Surrender or Starve

THREE The African Killing Fields

Mao Zedong said that a guerrilla army “swims in the sea of the people.” Another communist theorist (according to Peter Niggli’s report for Berliner Missionswerk), this one a young cadre of the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia, explained the corollary to that argument to a group of Tigrean peasants at Makelle after he had lost his temper with them: “If you dry out the sea the fish die.”

He continued, “We will dry out Tigre and force the bandits to give up. You are the backbone of the bandits, so we have to break you first; then we can also destroy the marrow.” Added another party cadre to another group of captured peasants, “We will not stop with the people, but we will destroy the whole land unto the last tree.”

Ethiopia’s communist rulers were aware that the Tigrean guerrillas could not be defeated by military means alone. So the government’s office of nationalities, run by Ethiopian Amharas assisted by Soviet advisers, came up with a plan at the beginning of the 1980s to exterminate the TPLF’s rural power base. But the plan didn’t really get rolling until the famine-inspired Western relief effort did. Here is what happened to one of the fish in the sea.

Woldeselassie Gebremariam, a Tigrean priest in his late thirties, was one of fifty Ethiopian refugees interviewed in March 1985 at a camp in eastern Sudan by Peter Niggli, a Swiss investigator for the German church group Berliner Missionswerk.

Woldeselassie, expecting to return home in a few days, left his wife and three children back in his village. This was about the time that a Newsday report (December 9, 1984) entitled, “New Start for Chosen Few” by Josh Friedman, indicated that a number of resettlement abuses, including the forced separation of families, had ended.

For food, the prisoners were given two pieces of bread a day. The soldiers reportedly ate from grain bags, whose markings indicated they had been donated by the European Economic Commission and the governments of Canada and West Germany. On the eleventh day, Soviet pilots transported Woldeselassie and the others from Adwa to Makelle by helicopter. They couldn’t go by land because the countryside in between was controlled by the TPLF.

Others at the camp explained how on account of catastrophic sanitary conditions, people fell ill with diarrhea and vomiting. Many died before even leaving Makelle. But when foreigners, including journalists, visited near the camp, the Tigreans temporarily were moved elsewhere.

Soviet-made Antonovs, provided by the Soviet Union and Libya, were used in the operation. The planes, whose unpressurized cargo bays were designed for 50 paratroopers, carried 300–350 people on each flight to Addis Ababa. As Woldeselassie and many others described it, the sick people were laid on the floor in the middle of the plane, then the healthier ones were packed in. “We stood like sticks tied together. Those stretched out on the floor in the middle suffered most. People stepped on them, fell on them, squashed them. One person died before my eyes.” Bonnie K. Holcomb, who worked alongside Niggli interviewing survivors, told Spin magazine that people “were crushed to death on the impact of takeoff and landing. They were suffocating, throwing up on each other, literally being asphyxiated. …Children had to be held over people’s heads so they wouldn’t be smashed. Women miscarried and bled.” At Bole airport in Addis Ababa, troops carried off the dead bodies, and a fire brigade hosed out the pool of vomit and piss from the floor of the plane.

Although water was not scarce, the peasants were given only one cup of water each before being packed tightly onto buses for the long journey to Welega, a province in western Ethiopia astride the border with Sudan. “We were simply dropped off in the middle of the jungle, all around nothing but grass and bamboo of a man’s height. I felt like garbage that had been dropped in the middle of nowhere,” said another captured peasant, who like Woldeselassie, was used to living in the highlands of Tigre.

The jungly no-man’s-land was near Asosa, a town about twenty-five miles from the Sudanese border. Woldeselassie said that no food was provided for two days after his group had arrived. He and other Tigreans tried to escape. But after three days in the bush they were caught by Berta tribesmen and brought back to Asosa. “The administrator asked us why we tried to run away. ‘No one had forced us to come,’ he said. …We nodded in agreement, hoping to reduce our punishment: yes, we had all come here voluntarily. Then we complained that there was no food, how should we survive? He answered that the government was begging other governments to feed us.”

Woldeselassie was fortunate, however. A few days later, he made a second escape attempt and this time succeeded in reaching Sudan, where Niggli interviewed him at Damazin on March 6, 1985.

At this time, 42,000 people already had been relocated to the Asosa region, mainly east of the Dabus River, in order to make escapes to Sudan more difficult. Not a single installation awaited the peasants, and food and water were scarce. For those not lucky enough to escape soon after arrival, several months of hard labor followed: savannah grass had to be cut, trees were felled, and bamboo forests were cleared. Houses of corrugated iron were built for the militia and party cadres, and large grass huts were put up for assemblies. Only afterward were the peasants allowed to build smaller grass huts for themselves. In the intervening period, the peasants either slept out in the open or in the larger assembly huts, where two hundred to three hundred people were squeezed together, side to side, each night. Because the grass was so dry, fires were frequent. It is possible that some of the fires were set by Tigreans as a form of protest. In any case, the consequences were horrific. Hundreds of people reportedly were burned. Those who died were buried in mass graves. Among the victims were women and children, who on account of being ill from starvation, couldn’t run fast enough from the flames. Others who were not hurt had their clothes destroyed. Because new clothing was not available, the cadres handed out empty sacks to the peasants so that they could make new garments.

The workday began at six, but most had to rise by three in the morning in order to stand in line for a cooking pan to roast the little bit of peeled grain that was distributed. Except for a short break in the middle of the afternoon for a second, similar meal, work continued until dusk, when graves were dug for those who had died during the day. New settlers usually received unground wheat. Only sometimes was wheat flour distributed. According to Niggli, the wheat rations varied considerably, from eleven pounds per person per month to fifty-five pounds. (A person needs at least sixty-five pounds per month to meet his or her minimum protein requirement through wheat alone.) Special food for the cadres and militia troops was brought in from the town.

