– The winner of the Peace Prize must enter a ceasefire – VG

From the Um Rakuba camp in Sudan, about 70 km from the border with Ethiopia, Jan Egeland, general secretary of the Norwegian Refugee Council, calls VG. He has spent the day among the refugees in the camp and concludes:

– These are miserable conditions. Access to food has improved, but it is difficult to get enough safe water for the refugees and sanitation conditions are very poor. There are only two health posts for 10,000 people, Egeland says.

Last week, VG spoke with representatives from Norwegian Church Aid, who discussed another camp, where many children had become estranged from their parents.

Egeland also talks about boys being orphaned, but there is something else that surpasses him in the field he visited: the sheer number of young men.

– What is very special compared to most refugee camps is that there are not a majority of women and children fleeing, but on the other hand there are many young men, explains Egeland.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) confirmed this week that the number of Ethiopian refugees in the poor neighboring country of Sudan has exceeded 40,000, and the UN has also noted that many of them are young men.

The fact that so many young people have fled is portrayed by certain Ethiopian sources as a sign that the refugees are indeed affiliated with the rebels of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which has been at war with the government army since the beginning. of November.

Egeland has a completely different impression of who young people are:

– The people I have met are young civilians who have nothing to do with the war. They have fled in haste for their lives. The reason is that they were seen as potential recruits for TPLF as they are ethnic Tigers, Egeland explains.

– Those who fight for the rebels in the TPLF are still inside Ethiopia. But those who have been forced to flee are ordinary civilians who often lived in other regions, where they were a minority, and who were suddenly persecuted during the night when the war broke out, he explains.

Then corpses

VG gets to speak on the phone with one of the refugees in the camp, Younas, 26, (VG does not use his last name, for the sake of his family who is still in Ethiopia). Younas says he saw many people killed before leaving Ethiopia when crossing the border into Sudan three weeks ago.

– We have been well received here in the camp. But the escape was very hard, because I lost contact with relatives and relatives, and I do not know where they are and if they survived or not, the 26-year-old tells VG.

– Who is to blame for exiling you, the government army or the rebels?

– We fled from acts of war. I am a student and I am not involved in politics. But it was artillery fire that took place around our house, there was war and I saw many corpses along the escape route. It’s sad and it hurts, says the refugee, who adds that he crossed the border illegally.

He says that he is from the area between Tigray and the neighboring region of Amhara, and that he himself is from the Tigray people.

Ask for negotiations

An ethnic conflict between the Tigray and Amhara peoples has been going on for some time, and on November 9, at least 600 people, many of them ethnic Amhara, were killed in a massacre in the city of Mai Kadra.

In that area, the Tigray people have been the majority, and the Amharas the minority. The day after the massacres, TPLF was expelled from the city. Amnesty International has not been able to determine who was behind the outrage, but witnesses believe it was the rebels, and not the government army, who were responsible for the brutal killings.

– It is not clear who has done what inside Ethiopia, but it is certain that there is deadly violence and that this is what people flee from, says Jan Egeland.

– what do you think about that The Prime Minister of Ethiopia received the Peace Prize last year?

– I urge the Nobel Committee to make a new statement. I urge the winner of the Peace Prize to enter a ceasefire and come to the negotiating table. The other party should do the same. Ethiopia must avoid a new ethnic conflict, says Egeland.

The UN gets access

Egeland adds that both parties to the conflict must give international aid organizations access to the closed region of Tigray. That wish may come true, because while Egeland was in the field, NTB received a message that the UN and Ethiopia had agreed to an agreement that gives the UN access to parts of the war-torn region.

The UN has been praying for weeks for humanitarian access to the region, as reports have emerged of a growing shortage of food, medicine and other supplies. At the same time, trucks with supplies were blocked on the border with Tigray.

But Egeland’s hopes for real negotiations appear to be at stake. So far, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has rejected all international interference. This week, he warned the other party, saying the government army knows where the TPLF leaders are fleeing:

– I want you to listen to this: last night, around midnight, we saw them. We did not attack them at night, because they had with them their wives, children and soldiers who had been captured, said the Prime Minister, who was aware that next time they will not be held.

– We will win

Debretsion Gebremichael, leader of the TPLF, says in a telephone interview with the AP news agency that the TPLF will continue the war and claims that Ethiopian government forces are committing genocide against the people of Tigray. He asks the Prime Minister to “end the madness”.

It claims that the TPLF will continue the war until the “invasion forces” are out of the region. Gebremichael says the TPLF still has missiles, and that these will be used, but will not be used to attack Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa.

– We will surely win, says Gebremichael.

FACTS: THE WAR IN ETHIOPIA

• The TPLF came to power in Ethiopia in 1991 after a 17-year civil war and took full control of the country’s military and intelligence forces.
• The group had this control until Abiy Ahmed Ali became prime minister in 2018.
• Since then, TPLF leaders have ruled Tigray as an autonomous region, and in September they defied Prime Minister Abiy’s ban on holding local elections.
• In early November, TPLF soldiers seized control of the large military base of government forces on the outskirts of the regional capital, Mekele. There they obtained large quantities of weapons, including rockets and missiles.
• The attack was the icing on the cake for the prime minister, who on November 4 called on government forces to intervene and take control of Tigray.
• The Prime Minister wants to put an end to the fact that various regions have great autonomy and will take power in the capital Addis Ababa.
• A brutal border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea claimed some 300,000 lives between 1998 and 2000, and the TPLF has had Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki high on its enemy list for years.
• Prime Minister Abiy negotiated peace with Eritrea, and the neighboring country has now assisted the government army during the offensive in Tigray.
• It is feared that the TPLF will seek refuge in the inhospitable mountainous areas in the east of the region and wage an exhausting guerrilla war from there.

Sources: NTB / AP / AFP