BACKGROUND:

1. Eritrea's expulsions, abuse of Ethiopian Civilians and Former Prisoners in 1991
2. Eritrea's blocking international relief activities and diverting relief food shipments.


October 31, 1998

Dear Netters:

Eritrea's public relations machine has been telling the world that no Ethiopian civilians were expelled from Eritrea in 1991. But not everyone has forgotten what happened back then. The following New York Times article from July, 1991 provides some indication of the massive abuses the EPLF inflicted upon Ethiopian civilians as well as on soldiers who were taken prisoner when the conflict ended.

Thanks to Natoli Geda for providing this article.

A second New york Times article from August 1991 shows how the Eritrean government blocked relief food shipments to Ethiopia while civilians were dying of hunger.

- Dagmawi


The New York Times
July 22, 1991, Monday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 1526 words
HEADLINE: Ethiopia Troops Battle to Survive Misery of Peace
BYLINE: By JANE PERLEZ, Special to The New York Times
DATELINE: MEKELE, Ethiopia, July 15


QUOTE: "Compounding a problem of what to do with the old army is another wave of refugees. Tens of thousands of Ethiopian civilians who have been expelled by the new authorities in Eritrea have started to arrive in camps at the Eritrean border."

"The Eritrean Front has told relief officials to expect 150,000 more Ethiopian civilians soon, apparently people who are being dismissed from their jobs in Eritrea, some of them longtime residents in Eritrea." click for rest of article...


Article #2:

US Accuses Eritrea on Food Relief

New York Times
August 12, 1991

By Clifford Krauss

Washington, Aug.11 - Bush Administration officials say that in the aftermath of Ethiopia's civil war the new provisional government of the separatist province of Eritrea is playing politics with food relief to assert its independence before a planned referendum to decide its sovereignty.

The officials, who deal with aid programs, said the Eritrean authorities had increased dock fees for some ships by more than tenfold, which they said could deter shipping companies under contract to deliver food. And they said Eritrean officials had diverted foreign relief aid for the rest of Ethiopia to their own people as a way of increasing their control and popular support.

The Administration, in response, has rejected an Eritrean appeal to have American food aid distributed by an agency affiliated with the ruling Eritrean People's Liberation Front.

'Kids Are Dying'

The way Eritrea is handling relief aid, one State Department official said, appears to be part of a broader effort to isolate itself from Ethiopia. The Eritrean provisional government has prohibited telephone links between Eritrea and Ethiopia and banned Ethiopian Airlines from landing in Asmara, the Eritrean capital.

"As they try to cut links between Eritrea and Ethiopia, kids are dying," charged Andrew Natsios, director of the office of United States Foreign Disaster Assistance. "They are using the relief program to make a political statement."

The Red Sea province, which developed a distinct culture as an Italian colony in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was officially ruled by the Government in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, until Eritrean separatist rebels drove the Ethiopian army out of the province last May. That fighting was part of a wider rebellion involving other rebel factions that ousted the long-ruling authoritarian Government of Lieut. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam.

The issue of Eritrean independence is sensitive because Ethiopia would be left landlocked if the northern province broke away permanently. The current provisional Government in Addis Ababa is dominated by a political group that was loosely aligned with the Eritreans during the war against President Mengistu. But now the provisional President, Meles Zenawi, is believed to want to encourage Eritreans to remain a part of Ethiopia.

U.S. Voicing Disappointment

The United States has traditionally supported the concept of a united Ethiopia. But the Bush Administration adjusted policy when confronted with the inevitability of an Eritrean victory, and came out in support of Eritrean self-determination in the final days of the war.

But the Administration is voicing increasing disappointment with the Eritreans. Last month, officials complained that the Eritreans were mistreating hundreds of thousands of former Ethiopian soldiers who they said were abandoned, stripped of their clothes and boots at Eritrea's southern border.

Now the Eritrean relief policies have created new tensions between the Administration and the provisional Government. In a meeting two weeks ago with Tesfai Ghermazien, an Eritrean representative in Washington, Mr. Natsios hurled an unusually caustic insult: "You've taken lessons from Mengistu: using food as a political weapon." Afterwards, the Eritrean authorities refused to allow an American aid official to travel to the port of Assab from Addis Ababa, claiming he would first need to come to Asmara to seek a treavel permit.