The peasants were divided into work brigades of twenty-five, called a guad. Twenty guads equaled a tabia (center in Amharic) of five hundred people. An amba (village) usually consisted of about seven thousand people, or fourteen tabias. Each amba was commanded by seventy militia troops, who in turn were under the power of fourteen armed cadres from the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia. A study prepared by Cultural Survival, an independent human rights organization staffed mainly by Harvard professors, explained how the militia troops lived in fear of the Marxist cadres.

When Niggli, Bonnie Holcomb, and the research director of Cultural Survival, Dr. Jason W. Clay, arrived in Sudan in February 1985 to interview the Tigreans and others who had escaped over the border, the resettlement issue was an interesting sideshow to the main famine story. Western journalists and diplomats in Ethiopia had caught glimpses of people being herded onto trucks and airplanes. One U.S. diplomat went so far as to say that “the selection process recalled Auschwitz.” From the little that could be discerned, resettlement appeared to be yet another indication, if any was needed, of the Marxist regime’s insensitivity to its own people. But there the issue ground to a halt for lack of evidence. Resettlement areas simply were off limits to almost all foreigners, except those on prearranged tours to model camps. The government denied that the program was not voluntary or that it was motivated by any factor besides the humanitarian desire to relocate drought-stricken peasants to more fertile areas in the west and southwest of the country. Western relief officials stationed in Addis Ababa, whose presence depended on the good will of the local authorities, tended to back up the regime’s assertions. The obfuscations no doubt influenced Friedman’s Newsday article, as well as a report aired April 1, 1985, on ABC’s World News Tonight by correspondent Lou Cioffi, who depicted resettlement as a necessary evil.

Jimma, as it turned out, was one of the camps about which Cultural Survival had obtained first-hand information concerning massive human rights abuses.

For the two months that they were in Sudan, Niggli, Holcomb, and Clay were relatively unobtrusive. They went about their business quietly and didn’t socialize with the crowd of journalists and relief workers in Khartoum. A year later, when the results of their research were being hotly discussed, few could even remember them. (I was fortunate to be tipped off to their operation by a diplomat, who casually mentioned that “there was this guy here from Harvard a few months back, Jason Clay, conducting research on resettlement, who seemed a lot more serious and professional than the others passing through this place. You ought to get in touch with him.”)

Cultural Survival, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, came to Sudan with especially impressive credentials. Founded in 1972 by a group of social scientists at Harvard University, its reports on endangered ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have criticized right-wing and left-wing governments alike and have been utilized by the World Bank, USAID, and foreign governments to judge a country’s human rights record and need for development assistance. Clay’s team interviewed 277 Ethiopian refugees at six sites in eastern Sudan (Fau II, Tawawa, Wad Kowli, Damazin, Kirmuk, and Yabuus) using local translators who were not connected with the TPLF. (Bonnie Holcomb, who speaks Oromo, helped with some of the translations.) All interviews were taped and then translated a second time by other translators back in the United States. More than half those interviewed were selected at random and, in almost all cases, involved more than 5 percent of the total population of each camp. This was a statistically huge sample. (Harris Polls, for instance, rely on .0004 of 1 percent of the U.S. population.) As Clay told me in a letter, “Methodologically, you cannot touch [criticize] the data that we collected” about conditions in Ethiopia “as it relates to the refugees in Sudan.”

Nevertheless, by the time Clay and his team completed their work in Sudan at the end of March 1985, between 300,000 and 400,000 peasants from the north of Ethiopia already had been resettled, according to the authorities in Addis Ababa. From a strictly scientific point of view, as Clay admitted to me, his findings could not claim to provide a wholly accurate picture of what was happening to those still in Ethiopia, who did not escape. This is because the Ethiopian refugees in Sudan, for a variety of reasons, may not have been representative of those who were resettled. Clay said, however, “the information that we collected was so similar on so many fronts, that it has to be taken seriously” regarding the present situation inside Ethiopia. Although this obviously was a researcher’s opinion of his own work, Clay’s words found an echo in the remarks of author William Shawcross, in The Quality of Mercy, about the situation inside Cambodia in the mid 1970s.

Clay told me that he tried to get permission for Cultural Survival to conduct research inside Ethiopia itself, but his queries never were answered. Nevertheless, certain scientific reservations notwithstanding, the work carried out in eastern Sudan by Clay, Niggli, and Holcomb was not only more thorough and unrestricted than was any other investigation of Ethiopian resettlement practices, but the work also stands as one of the most richly detailed, academically guided studies of the actual process of forced collectivization and its attendant human rights abuses in the reality of the Third World. To my knowledge, no study of the Great Leap Forward in China or the actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was as well packaged as was Cultural Survival’s Politics and the Ethiopian Famine 1984–1985, a 250-page monograph, served up with an array of attractive maps, whose results—if you could wade through the overwhelming details (few could)—were absolutely devastating.

“All those interviewed insisted that they had been captured by government troops and forced to resettle. …Ten percent of all those interviewed reported that they witnessed people being killed who tried to escape.” More than 40 percent said they were beaten. More than 85 percent said they had been separated from at least one member of their immediate families; 70 percent were separated from all members of their immediate families. Amete Gebremedhin, a Tigrean in her early forties, stated that after she and a group of other captured women protested to the militia about being separated from their husbands and children, “the soldiers laughed and said: ‘What do you care about your children, you will find new ones in Asosa.’”

