Word: mengistu
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...scheme to move 1.5 million peasants from the overcrowded and barren north to the more fertile south. While international agricultural officials acknowledge that the program is a legitimate effort to solve some of the country's long-term social and economic problems, they charge that in past years the Mengistu government carried it out with unnecessary cruelty. According to some Western diplomats, the regime broke up families and forced villagers to move to camps that had no housing, no water, no health facilities and often no food. Of the 600,000 northerners who were resettled during the last famine...
Despite a continuing flow of arms from Moscow, Western diplomats suspect that the Soviets are not happy with their ally. When Mengistu visited Moscow in April, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev cautioned him to "proceed from realities and not outrun stages of development." Politburo Member Lev Zaikov was reportedly blunter when he visited Addis Ababa in September...
That is more or less the question that bedevils Western officials as they face the horrors of another famine in the Ethiopia of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. All too clear in the public memory are those televised pictures from 1984-85 of starving children with their matchstick arms, their swollen bellies and their huge, staring eyes. The public may also remember reports of relief shipments being taxed $50 a ton to help finance Mengistu's 225,000-man army, the largest in black Africa, and of sacks of Western grain rotting on the docks or disappearing into the black...
...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...
...feed themselves, the skeptics argue, and a tougher approach just might force Ethiopia to mend its ways. "What will aid do?" asked Britain's Economist last month. "It will strengthen the dominion of Ethiopia's ignorant rulers. The weather is the only calamity not directly caused by Colonel Mengistu . . . and his cronies. Their Russian advisers have taught them to run vast state farms that produce no food. Imitating Stalin's anti-kulak terror, they have shot 'hoarders and saboteurs' prudent enough to store grain . . . Help for the starving may make some of them suffer more, and reinforce the grip...