Mr. Tesfai, the Eritrean representative, denied that his movement was attempting to use food as a political weapon and said Asmara retains excellent relations with the authorities in Addis Ababa. "We have been open for relief activities," he said, adding that whatever administrative problems there are pertain to the fact that "we are just starting to administer the ports."

The matter of Eritrea's sovereignty will not be settled officially until a popular referendum on independence is held within two years, but American officials said they suspect that the provisional government in Eritrea is attempting to force the issue.

American officials said the danger of a massive famine in Ethiopia has subsisded since the end of the war, but there are still pockets of hunger that can only be alleviated if Eritrea allows aid to flow freely.

James Jonah, the United Nations Undersecretary General for Special Political Questions, said he thought progress had been made in improving the relationship between international relief organizations and the provisional government during a visit to Eritrea last week. He said the Eritreans had agreed to drop restrictrions on the movement of relief workers in the country and their insistence that foreign agencies be prohibited from installing radio communications with the outside world.





Article #1 - BODY:
Ethiopia Troops Battle to Survive Misery of Peace
By JANE PERLEZ, Special to The New York Times
MEKELE, Ethiopia, July 15

Six weeks after they lost the war, hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian Army soldiers, sick and hungry, are huddling without shelter in squalid camps or slogging on foot through brutal mountain passes in a chaotic nightmare of demobilization.

Hundreds of soldiers have died of exhaustion, malaria and pneumonia, relief workers say. Exact numbers of deaths are not known because many are believed to have died in rough and remote areas.

Here in Mekele, a camp about 100 miles south of the Eritrean border, 7,000 former soldiers trudged in one day last week from the mountains. Many of the arriving soldiers were barefoot, too weak to talk or suffering from untreated war wounds, including in one case a missing jaw.

'Help! We Are Dying'

With no beds available for the makeshift infirmary, the sick lay in tents on blankets on the rough ground. Soon after staggering into the camp, two men, dehydrated and worn out from the 200-mile walk from Adwa, died within half an hour of each other.

When a visitor appeared in the camp, some of the men called: "Please help! We are dying."

The 17-year-old rule of Lieut. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, a Government said to have the largest army in Africa, was toppled at the end of May by guerrilla forces from the northern provinces of Tigre and Eritrea.

Today, Mengistu soldiers, many of them peasant conscripts who were lured away from their villages for up to a decade, are trying to rejoin the impoverished Ethiopian society, penniless, jobless and with few means to get home.

The effects of the demobilization are most acute in areas south of the border of Eritrea, a province of Ethiopia where rebels in control of the province now seek secession from Ethiopia. About half of the army was stationed in Eritrea, and now the victors are taking the former soldiers by bus across the border and dropping them there or freeing them from prison camps and telling them to walk.

Until several days ago, there were only 50 tents in this rain-drenched camp to protect more than 50,000 soldiers, some of whom were trying to carve sleeping places out of the mud in the camp after the grueling walk through soaring escarpments at Aduwa that helped Emperor Menelik defeat Italian colonizers nearly 100 years ago. The stench from a pit latrine system in danger of being flooded by the seasonal rains filled the air.

'I Want to Go Home'

Berhane Worku, 22 years old, who said he volunteered for the army when he was 14, stood shivering in shorts and a ripped shirt, sodden socks and torn plastic sandals. "I want transport fast," he said as he tried to protect himself from a rain squall with a sheet of plastic. "I want to go home."

After the Ethiopian Army was defeated in Eritrea on May 24, Mr. Berhane said, he was held prisoner of war for a month in Mendefare, where he said he was fed a piece of bread a day. Hungry and bereft of his belongings, he was then told to walk back to Ethiopia, a seven-day trek over the 10,000-foot mountain east of Aduwa.

In the most modern society, the demobilization of a 350,000-member army would be difficult, relief and logistical experts say. It is proving to be a task of overwhelming proportions in one of the world's poorest countries, which is on the brink of famine and where the most common form of transport is a mule.

A senior Red Cross official from Geneva, Pierre Gassmann, who last week visited the Mekele camp, in the province of Tigre, and another at Bahir Dar, in the neighboring province of Gojjam, described the situation as more complicated and of a far greater scale than the repatriation of prisoners at the end of the Persian Gulf war.

"Here you have quadruple the number of the Iraqi prisoners of war and with no logistical support," Mr. Gassmann, the Red Cross Delegate General for Africa, said. After the Nicaraguan and Angolan wars, he said, orderly, pre-arranged demobilization agreements were put in place.

