Articles

It was authored by José Ramos-Horta, former President of Timor-Leste and 1996 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and five other international diplomats and peace builders, "colleagues and friends the Prime Minister knows well," including former President of Finland Tarja Halonen, former UN and Arab League Special Envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, Emeritus Bishop of Oslo and former Vice Chair of the Nobel Committee Dr. Gunnar Stalsett, former President of Slovenia and former UN Assistant Secretary General and President of the World Leadership Alliance Danilo Turk, and former UN Under Secretary General and Special Envoy for the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng.

The letter notes that "grave human rights violations and abuses are being committed against civilian Tigrayans, including extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, looting and destruction of property, mass executions, arbitrary arrests, rape, forced displacement of populations, hate speech and stigmatization including ethnic profiling. These attacks have caused tens of thousands of Tigrayan children and adults to flee their homes and to seek refuge in Sudan under extremely deplorable conditions."

"As a result of this conflict, according to the United Nations, approximately 4.5 million of a population of 6 million people are in immediate need of humanitarian assistance," it says. "Between two and 2.5 million people in the region will experience severe food insecurity through September. News outlets from around the globe are also increasingly writing of horrifying stories of rape, torture, and mass arrests."

It recalls Abiy's own words, from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech two years ago, "there are those, 'who have never seen war, but glorify and romanticize it. They have not seen the fear. They have not seen the fatigue. They have not seen the destruction or heartbreak, nor have they felt the mournful emptiness of war after the carnage."

Specifically, the leaders urge Prime Minister Ahmed to:

1. Act now and swiftly to save his country and end the suffering of Ethiopians afflicted by war in Tigray.

2. Invite independent and credible investigations, in full cooperation with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, into human rights abuses and violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law by all actors in Tigray. We encourage the Prime Minister to ensure that other human rights organizations are provided access in order to independently investigate reports of human rights abuses and violations in Tigray.

3. Consider establishing a hybrid court empowered with jurisdiction to hold accountable Eritrean perpetrators of war crimes.

4. Fully cooperate with regional organizations and the international community to facilitate all-inclusive dialogue, reconciliation and healing, involving all political and civil society actors in Tigray with the goal of charting a consensual way forward for the region's future governance.

5. Lead calls for a cessation of hostilities by all parties involved and encourage other parties to commit to ending the fighting immediately. Press for the immediate and verifiable withdrawal of Eritrean and Amhara regional forces from the Tigray Region.

6. Facilitate the work of international humanitarian staff including by issuing long-duration visas, expediting the process for the importation and use of satellite communication technology by humanitarian organizations, and instructing your military and allied forces to establish a civil-military coordination cell to facilitate the work of humanitarian organizations on the ground.

7. Issue orders to protect all civilians in Tigray and throughout Ethiopia regardless of their ethnicity, including refugees and internally displaced persons, and particularly women in the light of widespread reports of sexual and gender-based violence."

"It is clear that like all wars, the political dispute that led to the Tigray crisis cannot be resolved through military means alone," it states. "The suffering inflicted on the people in the region has already been too great. For the good of Ethiopia, and the good of the region and the world, we ask the Prime Minister to work toward a political solution as soon as possible. It is only through dialogue and negotiation that lasting peace can be established, and the healing for so many can begin."

There has been no response to date from Prime Minister Abiy.

Read the original article on IPS.

Source=Ethiopia: Global Leaders to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed - Stop the Atrocities in Tigray - allAfrica.com

Mark Lowcock, the top humanitarian emergency official at the United Nations, told a webcast meeting of aid officials and diplomats that the number of people affected by the famine was “higher than anywhere in the world”

Source: New York Times

Famine Hits 350,000 in Ethiopia, Worst-Hit Country in a Decade

United Nations agencies said the crisis in Ethiopia’s conflict-ravaged Tigray region had plunged it into famine. “This is going to get a lot worse,” a top aid official said.

Credit…Baz Ratner/Reuters

By Rick Gladstone

June 10, 2021

Famine has afflicted at least 350,000 people in northern Ethiopia’s conflict-ravaged Tigray region, a starvation calamity bigger at the moment than anywhere else in the world, the United Nations and international aid groups said Thursday.

With their joint announcement, the humanitarian officials for the first time described the unfolding crisis in Tigray as a famine and specified the number of people suffering from it. They had warned for weeks of an impending disaster from the conflict in Ethiopia, the most populous country in the Horn of Africa.

“Alarming new data has today confirmed the magnitude of the hunger emergency gripping Tigray,” David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, the anti-hunger agency of the United Nations, said in a statement.

Mark Lowcock, the top humanitarian emergency official at the United Nations, told a webcast meeting of aid officials and diplomats that the number of people affected by the famine was “higher than anywhere in the world” and was the worst in any country since a 2011 famine gripped neighboring Somalia.

Mr. Lowcock said the data “paints a picture of a very, very extreme situation,” requiring a generous donor response and smoother humanitarian access to areas of Tigray that he said had been blocked by Ethiopian forces and allies from neighboring Eritrea.

“This is going to get a lot worse,” said Mr. Lowcock, recalling the 1980s famine in Ethiopia that caused an estimated 1 million deaths and showed the horrors of mass starvation with jarring images on television.

The new famine data was from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a system used by humanitarian aid agencies and governments to determine the scale of a hunger crisis. The system is based on a five-phase scale of food insecurity — Phase 1 is minimal and Phase 5 is famine. The data showed that of 5.5 million people facing food insecurity in Tigray and neighboring zones during May and June, 350,000 were now in Phase 5.

“This severe crisis results from the cascading effects of conflict, including population displacements, movement restrictions, limited humanitarian access, loss of harvest and livelihood assets, and dysfunctional or nonexistent markets,” a summary of the data said.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, who participated in the webcast meeting, said “the very place that woke the modern world up to the scourge of hunger” four decades ago was at risk of a repeat.

“We cannot make the same mistake twice,” she said. “We cannot let Ethiopia starve.”

The conflict in Tigray erupted last November. when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and neighboring Eritrea ordered their military forces into the region to crush Mr. Abiy’s political rivals and strengthen his control.

Credit…Baz Ratner/Reuters

Mr. Abiy, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, expressed confidence that the operation would last just a few weeks, but it has turned into a quagmire that has severely tarnished his image. Ethiopian and Eritrean troops have been accused of ethnic cleansing, massacres and other atrocities in Tigray that amount to war crimes.

Last month, in a sign of growing American frustration with Mr. Abiy’s government, the United States announced punitive restrictions on some Ethiopian officials, an unusual step that invited a rebuke from Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry.

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield, who was once a top State Department official on Africa, expressed frustration on Thursday that the United Nations Security Council had yet to hold a public meeting on the Ethiopia crisis, much less take any action. She attributed the lack of a response to “impediments placed in front of us by some Council members” — apparently a reference to positions by China and Russia that the Ethiopia crisis is a domestic affair.

Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council and a former top U.N. humanitarian official, who also participated in the webcast meeting, said unimpeded access to Tigray by aid workers was critical. “It’s not rocket science,” he said, as he also expressed criticism over the Security Council’s inaction.

“I would like to see the Security Council act like a Security Council,” he said.