Word: mengistu
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...United Nations has estimated that 200,000 children under the age of 15 are bearing arms around the world. The Salvadoran army has forcibly conscripted boys not yet 18, while soldiers as young as 13 have sworn allegiance to Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam. But most child warriors belong to rebel groups, where how much they fight depends on how desperately their services are needed. The mujahedin of Afghanistan have boys as young as + nine battling Kabul. In Burma twelve-year-olds are recruited by the Karen rebels to defend their jungle territory. In El Salvador the F.M.L.N...
...pullback comes at a hazardous time for President Mengistu Haile Mariam, who continues to battle Eritrean secessionists in the north and two rebel armies in Tigre province. As Soviet aid withers, Arab countries are increasing their military and economic assistance to the Eritreans, who claim to be running up military gains. In search of a new patron, Mengistu re-established diplomatic relations with Israel last November after a 16-year hiatus. Now dozens of Ethiopian officers are being trained in Israel, which is also providing Mengistu with small arms...
Mozambique. President Joaquim Chissano is showing much more pragmatism than Mengistu. Last summer Chissano's government abandoned the Marxist-Leninist credo that his Frelimo Party has embraced since it came to power in 1975. Transformed from "a vanguard of the worker and peasant alliance" to "a party of all the Mozambican people," the ruling group has stepped up market reforms that it initiated in the mid-1980s. Last January Chissano introduced a draft constitution that embraces universal suffrage, a secret ballot, direct election of both the President and the parliament and the reintroduction of private ownership of land...
What makes this situation doubly frustrating is that distribution networks now exist in Eritrea and Tigre -- if only the government would put them to use. But the organizations are controlled by the rebel fronts. The Mengistu government might be less obdurate if the food were funneled through the Joint Relief Partnership, a group of five Ethiopian churches without ties to any of the rebel groups. In response to heavy international pressure, Mengistu hinted that the government might work with the churches to open "corridors of safe passage" through the hardest-hit regions. But he has yet to give formal approval...
There is little hope that either country will settle its political differences soon enough to allow a swift rescue of the people in peril. Ethiopia has recently claimed victories against the Tigre rebels, which may soften Mengistu just enough to permit some relief operations, at least for a time. But in Sudan, stiff rebel resistance threatens only to convince Bashir that his best course is to continue to block the already difficult lines of transport into the south -- and let starvation and disease do the rest...