Tigray crisis

NAIROBI, Kenya — The United Nations says food has now run out for the nearly 100,000 refugees from Eritrea who have been sheltering in camps in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, which has been cut off from the world for nearly a month amid fighting.

“Concerns are growing by the hour,” UN refugee spokesman Babar Baloch told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday.

“The camps will have now run out of food supplies – making hunger and malnutrition a real danger, a warning we have been issuing since the conflict began nearly a month ago. We are also alarmed at unconfirmed reports of attacks, abductions and forced recruitment at the refugee camps.”

Wednesday marked a month since Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced that fighting had erupted in the Tigray region between federal forces and regional ones, as each government now regards the other as illegitimate due to a dispute over holding elections during the pandemic.

Communications and transport links to the Tigray region of six million people have been severed, and the UN and others have pleaded for access to deliver badly needed food, medicines and other supplies.

Mr Abiy, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, has rejected the idea of dialogue with the Tigray regional leaders, who are on the run but say they continue to fight even after Mr Abiy over the weekend declared victory in the deadly conflict. Under growing international pressure, Mr Abiy on Monday said “my message to friends of Ethiopia is that we may be poor but we are not a country that will negotiate our sovereignty. Threatening Ethiopia for coins will not work”.

Ethiopia’s government has said it will create and manage a “humanitarian corridor” for the delivery of aid, but the UN wants access that is neutral, unhindered and immediate.

The UN has said some two million people in Tigray now need assistance — a doubling from the number before the fighting — and some one million people are displaced, including more than 45,000 Ethiopians who have fled into Sudan as refugees.