Source: Trouw

By Mella Fuchs 5 February 2024, 20:05

Hunger took the lives of nearly four hundred Ethiopians in the past six months: 351 people died in the northern region of Tigray and 44 in neighboring Amhara. That, at least, is what the state-appointed ombudsman said Tuesday.


The actual death toll runs into the thousands, says Ethiopia expert and geographer Jan Nyssen, professor emeritus at Ghent University. He lived in Tigray for seven years and conducted research there for many years. During the war, he charted the number of deaths from starvation, violence and lack of medical help. He still calls and emails with his contacts in Tigray. “Acquaintances tell us that towns are unrecognizable because of the number of beggars. There, fortunately, one can still give them something. In a village where the harvest has failed, no one has anything.”

Famine like in the 1980s
More than a fortnight ago, the war ended in Tigray, but starvation continues. As early as December, officials in Tigray warned of a famine like those of the 1980s. Authorities waved away the possibility of famine. There was no confirmation, they said, that anyone, in any region, had died of starvation.
Famine is a sensitive word in Ethiopia, says Nyssen. “In 1974, a famine caused 200,000 deaths. Emperor Haile Selassie denied the problem. He was deposed and killed by the army that revolted.”
The military regime thereafter used the drought as a means to control rebellions in Tigray. That led to the mass famine of 1983-1985. At least 400,000 people died of starvation. According to the UN, that number is even twice as high. With that famine, the situation now is compared.


Poor rainy season
Abiy Ahmed’s government does not want to fall into the same category as their predecessors, says Nyssen. “So they only grudgingly admit that a famine seems imminent.” But the National Ombudsman now reports that millions of people in the war-ravaged northern regions are starving, and advises the Ethiopian government not to waste time on how to name and shame.
The famine is due to a poor rainy season and a war-devastated society, Nyssen said. “Because of El Niño, rains started early in 2023 but stopped as early as July and August, months when most rain normally falls. Crops dried out completely.”
In a period of peace, they could have made up for that with reserves from previous years, Nyssen says. But because of two years of war, the 2021 and 2022 harvests also failed.


Mass killings and sexual violence
The war was fought between the Ethiopian army and the Tigray army. Tigray is home to about seven percent of the population. For nearly thirty years, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) ruled in coalition with other friendly parties. That such a small group held so much power led to discontent among the Amharic elite, who consider themselves legitimate leaders of the country, and among the Oromos, the country’s largest population group.
In 2018, Abiy Ahmed came to power. He pushed aside the TPLF and founded the Prosperity Party, through which he sought to end ethnic rivalry. The TPLF refused to participate in the merger. When national elections were postponed because of corona, Tigray organized its own elections in September 2020. That led to a blockade of the region and an attempt to depose the regional government, upon which the TPLF attacked military bases. Then Addis Ababa had had enough.
Tigray turned into a war zone. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. The Ethiopian army was joined by forces from Amhara. Eritrea also fought alongside the Ethiopian government and engaged in mass killings and sexual violence on a large scale.

Plowing in the dark
The food supply in Tigray, where there had been a strong commitment to rural development in previous decades, suffered a catastrophic blow. Soldiers looted food supplies and set fire to farms, cattle were slaughtered and water systems destroyed. The Tigray blockade left farmers without fertilizer or seeds to work their land. Food aid also did not arrive. The UN accused the Ethiopian government of using hunger as a weapon of war.
Tigray society was deliberately weakened, says Nyssen. “Farmers were shot dead in their fields. Entire periods were forbidden to plow. Farmers were resourceful: they started plowing at night, or one person sat on top of a mountain to warn when the army was coming. But the harvest failed anyway.”
Meanwhile, the Tigreans ran out of reserves, says Nyssen. “People were already eating corn cobs in October. People keep that as a supply for when things get bad. Now they have nothing left.”


Theft
More than 20 million Ethiopians need food aid, reports Ocha, the agency that coordinates emergency aid on behalf of the United Nations. Last March, the UN and U.S. stopped food aid to Tigray, and later to all of Ethiopia, after discovering large-scale theft of grain. “The Ethiopian army was reselling food aid all the way abroad. And the Tigray military creamed off one-sixth of the families’ food aid for their military.”
The suspension of food aid resulted in 1,400 deaths in Tigray between April and August, the Tigrean government reported to the BBC in August. Since late October, food aid has been coming back into the country sparsely, but according to Nyssen, people hardly notice. “It is maybe a tenth of what would come before the war,” he said.
Nyssen fears for the country he loves. “People always counted on their own strength, but now they say there is no future.”