Lalibela a Metaphor for Nation’s Suffering : Old Ethiopian Tourist Town Dies in War

At 3 a.m. on Oct. 19, guerrillas seeking independence from the Ethiopian government poured out of the hills and, after a fierce firefight with army troops, captured this mountaintop town.

Long ago, Lalibela was Ethiopia’s capital and more recently,its top tourist attraction, with its 11 hand-hewn rock churches. The guerrillas from the Tigre People’s Liberation Front held it for 13 days. Then, apparently feeling that they had caused the government sufficient embarrassment, they withdrew.

Since then, outsiders other than famine-relief workers and a few reporters have been forbidden from entering this beautiful town, which encapsulates the problems of Ethiopia--war, drought and famine.

As in other areas of the central highlands, the famine has come to Lalibela with a vengeance. Hundreds have died here and in the surrounding villages, which are perched atop two-mile-high peaks that seem inaccessible to all but birds.

A grain-distribution center has been set up here, and donkeys trot through town, each carrying a sack of wheat bearing the name of the donor, West Germany. Four German doctors work here, and World Vision International, a Christian relief organization headquartered in Monrovia, Calif., has set up a feeding station that is providing meals for 5,500 people a day.

No details of the guerrilla attack were ever released by the Addis Ababa government, which is facing armed rebellions on several fronts. However, residents here said the rebels were heavily armed, well-organized and apparently self-sufficient. They even brought their own doctors and nurses to care for their casualties.

Six Western tourists were taken captive by the rebels. Three of them, elderly Europeans, were released within three days, but three others were taken to the Sudanese border and not set free until the first week in December. No relief workers were harmed during the guerrillas’ brief occupation.

Since the attack, the town has become tense and more closely resembles a military fortress than a onetime tourist center. The army has taken over the closed hotel; the Egypt Air DC-3 flight that used to come here daily from Addis Ababa, 350 miles to the south, has been canceled, and no relief planes are allowed to land after 3:30 p.m.

Before the civil war--now in its ninth year, and the famine-- now in its second, hundreds of tourists from the far corners of the world would visit Lalibela. They came to see its churches, cut into the rocks by 12th-Century Ethiopians. Now, the only visitors to Lalibela are there to try to relieve the suffering amid this sad nation’s disaster.