Thousands of people have moved back and forth between Gedeo and West Guji in southern Ethiopia over the 15 months since ethnic violence broke out in April 2018, Médecins Sans Frontières said in July 2019.
A June 2018 map of forced displacement in Gedeo and West Guji (European Commission Emergency Response Coordination Centre, Wikimedia Commons, public domain) [file photo]
The camps where many of them stayed have been closed, but many people cannot go home and remain displaced, either in host communities or in their areas of origin, MSF said. Most survive in difficult conditions with little aid, struggling to protect their children from malnutrition and disease. At the peak of the crisis as many as one million people were displaced, according to official figures.
Desalegn, his wife and their five children have lived in about a dozen places since their home in West Guji, in Oromia, was burned down. They stayed with a neighbour, then with relatives, then at a site for displaced people, a ruined building and a school, before leaving for Gedeo in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region, where his family has its roots. In August 2018 he went back to his farm in Kercha woreda and built a shelter in the ruins. It too was burned. The family now rents a small wooden hut in Banko Gotiti kebele for 100 birr (about $3.40) a month. “We are not getting any [humanitarian] assistance these days,” he said. “We don’t have enough food to go around.”
Malnutrition has stayed high since the crisis began. Between July and December 2018 MSF treated more than 6,000 malnourished children. When its teams returned to Gedeo in April 2019, rates of severe acute malnutrition among children under five and pregnant and breastfeeding women were well above the emergency threshold. In the early weeks, at least one child a week arrived dead at the health facilities MSF supports in Gotiti and Gedeb. Since April 2019 MSF has enrolled about 2,340 children in outpatient feeding programmes and treated 560 for severe acute malnutrition with complications.
In May 2019 the authorities demolished the camps ahead of a third plan to return people to their areas of origin. Many did go back, but the health of both returnees and those who stayed in Gedeo remains at risk. “Since the camps were dismantled, there hasn’t been a big change in the medical conditions of the patients we see in Gedeo,” said Caroline Harvey, an MSF medical team leader. Her teams mainly treat diarrhoea and respiratory infections, with some meningitis and many skin diseases linked to poor living conditions.
Simein, 26, from Kercha woreda, cares for her three children and the two children of her sister, who died some months earlier. When the government announced the return plan in May, her family went back and began building a shelter on their land with blankets and plastic sheeting from the Guji authorities. Promised food and other help never came. After threats, and after their shelter was destroyed, they were back in Gedeo within two weeks. “I feel worried about how to bring them up as I have no sources of assistance,” she said.
Some returns have held. Bekele, his three wives and 15 children fled Gedeo for Guji and came home in May 2019 to find their house still standing. “We don’t have a problem anymore with the Gedeos,” he said. “Now I have planted corn again and I am waiting for the new crop to grow.”
On 9 July 2019 the United Nations Development Programme launched a four-year, $20 million project to help about 50,000 displaced people in Gedeo and West Guji rebuild, beginning with about 5,000 households in the first year, according to a report carried by ReliefWeb. UNDP’s resident representative, Turhan Saleh, said it would focus on food security, housing, farm inputs and infrastructure, with Japan contributing $1 million and Denmark $1.5 million. Mekonnen Lengissa, deputy commissioner of the National Disaster Risk Management Commission, said priority would go to building houses and providing agricultural inputs.