THE REGIME THAT KILLS ETHIOPIANS

Myles Harris blames Western

aid agencies for supporting a murderous government

`No good comes of contact with a fore- igner.' (Ethiopian saying) IS THE Ethiopian famine over? A few brief lines in the national papers tell us the rains have returned to the country and what was desert is now fertile land. Those of the victims who survived have, we assume, returned to their homes to try to reconstruct their shattered families and begin farming again. People in the West must feel some sense of achievement. After all, over $1 billion worth of aid, a lot of it from the UK, was sent to Ethiopia. Our young people raised over $50 million with their music, and for once the charities we supported were not accused of spending more on administration than on aid.

But what did we achieve? Nobody really knows, or if they do they are not telling. How many people died in the famine? What steps are being taken to prevent a recurrence? All we know is that the Ethio- pian government is now pursuing a policy of mass collectivisation of its peasant far- mers. When it is complete over 35 million people out of a total population of about 40 million will have been `villagised', that is, obliged to live in state collectives and to farm land they no longer own. We know no more than that because the Ethiopian government has closed the country to anybody it feels might criticise its plans.

`It's your four-in-the-morning call, sir.' Eighteen months ago Medecins sans Fron- tieres voiced its public disapproval of a variant of villagisation called resettlement. The agency described how the government was forcibly, and at great loss of life, emptying the famine camps in the north to fill their collective farms in the south. In December 1985 the agency was expelled. After that there was silence.

But while these struggles were going on, Germaine Greer, that bell-wether of misin- formed progressive thought, appeared on Channel 4's programme Diverse Reports to reassure us that all was well with the Ethiopian government's villagisation scheme. We were treated to an interview with the head of the Ethiopian govern- ment's famine relief agency, Dawit Wolde. Giorgis. He assured us about moving so many people and chided the West for trying to seem more concerned about the Ethiopian people than the Ethiopian gov- ernment itself. His government, he said, had shown both responsibility and concern for the famine victims. Replying to James Cheek, the United States cultural attache in Addis Ababa, who suggested that resett- lement was at the very best ill-timed and at worst very dangerous, Dawit Wolde Gior- gis asserted that the timing was exactly right. The Ethiopian government, he said, was responding to a natural internal migra- tion caused by the famine. Without its help there would be chaos. He ended by appeal- ing for more Western aid, without which resettlement would fail.

Everything was being done to help the peasants he said, but the Ethiopian govern- ment was short of money and because of that there were problems with transport, tools, medical supplies and food. Why, he asked, were Western governments refusing to give development aid to Ethiopia?

Germaine Greer agreed. Resettlement, she enthused, was welcomed by the peasants. In 'resettled' areas they had, for Africa, reasonable medical care, adequate housing and the benefits of expert agri- cultural advice.

BBC Radio Four followed with a prog- ramme tacitly supporting peasant resettle- ment, except that during all the shifty talk about new initiatives, planning and coop- eration, Mike Woldrich, an experienced Africa hand, managed to record a brief snatch of protest from an old lady before she was quickly led away. 'A little dis- turbed,' explained the cadres. The pro- gramme ended with an Ethiopian govern- ment expert on Marxist economics lectur- ing us on the theory and practice of collective farming in Ethiopia. He assured us it would be a model for the rest of the world.

The unreliability of these reports soon became apparent. Large refugee camps (some containing up to 50,000 people) sprang up both in Somalia and the Sudan, filled with peasants who did not share either the BBC's or Miss Greer's enthus- iasm for compulsorily living on state farms. They fled, they said, because of intolerable oppression and brutality. But perhaps most tellingly of all, it was Dawit Wolde Giorgis, the head of the Ethiopian Famine Relief Agency upon whose word Miss Greer placed such faith, who was to betray her.

Soon after her programme was broad- cast he defected to the United States and in a press conference in New York which led to a Times headline, 'How the West's food aid keeps a tyrant in power,' he spoke of `the brutal, forced resettlement of starving peasants, purges of liberals, and the Ethio- pian government's misuse of Western aid money'.

The refugees are undoubtedly telling the truth. People do not become refugees in the Ogaden desert at a whim. And in the last year Dawit Wolde Giorgis has been joined abroad by the country's foreign minister and more than 100 senior officials. All tell the same story. Villagisation is killing tens of thousands of their country- men.

The French have said all along that resettlement was being done with our money. Medecins sans Frontieres' presi- dent, Rony Brauman, in an article appear- ing in the New York Times in September, accused the Ethiopian government of opening the country's doors to Western relief only when it realised it could gain substantially by a brief period of intense publicity. When that was over and awk- ward questions began to be asked, the doors were closed and the money used for resettlement. But, Dr Brauman says, resett- lement covered a much uglier reality. Much of the famine in the north was created by the destruction of crops and villages by the Ethiopian army in order to force dissaffected peasants into refugee camps set up by Western aid. Here they became targets for deportation by the government to their hard-currency-earning coffee plantations in the south. There, more than 20 per cent of the resettlers died — a total of 100,000 people.

