UN Braces for 200,000 Refugees as Ethiopia War Rages

Date: 20 November 2020 - 19:47

News ID: ۸۵۰۲۸

GENEVA (Reuters) – UN agencies are planning for the possible arrival of 200,000 refugees in Sudan fleeing violence in Ethiopia over a six-month period, a U.N. refugee agency official said on Friday.
"Together with all the agencies we have built a response plan for about 20,000 people and currently we are at about 31,000 so it has already surpassed that figure,” Axel Bisschop told a Geneva briefing. "The new planning figure is around 200,000.”
Forces from Ethiopia’s rebel Tigray region fired rockets on Friday at the distant capital of the neighboring Amhara region, Amhara authorities said, raising worries the conflict could spill into a wider war.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have been killed and tens of thousands of refugees have fled from two weeks of fighting in Tigray, raising questions of whether Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed can hold his ethnically diverse nation together.
"The illegal TPLF group have launched a rocket attack around 1:40 a.m. in Bahir Dar,” the Amhara government’s communications office said on its Facebook page, referring to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. It said the rockets caused no damage.
Bahir Dar, the lakeside Amhara regional capital, is located hundreds of miles from the fighting in Tigray. Tigrayan refugees have told Reuters the Amhara militia is fighting on the government side, and the two regions have a border dispute.
A local journalist and another resident in Bahir Dar both told Reuters they had heard two explosions and had been told by people in the area that at least one of the missiles landed near the airport.
Ethiopia, a federation of 10 ethnic regions, was dominated for decades by Tigrayans in a TPLF-led ruling coalition, until Abiy, who is of Amhara and Oromo descent, took power two years ago. He says he aims to share authority more fairly in the country; the TPLF accuses him of pursuing a vendetta against former officials and restricting regional rights.
The conflict erupted two weeks ago after what the government called a TPLF attack on army forces stationed in the region.
A week ago, Tigray forces fired rockets at two airports in Amhara. They have also fired at rockets into the neighboring nation of Eritrea, which has a long-running enmity with the TPLF leadership and made peace with Ethiopia in 2018, earning Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize.
Reports of ethnically motivated killings have emerged during the conflict. Rights group Amnesty International documented a mass killing of civilians, many of whom appeared to be Amhara, by what it says were Tigrayan forces on Nov. 9-10, which the Tigray authorities denied. Refugees fleeing the conflict into Sudan have said they were targeted for being Tigrayan.
Tigray forces accused the government of bombing a university in the Tigray capital of Mekelle on Thursday.