Ethiopia crisis ‘stain on our conscience’

UNITED NATIONS — The crisis in Ethiopia is a “stain on our conscience,” the United Nations humanitarian chief said, as children and others starve to death in the Tigray region under what the U.N. has called a de facto government blockade of food, medical supplies and fuel.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Martin Griffiths issued one of the most sharply worded criticisms yet of the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade after nearly a year of war. Memories of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, which killed some 1 million people and whose images shocked the world, are vivid in his mind, “and we fervently hope is not happening at present,” he said.

“That’s what keeps people awake at night,” Griffiths said, “is worrying about whether that’s what is in prospect, and in prospect soon.”

He described a landscape of deprivation inside Tigray, where the malnutrition rate is now over 22 percent — “roughly the same as we saw in Somalia in 2011 at the start of the Somali famine,” which killed more than a quarter-million people.

The war in Ethiopia began last November on the brink of harvest in Tigray, and the U.N. has said at least half of the coming harvest will fail. Witnesses have said Ethiopian and allied forces destroyed or looted food sources.

Meanwhile just 10 percent of needed humanitarian supplies have been reaching Tigray in recent weeks, Griffiths said.

“So people have been eating roots and flowers and plants instead of a normal steady meal,” he said.

“The lack of food will mean that people will start to die.”

Last week the AP, citing witness accounts and internal documents, reported the first starvation deaths since Ethiopia’s government imposed the blockade on the region of 6 million people in an attempt to keep support from reaching Tigray forces.

But the problem is not hunger alone.

The U.N. humanitarian chief, who recently visited Tigray, cited the lack of medical supplies and noted that vulnerable children and pregnant or lactating mothers are often the first to die of disease. Some 200,000 children throughout the region have missed vaccinations since the war began.

AP file photo An Ethiopian woman argues with others over the allocation of yellow split peas after it was distributed by the Relief Society of Tigray in the town of Agula, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia on May 8. In an interview with The Associated Press Tuesday, the United Nations humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths calls the crisis in Ethiopia a “stain on our conscience” as children and others starve to death in the Tigray region under what the U.N. calls a de facto government blockade of food, medical supplies and fuel.