Why is the Ethiopian government withholding food for Tigray?

By Ermias Bolomicheal

Abiy Ahmed seems to be politically irredeemable given his use of slow famine as a tool against Tigrayans.

The USAID Adminstrator Samantha Power deplored the aid food that the Ethiopian government is keeping in stores for political reasons. “In Ethiopia, warehouses are filled with food that’s blocked from getting to millions in need. Progress has been made to increase the trickle of aid previously allowed through—but we need a flood to make up for lost time” tweeted Samantha Power.

Ethiopia has the unenviable record of triggering man-made famine to decimate citizens that the state regards as dissidents or sympathisers of opposition fronts. The Ethiopian government has the power to decide the amount of food that goes into Tigray. To misuse this power is to use starvation as a political tool.

That Abiy Ahmed, the Nobel Peace Laureate Prime Minister of Ethiopia, pursues inhumane policies against his fellow citizens is mind-boggling. He invited Eritrean forces to attack a part of Ethiopia to kill, maim and rape Tigrayans.

No country has a right to use it’s sovereignty as a means to deprive its citizen of the right to live. There is a limit to what extent Abiy Ahmed will be able to hide under the banner of sovereignty to execute policies that subject citizens to man-made famine.

The evidence that Abiy Ahmed is waging a war against one ethnicity, Tigrayans, that he is ignoring the extremism of FANO Amhara extremists is mounting.

Abiy Ahmed signed up to a war that Trump administration and Atlantic Council promoted to discredit the progress made through developmental state. The Ethiopian government revived the old image of Ethiopia as the land of man-made famines.

Ermias Bolomicheal