Famine in Ethiopia as the Tigray Conflict Worsens

On June 16th, the UN’s top humanitarian official Mark Lowcock told members of the security council that there is famine in the Ethiopian region of Tigray. Some 350,000 people in Tigray are living in famine conditions with millions more at risk. “We are at a tipping point” Lowcock said.

So far, the urgent appeals from the humanitarian community have not been met with commensurate action by the key players in Tigray, including the Ethiopian government. Since November 2020, the federal government of Ethiopia, backed by troops in neighboring Eritrea, have fought a war against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, the TPLF. The TPLF is the dominant political force in Tigray region, but for decades, the TPLF was the dominant political party in the federal government as well.

That was until Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018 and effectively sidelined the TPLF. As my guest today Zecharias Zelalem explains, unresolved conflict between the TPLF and the federal government is what lead to the outbreak of civil war.

Zecharias Zelalem is a freelance journalist and contributor to Al Jazeera and The Telegraph, among other outlets. We kick off with a discussion about the circumstances that lead to the outbreak of war in November 2020. This includes the delaying of national elections last summer, ostensibly due to COVID. Those delayed elections are now scheduled for June 21, just a few days from now. We discuss the implications of the elections for the trajectory of conflict in Ethiopia.

By all accounts, the situation in Tigray is extremely grim and about to get much worse. This conversation does a good job of examining how we go to this point.

Source: UN DISPATCH