Word: eritrea
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...country. But much of this aid never reaches the hungry. Last week relief officials reported that 172 tons of food, given chiefly by Italy, were destroyed when rebels of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front attacked a 17-truck commercial convoy moving supplies to the stricken provinces of Eritrea and Tigre. The guerrillas say the vehicles were used to ferry ammunition to government troops, a charge adamantly denied by aid organizations and U.S. officials, who fear many people will die if relief supplies cannot be safely delivered to distribution centers...
...rebel sabotage brought the entire operation for Tigre and Eritrea to a halt for more than a month. Not only were the convoys under threat from Eritrean and Tigrean rebels, but even those agencies willing to risk assault could not move their trucks because the government closed the roads. "If many people die this year and next, it will not be due to drought but the politico- military situation," said one relief worker...
Convoys are moving again during daylight hours in Eritrea, with agency staffers driving the perilous roads at their own risk. But much of Tigre remains cut off; the Tigrean People's Liberation Front has demanded that the Mengistu government rescind its resettlement policy before it guarantees the safety of the food trucks...
...Mengistu's tyranny were not bad enough, the secessionist rebels in famine-threatened Eritrea are now showing that they too can and will interfere with United Nations food shipments. Says Manuel Pietri of the Paris-based International Aid Against Hunger: "There is a perverse game between the government and the rebels to make aid not work, unless, of course, they can turn it to their own advantage." But the stronger of the two parties, Mengistu's government, is the source of most of the trouble. Says an aid official in Washington: "I'll tell you what the government's three...
Despite the criticisms of Mengistu's regime, some of his heavy-handed policies appear to have rationales behind them. It is true, of course, that rebellious Eritrea, governed as an Italian colony from 1890 until World War II, has a tribal makeup different from the rest of Ethiopia. Yet the country as a whole contains more than 80 distinct ethnic groups, and poverty-stricken Eritrea could hardly survive as an independent entity. It is also likely that Mengistu's motives for forcibly transporting 600,000 peasants from Eritrea and neighboring Tigre to the less populated southern part of the country...