The parents of
thousands of Ethiopian students stranded in the war-ravaged northern region of
Tigray on Friday appealed for help to evacuate them after the main university
warned it could not feed them for much longer amid food and cash shortages.
Mekelle University, which gets its budget from
the federal government, posted a notice on its Facebook page on Thursday saying
its bank accounts have been blocked and the federal government has not sent its
funds for this year.
It said it was running out of money to feed
students and that from July 27 it would stop taking responsibility for them.
The ministry of higher education did not
respond to Reuters requests for comment on the situation at the university.
"We are asking the U.N. to bring our
children from Tigray," Berhanu Tegeneh, a representative of a parents'
committee, told Reuters as hundreds of parents flocked to the U.N. office in
Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa to deliver their request.
Berhanu, from Addis Ababa, said he has been
unable to speak to his daughter, a fourth-year student at Mekelle University,
since phone lines went down on June 29, the day after Tigrayan forces retook
the regional capital Mekelle.
A spokesperson for the U.N.'s Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) did not immediately respond to a
request for comment on the parents' demands.
The parents' committee said students were
stranded at four universities in Tigray, including Mekelle, after the conflict
severed communications and transport links. Banks are no longer functioning and
more than 90 percent of Tigrayans need food aid, according to OCHA. Food
convoys have been suspended since Sunday, when trucks came under gunfire.
War erupted in Tigray in November between the Ethiopian military and the
region's ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF). Three weeks
later, the government declared victory when it captured Mekelle, but the TPLF
kept fighting.
At the end of June, the TPLF seized back
control of Mekelle and most of Tigray after government soldiers withdrew.
In its notice, Mekelle University said it had
bussed about 5,000 students to the neighbouring state of Afar on July 18, but
that education officials expected to receive them never showed up. The buses
returned to Mekelle, according to the university.
Reuters could not independently verify that
account. Officials from Afar did not respond to requests for comment.
The conflict spilled out of Tigray into Afar
this week, threatening a key road linking the Ethiopian capital to the port of
Djibouti.
By Reuters
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