On July 1, Arte broadcast an exceptional report entitled Ethiopia: Tigray Humanitarian Crisis. This is the first documentary made in over a year by independent journalists in Tigray. It says and clearly demonstrates that this famine is the product of a war where the goal of Tigray's opponents is annihilation. Unable to defeat the region militarily, they have laid siege to it, cutting Tigray off from the world in order to erase it from public consciousness, in Ethiopia as elsewhere. And this situation has continued for a year. The report shows the result: famine, disease and death. The victims who testify are without hope. The doctors and people in charge of helping the poorest people, the first to be affected by the famine, express a terrible feeling of powerlessness and abandonment by the international community.
The documentary provides a stark rebuttal of the official position of the Ethiopian government, which is trying to cover up this disaster by maintaining a ban on access to the region for journalists and other observers. The government claims there has been a return to normalcy as evidenced by the partial lifting of the blockade on Tigray and efforts at "national dialogue." Most Western diplomats, including those from France, are anxious to put an end to this war, which has tarnished the image of a "reformist" and "liberal" Ethiopian prime minister – highly praised only four years ago – and accept these gestures as signs of progress.
However, the siege has only been marginally eased for the people of the region's capital, Mekele, as fuel shortages have prevented aid from being transported to the countryside. In their most optimistic projections for the next few months, UN agencies hope to deliver aid to only one-third of the needy Tigrayan population. There has been no internet, telephone, banking services, or even fertilizer and medicine in Tigray for more than a year: the consequences of this blockade are disastrous in the short and long term. The pills needed to decontaminate water are still on the list of products banned from entry.
Subjugating a part of the population
This documentary is an important milestone in the efforts to document and denounce the violence of this conflict, which to date have been in vain. It is evidence that cannot be erased. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released a report on April 6 with alarming findings on the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Tigrayans in the western region. On June 9, Voice of America showed efforts by various government organizations to cover up the evidence in the same region occupied by government forces and their allies.
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