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Officials say
Ethiopia is blocking food to rebels
-Thousands of people at risk of starvation
as gov't
By
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, The New York Times
NAIROBI,
Kenya, July 22, 2007—
The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off
trade to large parts of a remote region in the eastern part of the country
that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at
risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.
The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off
millions of dollars in international food aid, and using a U.N. polio
eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to
humanitarian officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a
member of the Ethiopian parliament who defected to Germany last month to
protest the government's actions.
The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on
the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing
rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights
groups of widespread brutality.
Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic,
intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent
food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads
who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people
are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult
to survive in even in the best of times.
"Food cannot get in," said Mohammed Diab, the director of the U.N. World
Food Program in Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian government says the blockade covers only strategic locations,
and is meant to prevent guns and other supplies from reaching the Ogaden
National Liberation Front, the rebel force that the government considers a
terrorist group. In April, the rebels killed more than 60 Ethiopian guards
and Chinese workers at a Chinese-run oil field in the Ogaden.
"This is not a government which punishes its people," said Nur Abdi
Mohammed, a government spokesman.
But Western diplomats have been urging Ethiopian officials to lift the
blockade, arguing that the many people in the area are running out of time.
"It's a starve-out-the-population strategy," said one Western humanitarian
official, who did not want to be quoted by name because he feared reprisals
against aid workers. "If something isn't done on the diplomatic front soon,
we're going to have a government-caused famine on our hands."
The blockade, which involves soldiers and military trucks cutting off the
few roads into the central Ogaden, comes as Congress is increasingly
concerned about Ethiopia's human rights record. Ethiopia is a close American
ally and a key partner in America's counterterrorism efforts in the Horn of
Africa, a region that has become a breeding ground for Islamic militants,
many of whom have threatened to wage a holy war against Ethiopia.
The country receives nearly half a billion dollars in American aid each
year, but this week, a House subcommittee passed a bill that would put
strict conditions on some of that aid and ban Ethiopian officials linked to
rights abuses from entering the United States. The House also recently
passed an amendment, sponsored by J. Randy Forbes, R-Va., that stripped
Ethiopia of $3 million in assistance to "send a strong message that if they
don't wake up and pay attention, more money will be cut," Forbes said.
Ethiopia's decision on Friday to pardon 30 political prisoners who had been
sentenced to life in prison could ease some criticism. But Sen. Patrick J.
Leahy, D-Vt., is pushing ahead with measures to more closely scrutinize
assistance to the Ethiopian military. According to human rights groups and
firsthand accounts, government troops have gang raped women, burned down
huts and killed civilians.
U.S. officials in Ethiopia said they were trying to investigate the
situation but that the Ogaden was too dangerous right now for a fact-finding
mission. They said they have heard persistent reports of burned villages and
that the blockade was putting the area on the cusp of a crisis.
Villagers say that anyone who criticizes the government risks getting
killed. According to Ogaden Online, a Canadian-based news service that
covers the Ogaden through a network of reporters and contributors, some
equipped with satellite phones, four young men who were videotaped by The
New York Times at a community meeting in an Ogaden village in May were later
tortured and executed. The claim could not be fully verified independently,
but their identities may have been discovered by Ethiopian soldiers who had
arrested three journalists for The Times in the Ogaden and confiscated their
notebooks, cameras and computers.
"The army is out of control," said Jemal Dirie Kalif, the member of
parliament who defected.
The blockade has been in place since early June, and thousands of people
have already fled on foot and by camel. Two weeks ago, Abdullahi Mohammed, a
17-year-old student, walked from his village deep in the Ogaden to the
nearest town with a bus station. He carried with him a few pieces of bread.
He said that when he stopped to ask villagers in the Ogaden for food, they
asked him for some instead.
"They had nothing," he said.
Though good rains this year have nourished the few crops in the area and
provided a little cushion, "The most these people can last without facing
serious problems is one month, maybe two," said David Throp, country
director for Save the Children UK.
Even if relief trucks are allowed in to all the critical areas, the food
might not reach the people who need it.
According to humanitarian workers and several former Ethiopian officials,
including Kalif, food aid is embezzled in two stages. First, soldiers skim
sacks of grain, tins of vegetable oil and bricks of high-energy biscuits
from food warehouses to sell at local markets.
"The cash is distributed among security officers and regional officers," a
former government administrator from the Ogaden region said in a recent
telephone interview on condition of anonymity because he still works with
government officials.
Then the remaining food is hauled out to rural areas where the soldiers
divert part of it to local gunmen and informers as a reward for helping them
fight the rebels.
The former administrator said he also knew of specific cases in which army
officers stole food from warehouses and gave it to the families of women
their soldiers had raped, as compensation.
Several Western humanitarian officials estimated that 20 percent to 30
percent of the donor countries' food aid to the Ogaden — aid that last year
was valued at more than $70 million — routinely disappears this way. To
cover their tracks, the soldiers and the government administrators who work
with them tell the aid agencies that the food has spoiled, or has been
stolen or hijacked by the rebels, humanitarian officials said.
Relief workers in Ethiopia have known about these problems for several
years, one humanitarian official said, and have tried to set up committees
of local elders to oversee distribution. But that did not work either, and
aid officials eventually concluded that as long as the majority of the food
was getting through, they would not stop the shipments.
Mohammed, the government spokesman, denied Ethiopian troops were pilfering
or mishandling foreign aid.
"We don't do that," he said.
As the food crisis looms, Western diplomats are also concerned about a
separate plan by the regional government in the Ogaden to divert a share of
its own budget for development projects — like schools and farming — to the
Ethiopian military.
This seems to be part of the Ethiopian government's strategy to do whatever
it takes to crush the rebels, who have deep popular support. The people of
the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland
Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long-standing
battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year.
The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a
visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and
several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.
Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting
the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the Ogaden National
Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan, and so the
government has turned to other clans to form militias. In the past few
weeks, thousands of men have been armed.
"Those Ethiopians are smart," Kalif said. "They know Somalis are more loyal
to clans than anything else." Tactics like these, he said, drove him to
defect on June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was
affiliated with the ruling party, and had been representing an area in the
eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.
He described a scheme with a U.N. polio program, which was corroborated by
two former administrators in the Ethiopian government and a Western
humanitarian official, in which military commanders gave prized jobs as
vaccinators to militia fighters, and in the end, much of the polio vaccine
was never distributed.
"Army commanders are using the polio money to pay their people, who don't
pass out the vaccines, so the disease continues and the payments continue,"
said Kalif, 32. "It's the perfect system." U.N. officials in Geneva said
they did not know whether that was happening, but that they would
investigate.
When asked how he knew about the polio scheme, Kalif said: "Everybody out
there knows. They're just too scared to talk."
"If I don't get asylum and they send me back to my country, I'm dead," he
added. "But I was sick of being a parrot. I have no regrets.
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