Though there is currently no famine to galvanise action, the UNCT has warned that without additional food aid and targeted non-food interventions, the counter-intuitive notion of a "green famine" may become dreadfully familiar - with food crops growing in the fields as an ironic backdrop to the large-scale migrations and displacements, massive camps and widespread deaths for which Ethiopia, sadly, has become a byword.

A poor response to successive government appeals reflects a measure of donor impatience with the Ethiopian authorities. A diplomatic source told IRIN that, while donors are well aware of the humanitarian crisis developing, they have had difficulty reconciling Ethiopia's appeals for aid with the continuing border war with Eritrea, estimated to be costing at least US $1 million a day. "There are certainly people considering how to respond to a government which can find somewhere around US $150 million off the books to finance this war," the source said.

The opportunity costs of the war - apart entirely from those killed and maimed in fighting - became clearer last week when the annual 'Human Development Report' published by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) revealed that Ethiopia had slipped further in its human welfare rating and now stood third from bottom of 174 countries.

Given Ethiopia's social needs - the report revealing, for instance, a per capita calorie intake of 1,845, compared to a recommended minimum daily intake of 2,000 calories, and that 42.3 percent of the population will not reach 40 years of age - donors have been dismayed at Addis Ababa's recent reversal of its policy of cutting military spending. This has jumped from 1.8 percent of government expenditure in 1997 to an estimated 12 percent in 1998 and what could account for anything from 15 to 20 percent of budgeted spending this year, media sources in the country told IRIN.

Ethiopia's position, outlined to journalists last week by Deputy Commissioner of the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission (DPPC) Gizaw Birhane, is that it has been "confronted by two disasters not of its own making", drought and war. While it had "no alternative but to fight aggression", the war had never drawn its attention from the food security crisis. Gizaw said he had come across no linkage by donors between Ethiopia receiving humanitarian assistance and making peace with Eritrea. What he had been told by donors, he added, was that the Kosovo crisis had exhausted a big part of their emergency budgets.

There have also been claims, virtually impossible to substantiate, that food is being diverted to feed troops fighting Ethiopia's war with Eritrea. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) country director, Judith Lewis, said food distribution was being closely monitored to ensure that this would not happen. The war has also displaced an estimated 380,000 people from their homes along the border with Eritrea and seen Ethiopia mobilise a large standing army, which have both disrupted agriculture and created additional food aid requirements. Humanitarian sources in Ethiopia told IRIN peasant farmers in the north of the country were signing up for the front, enticed by wages reported to be 250 to 400 Birr (about US $30 to $50) a month.

The UNCT has said it considers the war "a most unfortunate thing" but not a crucial factor in the current crisis. "Regardless of the war, this year we would have an emergency operation to address this drought," said Emergency Coordinator Jim Borton.

There is also a school of thought among donors that, with Ethiopia having had a good harvest last year and a surplus in western parts of the country this year, the weakness of the internal market is a crucial issue and only by strengthening it can the phenomenon of cyclical food shortages in particular regions be addressed. "Parts of the country will just never be food secure," said one source. "The argument is that instead of people calling crisis year after year, the market should ensure distribution of food from surplus areas to those that are short."

Meanwhile, however, as a humanitarian crisis unfolds for over five million people at risk, the UN Country Team "is trying to separate the humanitarian needs from the political issues", according to WFP country director, Judith Lewis. "If we don't have assistance, immediate assistance, then that's when people will die", she warned.

Some of the same factors that enabled Ethiopia and Eritrea to make significant economic and political progress in recent years may, ironically, lead to the mutual destruction of all that the two countries have achieved.