"This is total chaos," he said. "No one was prepared for this. The previous Government didn't even know how many people were in the army."

Upwards of 150,000, maybe as many as 200,000 men of the Ethiopian Army were stationed in Eritrea, the province which fought for 30 years for independence from Ethiopia.

After defeating the army, the Eritreans held most of the men as prisoners of war. In the last several weeks they have been pushing them across the border far quicker and in far greater numbers than the Red Cross expected.

The Eritreans have also refused to agree to a proposal by the International Committee of the Red Cross to fly some of the soldiers to the southern part of Ethiopia.

Most of these former soldiers are now strung out in camps around the city of Gondar, Bahir Dar in the province of Gojjam, and Aksum, Aduwa, Adigrat and Mekele in the province of Tigre.

50,000 Flee to the Sudan

About 50,000 Ethiopian soldiers in Eritrea escaped across the Sudan border to Kassala and 40,000 more are clustered around Homera on the Sudanese border, relief workers said. The men from Homera are now starting to trek into Ethiopia through western Tigre province.

Many of these have arrived at the camp in Bahir Dar suffering from feet infected with sores and the effects of bad water and days without food, the head of surgery for the Red Cross in Geneva, Dr. Robin Gray, said after visiting the camp.

The soldiers from the half of the Ethiopian Army that was stationed outside Eritrea and was defeated by the rebels of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front are being held in army camps further south in Diredawa, Awasa, Tatek, Jan Meda and Holuta, relief officials said.

A traveler along the north-south road from the national capital, Addis Ababa, to the Eritrean border comes across former soldiers, many of them in torn clothes, at virtually every turn north of the point where the road turns into gravel and climbs and dips across the Tigrean highlands.

By today, 51,000 men were crammed onto the terraced site that served as a feeding center for hungry peasants in the 1985 Ethiopian famine. But then, a Red Cross official said, only 12,000 people camped here and they were properly sheltered from the weather in tents.

"There will be social problems and disease if they stay too long," said Abraha Haile Michael, the project coordinator for the Relief Society of Tigre, as he tried to organize 150 shovels and picks to dig new latrines. "We are worried about an epidemic because of the rainy season that could lead to contamination of the water."

To try to shore up the deteriorating health of the former soldiers, the Red Cross ran a truck between Adigrat and Mekele distributing United States Army ready-to-eat meals as the men walked.

The packs, left over from the Persian Gulf war, are being flown to Ethiopia by American military aircraft. So far, more than 3.5 million of the packs have arrived, with a million more expected on daily flights from Saudi Arabia in the coming days, according to Willard J. Pearson, the director of the United States Agency for International Development in Ethiopia.

After eating the meals on the roadside, some of the soldiers improvised footwear by swathing their bare feet in the brown plastic wrapping. Other soldiers in the camp sold the prepackaged meals -- "no bread," complained one -- to residents of Mekele to buy tea and sugar.

Most of the men in the army based in Eritrea, which is the northernmost province, were conscripted from the southern part of Ethiopia and find themselves nearly 1,000 miles from home.

Mizmaru Daoud, 22, said he was conscripted at the age of 15 from his village near Metu southwest of Addis Ababa. His family could not afford the necessary bribe that would have freed him from conscription, he said.

Mr. Mizmaru, who sat in a coffee shop in the town of Adigrat with a friend, looked better off than many of the former soldiers. He had received some help, including clothes, from peasants as he walked along the route from the Eritrean border, he said. "We want to go back home and grow coffee," he said.

New Civilian Refugees

Compounding a problem of what to do with the old army is another wave of refugees. Tens of thousands of Ethiopian civilians who have been expelled by the new authorities in Eritrea have started to arrive in camps at the Eritrean border.

About 30,000 wives and children of the Ethiopian soldiers stationed in Eritrea have been bused by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front across the border in the last two weeks and are crowded into camps here and in Adigrat, Aduwa and Aksum. The Eritrean Front has told relief officials to expect 150,000 more Ethiopian civilians soon, apparently people who are being dismissed from their jobs in Eritrea, some of them longtime residents in Eritrea.

Some military wives have made their way to Addis Ababa, where they remain stranded in camps, uncertain whether their husbands are dead or alive, and in many cases with no home to go to.

"I have no idea where my husband is," said Abba Hailam Meskel, a 20-year-old Eritrean seven months pregnant and married to a lieutenant in the Ethiopian Army.


Copyright 1991 The New York Times Company



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