50,000 Ethiopia Peasants Return to Reopened Camp

A month after government soldiers burned down their refugee camp, 50,000 famine-stricken peasants have returned to Ibnet to seek food and medicine and to rebuild their grass huts.

A contingent of soldiers stationed on a nearby hill has made no move to stop them, and relief workers said the camp’s population appears to be larger now than it was on April 27 when the government gave the peasants 24 hours’ notice to evacuate. After the peasants straggled off, the soldiers burned their huts and broke the water jugs left behind.

“I don’t know why they told us to leave or why they burned our homes,” a 20-year-old woman named Adina said Saturday. “After a week I came back. Where else am I going to get food?”

Most of the peasants who were gathered here, 250 miles north-northwest of Addis Ababa, the capital, did not return to their villages as ordered, but instead merely trekked over a ridgeline to wait until it was safe to return. Now scores of new arrivals are joining them daily in the valley.

Donor Nations Shocked

Before heading into the hills, the malnourished peasants were given dry rations by the soldiers. Four helicopters piloted by Soviets flew in on the day of the expulsion to shuttle about 500 peasants into new resettlement camps, relief specialists said. The others headed off on foot and doctors estimated that about 100 died as a result.

The forced evacuation shocked the Western donor nations that have given Ethiopia about $1 billion in famine relief and was denounced by the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, M. Peter McPherson, as “brutal” and “barbaric.”

Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs initially called the Ibnet story “a shockingly big lie” and condemned the Reagan Administration for using the incident “to go berserk once again on this usually familiar anti-Ethiopian campaign of denigration, disinformation and falsification.” (The United States is the major donor of relief aid to Ethiopia.)

A few days later, the Ethiopian leader, Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, apparently realizing that continued Western aid was in jeopardy, did an abrupt about-face and admitted the incident had taken place. He said the man responsible would be punished.

“The person responsible is now in prison,” said Tamiru Abera, local official of the government Relief and Rehabilitation Commission. “He was a simple man from Wallo province who was an ex-convict.”

Western sources in Addis Ababa said that it is unlikely that such a person could be in charge of executing a major government policy. They said the man responsible for evacuating and burning the camp was the head of the Marxist Party in Gondar province, Melaku Tefara, an army officer whose brutality during the Ethiopian revolution had made him something of a legend. No action has been taken against him, Western sources said.

The government had ordered Ibnet closed because, with the rains returning to Ethiopia, it wanted the peasants to return home and cultivate their land for the fall harvest. Western relief officials did not contest the reasons for closing the camp, only the method.

Ethiopia plans to close all the 250-odd feeding centers throughout the country, believing that the longer they remain open, the more peasants will become dependent on handouts.