Ethiopian military airstrikes on Friday forced a UN humanitarian flight to abandon its landing in the capital of the country’s Tigray region, and a government spokesman said authorities were aware of the inbound flight.
It appeared to be a sharp escalation in intimidation tactics authorities have used against aid workers amid the intensifying, year-long Tigray war.
Further UN flights have been suspended to Mekele, the base of humanitarian operations in Tigray, the World Food Program said.
Photo: AP
The flight with 11 passengers had been cleared by federal authorities, but “received instructions to abort landing by the Mekele airport control tower,” it said, adding that it safely returned to Addis Ababa.
UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said that “the UN had not received any prior warning of the attacks on Mekele and had received the necessary clearances for the flight.”
He said he had “grave concern” for civilians facing airstrikes in Mekele and insufficient humanitarian assistance into Tigray, and alarm at the worsening toll of fighting on civilians in the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions.
“We’ve had flights turned around because of weather,” Gemma Connell, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for southern and eastern Africa, told reporters. “But this is the first time we’ve had a flight turn around, at least to my knowledge, in Ethiopia because of airstrikes on the ground.”
The friction between the government and humanitarian groups is occurring amid the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade, with nearly 500,000 people in Tigray said to be facing famine-like conditions. The government since June has imposed what the UN calls a “de facto humanitarian blockade” on the region of about 6 million people, and reports indicate that people have begun to starve to death.
Ethiopian government spokesman Legesse Tulu said that authorities were aware the UN flight was in the area, but said that the UN and military flights had a “different time and direction.”
It was not yet clear how close the planes came to each other.
“Our air defense units knew the UN plane was scheduled to land & it was due in large measure to their restraint it was not caught in a crossfire,” Tigray People’s Liberation Front spokesman Getachew Reda wrote on Twitter.
He added that it was “not entirely implausible to suspect” that Ethiopian authorities were “setting up the UN plane to be hit by our guns.”
A military spokesman did not respond to questions.
Legesse said the airstrikes targeted a former military training center being used as a “battle network hub” by rival Tigray forces. Residents said they hit a field near Mekele University.
Ethiopia’s government in recent months has accused some humanitarian groups of supporting Tigray forces, and last month it took the extraordinary step of expelling seven UN officials, while accusing them without evidence of falsely inflating the scale of the Tigray crisis.
Authorities have subjected aid workers on UN flights to intrusive searches and removed medical cargo.
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