It is hard to believe it’s happening again, even harder to believe that so few people seem to know or care. A massive famine is unfolding in Tigray in northern Ethiopia.
Five million people are in need of food aid, and perhaps
900,000 are already starving.
In other words, it’s looking horribly reminiscent of the start of the 1984 famine, in which a million people died, most of them in Tigray. Like the last cataclysm, this has nothing to do with “natural causes”. It’s caused by war and its associated crimes. This time, however, the man in charge is a Nobel peace laureate: the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed. A great weight of
evidence suggests that his troops, and those of his Eritrean allies, are using hunger as a weapon of war.