Pic: Mekelle University Aider Referal Hospital staff, including medical doctors collecting wheat and oil as salary after three months,

To understand the depth of the inhumane and shortsighted siege and blockade in Tigray, meet medical staff of one of the finest hospitals of this cursed country, Aider Referal Hospital, queuing for their first salary in three months:
Just a sack of wheat and edible oil! Ones in just three months!

Three months since thier eye saw salary, their nose smelled money in thier own bank accounts, and thier hands touched thier own money in the “Ethiopian” banks.
A senior director of the hospital told me, medical professionals including general practitioners are coming to save lives, while they are terribly starved themselves. Some keep roasted weat (ቆሎ) in thier pockets fearing collapse while working.

Workers of the hospital are allowed to eat lunch prepared in the hospital for patients now. While eating thier lunches, some feel, the guilt of eating while leaving thier family starved back home.
Mind you, people are starving with money in thier accounts, with relatives who can remit them, with friends and families who would have otherwise lend them, had it not been for the inhumane blockade…
If you ask the NGO staffs wandering the town without having much to do, due to shortage of resources, they will unanimously tell you how “the resilience of Tigrayans” is never seen in thier humanitarian work experience worldwide.
It’s sad that, we have become the guinea-pig of hardship and suffering. Stunningly, the acts of genocidal barbarism increases the suffering yet hardens the spirit of resistance.

It all breaks my heart , yet amazes me to see our people hopeful no matter what. Thousands on the verge of perishing by starvation, the people is yet emphatic and hardened as rock…
Say, whenever a taxi overloads or a shop owner asks for unfair cost, it’s strikingly common to here people say “ፅባሕ ንዝወግሕስ…”

Orderly and content, with tangible and almost divine hope.
Rabbi Sacks says “One of the advantages of being a people with four thousand years of history is that wherever Jews find themselves, they have been here before”

During the 1984 famine, the dergue was trying to kill the fish by draining the pond (resettlement of peasants and bombarding villages) and following a pity political fall out with TPLF, EPLF (shabiya) denied safe passage to Relief Society of Tigray through Eritrean territory to Kessala, Sudan, an act described by Gebru Tareka as inhumane and diplomatically shortsighted. The front responded emphatically by mobilizing thousands of peasants to construct, using no more than axes, hoes, and their bare hands, an alternate road to Gedarif….
The genocidal barbarians entrenched in the state and religions (the likes of Daniel Kisret) are pursuing a lost battle to pile up savagery in their resume.

Abreham Asefa

The Prime News