Word: eritrea
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Worst hit was the far northern province of Eritrea along the Red Sea, where the crop failure exceeded 80%. More than 40% of the harvest was lost in Tigre, 44% in Wollo and 35% in Harar, the Ogaden desert region that juts into Somalia. Altogether, nine of Ethiopia's 14 provinces are suffering food shortages...
...poor or nonexistent roads and insufficient planes and trucks to transport food to rural areas. But the biggest block in the pipeline is civil strife. The government is battling 23 rebel groups and factions in every part of the country. The two strongest insurgent armies are in Tigre and Eritrea, the provinces hit hardest by the drought. Eritrea has been in rebellion against the government ever since it was annexed by Ethiopia in 1962, and a guerrilla movement began building in Tigre...
During the last famine the rebels and international agencies had a policy of live and let live. But in late October, Eritrean People's Liberation Front guerrillas attacked an unguarded convoy of 23 trucks on its way from Asmara, capital of Eritrea, to Mekele, capital of Tigre. One driver was killed, and the trucks -- loaded with 674 tons of food, enough to feed 30,000 people for a month -- were destroyed by grenades. The E.P.L.F. claimed that some of the trucks contained military equipment, a charge that U.N. officials deny. Since then, the E.P.L.F. has attacked two Ethiopian military-civilian...
Through the parched Eritrean highlands in northern Ethiopia, 25 trucks rumbled along a rough, winding road. Their cargo: 674 metric tons of food, enough to feed 30,000 people for a month, destined for drought victims in the provinces of Eritrea and Tigre...
...famine took hundreds of thousands of lives and left 4.5 million Ethiopians on the edge of starvation; most are now receiving food aid, thanks largely to Western relief programs. While rains finally broke the drought last summer, much of the population remains undernourished. In the parched northern provinces of Eritrea and Tigre, a simmering civil war is making already harsh conditions even worse. The government's conflict with rebels in those regions has driven out relief workers and blocked food shipments. World Vision, a California-based agency, was feeding 370,000 people in Tigre province last May when threats...