“In Ethiopia, a policy of ethnic cleansing marked by atrocities continues quietly in Tigray”

Le 1er July, Arte broadcast an exceptional report entitled Ethiopia: Tigray, the land of hunger. This is the first documentary produced in over a year by independent journalists in Tigray. He says and demonstrates bluntly that this famine is the product of a war that the adversaries of Tigray wanted to annihilate. Unable to defeat the region militarily, they besieged it, cutting off Tigray from the world to erase it from consciousness, in Ethiopia as elsewhere. And has been for a year. The report shows the result: starvation, disease and death. Victims who testify are hopeless. Doctors and people in charge of helping the poorest, first affected by the famine, express a terrible feeling of powerlessness and abandonment on the part of the international community.

The report is a scathing denial of the official position of the Ethiopian government, which seeks to hide this disaster, by maintaining the ban on the access of journalists and other observers to the region. The government is showing a return to normal, of which the partial lifting of the blockade on Tigray and the “national dialogue” efforts would be tangible proof. Most Western diplomats, including France, in a hurry to put an end to this war which is tarnishing the image of a “reformist” and “liberal” Ethiopian Prime Minister extolled four years ago, accept these gestures as progress.

However, the siege was only lightly eased, benefiting at most the inhabitants of the capital, Mekele, as the shortage of petrol prevented the delivery of aid to the countryside. In their most optimistic projections for the next few months, UN agencies only hope to deliver the aid needed for a third of the distressed Tigrayan population. Internet, telephone, banking services, but also fertilizers and medicines have not been provided in Tigray for more than a year: the consequences of this blockade are disastrous in the short and long term. The tablets necessary for the decontamination of water are still on the list of products prohibited from entry.

Subdue part of the population

This report marks an important milestone in the efforts to document and denounce the violence of this conflict which, to date, have remained in vain. It constitutes proof that cannot be erased. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International published on April 6 a report with alarming conclusions on the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Tigrayans in the west of the region. On June 9, radio and television Voice of America showed the efforts made by various government organizations to conceal evidence of it in the same area occupied by government forces and their allies.

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