NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – “Many, many severe cases of malnutrition” are reported in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, Red Cross officials said on Wednesday, as 80% of Tigray’s 6 million people are inaccessible in the fourth month and “weaken” “Women and children fill displacement camps.
Reports of people already starving it could be just one hand, but “in a month it will be in the thousands,” warned Ethiopian Red Cross President Ato Abera Tola. In two months, he said, there will be tens of thousands.
Fighting continues between Ethiopian and allied forces and those of the now fugitive Tigray government, which has ruled the country for nearly 30 years.
The conflict erupted just before harvest in the largely agricultural region and in the middle of a locust outbreak. A large part of the Tigray population has been living off any resources since early November and many people are fleeing, leaving their possessions behind.
Nearly 3.8 million people in Tigray need help, Abera said.
He described seeing women and children displaced in the northern city of Shire, who were “all weak … their skin is truly on their bones.” And these are the people who were able to escape the camps, he said.
Once humanitarian workers are able to reach rural Tigray, “there we will see a more devastating crisis,” Abera said. “We have to prepare for the worst, that’s what I’m saying.”
The regional capital of Tigray, Mekele, “is, paradoxically, a very lucky 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 function” without medication, without food for patients and without psychosocial support – “something surreal” after being robbed or damaged.
“I have never seen a place where a simple antibiotic is not present,” he later told the Associated Press in an interview, expressing the shock of “systematic aggression against medical institutions.”
The vaccines have expired. There are no drugs for HIV or tuberculosis. “This is unacceptable,” Rocca said. In the camps for displaced people, “there is a high risk 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 repeated the plea for more access for humanitarian workers. “Slowly, slowly, support is coming, but it’s still not enough,” he said.
Asked what will last until the end of the conflict, he told the AP that “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 really difficult to predict how this will end and how long it will last. ”
___
This version corrects the second reference to the president of the Ethiopian Red Cross at Abera.