A medical system that's been decimatedįor years, the medical system in Tigray was a capable network of urban and rural facilities servicing nearly 7 million people. "The scale of human suffering really has few parallels," says Thomas McHale, a deputy director with PHR. report has faulted all sides for what it believes to be "violations amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity," including extrajudicial killings, rape, sexual violence and starvation of civilians. Goats and Soda Ethiopia set a world record for displacements in a single year: 5.1 million in 2021Ī September U.N. "This conflict has truly decimated the health system," says Lindsey Green, a senior program officer who researches sexual violence and other human rights violations at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). (Per the Ethiopian custom, we are using first names for subsequent references.) "You cannot do anything for them and you tell them to pray," adds Fasika, who was dean of Mekele University's medical school before the war. "Seeing the hopelessness in their eyes," he says, "and being the one to tell them that you cannot help them, that they are going to die soon, as a firsthand witness as a physician is very heartbreaking." Fasika Amdeslasie, a surgeon at Tigray's Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, says, "Our patients are not getting basic medicines like antibiotics, IV fluids, oxygen." Without these kinds of supplies, he's watched patients die. With the country's northern Tigray region under blockade and cut off from most communications, a disastrous humanitarian crisis has been unfolding in a war that has become the world's unseen war.ĭr. One of the greatest casualties of the brutal civil war in Ethiopia has been its health care. Elsewhere, "they are stopped because there is no supply, there is no electricity, and there is no fuel," says one Tigray doctor. It's the only place in Tigray currently conducting surgery. An injured Tigray People's Liberation Front fighter who was shot in the cheek recovers after surgery at the Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital in Mekele, the capital of Ethiopia's Tigray region.
0 kommentar(er)
