Millions Starve as Ethiopia Rejects Eritrean Ports
As famine stalks millions of Ethiopians, and aid ships wait forever to
unload at Ethiopia’s port of Djibouti, offers of free use of Eritrea’s
Red Sea ports fall on deaf ears in Addis Ababa.
According to Oxfam between 50% to 90% of Ethiopia suffered all or
major crop failure due to the latest, greatest drought (this is just a
guess because Oxfam isn't allowed access to most of Ethiopia).
Millions upon millions have now exhausted their food stocks and major
starvation has begun.
Desperate for food aid to be unloaded, aid agencies are begging the
Djibouti port authorities to work faster, but the port of Djibouti is
small and creaky and completely unable to keep up with the desperate
need.
Enter Eritrea, home to not one but two ports on the Red Sea, with the
southern and larger of the two, Assab, having been given a major
upgrade by the Emirates this past year.
All backlog of food aid would be cleared up quickly if Ethiopia will
only use the Eritrean ports, an offer repeatedly made in the past
during droughts to no avail.
The question has to be asked, what kind of government sits back and
allows tens if not hundreds of thousands of its own people to die of
starvation because of some political dispute with its neighbor?
Only Ethiopia is allowed to get away with deliberately starving its
own citizens, for there is supposed to be enough food aid in the
pipeline to prevent the worst of the famine and only the shortage of
port facilities in Djibouti is preventing its distribution.
Why isn't the USA and its lickspittles in the EU pressuring the
Ethiopians, who are supposed to be under UN Article 7 Sanctions for
their refusal to accept final and binding peace and border agreements,
and entirely dependent on foreign loans to keep running ($11 billion
in 2015)?
The politics of famine is what its all about as death from starvation
stalks Ethiopia, again.
Thomas C. Mountain is an independent journalist living and reporting
from Eritrea since 2006. He can be reached on Facebook at
thomascmountain, on twitter _at_thomascmountain or thomascmountain at g
mail dot com
Received on Tue Apr 05 2016 - 04:42:56 EDT