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Church and international aid workers say Tigray still deprived of humanitarian aid, lack of food and health facilities
By La Croix International staff | Ethiopia
Catholic bishops in Ethiopia's war-torn Tigray region are pleading for urgent humanitarian aid and are calling on the international community not to forget the thousands of people dying every day in the second most populous nation in Africa.
"The atrocities committed so far against the Tigrayan population are not only against the right to the existence of human beings, but also against God who created us", said Bishop Tesfaselassie Medhin of Adigrat, whose diocese covers the whole of Tigray.
The Catholic bishop's words echo those of United Nations officials.
"The situation in Tigray is catastrophic, the region has been isolated from the rest of the world for 500 days now", said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization.
"Public attention is mainly focused on the war in Ukraine, but as of mid-December 2021, no food aid has been delivered to the northern region of Ethiopia", Tedros said in a recent press conference.
He added that about three-quarters of health facilities assessed by WHO in the region have been destroyed and around 40,000 people with HIV are without treatment.
"It is true that I come from Tigray," said Tedros, "and this crisis affects me, my family and my friends in a very personal way. But as Director-General of WHO, I have the duty to protect and promote health wherever it is threatened. And there is no place in the world where the health of millions of people is more threatened than Tigray"
Tedros pointed out that there is also the critical issue of COVID-19 in Africa where according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the number of confirmed coronavirus cases has reached 11,287,599.
The Church Church in Tigray deeply shares the pain and suffering of war crimes that have been perpetuated for more than 15 months against humanity and of the genocide committed on the Tigrayan people and confirm total solidarity and firm condemnation, Bishop Medhin said.
He added that Catholics have a Christian obligation, in a spirit of brotherhood with one another, to help.
"Particularly in these times of enormous difficulties due to the terrible tragedies inflicted on pastoral agents, the faithful, and all the people of Tigray," Bishop Medhin said in a statement to Fides.
"We are heartbroken to see people suffering, left without food"
Bishop Medhin also urged Catholic bishops in other parts of Ethiopia to step up its condemnation with words and actions the crimes committed against the Catholic faithful, the clergy, men and women religious and the entire people of Tigray.
"Since the very day the war broke out, the Catholic Church in Ethiopia has not kept silent. The Church has not stopped making public statements denouncing the war, loss of lives, displacement, loss of property and all consequences of the war", according to a statement by the Bishops' Conference of Ethiopia.
The Catholic Church in Ethiopia is also mobilized, together with sister churches in other parts of the world, to help war-affected populations in the states of Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, Afar and Benishangul Gumuz with food and basic necessities, it said.
"As bishops, we have expressed several times that we are heartbroken to see people suffering, left without food", they said adding that "the bishops assure their prayers and renew their appeal for the protection of the natural rights and dignity of every human being".
"If war is not thrown out from Ethiopian history by us Ethiopians, it will be the war to throw out us Ethiopians from history", the bishops warned, renewing their appeal "to all parties involved in the conflict in our country so that they abandon their weapons and start a real dialogue in the interest of the people to allow them to live in peace".
The conflict in Ethiopia continues, as reported on March 7 by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, "serious and large-scale violations of human rights in the context of the raging conflict in the Afar and Amhara regions, as well as in Tigray"
According to Bachelet, between November 22 and February 28, more than 300 civilians were killed in a series of aerial bombardments in the north of the country.
Earlier, Bishop Medhin had called for an immediate peaceful solution to the "ethnic-cleansing" which first started as a political row.
International human rights groups had also stated that Ethiopian officials and allied militia fighters are engaged in a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing in Tigray, the civil war-torn northern region in Ethiopia, after the country's prime minister, Abiy Ahmed Ali, started a surprise military raid in November 2020.
Large-scale violations of human rights
Abiy Ahmed launched an attack on the Tigray People's Liberation Front, former rulers of the semi-autonomous region and which ruled Ethiopia for almost three decades until he assumed power in 2018.
The prime minister accused the Tigray People's Liberation Front of seizing the national army base in Mekele, the regional capital.
Tigrayans are only a small minority of about 5 percent in a country of 109 million.
The U.N. human rights office has reported that tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than 2 million people have been displaced but no one knows exactly how many civilians have perished in the conflict.
Reports put the death toll at thousands of civilians with 400,000 facing famine conditions in Tigray and 9.4 million people needing food in the northern region.
Church workers on the ground say the lack of food has become the weapon with which to make people die and not feed them and that about 6-7 million people suffer from this situation of violence.
According to a recent report by the UN High Commission for Human Rights, war and other crimes against humanity have been conducted by both sides in the bloody civil war.
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