According to the report, resettlement often occurred in the process of fighting between the government and the TPLF. The government would surround a village, burn the crops, take the animals, and round people up. But in other instances, various lures were used; as in the case of Woldeselassie, the government would advise peasants to bring their oxen to a certain place for vaccination and then abduct those peasants. The most common lure was the promise of food at government feeding centers. Here Western grain deliveries played a direct part in the resettlement process. It also explains why hundreds of thousands of northern peasants, mostly Tigreans, ran away from the food that U.S. relief workers were donating in November 1984, rather than toward it, and trekked for weeks on foot to Sudan instead.

More than 30 percent of those taken for resettlement, according to Clay’s report, “were held in regular prisons with common criminals or in military barracks until transport was arranged…. People reported that as many as 20 percent of those captured at the same time from their village died in the holding camps even before beginning the trip.” Relatives trying to bring food to those in holding areas were denied entry and were beaten by soldiers.

Some of the peasants were held in proper feeding camps, accessible to Western journalists. But “only the meek, quiet people were allowed to see the journalists. Group leaders and known resisters were moved out of camp areas where journalists were permitted to roam.” In one case, an Ethiopian government official announced that “white guests are coming. …Whether you speak positively or negatively we will translate positively to the journalists.” Tsegay Wolde Giorgis, a Tigrean in his fifties, said that in November 1984 “the inmates in the camp at Makelle were told to select ten speakers who should talk to western journalists. The speakers were supposed to talk about drought and famine that had affected their villages… and that they had no other desire but to be resettled.” Another Tigrean, Haili Kelela, claimed that in front of a group of “white people” who had arrived in “a white car with a red cross painted on it,” he and seven others told party cadres that they didn’t want to be resettled. The cadres assured them that “we will give you food… and lead you back to your village.” But after the “white people” had left, he and the others were thrown in prison and beaten until “I had to vomit blood.”

Everyone interviewed said people had died en route to the resettlement sites; 60 percent said they actually saw people die. Clay’s analysis of the death figures was the most comprehensive and the most controversial part of his research.

The figure of “50,000 to 100,000” dead set the aid communities in Khartoum and Addis Ababa ablaze. It was a higher death rate than that at the emergency feeding camps on the Sudanese border at the height of the famine, and most of the Ethiopians who perished in Sudan were children and old people—of which there were very few in the resettlement program. Father Jack Finucane, the head of Concern, an Irish aid group in Addis Ababa, saw the death rates in an article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal about Cultural Survival’s report and told a group of sixty foreign aid workers assembled on October 19, 1985, at the RRC headquarters, “I’ve read it and I don’t believe it.” Finucane said that in visits he and other members of Concern made to the resettlement area, there were no indications of any such horrors. But as it turned out, one month earlier, at a private meeting at the Hilton Hotel where only Western ambassadors and some aid officials were present, Finucane told a different tale; about a half million people were being displaced in “horrible conditions.” Of seventy-seven resettlement areas, only two or three had succeeded, he had said. In a July 29, 1985, letter to his home office, Finucane wrote it was safe to assume that 25 percent—or 125,000—of the settlers had died.

Finucane’s reversal, whereby he independently confirmed from the Ethiopian side the main points of Cultural Survival’s Sudan-based research, only to deny it all at a public forum in the presence of Ethiopian officials, was laid out in a November 3, 1985, article by David Blundy in the Sunday Times (of London). When Blundy, then one of the paper’s leading foreign correspondents, asked the chair of the Band Aid coordinating committee in Addis Ababa, Brother Augustus O’Keefe, about the discrepancy, O’Keefe replied, “That was a private meeting [the meeting between Finucane and the ambassadors]. I won’t talk about it. The press have done a lot of damage here. I have never heard about any problems with resettlement.”

It was a familiar pattern: back up the research of Cultural Survival and Berliner Missionswerk in private, but condemn it in public. The Red Cross League, for example, did a study on resettlement in the summer of 1985 that corroborated much of what Clay’s resettlement study had found, including the death rate. But the report was kept secret. (Oddly enough, the Canadian Embassy in Addis Ababa was a true believer in resettlement, even in private. One Canadian diplomat actually told me that the West had to get involved in a big way in resettlement, in order to have “influence here.” When I mentioned to another Canadian official, whom I met in Sudan, that Canada was assisting resettlement through funding to private agencies involved in the program, he got very angry and proceeded to launch a tirade against U.S. human rights abuses in the Third World. At the time I knew of no other country about which the views of the Canadian and U.S. governments were as divergent as on Ethiopia. Officials in the U.S. State Department and National Security Council had been extremely critical of Canada’s policy toward resettlement. In Addis Ababa, the two embassies literally represented opposing camps. Some of the Canadians I met appeared absolutely driven about proving that—at least as far as Ethiopia was concerned— they had a foreign policy truly different from that of the United States. In Canada itself this policy was criticized. This was one of the stranger aspects of the famine emergency.)

The spinelessness of the aid community in Addis Ababa was demonstrated a few months later, in December 1985, when the inevitable happened—one of their own went public about the appalling consequences of resettlement. Medecins sans Frontieres published a report entitled, “Mass Deportation in Ethiopia,” alleging that with a death rate of 20 percent, as many as 300,000 people were likely to die in the resettlement program, of which up to 100,000 already had. The report noted that “one of the most massive violations of human rights” was “being carried out with funds and gifts from international aid.” The French group quickly was expelled from Ethiopia, while the rest of the aid community chastised the group for getting involved in “politics” when it should have been keeping its nose to the grindstone of relief work. Apparently, nobody in Addis Ababa was drawing the distinction between “politics” and gross violations of human rights. The kiss of death to the French group’s presence in Ethiopia was administered by the United Nations, which publicly defended resettlement by saying that the French organization’s charges could not be taken seriously because it was the only group in the field making such accusations.

