Families forced from their homes inside Ethiopia were living without enough food or shelter in June 2019, Jan Egeland said on Thursday. Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, had been in the southern town of Dilla a day earlier. He told Reuters he saw 3,500 people without food inside an abandoned factory. They were sharing 16 latrines that rains had flooded and left overflowing. "These people feel abandoned and I don't blame them," he said. He also said he met a young man whose hand had been cut off at a market by an attacker hostile to his ethnic group.
The government said 2.3 million citizens were displaced inside the country, 1.7 million of them after fleeing conflict. There was no immediate comment from the government on Egeland’s account of the factory. The Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre had given a higher count the previous month, estimating that 3.2 million Ethiopians had fled conflict and drought by April. Added to about 900,000 refugees, mainly from South Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea, that centre said Ethiopia was hosting the most displaced people in the world. The government had not commented on the difference between the two counts.
Egeland, a former Norwegian minister and United Nations official, said aid agencies and donors were failing the displaced. "The internally displaced people are living totally in subhuman conditions," he told Reuters. The United Nations appeal for Ethiopia that year was 1.31 billion dollars, and he said only a third of it had arrived. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had been in office for more than a year, after his predecessor resigned following protests. His government had released journalists and political prisoners and unbanned parties. The country of about 100 million people was still seeing bursts of ethnic violence, and the families in Dilla were among those waiting for food, shelter, and a safe return.
Sources: Reuters