Army ‘is keeping food from
rebel areas’
Jonathan
Rugman in Jijiga
Ethiopia has been accused of deliberately
underestimating the scale of a deadly
drought facing millions of its people, some
of whom are being deprived of emergency food
aid by the country’s military.
The humanitarian crisis, caused by three
years of failed rains, currently affects
about 4.6 million people, though the
official number could jump to as high as 6.7
million this week.
United Nations agencies say that the real
number at risk is above 8 million, an
estimate disputed hotly by Addis Ababa,
which is insisting on publishing a much
lower figure.
“The figure has risen very substantially,
maybe even doubled,” said Sir John Holmes,
the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator, who
visited Ethiopia earlier this month. “Any
government doesn’t want to be perceived as
always in the position of receiving aid.”
Related Links
Explaining the Ethiopian drought
The crisis is at its most worrying in the
vast deserts of the Ogaden region, where the
UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says in a
confidential alert to donors that it is
receiving “increasing reports of
hunger-related mortality”. About two million
people are at risk until the main rains fall
next spring – if they fall at all. The
Ogaden is Ethiopia’s biggest and most remote
state.
Nomadic tribes there are resorting to eating
dead leaves and cactus fruit to survive the
worst drought since the famines of 1984-85,
when an estimated one million Ethiopians
died.
A twenty-mile trek on foot into the bush
revealed mediaeval mud-hut villages, where
ethnic Somali herdsmen say that their
children have died after eating poisonous
buds from trees, for lack of anything else
to eat. Others say that they depend on camel
milk and meat because cattle, sheep and
goats have perished in their thousands.
“I am ill and hungry,” said one man,
removing his shirt to reveal his rib cage
visible through taut skin. “Because of the
drought we have nothing to eat. The only
people who receive food are the military
forces.”
The UN has raised about 60 per cent of $325
million (£181 million) it is seeking in
emergency relief for Ethiopia and says that
it is suffering a shortfall of about 300,000
tonnes of aid.
The WFP has told donors that it blames
Ethiopia’s “delays in recognising the extent
of need” for causing the rapid depletion of
existing food stocks. But a Channel 4 News
investigation tonight claims that the army
has withheld food from villages in the
Ogaden deliberately as part of a “scorched
earth” policy against separatist rebels of
the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF).
Herdsmen in villages almost completely cut
off from the outside world said that many of
their animals had been killed by Ethiopian
soldiers, who also deprived them of water.
“We walk for eight hours to collect water,”
said Abdi, a villager about three hours from
Jijiga, the regional capital. “Then the
military take the water from us. They say
the rebels pass through our villages and
that we give them supplies. But what can we
give? We are dying of hunger. We have
nothing to give to our own children.”
The UN says that it has negotiated with the
Ethiopian army for the military’s role in
food distribution to be kept to a minimum.
“If there is a situation where food is taken
by the military, we protest,” said Mohammed
Diab, the WFP’s Ethiopia director.
However, a confidential investigation by
USAid, the US Government’s disaster relief
agency, complained in March that “literally
hundreds of areas . . . have neither been
assessed nor received any food assistance”,
with “populations we met terrorised by the
inability to access food”.
“This situation would be shameful in any
other country,” the report concludes. “The
US Government cannot in good conscience
allow the food operation to continue in its
current manifestation.” The US is spending
more than £230 million on food aid for
Ethiopia this year but is hamstrung from
being too critical in public; Washington
sees Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s Prime
Minister, as an ally in the War on Terror
after Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in
2005, which ousted an Islamist
administration from power.
Britain has doubled its annual aid to
Ethiopia in the last three years to £130
million, including £15 million this summer
through the UN’s Humanitarian Response Fund,
while Save the Children (SCF) is halfway
through a campaign to raise £10 million for
the country. Two SCF workers were expelled
from the Ogaden last year amid allegations –
rejected by SCF – that they had diverted
food to ONLF rebels. The British charity
abandoned a full-scale feeding programme,
fearing supplies could be diverted.
Jonathan Rugman’s report on Ethiopia’s
drought is on tonight’s Channel 4 News at
7pm.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article4776062.ece
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