Le Monde, leading French language newspaper says “Ethiopia & Eritrea destroyed and looted Tigray’s infrastructure that takes the region 40 years back”
“Tigray went back forty years”: how the war in Ethiopia brought the region to its knees
The federal army and its Eritrean ally have multiplied the destruction and looting to undermine the economy of the province, which only survives thanks to food aid and smuggling.
t is a symbol of the ravages of civil war on Tigray's economy. In the past, the Addis Pharmaceutical Factory, nestled in the arid mountains of the northern province, produced most of the drugs for the Ethiopian market . Located in Adigrat, about thirty kilometers from the Eritrean border, the imposing factory employed nearly a thousand workers. But on December 19, 2020, just one month after the outbreak of hostilities between the Ethiopian authorities and the Tigrayan rebels, the former national flagship went up in smoke.
"They destroyed it in such a way that everything was unusable, irreparable" , accuses Hayelom Kebede , the former director of the Ayder hospital in Makalé, the provincial capital, who points to the responsibility of the Eritrean army, an ally of the first Ethiopian Minister, Abiy Ahmed: “They stole the most important machines and voluntarily broke what they could not take. Sixteen employees seeking to defend their factory were massacred by Asmara soldiers.
Dozens of other industrial units suffered the same fate during the conflict: the Semayata Dimensional Stones Factory granite factory in Wukro, the large textile company Almeda in Adoua, the Mesfin Industrial Engineering car factory in Makalé ... is a way to bring Tigray to its knees , ”laments Hayelom Kebede.
https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/ ... _3212.html