The U.N. statement, reported January 30, 1986, on the BBC’s hourly broadcast, was yet another example of the aid community closing its eyes and ears to unpleasant facts that would have further complicated its working relationship with the Marxist regime, although these facts were easy to come by. Relief workers saw six hundred people at Korem, in Wollo province, being herded onto trucks by militia troops using sticks and whips. Within twenty-four hours, ten thousand other peasants fled the Korem camp fearing their turn would be next. Relief workers also knew that women and children were being denied food at Korem as punishment by the government because the husbands had escaped from resettlement camps. It was no secret that thousands of other women and children were being cut off from intensive feeding programs in Wollo in order to pressure people to volunteer for resettlement.

In early 1986, MSF took its case to the court of U.S. public opinion, which barely paid attention, even though the United States was providing almost as much aid to Ethiopia as was the rest of the world combined. A Washington press conference, among other activities, got the French doctors onto the front page of The New York Times for a day and into the editorial pages of several important dailies. But the story had difficulty making the evening news on the major networks because there was no footage of the settlers being abused. Also, this was the period of the Challenger disaster. Therefore, the impact of MSF’s revelation on the general public was marginal. And as one refugee official in Washington explained to me, “Suzanne Garment of The Wall Street Journal was the only big columnist to write about it, so everyone around here dismissed it as just a right-wing issue.” As limited as MSF’s effect was, it was still greater than that of Cultural Survival. This was in a way unfortunate because MSF, a relief group whose investigation was not as well grounded academically proved a much softer target for supporters of resettlement than did the Harvard-based Cultural Survival. Because the resettlement debate began in 1986 to swirl around MSF, it was assumed by many that the accounts of human rights violations were exaggerated. Most observers forgot that the French doctors’ report was merely part of a growing body of evidence corroborating what Clay’s group initially revealed. The daily news media, by this time obsessed with the southern part of the African continent in place of the Horn, did little to put the findings into perspective or to investigate the matter further. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal was a constant exception to this rule, but like all opinion pages, it didn’t have quite the credibility of a hard news section, and the page’s conservative slant meant that liberals often distrusted it. A breakthrough of sorts occurred in early March 1986, after a visit to the Damazin refugee camp by Blaine Harden of The Washington Post and Charles Powers of the Los Angeles Times.

The refugees on whom Cultural Survival’s study was based were at Damazin for months in 1985, but few members of the media had bothered to interview these refugees. Even after Clay and Holcomb’s report was published, journalists tended to write about the skeptical reaction in the relief community, rather than to hunt down the actual victims in order to hear their firsthand accounts. Harden had planned to do this, but as he explained to me, “I had a whole continent to cover and after several straight months in Ethiopia and Sudan, just as I heard about the Damazin story, I had to do a stint in West Africa.” By the time Harden was able to return to Sudan, the refugees had been scattered to other locations, but another group of about one thousand had arrived from Ethiopia, and this group had been through an experience that was far more horrible than the experience of the people whom Clay, Niggli, and Holcomb had interviewed. As Harden wrote in his story, which ran March 11, 1986, in the International Herald Tribune:

The rebels belonged to the Ethiopian-backed Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which was at war with the Khartoum government and in control of the jungles on Sudan’s southeastern frontier. The escapees from resettlement fell prey to the rebel soldiers in the bush just as the Vietnamese boat people fell prey to pirates on the high seas. According to interviews conducted by Khartoum-based relief officials, several hundred Tigrean women and children escaped from resettlement camps only to be taken into captivity by the SPLA. The women and girl children were raped repeatedly, while the boys were forced to become fighters.

Harden pointed out in his article that “the stories told here… come not from outsiders, but from peasant farmers [who] in 13 separate interviews… told a remarkably consistent story.” He and Powers spent two days at Damazin doing nothing but interviewing a completely new set of refugees, and both reporters came up with exactly the same information as had Clay. In the lobby of the Khartoum Hilton, Harden told me that despite his reservations about aspects of the Cultural Survival report, he found nothing in Damazin to contradict the basic tenets of Clay’s research. Referring to the large-scale human rights abuses in Ethiopia, Harden shook his head and said, “It’s really happening over there.”

Harden’s report triggered a moving editorial in The Washington Post a few days later, but not much else. The television networks as usual were preoccupied elsewhere. Yet what I find particularly disturbing was that at no point in 1985 or 1986 did The New York Times send a reporter to Damazin. Neither Clifford May, Nairobi-based Sheila Rule, nor anyone from the Times Cairo bureau had ever gone there. Even the best newspapers cannot be expected to cover every single story, but the refugees at Damazin were at the center of the whole resettlement controversy, and they were available to journalists for months at a time. The Times dutifully editorialized about resettlement and reported the controversy in the relief community surrounding it, but the most prestigious daily in the United States never really probed the issue in the same aggressive manner in which it had probed human rights violations and other misdeeds of far lesser magnitude in other areas of the world, particularly the Middle East and South Africa.

In spring 1986, a few weeks after The Washington Post published Harden’s Damazin dispatch, former RRC head Dawit Wolde Giorgis, who had defected to the West several months earlier, admitted publicly that “force had to be used [in the resettlement program], and a vast number of people were herded like cattle, loaded on trucks and airplanes, and sent to the south. The whole operation was run by the Workers’ Party and its cadres in the various provinces.” This was the same Dawit who consistently had defended resettlement at the height of the famine emergency, and many of the media reports that had cast a somewhat favorable light on the program had made use of statements from him and his chief assistant in the RRC, Berhane Deressa, who also defected.

