The Mengistu famine
George Galloway
Khartoum Under a thickly-camouflaged low roof, deep in a secret valley, a remarkable scene was taking place. On the table, his stomach ripped apart by shrapnel, intes- tines tumbling over his belt, 13-year-old Fitsum Serki lay. Outside in the half-dark corridor, unable to find a place in the operating theatre, Almaz Tesfasion, a 17- year-old girl, lay dying, with a hole in the back of her head as big as a saucer. All around this cottage-sized 'hospital' could be heard the low moans of young children in agony. Even the hardened ITN crew coolly recording it confessed later that their heads had swum. The boy died after a two-hour operation, the girl after 30 min- utes of heart pummelling. Fifteen other children were seriously hurt. Some of them are now amputees.
Their school lunch-tables had been visited by Soviet MiG-21 aeroplanes drop- ping fragmentation bombs. The bombs were from the United States, from a stockpile pre-dating the superpower music- al chairs, but the author of the raid was the mendicant Colonel Megistu Haile Miriam, Chief of the Dergue, General Secretary of the Ethiopian Workers' Party.
These were not the last corpses I came upon and certainly not the last shattered children. The Ethiopian air force, it would appear, is a busy one. Cost is apparently no obstacle, £30,000 for each two-MiG sortie. Which is strange in a way when Western public and Governments are pouring mil- lions into the Workers' Party's begging bowl. Stranger still that heaps of grain, pounds, dollars, marks and francs are being given without the remotest guaran- tee that they will reach all the hungry people who need them, will not merely release resources for the Dergue's six simultaneous civil wars, and will not end up on the open market for sale.
My mission as head of the only British aid agency (War on Want) working solely in areas outside the Dergue's control was to see whether, in the absence of such guarantees, Mengistu as famine-fighter cut a credible figure. I can report that he does not.
The vast lunar tracts of Eritrea (annexed by the previous emperor Haile Selassie in 1962) and the Northern territory of Tigre in particular, lie almost entirely outside the control of the government in Addis Ababa. Reliable estimates put the extent of guer- illa control at 85 per cent of the land, 75 per cent of the people. In Eritrea it is clear that the Dergue control only the few largest towns, and are permanently be- sieged within them. In nearly three weeks there, covering thousands of back-
breaking kilometers (the Italian colonial- ists were no Roman road builders), the only Ethiopians to be found were in the MiGs and Antonovs high in the blue sky. Clearly, none of the food aid now deluging the Addis government is ever going to reach such areas and it is a scandal that Western governments are refusing to supply them through neighbouring Sudan (whose Government would welcome it) for fear of upsetting Colonel Mengistu.
The Eritrean Relief Association esti- mates that they have to feed 1.75 million people who are at serious risk, requiring a minimum of 20,000 tonnes every month. Thanks to Western pusillanimity they are currently receiving fewer than 2,000 tonnes which leaves nine out of ten people getting no assistance at all. The Eritrean people now stand on the brink of disaster, with mass starvation now a reality.
Those who have the camels and the strength, and who survive the air attacks, are trekking epic distances to the Sudan,, there to crowd into the teeming refugee camps of Toukle Bab and Sefawa on the border. Highly-placed UN officials in Khartoum privately predict 100,000 more refugees in the coming months, which will trigger disaster for the long-suffering Sudan, already bloated with Chadian and other refugees.
The less well-off make the even more hazardous journey to the tender mercies of the Dergue. There, in the garrison towns, if they are lucky they will be merely harangued and 're-educated' out of their supposed support for the Eritrean gueril- las. The not-so-lucky are short-rationed or even refused food for the crime of lacking the proper papers showing their mem- bership of the new 'Marxist-Leninist Peasant Associations'. The least lucky are simply tortured with hunger. Among these are the nomadic Baria, who live on plants and berries in the mountains around the Ethiopian-controlled town of Barentu in
Central Eritrea. Earlier this month 400 of them were lured into the town by the promise of food. Neatly arranged into lines they were descended upon by helicopters bearing cameramen from Addis Ababa to record the generosity of the Dergue. Pictures of a food convoy, entering the town and the joyous faces of the hungrY were duly taken. The helicopters departed. The Baria sat there for 15 days waiting for the food to be disbursed during which time their women were reduced to selling even their nose jewellery to buy crumbs to stay alive. After 15 days the soldiers ordered them to leave the town, denouncing them as guerilla sympathisers. Amid the hyster- ical wailing of their women and children the men said they were refusing to move. Even when the tanks were brought out in threaten them they stood defiantly, de; manding the food they had been promise' Then, in this baked-dry, drought: stricken land the army brought out several water cannons and began turning powerful jets of precious water on the Baria. Stria- en with terror, never having seen such weapons before, and believing themselves to have been sprayed with some poisonous substance, the people broke away in panic' In the crush Ali Kera Weshishi and Idris Hamed Saleh were killed, the only known victims of death by water in the Saheliall drought so far. That the Ethiopian Government is using the massive injection of Western aid to improve its position on the battlefield is incontestable. The number of sorties being, flown is increasing. The 'People's mill° are being paid not in money but in gran?' up to 120 kilos per month. Most ominously of all the Dergue are now proposin g fl°io `re-settle' some two and a half people from the 'infertile', i.e. rebellious; north to the fertile', i.e. less troublen southern regions — and they are asking the West to pay for it. Perhaps the straw that will break thee camel's back, however, is the evidencif uncovered by ITN and witnessed by mYsern that a huge misappropriation of Westene food aid is currently taking place. In ‘3,-0, village, Girmaica, I personally Ph°',,e graphed sacks of powdered milk, the ft'r, gift of the people of Canada, West G. many, and the United States, and, vil,tjoj profit added, worth some £50,000 t Yamani Tekle Mariam, the local mereha.„g who now possessed it. I watched it bel.0° loaded on the backs of a long camel fr:er and setting off at night to cross the bill. for illegally into the Sudan. Later I saw it sale in the Sudanese town of Kassala. The case that Colonel Mengistu is usu.; British taxpayers' money to starve out rebel areas, indirectly to bomb inn°10 civilian targets in pursuit of his war 'his and directly to oil the wheels of is bankrupt economy by selling food aiu rid overwhelming. Will the West now demo se an international commission to supervfor and control the relief effort or will we' some strange and inexplicable reason, tul‘e Mengistu's no for an answer?
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