Dr Claude Malhuret, France's secretary of state for human rights said last October: `Western governments and humanitarian organisations unwittingly fuelled — and are continuing to fuel — an operation that will be described with hindsight as one of the greatest slaughters of our time.' For, if Medecins sans Frontieres' estimate of 100,000 dead per half a million is accurate, then moving 35 million peasants might well kill as many of them as the Khmer Rouge managed to kill in Cambodia.

Why is it that only the French and a handful of independent witnesses, a group of Harvard anthropologists, some journal- ists and writers, having witnessed similar scenes, are prepared to report it? Who will speak for 35 million peasants about to be subjected to a Ukraine-style famine? Only the people whose hands, however irreso- lutely, clutch the purse strings of Western aid, the aid agencies and our governments.

The problem is that most aid agencies spend more time working with foreign governments than they do with the people who send out the money. It is not surpris- ing therefore that after a while they get a bit like the men from the Foreign Office who these days see their job as protecting foreign rulers from British public opinion. Old ladies making their way to the post office with five-pound notes saved from their pensions for the black babies in Ethiopia are all very well, but it is only their money the agencies want, not their opinions.

While the charities say that their donors cannot possibly know what is the best way to spend the money they have donated, they conceal the pressure that is often put on them by Third World governments to embark on foolish schemes that only have the aggrandisement of a ruling class as their aim. None of this is new; a shuffling, guilty silence about what has been going on in Africa for the last ten years has been the rule. But how many of the agencies have faced up to the choice of going on with aid that might be enabling a murderous gov- ernment to continue a few more weeks or months in office, or withdrawing and publi- cising what is happening? To be fair to them, they have had little support from the only other source of pressure in such situations, the foreign diplomatic missions. Even when 750,000 people were murdered in Uganda the British Embassy played down the reports as 'exaggerated'. Now, with the resettlement policy of the Ethio- pian government, events have once again taken the same grisly turn.

The blame lies largely with attitudes that try to conceal abuses of aid on the grounds that 'people in the West were looking for an excuse not to give', or, 'the public are not in a position to make an informed judgment'. What is meant by the 'informed judgment' is usually one of many ideas drawn from a carpet-bag of second-hand ideological clothes carried about in the Third World by agency personnel. So we hear, 'Multinational corporations are structurally and unalterably racist,' Third World debt is the sole responsibility of the lender nations,' Only socialist control of the means of agricultural production is thinkable in the Third World.' Such ideas have led many agencies into the sort of morass they find themselves in Ethiopia today. The first casualty was the International Red Cross. Earlier this year the Society succumbed to a political takeover by Eastern-bloc, African and Arab delega- tions. All countries which agree to abide by the Geneva Convention can belong to the Red Cross, and up to late last year member governments refrained from using their majority vote to influence the essential apolitical and neutral stand of the society. But things were changing, money was getting tight, and there were signs that those who finance the Red Cross, mainly people from the West, were beginning to ask awkward questions. No African nation wanted attention to be focused on the treatment most of them were meting out to their own peoples. What better than South Africa as the sacrificial ram to silence Western opinion? So, by a careful cobbling together of block votes, Soviet, African and Arab government delegations had South Africa expelled, at a stroke destroying the politic- al neutrality of the Red Cross and depriv- ing thousands of black South Africans of the society's protection. From now on delegations of governments from countries with appalling human rights records, hav- ing overturned the constitution of the Red Cross, would shape its policies. In the future the interests of such as President Sergeant Doe of Liberia, Presidents Banda of Malawi, Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Mobutu of Zaire, all of whose governments practice extrajudicial killings, torture and the oppression of minorities, would be para- mount.

The scene for this disaster was set by the blackout of news from Ethiopia, and the decision by most agencies not to follow the French in condemning what has happened to the Ethiopian peasantry. It was obvious to most African governments then that if the West would remain silent over such a catastrophe they would accept almost any- thing at their hands, even the seizure of one of their great charities. But there is one ray of hope — and that is money. Those who pay to maintain the charities do not have to stand aside for delegations whose mandates represent no- thing but the interests of tyrannies. If the agencies think they are going to be refused funds the pressure that they will bring on the Ethiopian government will be im- mense. Let us hope it is not too late to prevent a disaster that even by our case- hardened times beggars the imagination.

Myles Harris is the author of Breakfast in Hell (Picador, £3.50), an account of his recent work with the Red Cross in Ethiopia.