Ethiopian project for a limitless war against the Tigrayans

The federal government and its running dogs may blame the TPLF for Tigray’s suffering, but its medieval siege strategy is an open secret.

In 2004, Eskinder Nega, an Ethiopian journalist, activist and politician, oversaw the publication of at least five columns in his daily Askual that labeled Tigrayans as Ethiopian Jews and asked Ethiopians to emulate the strategies used by Nazi Germany. When the civil war broke out in November 2020, such ideas were implemented against the Tigrayans by the Ethiopian government in concert with its allies in Eritrea and the Amhara region.

Comparisons with the Holocaust may seem a bit extreme. But the events in Tigray are strangely reminiscent of the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970. In response to a breakaway war waged by Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu in an Igbo-majority territory called Biafra, the Nigerian government intentionally starved the population, resulting in the deaths of one million children.

As evidence of similarities, state-owned Amhara Media Corporation said in 2021 that Tigray's future is "" like Biafra "and Fascist Abiy Ahmed boasted that the Ethiopian government decides whether aid enters Tigray or not. Despite a slight improvement in the humanitarian situation since April, these genocidal plans are underway in Tigray. Much Ethiopian public opinion seems to support these policies, or has chosen to remain silent out of fear and pressure, while the international community has not taken them seriously enough.

Artificial famine
Policies implemented by the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments that appear to be designed to induce famine conditions in Tigray have been documented since the war began. In June, despite the blackout imposed by the Ethiopian authorities, determined journalists reached the Tigray River on rocky paths and, in a rare case, filmed the horrors of the war. On 2 July ARTE TV aired its documentary, entitled "Tigray: in the land of hunger", which showed the effects of man-made hunger and the devastation of the region’s health system.

Among the events discussed by the interviewees and recounted in the 24-minute report, we recall the Aksum massacre perpetrated by Eritrean soldiers, an eleven-year-old boy in the hospital who weighed only eight kilos, and people who simply die at home because they know that medical centers they have run out of supplies of medicines and therefore cannot help them.

The United Nations recently released celebratory announcements about a hypothetical improvement in the Ethiopian government's collaboration in humanitarian assistance to the Tigrayans , rather than telling the truth that its workers are still prevented from reaching much of the starving population of Tigray. On June 29, the United Nations said on social media that, since April 1, the World Food Program (WFP) has delivered enough food to Tigray to feed 5.9 million people a month.

However, the WFP brief in Ethiopia contradicts what WFP said a month later: “In the Tigray region, we provided food assistance to 461,542 people in May”. The modest numbers of clients are confirmed by the report on the situation of 17 June by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Food partners in Tigray assisted more than 340,000 people with 5,303 tons [tons] of food during the week of the report. Cumulatively between the beginning of April and June 8, more than 20,000 tons of food were distributed to over 1.2 million people in the region ".

Due to the lack of fuel, only 1.4 million inhabitants of Tigray, about 25 per cent, were reached, while 15 per cent of the fuel needed and 35 per cent of the money needed for humanitarian operations were granted in Tigray by the Ethiopian authorities. As a UN staff member told us: "It would be more accurate to report on the impact than on the MTs and the number of trucks that survived."

Another Biafra?
Government officials have openly claimed to impose a Biafra-like siege on the Tigray in an attempt to subjugate the region and eradicate the TPLF. On June 12, 2021, Foreign Minister Demeke Mekonnen said, without providing evidence, that humanitarian actors had tried to smuggle weapons to the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF).

These charges were used to prevent aid from entering TDF-held areas. Eleven days later, in a televised interview, Abiy argued that the Derg government made a mistake during the famine of the 1980s by allowing aid to be delivered to Tigray. He was referring to allegations that the Tigray Relief Society (REST), the humanitarian wing of the TPLF insurgency, diverted some of the aid to military purposes in the 1980s.

After Tigray forces regained control of about 70 percent of Tigray on July 30, 2021, the Amhara Media Corporation ran an article calling for the Tigray to be transformed into another Biafra "by taking the breath away from all directions". Gizaw Legesse, a reporter regularly featured on ESAT TV, said the government's strategy should be to build a buffer zone around Tigray to give people "time to think" for three to five years.

Gizaw followed up recently with a Facebook post asking the government to "drag on the negotiations for years, to give nothing for free before or during the negotiations, to realize that time is on Ethiopia's side and to understand that under the present circumstances, Ethiopia loses little by pursuing containment ".

The Ethiopian project for a limitless war against the Tigrayans.