Word: ethiopia
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...what? "The aid Ethiopians need is diplomatic pressure, not food," says Rony Brauman of Doctors Without Borders, a French charitable organization that was expelled from Ethiopia two years ago for criticizing Mengistu's brutally handled program to resettle residents of rebel-threatened areas. "If we have a duty, it is to pressure the government to change its policies. Otherwise, in two or three years, we're going to see the same bodies, the same TV footage, the same appeals from humanitarian agencies to come to the rescue." But as a French government official asks, "Who is going to take...
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...
...outside observers think criticism of the Mengistu regime has been exaggerated. One of them is Father Thomas Fitzpatrick, director of Caritas International, the Rome-based Catholic emergency-aid organization. "There was not massive corruption or diversion during the 1984 famine," says Fitzpatrick, an American who supervised Catholic aid in Ethiopia at the time. "There weren't distribution foul-ups to the extent that has been reported. It's true that some ships were backed up in the harbors. True, it rained once unexpectedly, and some grain was exposed and began to rot. But no more than...
...officials estimate that there is now enough food committed to Ethiopia to last until spring, but whether it gets out of the warehouses and to the hungry depends heavily on the available transportation. Relief officials estimate they need nearly 300 additional trucks to haul food from distribution centers to rural areas, but the Mengistu regime has thus far provided only 100. So welfare officials are falling back on a vastly expensive airlift. It is notable that the Soviets, who sell Mengistu most of his weapons, have sent very little in the way of either food or transport...
COVER: Famine again stalks Ethiopia, and the West wrestles with the aid dilemma...