Around the same time that Dawit was recanting what he previously had told scores of journalists, the Ethiopian government announced that as of December 1985, 552,000 peasants had been resettled. Yet the previous summer, the government had claimed that as of May 1985, 547,000 had been resettled. Clay thus put forth the question: “What happened to the 100,000 to 250,000 people that were surely moved in the last few months of 1985, but who are no longer in the resettlement camps?” Not only did nobody have an answer, but few others were even aware of the question.

It is intriguing that resettlement received so little attention in the United States. After all, as I’ve demonstrated, the body of evidence was substantial. It is possible that more blacks were killed in the program in less than two years than had been killed directly by South African security forces in forty years. The manner in which Ethiopians died evoked the well-known slaughter of millions of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in the mid 1970s. Yet not only was the U.S. public more concerned about the abuses in South Africa, but both the media and the public also evinced more interest in the fate of a few hundred South Korean students, who had been detained by the police, than about tens of thousands of peasants in Ethiopia who had been starved, beaten, and worked to death in a veritable jungle gulag.

In the opinion of Chester Crocker, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, the lack of public awareness was the fault of the media. In a conversation with me in Washington in early 1987, Crocker explained that in the mid 1980s

Crocker, of course, was a very embattled figure during the Reagan years because of his controversial policy of “constructive engagement” toward the white minority regime in South Africa. The media was relentless in its pursuit of that story, and Crocker’s general attitude toward the Fourth Estate could not have been particularly warm.

Although it’s true that the magnitude of the abuses warranted more dramatic coverage than the story got, more than “access” was involved. As I see it, the fundamental flaw in the resettlement story was that it was a foreign news item with no domestic spinoff. Because the United States, despite its generous aid, was not influential in Ethiopia—and had not been for a decade—it was a tragedy for which the Reagan administration bore absolutely no responsibility. Although private donations to certain charities were indirectly assisting resettlement, as were public donations from other governments, USAID always was careful to channel U.S. aid to relief operations unconnected with the program. Thus, there was nothing to dig up against the administration, and the herd instinct in the media never was activated. Even after the MSF visit, journalists almost never raised the matter at State Department briefings. Ethiopia had been “lost” years before, and U.S. interests were not being jeopardized by the inhuman actions of Ethiopia’s regime. The country now was part of that zone of darkness where literally anything could happen away from the television cameras. Had the deaths occurred at the hands of a colorful madman, like Idi Amin or Muammar Gaddafi, or even someone less well known but just as crazy, like the former “emperor of the Central African Empire,” Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the story could have been rescued from oblivion. But Mengistu was far too efficient a killer to be distracted by buffoonery, so his crimes had little mass-market appeal.

The media, however, bore only part of the responsibility for the limited public response. Elliott Abrams, a former assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Reagan administration, told me that

Abrams remarks contained a subtle, deliberate, and fascinating contradiction: first, he suggested that the Reagan administration did attack the Ethiopian government for its resettlement practices, but then he implied that the administration didn’t. I strongly suspect that Abrams, one of the more ideologically motivated of Reagan’s political appointees, felt that as much as the administration did to publicize human rights abuses in Ethiopia, it could have done even more. I think he, as well as others, felt that had the administration wanted to pull out all the stops, it had it in its power to make resettlement a big media issue.

On the face of it, the Reagan administration did all that normally could have been expected. Crocker and Vice President George Bush spoke out against resettlement on a handful of occasions. USAID administrator M. Peter McPherson rarely missed an opportunity to bash the Ethiopian authorities over the head about it. McPherson made resettlement his pet issue, telling me that “from the start, we were totally disgusted with the Ethiopian regime.” Richard Shifter, who replaced Abrams as the human rights undersecretary (when Abrams became assistant secretary for inter-American affairs), made the investigation of resettlement abuses a priority. Finally, there was Alan L. Keyes, the assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, who as a black was perhaps in a better position to publicly articulate what many others were saying only privately. On March 6, 1986, Keyes told the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs that

Nevertheless, if ever there were an issue tailor-made for a president who was forever searching his file cards for examples of why fighting communism around the world was not just a strategic imperative, but a moral one as well, it was resettlement. Here was a difficult-to-dispute example of an undeniably Marxist Third World government mistreating its people on a grander scale than had any right-wing regime anywhere, particularly those in South Africa, the Philippines, and Chile. Here was an example of what happens to people when their country is “lost” to the Soviet bloc. Resettlement constituted powerful moral ammunition for the Reagan Doctrine. But when did President Reagan ever speak out about it? Maybe he did, once or twice. If so, it was a reference too obscure for even Ethiopia experts to remember. Resettlement was the issue Ronald Reagan had been waiting for all his presidency.

If not Reagan, why not Bush, at least? As one State Department official observed cynically, “Bush should have taken on resettlement as his issue. If ever there was a guy who needed— and was always looking for—his own issue it was Bush.” Reset-tlement, which Bush criticized in the context of his trips to Africa but never really jumped on in Washington, was perhaps the only cause available to him at the time that was original and would have helped to shore up his credentials as a presidential candidate among conservatives, without alienating moderate elements in the Republican party.

Some felt that the reason resettlement never made it past the door of the State Department was because Chester Crocker stood in the way. According to this theory, Crocker’s overriding obsession was his South Africa policy. He had gotten his job on account of his views on South Africa, and his performance as assistant secretary was being judged solely by how he implemented them. The last thing he needed was another complication to further erode his already strife-torn policy toward that country. Therefore, he seemed to some observers to be gun-shy about having the White House launch a frontal human rights attack against a black African regime at a time when President Reagan was being chastised for his indulgence of the white minority government in Pretoria. One State Department official explained the situation to me this way: “If you don’t have an issue that you can fully justify and explain in ten or fifteen seconds before a TV camera, then you don’t have an issue. It would have taken longer than that to show why there was nothing hypocritical in attacking Ethiopia harder than South Africa.” Alan Keyes went a step further: “If the Ethiopian government does away with tens of thousands of people nobody is interested, while if the South African government does away with thousands of people over a period of several years you can’t keep the media away.”

