AGAINST ALL ODDS  ‘FAMINE’

DAN CONNELL      

I returned to Eritrea in December 1984 for the first time in four years, with a television crew from Boston.  I was no longer a practicing journalist.  Instead, I was directing a new independent development agency, Grassroots International, which I had founded eighteen months earlier.  This was the third trip by a Grassroots staffperson to the war zone with the object of focusing media attention on the political causes behind the famine and on the alternative avenues of assistance that existed in the liberated zones through the ERA and REST.

I spent four weeks on this trip, travelling through Barka with the EPLF, which had taken the area from the ELF in 1981, and crossing into northern Tigray with REST and the TPLF. What I saw shocked me deeply, though I had known this disaster was coming for years.

Almost as disturbing 'as the agony and the death was the absence of most of the international community from the scene of the cries in Eritrea and in Tigray, and the refusal of most aid agencies operating in the region to level with the public about the political causes of the famine.

Drought was the catalyst for this catastrophe, but it was not a "natural disaster." It was no accident that the worst famine-affected countries in Africa in 1984 and 1985 were Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Chad, Mozambique and Angola.  Each was engaged in a war (or wars) that so squeezed its internal economy--disrupting food production and distribution systems, adding tens of thousands to already thin social services, triggering large-scale displacement, and blocking effective relief efforts--that a potentially manageable problem became an uncontrollable emergency.  To those up close, there were no surprises. 

 Ethiopia's much-touted "Red Star" military campaign had finally gotten under way in February 1982, after two years of preparations and nearly a month of punishing aerial bombing throughout most of liberated Eritrea.  Big Soviet Antonovs were brought in to supplement the MiG jet fighters.  For the first time, the bombardment ran day and night, without let-up.  "We worked in caves the whole day," Yemane Gebreab, then the director of the EPLFs clandestine radio station, told me later.  "When we went to our places at night, it was impossible to sleep." 

 There was no firsthand foreign media coverage of the offensive, which lasted almost four months, but from interviews done afterward it is clear that this was one of the largest battles fought in Africa since World War II.  By the time it was launched, the govemment had over 150,000 troops in Eritrea, including 40,000 to 50,000 special forces troops in four new divisions recently trained in the Awash Valley just for this campaign. Helicopter gunships saw combat for the first time in Eritrea, and a form of toxic gas was used on at least one occasion, though with little impact.

Prior to the campaign, Mengistu succesdully concluded a deal with Sudan to close the border to the EPLF, and Ethiopian troops crossed Sudanese territory during the fighting, apparently with  Sudanese permission, in a surprise move to seal off the EPLF’s rear. For weeks no food, fuel, ammunition or other supplies moved into Eritrea but that which was smuggled past Sudanese authorities.

Fighting broke out initially on three broad battlefronts—along the coast in northeast Sahel, outside Nacfa and in Barka, southwest of the EPLFs base area.  When government units made a surprise drive toward Nacfa from the seacoast, between the two main battle-fronts to the north and east, they very nearly broke through.  With all the EPLFs regular army units and its reserve militia already engaged, guerrilla leaders called on members of the nonmilitary departments to plug the gap. Amazingly, the hastily assembled army of woodworkers, mechanics, accountants, tailors, teachers, nurses and barefoot veterinarians held the line in three days of ferocious hand-to-hand combat.

    When EPLF forces routed the government on the Barka front at the end of four days and quickly moved two brigades to reinforce positions outside Nacfa, the situation stabilized.  Heavy fighting continued for ninety-five days, but the govemment never got any closer to a victory than in the first ninety-six hours of the campaign.  By the end, the Ethiopians had lost 43,000 troops.  The EPLF suffered 4,000 casualties, many wounded two and three times-their heaviest losses of the war.  When the dust settled, the positions of the two badly bloodied armies had not changed.

    T'he Ethiopian failure in this campaign marked the tuming point in the war.  Though the Derg engineered one more campaign, a less-publicized but no less fierce five-month affair in 1983, this was the last time the govemment threatened the liberation movement.  By early 1984, the EPLF launched an offensive of its own, first capturing the town of Tessenei in Barka and then smashing the entire Ethiopian front line in northeast Sahel.  In July 1985, the EPLF took Barentu.  This freed one-fourth of the country from any government presence and set the stage for a further EPLF push on the main highland towns, but the effects of the drought and a massive Ethiopian redeployment from the Ogaden halted the budding counter-offensive.  In the fall of 1985 the goveminent reoccupied Barentu and Tessenei in the last Ethiopian offensive operation of the war. Then the conflict settled into a tense stalemate for two years before the EPLF resumed the initiative, not to lose it again.

    Throughout these years, the combined effects of war and drought wreaked havoc. The signs of an imminent cataclysm were already visible in 1983 when European church agencies sent Dutch photo-joumalist Frits Eisenloeffel on the most extensive foreign tour of liberated Eritrea since 1977.  What he found confirmed what the ERA had been saying for months--anitnals were dying by the thousands, and people had long since used up their reserves.  Famine stalked the land.

     Hunger has an insidious effect long before the bodies begin to pile up.  As people become desperate for cash to buy food, they sell off the very things they need to grow it--their animals and their implements.  A reliable indication of approaching crisis could be found in the market-place where the price of goats, sheep and cattle plummeted while the cost of grain soared.  It could also be seen coming in the clinics where malnourished women were having a sharply increased number of miscarriages.  In Tigray, relief workers reported that cows had stopped giving milk and that diseases normally limited to animals, such as deadly anthrax, were appearing among humans.  By 1983 massive migrations began in Tigray as whole villages uprooted themselves in search of food, but they were not yet crossing the frontier to reach camps in Sudan.  As a result, they were largely invisible to the outside world.

Meanwhile, the Mengistu regime was preoccupied with the institutionalization of its political power.  The Workers' Party of Ethiopia-with Mengistu at the head--was to be launched on September 12, 1984, the tenth anniversary of the coup d'etat that deposed Haile Selassie.  More than $100 million was allocated for the festivities.

That April, Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC) head Dawit Wolde Giorgis had led members of a ministerial fact-finding committee to visit the shelters in Tigray.  "We saw horrible things wherever we stopped," he wrote later.  "Every village was full of suffering and death.  Whenever we stopped hundreds of people rushed to our cars, pressing up against the glass, faces twisted with the pain of hunger, crying for help.... There were corpses

everywhere, lined up in rows in ragged sack-cloth shrouds or still uncovered in the midst of the crowds.  Others were dying of slow starvation as we watched.  Some bodies twitched helplessly, some writhed in agony as hunger ate away their living tissue, some lay still, alive but barely distinguishable from the dead. It was like walking through an open graveyard.”