Racked by war and a famine that sucked up Live Aid funds in 1985, Ethiopia faces starvation again
Jason Burke
As the desert sun began to dip towards the hot horizon, Bashir Ahmed Abdi died. The three-year-old had spent his last day unconscious in a tiny hut, in the middle of a barren, red-earthed plain. His mother had fed him a little water and food at around noon. It was all there was.
The family’s hut is at the edge of a settlement of 9E000 starving people that did not exist a month ago. Now it swells every day as more of Ethiopia’s desert farmers trudge in from the bush.
Danan, a scrappy village in normal times, is on a road and a road means the chance of food, so the ragged walkers keep arriving. Some have trekked 250km. They have left their villages empty but for dead livestock.
“We had nothing there, we had nothing while we walked and we have nothing here,” said Arish Hassan Ragi, who took 10 days to cover 190km from his village of Abab Karo. “Now we are waiting to die.”
Like most people in the camp, Ragi spends his days lying in the shade trying to conserve energy or listlessly foraging for food. The only place in Danan where there is activity is among a cluster of low red mounds beside the refugee shelters: the burial ground.
Famine has come again to Ethiopia. Sixteen years after television news reports brought the desperate scenes in the hunger camps into the living rooms of the Western world and sparked the Live Aid rescue of the following year, people are again dying.
So far, the deaths are “only” in the thousands, but a catastrophe is imminent. The United Nations believes that eight million Ethiopians and eight million people in Kenya, Somalia and Sudan are threatened with starvation.
The province of Ogaden, in south-east Ethiopia, is the worst hit. Local people have always had to struggle to scratch a living from the dust, but an unprecedented three years of drought means that the only thing the soil now offers is a place to put corpses.
Many say that this time is worse than the early 1980s. “Even the very old say they can’t remember it ever being this bad,” said Walli Mohammed, another farmer who trekked to Danan.
Since the last famine and the fall of the Soviet-backed Marxist regime of President Haile Mariam Mengistu in 1991, the new government has worked hard to guard against a repeat. But since then, the country’s population has nearly doubled and the country is deep in debt.
According to the deputy head of the government’s disaster prevention planning committee, Berhane Gizaw, all the aid pumped into Ethiopia after the last famine has done little to stave off the present crisis. “Most of it was spent on emergency provisions, not long-term development,” he said.
Though some roads were built with the international cash, the logistical problems now facing aid workers are huge. The continuing war between Ethiopia and Eritrea has sucked up valuable funds and limited access to the small independent port of Djibouti. There are no planes to mount the massive air-lift that might be the only way to stop thousands more deaths. The few roads that do exist are in appalling condition. Trucks take five days to reach some areas. Other areas cannot be reached at all.
Aid workers have set up emergency feeding centres in the small town of Gode, about 80km from Danan.
Gode itself is swollen with almost 20 000 refugees and thousands more mob the huts in the hospital grounds where biscuits, rehydrated milk and oatmeal gruel are distributed. Each hut has a roughly drawn placard hanging above the entrance, marking whether it holds children of “50%” of usual body weight, 60%, and so on. One hut simply has TB scrawled above the door.
Because of the demand, rations at the centre have been reduced. “We are afraid we will run out soon,” said an aid worker, Dr Abduraziz Okash.
What everyone knows is that the situation will get worse before it improves. Even if aid does come in quickly, 90% of Ogaden’s cattle and 70% of its sheep are dead. The next rains are not due for six weeks – if they come at all. And then farmers have to plant and tend their crops and somehow restock their herds. Many are talking about migrating permanently to Ethiopia’s swelling cities – if they survive.
Ahmed Dayid Jama, a local man who is area manager for the Ogaden Welfare Society, knows that every margin here is thin. “People are dying every day and more and more will die in the days to come. Even the camels are dying. We cannot make any more mistakes or be slow. We have to be very strong, very active,” he said. “This is a very unforgiving land.”