Day: August 26, 2021

More than 210 people were killed over several days of ethnic violence in Ethiopia’s tense Oromia region last week, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said Thursday.

The state-affiliated but independent commission said witnesses described gunmen affiliated with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), a rebel group, arriving on August 18 after security forces withdrew from Gida-Kirimu in the western region.

“The area’s residents and others have told the commission more than 150 people were killed by the gunmen,” the human rights body said.

The attack forced women and children to flee to neighboring areas, and sparked a wave of revenge killings.

“In subsequent days, some residents carried out ethnic based reprisal attacks, killing more than 60 people” and triggering a further exodus of civilians fleeing the violence, the commission said.

The panel called for “immediate action” to prevent the instability from spreading further and an investigation into why security forces withdrew from the troubled area.

In a statement, the OLA denied responsibility for the attacks.

The OLA was designated a terrorist organization by lawmakers in May alongside the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), whose rebel forces have been fighting in Ethiopia’s north since November.

The government has accused the OLA of massacring civilians in Oromia, the country’s largest region, and in Amhara, the second largest.

Clashes involving the two ethnic groups killed more than 300 people over several days in March, federal officials said.

The militants have denied allegations of spearheading the grisly massacres.

Believed to number in the low thousands, the OLA broke off from the Oromo Liberation Front, an opposition party that spent years in exile, but was allowed to return to Ethiopia after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018.

Earlier this month, the OLA and the TPLF announced they had reached an agreement to fight together against Abiy’s forces and his allies.

A spokesman for the OLA said the two groups mutually agreed that Abiy’s “dictatorship” must be removed and that they were sharing intelligence and coordinating on strategy.

The government denounced the pact as a “destructive alliance” between two groups seeking to destabilize the country.

Northern Ethiopia has been wracked by conflict since November when Abiy, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, sent troops into Tigray to topple the TPLF.

He said the move came in response to TPLF attacks on federal army camps and victory would be swift.

But nine months later, the conflict has spread into the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara, and drawn in forces from across Ethiopia.

Source: Voice of America

African countries have committed to ending all forms of polio after cases of vaccine-derived polio increased last year, partly because of disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, Africa had been declared free of the wild poliovirus, after four years without a single case. But a variant has since returned in communities where not enough children have received the vaccine against it.

Addressing a session of the World Health Organization’s regional committee for Africa, the director of Uganda’s Health Ministry, Henry Mwebesa, said his country would carry out a national campaign to vaccinate children against polio before the end of the year.

“The challenges we anticipate is vaccine hesitancy, which has been common even with the COVID vaccines, and we expect to continue during this period. But we will try our best to mobilize the whole country, cultural leaders, the political leadership and professional associations to assist us to mobilize the communities to address the challenge, the hesitance, to make sure that all our children below five years have received this novel OPV,” Mwebesa said.

The novel Oral Polio Vaccine is key to stopping polio outbreaks.

Last year, Africa was declared free of wild poliovirus.

In the last three years, however, 23 African states have experienced outbreaks of vaccine-derived poliovirus 2. That’s a strain of weakened poliovirus that was included in the oral virus but mutated over time and now behaves like the wild or naturally occurring virus.

WHO regional director Matshidiso Moeti said the continent needs to do more to eradicate that form of the poliovirus.

“Our shared objective is to stop all polioviruses by 2023 and to integrate a polio infrastructure to strengthen border disease surveillance and outbreak response systems, as well as immunization policies,” Moeti said.

Ethiopia has recorded seven cases of poliovirus type 2 in 2021. The country’s health minister, Lia Tadesse, says her government is trying to address the current outbreaks.

“We all agree that the quality of any campaign is as good as our preparedness. We follow our preparedness to the national foundation mechanisms using electronic data tools and self-assessment at the different levels up to the district and then validate those assessments,” Tadesse said.

More than 100 million African children have been vaccinated against the poliovirus since July 2020. But many others missed the vaccinations due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Source: Voice of America