World Health Organization (W.H.O.) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters Thursday that the government of his native Ethiopia is blocking him from sending money to or even communicating with family in the blockaded Tigray region, lamenting, “I don’t even know who is dead or who is alive.”
Ethiopia has been in the throes of a civil war between the federal government and Tedros’s Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) since November 2020, which had slowed as part of a truce brokered in March. The TPLF, a Marxist organization, was once the nation’s ruling political party, under which Tedros served as foreign minister and health minister, but the current regime outlawed the party and designated it a terrorist organization last year.
That truce broke this week. Like the civil war itself, it began with both sides claiming that the other attacked first and proclaiming it is no longer possible to cease hostilities.
The civil war has caused a massive humanitarian crisis in Tigray, a northern region where the ethnic Tigrayan people and the TPLF are headquartered. The government, led by ethnic Oromo Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, has entirely blockaded Tigray with the help of the government of Eritrea, preventing food, medicine, and other basic aid from entering. Abiy, who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for helping end the war with Eritrea, has faced accusations for months of trying to exterminate the ethnic Tigrayan population by starving them out, preventing them from accessing medicine, blocking communication with the outside world, and otherwise asphyxiating the region. In March, Secretary of State Antony Blinken referred to the Tigray blockade as “ethnic cleansing.”
Asked about the rupture in the ceasefire this week – and longtime Ethiopian government accusations that he is aiding the TPLF behind the scenes – Tedros offered his personal experience with the war.
“I will tell you my own story. I have many relatives there. I want to send them money. I cannot send them money. They’re starving, I know. I cannot help them,” Tedros lamented. “I cannot do that because they are completely sealed off. I want to speak to them. It’s a long time since I have spoken to them. I can’t speak to them. I don’t know even who is dead or who is alive.”
Tedros said that, in his estimation, “the war had never stopped” despite the temporary truce.
“For more than 21 months the six million people of Tigray have been under a suffocating siege that has killed people, not only with bullets or bombs but by weaponising banking, fuel, food, electricity and healthcare,” he denounced.
Eritrea’s cooperation in blockading Tigray, he continued, has made the situation far more difficult for United Nations agencies than other conflicts. He noted the example of Syria, where the government of Turkey helped create a humanitarian corridor into the areas most affected by the civil war, making it unnecessary to negotiate with the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad.
“What makes it even very unique, the Tigray situation, is it’s completely sealed off by both Ethiopian and Eritrean governments,” Tedros explained, “So, not only access to food is limited, it’s trickling now, and access to medicine is very limited, our programmes, HIV programme, TB programme, have collapsed.”
“People on chronic follow-up, hypertension, diabetes, they don’t get medicine, so that has also collapsed,” he continued. “And many people that could be saved are dying because more than six million people are completely sealed. What they get is a trickle.”
Tedros rejected accusations that he was particularly invested in the Ethiopian crisis because he is Tigrayan, asserting, “I did it for Yemen. I have traveled there. I did it for Syria. I’m doing it for Ukraine.”
Tedros called for “unfettered access” to Tigray for humanitarian aid agencies.
Ibrahima Socé Fall, a doctor also present at the press conference, noted that the W.H.O. has not been able to send any medicine into Tigray from April 2022 on – essentially beginning with the now-concluded truce.
The Ethiopian civil war began in November 2020 after Abiy’s government accused the TPLF of attacking military compounds in a quest to return to power. TPLF leaders, in turn, claimed the government was using the alleged attack as an excuse to eradicate ethnic Tigrayans in general. In addition to the government’s blockade of Tigray, human rights groups have documented a litany of atrocities committed by both the TPLF and third-party militias, such as the Oromo Liberation Army, against Tigrayans, Oromos, and Amharic people, among other ethnic groups.
“The terrorist group [the TPLF], along with its foreign supporters, has expressed a strong desire to continue fighting,” the Abiy government said in a statement Tuesday. “They have been engaging in acts of harassment in the last six months accompanied by boasting that they will break the siege.”
On Friday, the Addis Standard reported that the government issued a notice to residents of the Tigray region to avoid any areas known to be TPLF military training or stockpiling areas for the foreseeable future.
Reuters reported on Friday that airstrikes began hitting the capital of Tigray, Mekelle, that day.
“Tigrai Television showed images of damaged buildings and what appeared to be wounded people lying on the ground being attended to by medical personnel,” the outlet relayed.
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