But, again, it wasn’t only the media, nor even just the human rights organizations that weren’t interested, but Western governments as well. Keyes said that at a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in February–March 1986, he

In fact, as a National Security Council staffer revealed, after the United States got independent intelligence confirmation of the main findings of Clay’s report, Secretary of State George Shultz was ready to enter a U.N. resolution condemning the Mengistu regime, but backed down after receiving absolutely no support from the United States’ Western allies, who did not want their aid programs in Addis Ababa jeopardized.

The oft-heard argument of all of those who discounted the conclusions of the U.S. government, Cultural Survival, MSF, Berliner Missionswerk, and others was that resettlement was a necessary step toward the prevention of future famines, even if, for the time being, it was being carried out badly. This was the line of thinking transmitted to the public by the media, as in the case of the ABC World News Tonight report by Lou Cioffi, who along with many other journalists heard this argument from relief workers and diplomats in Addis Ababa. I don’t know how many times it was pointed out to me that resettlement was originally a USAID–World Bank idea proposed to the Ethiopian government in the late 1960s during the reign of Haile Selassie. The question I usually asked in return was, So what? Isn’t it beside the point if it was a great concept in the abstract? Weren’t the goals motivating USAID and the World Bank very different from those motivating the Ethiopian authorities who now were in charge of the program? For this was the most startling and convincing, albeit ignored, finding of the Cultural Survival report—more significant in a way than even the extrapolation of death rates. Interviews with dozens of peasants revealed that the drought and famine were of marginal relevance to the resettlement program. The report stated:

Niggli wrote that of the Tigreans he interviewed who had escaped from resettlement camps, “only 14 percent… had had no harvest in the last year and can be regarded as drought victims or famine victims.” Of the rest, many had had an average harvest prior to being resettled, and some even had had a good harvest. Niggli mentioned there were even “absurd cases” such “as Tewolde Gebregziabher who had owned an irrigated fruit plantation and who was a rich peasant by Ethiopian standards” prior to being forcibly removed to the south. The studies indicated that most of the abducted peasants lived not in the worst, drought-affected regions, but in the vicinity of roads strategically vital to the government’s war effort.

The criteria the government used in the resettlement selection process had more to do with a peasant’s potential for assisting guerrillas than with his or her need for fertile land. For example, although most of the Amharas in Wollo were Christians, most of the Amharas taken for resettlement were Moslem Oromos, whose fathers and grandfathers had Oromo names, and who traditionally had supported warlords and other insurgents against the ruling Amharas of Shoa. Rather than a catastrophe—as it had been for Haile Selassie—the famine was a godsend for this regime. The famine created a pool of millions of peasants, who whatever their political leanings, now had no choice but to rely on the government for help. The government now had a legitimate excuse to relocate those it thought to be hostile, as well as the wherewithal to do it, partly because of relief supplies pouring in from the West.

Rather than work to alleviate the famine, the regime appeared to deliberately exacerbate it for the peasants targeted for eventual resettlement. Said one farmer, “The Dergue is the best friend of the pigs and the monkeys. He allows them free access to the fields while we sit imprisoned in useless harangues about paying more tax out of the crop that at that time is mostly eaten by animals.” Remarked another, “They should put the baboons in the meetings and let us go to farm the field. Then we could eat and get fat like the animals do.” In addition to the problem of animals, more than a quarter of those interviewed by Cultural Survival said that the army had stolen their farm equipment (plows, seed bags, leather straps, and other tools).

Not only did the resettlement program destroy the livelihoods of peasants in the north, but the program destroyed those in the south, too. Many of the new sites in fact had been successfully farmed for years before the indigenous inhabitants had their land expropriated by the state to make way for the new arrivals. The rationale for this seemingly irrational act was military and political: most of the sites were located along access routes used by the Oromo Liberation Front in its war against the government. Thus, not only would the Tigrean rebels in the north be deprived of their base of peasant support, but so would the Oromo rebels in the south. Moving people around became another way to prosecute a war. Amhara imperialism simply had evolved into a more sophisticated form. A look at the placement of resettlement sites on a map reveals a pattern strikingly similar to the military expeditions of Menelik in the late nineteenth century.

Because restoring agricultural productivity was not the aim of resettlement, the government put up with miserable results without attempting to change the program. About three-quarters of all the tractors at the new sites reportedly were out of order in 1984, and the production level of the resettlement camps was even lower than at the state farms. Yet the government, backed by segments of the aid and diplomatic community in Addis Ababa, kept insisting that “there was no other way.”

In Cambodia in the mid 1970s, a horde of primitive peasants, the Khmer Rouge, brutalized an urban elite. In Ethiopia in the mid 1980s, an urban elite brutalized a class of primitive peasants. Although for several years, until the release of the film The Killing Fields, the crimes of the Khmer Rouge were partially obscured by the closure of Cambodia to the outside world and the shadowy nature of the group’s leader, Pol Pot, there was never really a tendency in the West to portray the forced relocation of urban Cambodians to the countryside as anything less than wholesale murder; nor was it really necessary to prove that that’s what the relocation was. The Khmer Rouge, because they were primitive peasants, lacked the sophistication to con Western relief officials into subsidizing the reorganization of a society along Stalinist lines. But in Ethiopia, not only were Western officials dealing with an urban elite, but with the most sophisticated, Westernized stratum within that elite, composed of people who were able to convince others of what they themselves did not wholly believe. Forced collectivization thus was marketed successfully as famine relief.

