Humanitarian hope in war-torn Ethiopia


The announcement of a truce between the rebels of Tigray and the army could allow the arrival of emergency aid in this region cut off from the world for more than a year and victim, like all the Horn of the Africa, of an extreme drought which raises fears of a food catastrophe.

After seventeen months of armed conflict between the rebels of the Tigray region and the Ethiopian army, the two parties announced, one after the other, a ceasefire. The government of Addis Ababa had communicated on Thursday a “unlimited humanitarian truce” to allow “the free flow of humanitarian aid to those in need of assistance” in the north of the country, where no convoy of humanitarian aid has arrived by road since 15 December.

In a text published Friday morning, the Tigrayan rebels commit themselves “to implement a cessation of hostilities, effective immediately” and call on the government of President Abiy Ahmed to “take concrete steps to facilitate unrestricted access”, in this region where hunger threatens.

Pro-government forces and the rebels of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) have been clashing since November 2020. Abiy Ahmed, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2019 for easing tensions with neighboring Eritrea, had sent the federal army to dislodge authorities in the region who had been challenging his authority for months. Quickly defeated, the TPLF troops then, during 2021, militarily recaptured Tigray, and the conflict spread to the neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar.

Fuel and cash shortages

The conflict has caused a serious humanitarian crisis in northern Ethiopia, where more than 9 million people need food aid, according to the UN’s World Food Program (WFP). In Tigray, the WFP estimated in January that 4.6 million people, or 83% of the approximately 6 million inhabitants, were in “food insecurity situation”, while 2 million suffered from “extreme food shortage”.

Since mid-February, humanitarian operations in Tigray, where more than 400,000 people have been displaced by the conflict, have been virtually interrupted by shortages of fuel and cash there. Fighting in the Afar region is preventing the passage of road convoys of food aid and fuel on the only operational land route, which connects Semera, capital of Afar, and Mekele, capital of Tigray. The UN has denounced a “de facto humanitarian blockade” of Tigray, for which the government and the rebels have blamed each other.

Beyond the armed conflict, the Horn of Africa is facing a severe drought, after three consecutive poor rainy seasons. “This situation threatens agriculture and livestock, the livelihoods of the entire region,” underlined the NGO Oxfam on March 18, in a press release in the form of a cry of alarm: “44 million people need urgent humanitarian aid in Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan and Somalia. And nearly 21 million people are extremely food insecure.”

NGOs solicited in Ukraine

The war in Europe is aggravating this already catastrophic situation. Much in demand in Ukraine, NGOs will have fewer human and financial resources to devote to Africa, and the prices of food commodities have already started to soar.

Observers wonder if this announced truce will lead to talks and a possible lasting peace. Foreign diplomats, led by Olusegun Obasanjo, the envoy of the African Union for the Horn of Africa, present in Ethiopia in recent days, have been trying for months to obtain the opening of a dialogue, with little visible progress. Washington, whose special envoy for the Horn of Africa David Satterfield was in Ethiopia this week, “urges all parties to support” on the announcement of a truce “to advance a negotiated and lasting ceasefire.”

Roland Kobia, Ambassador of the European Union to Ethiopia, for his part greets a “positive proposal”. “The two parties seem in phase. Let us help create a favorable context for a durable solution to end” to the conflict, he wrote in a tweet.



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