War has become a global
obsession in the past eight months, but there is a conflict in Africa right now
that appears not only to have been forgotten by the rest of the world but to be
one which could, without much prompting, become one of the greatest
humanitarian disasters in living memory.
Fighting in the northern
Ethiopian Tigray in a civil war has been ongoing since November 2020 between
the Tigray People’s Liberation Front lead TDF and the government’s Ethiopian
National Defence Forces and has now drawn in the army of neighbouring Eritrea,the EDF. A truce was brokered last March to stop the fighting, but it collapsed
in August.
Renewed conflict in this
unseen war — hidden behind a government siege which has severed communications
in the region and mainly unreported because journalists are largely locked out
— has left 5.2m people urgently needing emergency aid across a territory the
size of Switzerland.
Artillery barrages,
drone strikes, and pitched battles have pulled in neighbouring countries andhave reportedly involved hundreds of thousands of combatants. In recent weeks,
according to UN observers, hundreds of civilians have died and as many as
500,000 people have fled their homes.
The stakes for the
civilians of the region are very high and while the African Union is
desperately trying to organised peace talks — negotiations were supposed to
take place last week only to be cancelled — as each of the warring parties has
been accused of war crimes; of using starvation as a weapon of war, and sexual
slavery to subjugate women.
This is a conflict which
has worsened with every day that passes and the international community now
needs to work together to stop this conflict with a humanitarian nightmare
facing this part of the horn of Africa.
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