the situation was very tense and his hospital was in a terrible state,” Vinas added, “without food, without water and without money.” Some patients who were hospitalized with traumatic injuries were malnourished. “A woman has been working for a week.
Beyond hospitals, up to 90 percent of the health centers between the capital, Tigray, Mekele and Axum, north to Eritrea, were down, he said. “There is a large population that is suffering, certainly with fatal consequences. … There have been no vaccinations in almost three months, so we fear there will be epidemics soon. ”
In a separate account posted on Friday by the World Peace Foundation, former Ethiopian official Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe, in a telephone interview in rural Tigray, told director Alex de Waal that “hunger among the peasantry is worsening” in neighboring areas. with Eritrea, after Eritrean forces burned or robbed. crops just before harvest.
“Soon, we may see a massive humanitarian crisis,” Mulugeta said.
Eritrean officials did not answer questions or confirm the involvement of their soldiers, and Ethiopia denied their presence despite eyewitness accounts.
The food situation in Tigray was already “extremely bad” before fighting broke out over a locust outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic, Ethzaam’s Oxfam director Gezahegn Kebede Gebrehana told the Associated Press.
“When the fighting took place, a lot of people fled into the bushes. But when they returned, most found their homes destroyed or all their belongings looted, “he said after an assessment in South Tigray, according to some accounts, the most accessible part of the region. “Food is a very, very important necessity from what I’ve seen.”
International pressure continues on Ethiopia to allow unrestricted humanitarian access to Tigray, now a complicated patch for local authorities, but Gezahegn has warned against suspending aid to the government as a European Union. recently did.
“The donor community may think it will push the Ethiopian government, but the Ethiopian government will never surrender,” he said. He acknowledged “good intentions” but said “people are the ones who suffer”.