
Shades of ocher as far as the eye can see. The plots of land and terraced crops where cereals usually grow are reduced to immense fields of dust. The single morning of rain, two months ago, lightly watered the hills of Atsbi (a district in eastern Tigray), revealing fine shoots of wheat in a meadow, before they were roasted under the sun.
In this semi-arid area of Tigray, the last significant ones date back to the fall of 2022, at the time of the last fighting of the civil war. The opposite conflict between 2020 and 2022 the Tigrayan rebels to the Ethiopian federal forces, supported by Eritrea. It would have caused at least 600,000 deaths according to an estimate by the African Union (AU).
His plastic sandals covered in dust from the dry ground that was once a field of teff, a cereal that constitutes the country’s staple food, Tesfaye Hailu, the administrator of the village of Felegweyni, in eastern Tigray, points point out several inhabited farms. The inhabitants fled, abandoning their homes and land. The cattle have been dead for months. The farmers did not want to suffer the same kind, specifies the administrator. “We don’t know where they have gone, we don’t know if they will come back, we don’t know if they are alive”sums up Mr. Hailu, whose field filled with stones is as sad as those of his neighbors.
At least 42 inhabitants of this village of 9,000 souls have already died of hunger since October 2023, says the administrator, notes in hand. “Usually, February is the time of the first harvests, but here we don’t have a grain. The death toll will rise because the next rains won’t come until May or June, if they come.»laments this forty-year-old whose gaze is lost in the arid and deserted horizon.
Atsbi hospital has recorded a 200% increase in cases of malnutrition since November. Tesfaye Hailu stopped counting the number of his neighbors who had gone to beg for food in the main cities of Tigray or exiled to Yemen or Saudi Arabia. Others are still conscripted into the ranks of the Tigray Defense Forces.
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Lishan Hagos, a 48-year-old farmer with sunburned features from the Ethiopian highlands, has not yet left her farm, unlike her six children, who have gone to Mekele, the regional capital, and Wukro, the nearest town. . His stable is deserted. The only cow that occupied it was sold in November to compensate for the lack of harvests. His mother, Azmera, “died there, five months ago, she was visibly losing weight, she no longer had any strength, like me she only ate one meal a day”she says in a hollow voice, staring into space, curled up against the wall of her stable, her shoulders surrounded by a traditional netela (shawl). Exhaustion seems to have got the better of his reserves of tears.
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