The United States (US) on Wednesday announced more than $181 million in new humanitarian assistance to help people affected by the crisis in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. The announcement comes after a United Nations (UN) report stated that over 350,000 people in Tigray are facing famine.
According to a statement released by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), administrator Samantha Power held a “series of high-level meetings on the humanitarian catastrophe in Tigray” with diplomats, aid workers, and US government officials “for urgent discussions on fighting famine and ending ongoing atrocities, including widespread and systematic sexual violence.”
The statement mentioned that the aid to Ethiopia was meant to ensure that efforts are scaled up to prevent the region from a major humanitarian catastrophe. It noted that “more people facing famine conditions in Tigray than anywhere else in the world [and] some 5.2 million are in desperate need of food assistance.”
The statement also blames the Ethiopian government, Eritrean forces, and Amhara militant groups for “blocking critically-needed relief from reaching people.” It underscored that the “conflict requires a political solution and the will of Ethiopian leaders to stop the indiscriminate violence that is killing innocent Ethiopians,” and urged the government to act immediately to prevent the crisis from worsening.
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Following the US announcement, the UN released a report on Thursday warning that more than 350,000 people are facing starvation, with over two million at serious risk. The report notes that the movement of aid in Tigray is restricted, which has led to several bottlenecks in delivering assistance to the region.
UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric on Wednesday said that there were reports of aid being blocked and incidents involving the assault and detention of humanitarian workers in Tigray. Dujarric also mentioned several instances where humanitarian supplies were looted by parties to the conflict.
The UN report came as the US and the European Union called on the UN Security Council to hold an emergency meeting on the Ethiopian crisis. On Thursday, during a US-EU meeting on Tigray, US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the situation in Tigray was a “moment of truth for the international community” and called it “unacceptable.”
Greenfield called the Ethiopian crisis a “man-made humanitarian emergency,” saying that thousands “have been killed, injured, or horrifically abused” during the civil war. In this regard, she asked “donors to rapidly and collectively support the UN scale-up […] to meet basic needs, including food and nutrition, health care, shelter, protection, and clean water.”
Since November, violent clashes between government forces and the TPLF have killed thousands, and displaced even more, resulting in the turmoil spilling over Ethiopia’s borders into Eritrea and Sudan. Ethiopian and Eritrean forces have also been accused of committing widespread atrocities against civilians, including massacres and using rape as a weapon of war.