NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – “Many, many serious cases of malnutrition” are being reported in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, Red Cross officials say 80% of Tigray’s 6 million people they are unattainable in the fourth month of fighting and “smeared.” Women and children fill the displacement camps.
Reports of people already starving it could be just a handful, but “in a month it will be by the thousands,” warned Ethiopian Red Cross President Ato Abera Tola. After two months, he said, it will be tens of thousands.
Fighting continues between Ethiopian and Allied forces and those of the already runaway Tigray government that had dominated the country’s leadership for nearly 30 years.
The conflict erupted just before harvest in the mainly agricultural region and in the midst of locust outbreaks. Much of Tigray’s population has been living since the first resources of November with the resources it has, and many people are fleeing, leaving their possessions behind.
About 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 crippled … their skin is really on their bones.” And these are the people who were able to escape to the camps, he said.
Once humanitarian workers can reach the rural areas of Tigray, “there we will see a more devastating crisis,” Abera said. “We have to prepare for the worst, that’s what I say.”
The regional capital of Tigray, Mekele, “is a paradox to say, a very lucky place,” added Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. It now hosts a quarter of a million displaced people.
Rocca described a “very difficult visit” to Tigray in which accessible hospitals “barely work” without medication, without food for patients and without psychosocial support, “something surreal” after being looted or damaged.
“I have never seen a place where there is not a simple antibiotic,” he later told The Associated Press in an interview, expressing shock at “the systematic assault on health facilities.”
The vaccines have expired. There are no drugs for HIV or tuberculosis. “That’s unacceptable,” Rocca said. In the IDP camps, “there is a high risk of cholera outbreak 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 request for more access for humanitarian workers. “Little by little, little by little, support is coming, but it’s still not enough,” he said.
Asked how long it will take to end the conflict, he told the AP that “I think it will take a long time. The wounds of this conflict are very deep, that 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 it will end and how long it will last. “
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This version corrects the second reference to the president of the Ethiopian Red Cross in Abera.