Thank you for that wonderful question.
I think it's important to recognize that this is a siege that's an outcome of policy; this is strategy. For example, we have famine in Ethiopia now because Tigrayans cannot access their bank accounts. You have people who have a lot of money in their bank accounts but they can't access it, so they're starving to death.
This isn't a technical problem, and there isn't a technical solution to it. This is a deliberate, calculated strategy to starve people to death, so we have to look at the broader political level.
To your earlier question, there is a great deal that the international community can do. The point is that the international community has really done nothing—practically nothing. We're not even condemning these atrocities in strong terms. We're basically not even talking about it. How many governments in the west today, in explicit terms, are talking about the use of mass starvation as a weapon of war by the Ethiopian government? How many are condemning them in the way that they condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Even at the discursive level, we're not willing to talk about it. If you look at the media, they go out of their way to obscure the intentional nature of the famine that has been essentially engineered.
I think there is a great deal we can do.
The first thing is to accurately describe what's going on, condemn it, and then make very concrete demands of the Ethiopian government.
Second, the Ethiopian government is economically extremely fragile. The national debt has doubled in the last four years. There is a big foreign exchange crunch. There is a great deal of leverage that the U.S. has, but also other western countries. What's lacking is the political will, which is more or less non-existent. It's not like a real attempt has been made and failed. The problem is that no attempt has been made.
I'll stop there. Thank you.