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Ethiopia’s civil war could fuel a new refugee drama in the EU, amid “out of control” violence, the Finnish Foreign Minister warned.
“We are seeing the beginning of a possible major refugee crisis in the world,” Pekka Haavisto told reporters in Brussels on Tuesday (February 22), according to the AFP news agency.
“If you do not influence now, circumstances will build for more and more refugees to arrive [toward Europe]”he added.
Haavisto spoke after visiting the Um Rakuba refugee camp in Sudan, near the Ethiopian border, as well as Addis Ababa between February 7 and 11 in his role as the EU’s special envoy.
But he was not allowed to go to the epicenter of the conflict, in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
Sudan was struggling to cope with the 60,000 Ethiopians who had already fled the conflict, Haavisto said.
“They have reached a situation that is out of control from a military and human rights point of view, and from a humanitarian point of view,” he said.
“This operation has lasted more than three months and we do not see an end,” he added, referring to the Ethiopian government’s military operation against the Tigray People’s Liberation Force (TPLF), a local force.
Haavisto called on Ethiopia to allow aid workers and monitors to go to Tigray, amid reports of massacres of civilians and sexual violence, including by Eritrean forces fighting on the Ethiopian side against the TPLF.
But Ethiopia kept him in the dark, Haavisto said.
“The issue of the Eritrean troops is extremely sensitive, so we did not get a clear answer on the whereabouts or the size of the Eritrean troops,” he said.
The Ethiopian government itself probably did not know what was happening, he added.
“My image was that even the government itself does not have a clear image, particularly [in] areas controlled by Eritreans … This is the problem: that the image is missing, even in Addis Ababa, of what has happened, “Haavisto said on Tuesday.
“In the public domain [in Ethiopia], there is still some kind of denial of the magnitude of the problems, “he said.
“When you’re in the middle of a crisis, people often say that things can’t get worse. But sadly, they can get even worse,” Haavisto said.
Tigray is home to 6 million people and the UN estimates that 3 million of them now lack reliable access to water, food and medical care.
But Ethiopia as a whole is a tapestry of 110 million people from different ethnic groups, and the EU fears the country will “unravel” if the civil war continues, according to an internal analysis last year.
And things got worse on Tuesday when 7,000 people also fled the Metekel region in western Ethiopia to Sudan due to clashes between Ethiopian ethnic groups Amhara and Gumuz.
The Metekel conflict was unrelated to Tigray, but broke out shortly after, highlighting the potential for further instability.
“The [Metekel] The situation has escalated rapidly in the last three months, “Babar Baloch, a spokesman for UNHCR, a UN refugee agency, said in Geneva on Tuesday.
“The stories that the refugees bring, they are fleeing attacks from their opponents,” he said, amid reports of massacre of civilians, including people burned alive.
Ethiopia used to be a stabilizing force in the Horn of Africa.
But more than 50 soldiers were also killed in a border clash between Sudan and Ethiopia two weeks ago, showing the risk of a wider collapse.
Rapid intervention
Meanwhile, the number of refugees arriving in Europe has steadily declined since 2015, when more than 1 million people arrived.
Some 7,679 people have arrived by sea in Italy, Greece, Spain, Cyprus and Malta so far this year, according to UNHCR.
That compared to 95,301 in 2020 and 123,663 in 2019.
But Syria’s civil war has also created millions of refugees in Turkey, who are being held from Europe under a fragile EU-Turkey deal.
Haavisto briefed the UN Secretary General, the EU foreign ministers, the EU aid commissioner Jutta Urpilainen and the crisis management commissioner Janez Lenarčič, as well as the media at the last two days.
“Implications for general stability in the Horn [of Africa] remain … cause for concern, “Urpilainen said Tuesday.
“Finland has always considered it important to intervene in a crisis at an early stage,” Haavisto also told the UN chief, António Guterres, on Monday.
The EU institutions have little influence over Addis Ababa, except to freeze budget aid to the government.
They already withheld 88 million euros last year and Urpilainen said that, last week, another 100 million euros to be paid this year were in doubt.
But individual member states are adding their weight.
Germany pledged 353 million euros in aid to Ethiopia before the Tigray war broke out last year.
And that would be paid on condition of “[launching] a political process to resolve the Tigray conflict and the holding of credible parliamentary elections “in June, a spokesman for Germany’s Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development told the Deutsche Welle news agency on Tuesday.
