Word: mengistu
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Afabet. In the annals of the interminable civil war between Ethiopia and its . province of Eritrea, the name is a milestone. It was at that dusty town in northern Ethiopia that the Eritrean People's Liberation Front overran President Mengistu Haile Mariam's main northern garrison in March. The rebels claim to have killed or captured 18,000 soldiers in one of their greatest victories in 26 years of fighting. At about the same time, just south of Eritrea, insurgents in Tigre scored a series of military triumphs...
With the rebel bands threatening to break Ethiopia in two, the brutal Mengistu and his secretive Marxist government have begun a frenzied effort to win back lost ground. In recent weeks government troops have retaken the major towns of Tigre, but the battle-hardened Eritreans have fought them to a stalemate. Both sides have used the region's chronic hunger as a weapon, with the rebels attacking a relief convoy and Mengistu ordering most foreign-aid workers out of Eritrea and Tigre. Some food is still reaching the estimated 2 million to 3 million victims of northern Ethiopia's latest...
...sidetracked by the increasingly vicious civil war. Western analysts in Addis Ababa compare the military situation to that in Afghanistan: well-motivated rebels fighting an army of conscripts who are poorly fed and poorly paid. "The army is just not fighting back," says a Western diplomat in Addis Ababa. Mengistu himself has been making frequent trips to the north to oversee military operations. But the rebels are said to be gaining ground daily while relief officials watch their distribution lines crumble. Brother Gregory Flynn, who works for the Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat, put it this way: "We have trucks, we have...
...Mengistu's critics, all such defenses are simply evidence that those who want to provide aid become prisoners of the system: anyone who faults the dictator risks being expelled, like France's Doctors Without Borders. "We have to be discreet," concedes Frank Conlon, Africa program director for Lutheran World Relief. "In relief situations, you often don't have a lot of time for dialogue." Says Laura Kullenberg, director of the Horn of Africa program run by Oxfam America: "This is a life-and-death situation, and our choices are limited. Our mission is to make sure food gets to people...
...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...