Such is the analysis presented in a new book examining the performances of East Africa's "new leaders": Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, President Isaias Afeworki of Eritrea, and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

Although the Ethiopia-Eritrea border war had just begun when this slim (138- page) paperback went to press, Marina Ottaway's Africa's New Leaders does alert its readers to the conflict's potential for wreaking catastrophe on both countries. The fighting will prove difficult to quell, Ottaway warns, "because compromise is not a part of the political culture of either side." Having taken power by force of arms, Mr.. Zenawi and Mr.. Afeworki operate from the shared premise that "war can put an end to conflicts that diplomacy fails to solve." Their governments have likewise shown themselves to be "equally driven not by international rules and principles but by their own." Neither Mr.. Zenawi nor Mr.. Afeworki has much use for the United Nations or the Organisation of African Unity, Ottaway notes, since those institutions historically failed to address Ethiopia's and Eritrea's problems.

The two strongmen's similarly assertive styles account, on one hand, for their successes in building national administrative systems and in reforming their respective economies. But this autocratic approach could well prevent a transition to genuine democracy, the author adds, and it may ultimately reveal the "new leaders" to be no different than the post-independence "big men" whose failures they had set out to transcend.

Museveni bears some resemblance to Meles Zenawi, in Ottaway's view. When the National Resistance Movement marched victoriously into Kampala in 1986, "the argument that Uganda needed time to stabilise the situation and to reconstruct state institutions was credible." Now, however, "it looks suspiciously like the beginning of the slippery road toward authoritarianism," says this increasingly prominent Africa scholar.

But her overall verdict on Museveni's rule is generally positive. A functioning and at least semi-independent civil society has developed in Uganda during the past 12 years. Even more so than in Ethiopia which she also thinks is moving in a promising direction - in Uganda "a dynamic process is underway that is beginning to create a degree of pluralism." Uganda's parallel "no-party" and "multiparty" realms may actually prove compatible, Ottaway suggests, and along with Ethiopia's "ethnic federation" system of governance, could "eventually evolve toward democracy - but by following an unorthodox path."

Eritrea, by contrast, remains firmly committed to a "top-down" form of rule that, while generally benevolent, holds little promise of becoming democratic. "There is nothing in the history of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front - and indeed the country - to predispose Eritrea to a democratic transition," Ottaway writes.

Unlike Uganda's southern-rooted NRM and Ethiopia's Tigrean-based ruling party, the EPLF has made no effort to reconcile or even acknowledge ethic differences. With its origins in the country's Christian highlands, the EPLF has likewise made no special overtures to the mainly lowland Muslim population, even the possibility of religious conflict in Eritrea is "very real."

At the same time, she concedes, the EPLF government is widely admired for its honesty, discipline and commitment to efficiency. The EPLF has also made an encouraging start to developing a deeply impoverished country. The economy is being designed in accordance with a "Singapore model," that is characterised by growing EPLF involvement in business even as privatisation proceeds.

Ethiopia's governing Tigrean People's Liberation Front has followed a similar course. In accordance with the approach taken in Korea and Taiwan, the TPLF is committed to both economic liberalisation and to "governing the market." Some notable successes have resulted, Ottaway decides.

Kagame might be an effective ruler, but his government is facing an almost impossible situation. The 1994 genocide produced such deep fissures in Rwandan society that neither the Ugandan, Ethiopian or Eritrean forms of governance can succeed there, she believes. Kabila is meanwhile dismissed as not a "new leaders" at all. In fact, Ottaway says, he bears a disturbing resemblance to Mobutu, the dictator he ousted.

In keeping with her role as associate at a Washington think tank (the Carnegie Endowment), Ottaway devotes a section of her book to United States policy toward Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda. The US could actually afford to behave in a principled fashion in regard to all three countries, she notes, because its policy does not have to be tempered by overriding economic or strategic considerations, as in the case of China, for example.

Close relations have been built with all three countries, but "democracy promotion has played little part in the so-called partnership." The US has done almost nothing to encourage greater political freedom in Eritrea - "by far the most autocratic and monolithic of the three." The US Agency for International Development has worked to assist NGOs and to strengthen parliament in Uganda, "but pressure on Museveni to open the system to multiparty competition has been erratic." Similarly, Washington has failed to condemn Ethiopia's "fictitious electoral process."

The US is perpetuating a charade in each of these cases, Ottaway argues.

Publication Date: July 12 - 20