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sarcasm
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Joined: 23 Feb 2013, 20:08

The World Bank should not fund Ethiopia’s war in Tigray (Financial Times)

Post by sarcasm » 13 Apr 2021, 08:06

This month, Ethiopia, a low-income country facing economic difficulties, is making its case for a financial bailout at the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF.

It is also conducting a war of starvation in the northern Tigray region. Week by week soldiers are destroying everything essential to sustain life — food and farms, clinics and hospitals, water supplies.

How should the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development treat a government engaged in widespread and systematic destruction and impoverishment, not to mention killing and rape? Bank staff don’t like to make political judgments, but in this case the directors — representing the shareholders including the US and UK — cannot shirk their obligation to acknowledge the political realities in Ethiopia.

Despite an information blackout, evidence of mass atrocities is coming to light. A Belgian university group has documented more than 150 massacres. Health workers are treating hundreds of victims of rape. The aid group Médecins Sans Frontières says that 70 per cent of health facilities have been ransacked and vandalised. The US State Department reports that militia from the Amhara region have ethnically cleansed the western part of Tigray. The huge army of neighbouring Eritrea has rampaged through the region — invited in by Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed.

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