Resettlement, however, was just one aspect of collectivization. The other, much larger, component was villagization. In 1984 and 1985, the government managed to resettle about 500,000 of the 1.5 million people targeted; the program was resumed again in 1987 after the last unsteady flickers of the media spotlight had been snuffed out. But in roughly the same time frame, 1984–1986, ten times that many people—approximately five million—had been forcibly uprooted through villagization, with another 27 million scheduled for the same fate by the mid 1990s.

Villagization—a more grandiose, amorphous, and incomprehensible program than resettlement—made even less of an impact on the outside world. Villagization happened deep in the bush, far away from the diplomats, television camera crews, and other Western monitors, and it was too great a cataclysm to be grasped through the medium of print alone. (I think a main reason why Stalin’s war against ethnic Ukrainians made less of an impact in the West than did Hitler’s war against the Jews—even though the former may have claimed more lives—was because there were far fewer pictures of it; as with villagization, the destruction of the Ukrainian peasantry happened in secret, inside the sealed perimeters of a Marxist police state.)

Moreover, the most descriptive and penetrating article about villagization was an October 3, 1986, cover story in the French news magazine L’Express, which isn’t read in the United States. Although effectively written articles and editorials on the subject did appear (notably in Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal), almost all were published in mid-1986, long after the Ethiopia story had been submerged by developments in South Africa. If resettlement came to light too late in the day to make a strong impact, villagization came to light even later.

However, unlike resettlement, villagization had no real defenders in the Western relief community in Addis Ababa. Even the Swedes, who in the past had been the most sympathetic to Marxist-style agricultural experiments, publicly criticized villagization and reduced their aid budget in Ethiopia on account of it. The reasons for this more realistic attitude were several. First, villagization did not become an issue until the very end of 1985. By then, the defection of Dawit, the publication of the Cultural Survival and MSF reports, and the demonstrated refusal of the Ethiopian regime to moderate its policies in the face of famine all had a cumulative effect on those, who the year before, had been willing to give the regime the benefit of the doubt. Second, the very size of the program—designed to affect three-quarters of the country’s entire population—denied it credibility. Third, the RRC, in the throes of high-level defections, was less successful in selling it. (Once in exile, Dawit condemned villagization as “another ill-conceived policy.”) Fourth, and most importantly, villagization was more blatantly ideological than resettlement was. Mengistu had spoken out openly against “kulaks” and, in a separate study done in Somalia, on escapees from villagization, Cultural Survival reported that, indeed, all those interviewed had been relatively prosperous farmers prior to being “villagized.”

In the face of these realities, nobody believed that the program was meant to combat drought, famine, and underdevelopment, as the Ethiopian government authorities claimed. Ray Wilkinson reported in Newsweek (May 5, 1986) that diplomats and relief officials told him that “villagization is really a smoke-screen for collectivization of the sort that Soviet leaders forced upon Russian peasants in the 1930s. The Ethiopian government’s real aim… is to herd peasants into centralized communities where the Army can keep them under control—and where communist cadres can indoctrinate them in Marxism-Leninism.”

The basic outline of the fate of millions of peasants, mostly Moslem Oromos, under villagization was not in dispute. The army would move into a group of villages, requisition the crops and livestock, and force the inhabitants to tear down their huts piece by piece. Then the peasants were made to walk, with the remnants of their homes on their backs, to a new, central location that had been selected by the party cadres. The new site almost always would lack a mosque, a school, and an adequate, nearby water source. But it would come equipped with a guard tower, a red flag, and a banner of the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia. In the Hararghe region of eastern Ethiopia, thousands of such villages sprung up in the mid 1980s, each with several hundred rebuilt huts put up in straight rows. Gilles Hertzog, a French relief official writing in L’Express (October 3, 1986), described the new sites as “black rectangles where the huts are aligned like on parade.” Hertzog asked, “What kind of crazy vision [has been] imposed on one of the oldest inhabited regions of Africa?” The tearing down and rebuilding usually occurred at harvest time at the peasants’ own expense, when they should have been in the field bringing in their crops. Just the time wasted on relocation served to lower agricultural productivity.

“As we understand human rights in the West, this program is a gross violation of those rights,” a Westerner in Ethiopia told Wilkinson; “This country’s communist rulers are breaking up a centuries-old culture, and the only people they asked are themselves. On these grounds alone the program is indefensible.” Yet, although nobody defended it, no Western government really condemned it either. Even the Reagan administration’s criticism was muted, compared to the way it attacked resettlement. Rarely in modern times have so many people had their human rights abused in so organized a fashion with hardly a whimper of real protest or sustained media coverage than in the case of villagization.

The utter brutality of the experience was far worse than the Newsweek and L’Express articles had suggested. In the first month of 1986, fifty thousand Moslem Oromos escaping villagization stampeded over the border into northwestern Somalia, where they were held temporarily in a squalid refugee camp, located a few miles from the Ethiopian frontier, called Tug Wajale B. In the spring, Jason Clay of Cultural Survival and Lance Clark of the independent, nonprofit Refugee Policy Group in Washington, D.C., went to Tug Wajale to interview the new arrivals about their experience in Ethiopia. All the Oromos interviewed told a similar story of a whole way of life being systematically destroyed, not only by the razing of ancestral villages, but through a deliberate policy—implemented by the army—of wrecking mosques, raping women, and removing children to far-off schools. Lance Clark reported the following testimony from a “woman of about 35 years of age.”

One woman told Clay “that in her village the standard rape ratio was five militia per woman and that the militia were ‘turned loose’ twice a week.” As to the food supply, the Oromo refugees “insisted that they had been told [by the cadre] not to give milk to their children; since all cows belong to the state [and] it is the state’s responsibility to feed the children.”

