The 1984 famine is still one of the first things that comes to mind when Ethiopia is mentioned. Almost 40 years on, human rights organisations fear one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 20th century could be repeating itself.
Officially the 1984 famine, which was concentrated in the north of the country, was blamed on a regional drought. But the policies of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military dictatorship to starve the Tigrayan rebels contributed too.
As many as 1.2-million people died.
Today, lobby groups say that people around that same region are being deliberately deprived of food again, as the authorities try to push back rebel Tigrayan forces.
“Tigray is facing a human-made famine,” Eritrea Focus and Oslo Analytica claim in a two-part report titled “The Tigray War and Regional Implications”. It details the sequence of the conflict , which broke out in November 2020.
In January the UN estimated that nearly 40% of the 6-million people in Tigray faced “an extreme lack of food”. And even though a blockade on humanitarian aid coming in by road was lifted almost three weeks ago, it’s still just a trickle.
Human rights organisations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in their recently released report — “We Will Erase You from this Land: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing in Ethiopia’s Western Tigray Zone” — present a long list of alleged abuses, including forced detention and the looting of Tigrayan agricultural stocks.
A 72-year-old Tigrayan farmer told researchers that guards from the neighbouring Amhara militia “kept telling us that Tigrayans deserve to be starved ... to death”.
“The destruction in the fertile Western Tigray region is aimed at moving farmers to dispossess them from their land,” the report says.
For example, a 63-year-old farmer in the area was told by men destroying his home: “This is not your land. You have nothing to claim here.”
Other alleged abuses include ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and a long list of crimes against humanity, such as torture, rape and sexual slavery. The report blames much of these abuses on the Ethiopian federal forces and the regional Amhara authorities, which have denied wrongdoing.
Access to Tigray for journalists and aid workers is severely restricted, which means the horrors there are mostly invisible to the world.
For some perspective, Eritrea Focus bills the Ethiopian war theatre as “the largest armed conflict in the world in 2021”.
It’s very difficult to say how many people have died, but one estimate puts it at half a million people.
Geography professor Jan Nyssen and a team of researchers at Ghent University in Belgium made this calculation. The figure includes an estimated 50,000-100,000 victims of direct killings, 150,000-200,000 starvation deaths, and more than 100,000 additional deaths due to a lack of health-care access as a result of the conflict.
The Amnesty International report lays the blame for the latest atrocities squarely at the door of the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) and allied forces and militias from the neighbouring Amhara region, but it does mention that these boundary disputes date back to at least 1992.
Western Tigray borders Ethiopia’s Amhara region, and in recent years the dispute has increasingly taken on political and ethnic overtones.
Tigray is facing a human-made famine
— Eritrea Focus and Oslo Analytica
A few days before the report was published, on March 24, a humanitarian truce was announced, and the next day the Tigrayan and Ethiopian forces for the first time agreed to cease hostilities. This made it possible for aid agencies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to get a convoy to the region, with medical assistance, emergency food, household items such as jerry cans, solar lamps, mattresses and kitchen sets, as well as water treatment supplies. This was the first ICRC convoy since September, and the first humanitarian aid to arrive by land since the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs stopped sending supplies by road in mid-December, citing security and administrative constraints.
While essentials such as medical supplies continued to be airlifted into the region, these were inadequate and expensive.
The conflict hasn’t only caused problems for the northern regions. Ethiopia’s eastern Somali region is experiencing a severe drought affecting millions of people. But because humanitarian efforts have been directed at the conflict, it’s been difficult to mobilise funds to assist the drought-stricken region.
The US has accused Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government of blocking humanitarian access to conflict zones. The Ethiopian authorities, in turn, blame the rebels.
Nearly 40% of Tigray’s 6-million people face ‘an extreme lack of food’
— What it means:
To an extent the authorities seem to have pre-empted some of the report’s recommendations by lifting the blockades against humanitarian convoys. The report asked the government and regional authorities to “immediately restore basic services and facilitate safe, sustained, and unhindered access to humanitarian agencies to all affected populations across Tigray”, and remove “bureaucratic and physical restrictions on UN agencies and humanitarian organisations”.
It also calls on the government to order its security forces to end human rights violations and suspend all those involved in such abuses. Those held in arbitrary detention should be released, the report says, and it urges the AU to set up a peacekeeping force for the region.
The Ethiopian government has promised to comply, even though it doesn’t agree with some of the report. In a statement from its ministry of foreign affairs last week, the government said it is “committed to holding accountable all those responsible for violations of human rights and humanitarian law”, and has established an interministerial task force following a joint investigation by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The task force held its second meeting last week to discuss ways to expedite its investigations.
The government also noted the “humanitarian truce” that has come into effect and said “aid has started to flow to the Tigray region” — something it said could lay the foundation for resolving the conflict.
Some of the report’s findings touch on internal boundaries, which could lead to the report being used for “political purposes”, the government said. It also feels the report has “ethnic undertones that seem to apportion blame disproportionately while trying to exculpate others”, and adds that it constitutes an “unfair attack against the gallant forces of ENDF and allied forces”.
The conflict in Tigray started in November 2020 when the ENDF retaliated following an attack on its northern base in Mekelle by Tigrayan rebels. Before Abiy came to power in 2018, most of Ethiopia’s political, military and economic power was in the hands of Tigrayan elites.
Could SA mediate?
International relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor says SA has offered to provide and even fund mediators to help Ethiopia in its peace efforts.
A process of national dialogue started in the country late last year in an effort to end the conflict.
“We’ve had discussions with the AU facilitator [former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo] because we can’t displace the AU, and we’ve indicated to Ethiopia through our president [Cyril Ramaphosa] in discussions with his peers that SA stands ready to be of assistance,” Pandor says.
This would be in the form of making available the services of NGOs from SA that specialise in conflict resolution and negotiations.
“We’re glad that the humanitarian corridor has now been established,” she says, though she adds that Obasanjo is concerned that aid isn’t flowing to all the regions that need it.
Soon after the conflict broke out in November 2020, Ramaphosa, then AU chair, sent three former presidents to Ethiopia in an attempt to encourage the two sides to talk. But they returned without having had any success. This is despite seemingly close ties between the ANC and the Prosperity Party of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who spent time studying in SA some years ago.
Abiy attended the ANC’s January 8 anniversary rally in Kimberley in 2020, and the party has in turn sent representatives to the Prosperity Party’s conference in March.
The ANC was represented by SA’s former ambassador to Eritrea, Iqbal Jhazbhay, who praised Abiy for ending the 20-year war between Eritrea and Ethiopia — something that earned him the Nobel peace prize in 2019 — and for setting up a process of national dialogue. He also praised the #NoMore movement in Ethiopia, which was created after the start of the war to push back against especially Western interference in Ethiopia.
Could Abiy lose his peace prize?
It is not possible to revoke a Nobel peace prize, as neither Alfred Nobel’s will nor the statutes of the Nobel Foundation mentions such a possibility.
But in January the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prize, took the unusual step of issuing an admonition to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 laureate, over the war and the humanitarian crisis in Tigray.
“As prime minister and winner of the Nobel peace prize, Abiy Ahmed has a special responsibility to end the conflict and contribute to peace,” the committee said in a statement.
Abiy received the prize a year after making peace with neighbouring Eritrea, ending a two-decade conflict. The committee said the prize had been awarded “on the basis of his efforts and the justifiable expectations that existed in 2019”.
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