The African killing fields; you heard all about the Ethiopian famine. Here's the story that President Reagan, relief groups, and the media didn't tell you.

• Author: Kaplan, Robert D.

You heard all about the Ethiopian famine. Here's the story that President Reagan, relief groups, and the media didn't tell you.

In 1984 and 1985, the American media saturated the public with stories about the famine in Ethiopia. Television footage of starving children made a deep imprint on the American audience, causing a flood of relief aid. However, while the amount of American coverage was impressive, the depth of treatment was not. The American media, in fact, dealt with only a thin slice of reality in Ethiopia, a country riven by ethnic conflict that was going through a bloody transition to a communist system.

The media told us little of the war between the Ethiopian government and the Eritrean and Tigrean guerrillas in the northern part of the country, even though it was taking place in the middle of the famine zone and was being fought on a larger scale and for a longer period of time than any other war in Africa. (Since 1961, the Eritreans have sought independence from the government; the government has fought to keep Eritrea, its only outlet to the sea, from seceding.) In the years preceding the famine, more soldiers the d in northern Ethiopia than in either Central America or Lebanon. And it was war, as much as drought, that caused the famine in the first place.

Forced resettlement of Ethiopian ethnic minorities was an important element in the communist regimes war against the gueff illas. So was the destruction of tribal farming systems and the regrouping of millions of farmers into state collectives. Since 1980 the number of blacks who the d at the hands of security forces in South Africa has been numerically insignificant compared to the number killed by the Ethiopian authorities by the force of collectivization-and this figure does not include famine deaths. Yet, with a few exceptions the media put relatively little effort into investigating this story.

Equally disturbing was the ambivalence of President Reagan on this important issue. What communists were doing in Ethiopia was far more horrible than what communists were doing in Angola or Nicaragua. But while other administration officials frequently criticized the regime in the strongest possible terms, President Reagan himself was pracfically silent.

A communist regime brutally uprooted its own citizens against their will, forcibly separating hundreds of thousands from their families and killing tens of thousands through deliberate mistreatment. But the impact of this cataclysm on the media, a conservative White House, and the American public Wus minimal.

Rather than a catastrophe, the famine was a godsend for this regime. The famine created a pool of millions of peasants who, whatever their political leanings, now had no choice but to rely on the governrnent for help. The government now had a legitimate excuse to relocate those it thought to be hostile, as well as the wherewithal to do it, partly because of relief supplies pouring in 'from the West.

Not only did the resettlement program destroy the livelihoods of peasants in the north but the program destroyed those in the south, too. Many of the new sites in fact had been successfully farmed for years before the indigenous inhabitants had their land expropriated by the state to make way for the new arrivals. The rationale for the seemingly irrational act was military and political: most of the sites were located along access routes used by the Oromo Liberation Front in its war against the government. Thus, not only would the Tigrean rebels in the north be deprived of their base of peasant support but so would the Oromo rebels in the south. Moving people around became another way to prosecute a war.

Prisoners on Soviet planes

Woldeselassie Gebremariam, a Tigrean priest in his late thirties, was one of 50 Ethiopian refugees interviewed in March 1985 at a camp in eastern Sudan by Peter Niggli of the Swiss church group Berliner Missionwerk. Woldeselassie's village was in the area held by the TPLF, the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front, fighting the Ethiopian regime.

Woldeselassie told Niggli: "A cattle plague broke out last fall (1984) in the whole region... .The government announced it was going to vaccinate all the cattle free of charge at Adme (in the north -central part of the province). . . .We rounded up 750 head of cattle in our village and started off.

Woldeselassie, expecting to return home in a few days, left his wife and three children back in his village. This was about the time that a Newsday report (December 9, 1984) entitled, "New Start for Chosen Few" by Josh Friedman, indicated that a number of resettlement abuses, including forced separation of families, had ended.

"We arrived in Adwa on December 6 (1984) and were surrounded by soldiers in the middle of the town." (Woldeselassie explained how the soldiers picked out the youngest and the strongest of the peasants and took them to prison.) "We shouted 'Who was going to take care of our cattle?'. '. .They answered that it would be no loss if we lost our cattle, the government was going to resettle us and would replace our cattle in the new settlement."

For food, the prisoners were given two pieces of bread a day. The soldiers reportedly ate from grain bags, whose markings indicated they had been donated by the European Economic Commission and the governments of Canada and West Germany. On the eleventh day, Soviet pilots transported Woldeselassie and the others from Adwa to Makelle by helicopter. They couldn't go by land because the countryside in between was controlled by the TPLF

"We were kept in an open field. There was no shade during the day and no shelter from cold at night '" Others at the camp explained how on account of catastrophic sanitary conditions, people fell ill with diarrhea and vomiting. Many died. But when foreigners, including journalists, visited near the camp, the Tigreans were temporarily moved elsewhere.

Soviet-made Antonovs, provided by the Soviet Union and Libya, were used in the operation to move Woldeselassie and the other prisoners to the capital of Addis Ababa. The planes, whose unpressurized cargo bays were designed for 50 paratroopers, carried 300-350 people on each flight. As Woldeselassie and many others described it, the sick people were laid on the floor in the middle of the plane, then the healthier ones were packed in. At Bole airport in Addis Ababa, troops carried off the dead bodies, and a fire brigade hosed out the pool of vomit and piss from the floor of the plane.

Although water was not scarce, the peasants were given offly one cup of water each before being packed tightly onto buses for the long journey to Welega, a province in western Ethiopia astride the border with Sudan.

The jungly no-man's-land was near Asosa, a town about 25 miles from the Sudanese border Woldeselassie said that no food was provided for two days after his group had aff ived. Woldeselassie was fortunate, however After one failed escape, he succeeded in reaching Sudan, where Niggli interviewed him.

Resettlement was simply an interesting sideshow to the main famine story when Niggli, along with Bonnie K. Holcomb and Dr. Jason W Clay of the research group Cultural Survival, arrived in Sudan in February 1985 to interview those who had escaped. Western journalists and diplomats in Ethiopia had caught glimpses of people being herded into trucks and airplanes. One U.S. diplomat went so far as to say that "the selection process recalled Auschwitz '" But there re issue ground to a halt for lack of evidence. Resettlement areas were off limits to all foreigners except those on prearranged tours to model camps. The government denied that the program was not voluntary or that it was motivated by any factor besides the humanitarian desire to relocate drought-stricken peasants to more fertile areas in the west and southwest of the country. Western relief officials stationed in Addis Ababa, whose presence depended on the goodwill of the local authorities, tended to back up the regime's assertions. The obfuscations...