Rights experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council are calling for urgent action to end violence against women and girls caught in the Tigray conflict in northern Ethiopia.
This is coming as the number of people in need of humanitarian food assistance across the region in the last week of November spiked as a direct result of ongoing conflict, according to World Food Programme (WFP). The agency’s spokesperson, Tomson Phiri, told journalists in Geneva that 9.4 million people are living their worst nightmare.
Of the people across northern Ethiopia in need of assistance, more than 80 per cent – 7.8 million – “are behind battle lines”. The largest jump in numbers has occurred in Amhara region with 3.7 million people now in urgent need of humanitarian aid.
Screening data from all three regions in Northern Ethiopia has shown malnutrition rates of between 16 and 28 per cent for children. Even more alarming, up to 50 per cent of pregnant and breastfeeding women screened in Amhara and Tigray were also found to be malnourished.
According to the WFP spokesperson, a convoy loaded with 2,200 metric tons of life-saving food was expected to arrive in Mekele (in Tigray); 35 trucks have arrived so far and more vehicles loaded with food from Kombolcha are being sent into Southern Tigray.
Corridors into Tigray had been closed due to the recent Tigrayan advances into Afar and Amhara, as well as severe disruptions linked to federal government approvals. Phiri pointed out that this has meant that less than a third of the supplies needed have entered the region since mid-July.
He added that one million litres of fuel is also needed to be able to reach the 7.8 million people behind battle lines. While WFP has reached 180,000 people in Tigray in this current round, this amounts to just seven percent of the 2.5 million WFP needs to reach, the spokesperson highlighted.
“A famine has not been declared in Ethiopia but…we are running out of words really to capture exactly the situation that is unfolding before our eyes, but… it is the textbook definition of a humanitarian crisis”, he said.
Earlier in the last week of November, WFP delivered food to over 10,000 people in the Amhara towns of Dessie and Kombolcha. These were the first distributions to happen there since they were taken over by Tigray forces almost a month ago. WFP was only granted full access to its warehouses in the region a week before.
By the end of last month, WFP has reached more than 3.2 million people with emergency food and nutrition assistance across northern Ethiopia, including 875,000 vulnerable mothers and children with nutritionally fortified food.
In Amhara, WFP has reached more than 220,000 people with food and nutrition assistance and is scaling up to reach 650,000 people. In Afar, WFP has distributed food to 124,000 people out of its targeted 534,000.
While Phiri called for urgent action to be taken to help WFP deliver assistance till May 2022, at least $316 million in funding is required for Northern Ethiopia, with an unprecedented $579 million to save and change the lives of 12 million people across the country over the next six months.
Risk of genocide is real
Later, the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, reiterated her grave concerns regarding the deterioration of the situation.For Ms. Nderitu, several threats are “spiralling the country down to a path where the risk of commission of atrocity crimes, including genocide, is real and must be addressed as a matter of utmost urgency.”
She pointed to calls to arms and hate speech, militarization of society, ethnic profiling, denial of humanitarian access and blockage of food to areas under fighting inhabited by specific ethnic communities.
The Special Adviser also called on regional and international actors to intensify their engagement to “prevent falling into this abyss”, concluding that while nothing can restore the lives of those that have been lost, it is not late to prevent more suffering and to put an end to the hostilities through dialogue.
However, in a statement, the rights experts expressed grave concern about the widespread sexual and gender-based violence attributed to Ethiopian, Eritrean, Tigray and Amhara forces, as well as allied militia.
These incidents constitute some of the most egregious violations of human rights and humanitarian law, according to experts.
“They appear to have been used as part of a deliberate strategy to terrorize, degrade and humiliate the victims and the ethnic minority group that they belong to with acquiescence of the State and non-State actors’ parties to the conflict”, they said.
“These brutal acts have devastating physical and psychological impacts on the victims, which are exacerbated by the lack of access to assistance, support and redress for survivors.”
The UN continues to voice alarm over the war in Tigray, which began just over a year ago. Last month, the UN Human Rights High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, noted that the conflict has been marked by ’’extreme brutality’’.
Cases under-reported
The rights experts said although the exact prevalence of gender-based violence is unknown, estimates are shocking.
From November 2020 through June of this year, some 2,204 survivors reported sexual violence to health facilities across the Tigray region.
Furthermore, one of the one-stop centres reported that the majority of victims, or 90 per cent, were underage girls, and estimated that visits have quadrupled since the conflict began.
The experts said these figures are, however, an underestimation of the true extent of gender-based violence being committed. Cases are severely under-reported due to fear, stigma and inability to access health or support centres. “Despite the humanitarian situation, proper access to facilities is vital to ensure adequate care, for instance for women and girls at risk of developing life-threatening infections, or to allow for abortion for women and girls who become pregnant as a result of rape”, they stressed.
Displaced women vulnerable
The experts reported that the violence occurred in both rural and urban areas, in the victims’ homes or in places where they were sheltering. In some cases, women and girls were raped because of their perceived or actual political affiliation, to pressure them to reveal the whereabouts of their male relatives, or as acts of revenge.
“Internally displaced women and girls in Ethiopia, and Eritrean refugee women and girls living in the Tigray region, have been particularly exposed to sexual violence. Eritrean women and girls, specifically, have been seriously affected by the conflict and doubly victimised”, the experts said, adding, “in addition to the grave consequences of sexual violence, most victims have also been harmed in other ways by the conflict including by having close relatives killed.”
The UN experts reminded parties to the conflict of their duty to respect and protect human rights, and to prevent violations in any territory under their control. They also urged the sides to implement recommendations contained in a joint report by the Ethiopian Human Rights Office and its UN counterpart.
Those recommendations include taking immediate measures to protect women and girls from rape and other forms of gender-based violence, providing redress to victims, facilitating immediate access to health care, and ensuring independent and impartial investigation of all incidences of sexual violence.
Role of UN experts
The 14 experts who issued the statement receive their mandates from the UN Human Rights Council, which is based in Geneva. They monitor specific country situations or thematic issues, such as violence against women, discrimination against women and girls, and the rights of internally displaced persons.
The experts are independent of the UN and serve in their individual capacity. As such, they are not UN staff, nor are they paid by the global organisation.
