Ethiopia the Politics of Famine

By Pico Iyer

The saga of Ibnet camp grew more and more curious as the days went by. First, foreign relief workers watched with incredulity as Ethiopian officials abruptly ordered some 30,000 famine-weakened residents out of the refugee camp, burned down their huts and told them to begin walking back to their homes, many a two-week trek away. Then an official in Addis Ababa, the capital, dismissed the accounts of a forced evacuation as fabrications. Eventually the Foreign Ministry issued a splenetic communique calling the stories "a shockingly big lie" that betrayed the tendency of "high-ranking officials of the Reagen (sic) Administration to go berserk once again on their usually familiar anti-Ethiopian campaign of denigration, disinformation and falsehood." Finally, last week, Ethiopia's Soviet-backed leader, Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, conceded that the mass exodus had indeed taken place--at the command of a misguided local official. The offender would be punished, he said, and the refugees welcomed back to Ibnet.

Almost forgotten amid the word games was the plight of the evicted and of the 8 million others in drought- and famine-plagued Ethiopia whose lives are hanging by a thread. The Ibnet episode highlighted the ways in which political issues have complicated and sometimes obscured a humanitarian problem. It also deepened the unease of Western governments and relief agencies faced with a leadership in Addis Ababa that accepts their aid while reviling their principles. "There is a growing awareness in the relief community of just how ruthless the Mengistu government is," said Chris Cartter of Boston-based Grassroots International, one of the relief groups operating in East Africa. "The question is what to do about it."

The issue has gained urgency in recent weeks as the Mengistu government has mounted a major military offensive against the guerrillas of the Tigre People's Liberation Front. The attack, according to diplomats in Addis Ababa, may be aimed at severing the pipeline that brings in supplies, including some military hardware, from Sudan to the northern rebel-held regions of Ethiopia. But the offensive has also hampered relief convoys that have been secretly ferrying food from Sudan to at least 160,000 starving people. Because many aid trucks are avoiding the most dangerous areas, villagers in the Central Highlands, where the famine is particularly acute, are now cut off from regular food supplies. "There is a stalemate," says Terry Norr, a vice president of Mercy Corps International, another U.S. relief organization. "The military cannot win because it is not strong enough, and the rebels cannot win because of the government's support from the Soviets. The noncombatants are caught between two sides of a vice."

The latest outbreak of fighting also promises to swell the stream of refugees fleeing into Sudan, which is itself suffering through a wasting famine. Almost 850,000 Ethiopians have crowded into Sudanese camps where, often, there is little shelter or food or water to be found. There is, however, peace. Mohammed Ali, a gaunt 60-year-old Ethiopian farmer, led his wife and five children on a ten-day walk to Sudan's Wad Sherife camp. At the end of the road he found scant sustenance. "I miss my village," Ali told TIME's Philip Finnegan, "but I am glad I came. I am afraid of the war. Even if I am hungry here, I don't hear the bombs and the fighting."

The Mengistu government has also antagonized Western governments and aid groups with its grand scheme of moving 2 million Ethiopians, as soon as possible and however possible, from the ravaged farmlands of the north to the more fertile and sparsely populated regions of the southwest.In principle, the program makes a fair amount of sense. In practice, however, some of the 350,000 already resettled have fled their new homes, claiming that they were relocated against their will. Sometimes, they report, they were cultivating their fields when they were suddenly seized and flown south in Soviet transport aircraft; in the process, many families were torn apart. To make matters worse, resettled farmers frequently have not been provided with draft animals or farming tools or seeds. All the while, the resettlement project uses up funds and transport desperately needed to supply the hungry. "Tremendous resources are directed to resettlement," says a Western relief official in Addis Ababa, "at the expense of all those other people needing famine relief."

The forced resettlement scheme has further agitated Washington's already mixed feelings about assisting the citizens of an unfriendly government. "We don't like the regime," says a senior State Department official. "It's an abomination. But we must deal with the emergency." Not long ago, indeed, the U.S., which has been the most generous donor of famine assistance (more than $300 million since last October), lifted restrictions on development aid to Ethiopia.

Last week, Mengistu made some promising moves. He ordered increased daily processing of supplies at Assab, Ethiopia's largest port, where 100,000 tons of grain have been stockpiled and are going to waste. He also announced that 70% of the country's commercial trucks would be made available for shuttling relief goods from Assab to the parched heartlands.

Yet it is the final sad irony of Ethiopia's predicament that, after a decade of drought, relief workers are, for the moment, praying for little rain. Early last week, torrential downpours damaged 5% of the supplies stranded at Assab. Worse still, heavy rains expected in many areas within the next two months will render roads muddy and impassable for relief trucks. Above all, they will increase the likelihood that both contagious diseases and death by exposure could sweep through the crowded camps.

With reporting by Edward W. Desmond/New York and Alastair Matheson/Addis Ababa