Ethiopia ‘s Tigray is under a “systematic” blockade: WHO head News

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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also said that thousands of tigers across the country were being profiled and arrested.
The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) said Ethiopia’s “conflict-ridden” Tigray region is in a “systematic blockade” and warned that people were starving to death for lack of medicine.
“People are dying from a lack of supplies,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, from the region in conflict in northern Ethiopia, told reporters in Geneva on Friday.
The UN health agency, Tedros said, “cannot send supplies and medicines to Tigray because it is under blockade, and because the blockade is systematic.” The WHO leader did not say who he thought would stop helping Tigray, where the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) is fighting a year-long war with Ethiopian government forces.
Shortly after the conflict erupted, the Ethiopian army chief accused Tedrosi of backing the Tigray rebels. He denied the allegation. The Director-General of the WHO, who was the Ethiopian Minister of Health at the time when the TPLF dominated national politics, has repeatedly said that he does not support the war.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has refused to block aid to the region and said infrastructure is being rebuilt. The UN has repeatedly called on the government to include aid in the north, saying the shortage is “man-made”.
No aid has reached the region by road since Oct. 18, and 364 trucks are stranded in the capital Afar “awaiting permission from authorities to move forward,” the UN said in a weekly report on the humanitarian situation on Thursday.
Support from the WHO and other aid agencies in the region has become “almost nothing,” Tedros said. “So no medicine. People are dying. No food. People are starving. No telecommunications. They are isolated from the world. No fuel. No money, ”he added.
The WHO chief also lamented how tigers across the country were “massively profiled and arrested, by the thousands.”
“This is remarkable and open,” he said.
The government last week announced a six-month emergency across the nation amid growing concern that Tigray fighters and allies may be advancing in Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) rebels in the capital. The move sparked a new wave of mass arrests, which further hampered the response to aid.
Lawyers say there has been an increase in arbitrary arrests of Tiger ethnic groups since then, and the new measures allow authorities to protect “terrorist groups” without an arrest warrant for anyone suspected. Law enforcement officials describe these arrests as part of legitimate operations against the TPLF, which the government has called a “terrorist” group.
The Ethiopian government has refused to target tigers according to their ethnicity. “There are no systematic arrests … because of your profile,” State Foreign Minister Redwan Hussein told Al Jazeera on Wednesday.
“From the state of emergency that the government has really imposed, people are vigilant in the face of attacks that citizens may have in their neighborhoods and waiting for each other. So if people see something unusual they can report it to the police,” he said.
Around 22 UN workers have been arrested in raids by ethnic rights groups, and the UN has also sounded the alarm. 72 drivers Contracted by the World Food Program arrested for dinner.
The government has ruled the arrests legitimate.
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