International aid organizations have recently reported an increasing number of rape cases, widespread famine and millions of displaced people as the armed conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region escalates.
The six-month-long conflict has already taken the lives of thousands and left many without shelter and access to basic services, healthcare and education while the warring central and regional parties are nowhere near bringing peace to the region.
Last March, the UN confirmed that over 500 rapes had been recorded in the region while one of the top health officials in Tigray’s interim government said that “women are being kept in sexual slavery.”
UN Aid Chief, Mark Lowcock, has recently confirmed the woeful state of affairs, noting: “There is no doubt that sexual violence is being used in this conflict as a weapon of war, as a means to humiliate, terrorize and traumatize an entire population today and into the next generation.”
He indicated that, according to some reports, 30% of all incidents against civilians involved some sort of sexual violence, and nearly 25% of reports involved gang rape with children also being among the victims.
Tigray is also facing a shortage of medical care as 37% of its healthcare facilities are no longer fit for work as they have been deliberately destroyed.
“I saw an example of this destruction in a health clinic 100km from Mekelle. This had an entire new operation ward devoted to emergency c-sections for mothers and emergency surgery – that opened in 2020, with the support of Rotary in Belgium. Everything – X-ray machines, oxygen and mattresses for patients – are gone. Operating beds and incubators for babies have been broken and turned upside down,” UNICEF has quoted a Tigray doctor as saying.
The ongoing conflict has also had a disastrous impact on children and education with UNICEF assessing that the conflict and COVID-19 have together taken 1.4 million of children in Tigray out of school for more than a year.
Emily Dakin, the head of the US Agency for International Development mission in Tigray, has demanded that humanitarian organizations be allowed to reach civilians in need.
“We are very concerned about rising malnutrition levels and the U.N. has warned about the risk of famine. Humanitarians absolutely need unhindered access to populations in need, and we are concerned about the fact that there are populations that we haven’t yet been able to reach,” she said.
Located in northern Ethiopia, Tigray has been torn by armed conflict since November 2020 as the central authorities launched an offensive against the regional power following the latter’s attack on a federal military base. All efforts by the international community to bring an end to the conflict have failed.