Officials at the State Department in Washington said that the main reason why a greater protest wasn’t made against villagization was because unlike in the case of Cultural Survival’s resettlement study, the United States was unable to verify independently the stories told to Clay by the refugees in Somalia. I was told that the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa mounted a special effort to investigate villagization in the Hararghe region but was unable to confirm, or to deny, the accounts about mosques being destroyed and women being raped. I then asked myself, How are observers based in the Ethiopian capital supposed to find out about the specific acts of militia troops in small places out in the bush when the entire relief community in Addis Ababa knew nothing about the flight of the fifty thousand Oromos to Somalia while it actually was occurring? (As thousands of Oromos were pouring over the border, international observers in Addis Ababa were telling their counterparts in the Somali capital of Mogadishu that it shouldn’t be happening because they had no information about it!) Moreover, because the basic facts about how the program was being administered were already well known and chilling enough, was it really necessary to have independent verification for every gory detail before the State Department could scream bloody murder? Even in the most controlled and manipulated circumstances, journalists who were taken to showcase sites in Hararghe with Ethiopian government guides could not escape the feeling that something awful was taking place. One doesn’t have to read in between the lines of Sheila Rule’s June 22, 1986, story in The New York Times (buried on page eleven) to get this message.

I decided to go to Somalia (in October 1986) to hear the refugees’ stories firsthand. It took me a week to get a visa from the Somali Embassy in Nairobi and then to get on to one of the twice-weekly flights to Mogadishu. Once in Mogadishu, the UNHCR office assisted me with the rest of my journey, which included another plane flight to the steamy port of Berbera in the north; from here a UNHCR Land Cruiser drove across the entire width of northern Somalia, first to Hargeisa, where I spent the night, and then, finally, to Tug Wajale, where I slept in a sleeping bag inside a drafty tent on the freezing, windy plateau. The return journey to Nairobi took just as long. Several members of the Nairobi-based foreign press corps also made the journey at one time or another in 1986. But because Tug Wajale, on account of its location, could not be done as a “quickie,” practically no one from outside Africa came in to do the story. (The only exception I am aware of was Philip Revzin of The Wall Street Journal, whose report was published May 26, 1986.) Thus, only a handful of articles appeared about the testimony of the Oromo refugees, and almost all of those were buried on inside pages.

I interviewed fourteen refugees at Tug Wajale B and another nearby camp in three days at the end of October 1986. Almost all of the interviews were done in isolation; the refugee was moved by Land Cruiser to an area out of earshot from his or her compatriots, where I spent, on the average, about ninety minutes talking to the person. The translator I used was not a member of the Oromo Liberation Front or any other political organization I know of, and he had been highly recommended to me by several foreign relief officials. I tried hard to avoid asking leading questions, and I sought constantly to ferret out inconsistencies in the stories I heard, so much so that one of the women I interviewed accused me of being hostile. Despite all of these precautions, I was impressed with the consistency of the accounts. All, interviewed separately, told more or less the same story; the gruesome tale of Fatma Abdullah Ahmed, described at the beginning of this book, was repeated many times during my stay at Tug Wajale. Nothing I heard was substantially different from what Jason Clay or Lance Clark had reported, even though some of the people I interviewed had arrived at different times and were in a different batch of refugees from the ones Clay and Clark interviewed. I was warned that refugees were prone to invent tales of political persecution, so that they will be considered by the U.N. as bona fide “refugees,” instead of just as drought victims, who were liable to be sent back to their country of origin after agricultural conditions improve. But my interviews proved otherwise. These escapees, who had lived in isolated villages, spoke only Oromo, and probably encountered white foreigners for the first time in their lives at Tug Wajale, simply were not sophisticated enough to recognize bureaucratic distinctions that not every relief official could recognize. It simply strained logic to believe that what these refugees were saying was not essentially true. Yet not only did few want to believe them, as in the case of resettlement, few even wanted to listen.

Villagization went on unabated and thereby paved the road to the next famine by uprooting the way of life of the country’s most successful group of farmers. In 1987, foreign donors were helping to make up cereal deficits in twenty-two of thirty-nine regions of Hararghe, which prior to villagization traditionally had registered surpluses. Thus, large amounts of Western aid were subsidizing communism, albeit indirectly, while charities such as Live Aid were serving to buttress a ruling elite that had destroyed the lives of more of its own people than had any other government in this decade, with the sole exception of Iran’s, and that consistently had refused to negotiate a truce in a war that killed hundreds of thousands. Clay’s frequent assertion that Western aid in the long run could kill more people than it saved in the short run was neither farfetched nor unfair.

Meanwhile, partly on account of the uproar raised by the U.S. government and MSF, resettlement ground to a halt in January 1986. But it got rolling again in March 1987. The first mention of this appeared near the bottom of a story on Ethiopia, written by correspondent James Brooke, in The New York Times (March 13, 1987). The article labeled resettlement “controversial.” The New York Times correspondent also noted that the Ethiopian government planned to resettle only thirty thousand people a month, which was half the rate of the 1984–1985 period, thereby indicating perhaps that resettlement would be less “hurriedly executed” and therefore somewhat more humane. If it eventually turns out that resettlement—if not villagization—was truly reformed, then the Reagan administration and a few human rights and relief groups deserve the credit. The media’s overall response to Ethiopian collectivization was remarkably passive.

For a time at least, U.S. journalists were as ubiquitous in Ethiopia as they have been in Nicaragua. But, as Arch Puddington pointed out in Commentary (April 1986), while “the Nicaraguan revolution has been subjected to a microscopic examination,” the one in Ethiopia, which has led to the deaths of many more people, “has been largely ignored.”