Ethiopia Official Reported Seeking U.S. Asylum

The head of Ethiopia’s famine relief effort is seeking asylum in the United States, officials of private relief organizations said Friday, adding that the event will provide an opportunity to document misery caused by the Addis Ababa government’s forced resettlement of famine victims.

Dawit Wolde Giorgis, Ethiopia’s relief and rehabilitation commissioner, has not been seen in public for weeks, and American relief agency officials said he is in this country and negotiating with U.S. government officials on a deal to defect from the Marxist government of Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Officials at the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service publicly denied the reports. However, one official conceded that any negotiations would not be acknowledged until Dawit agreed to their disclosure.

At the Ethiopian Embassy, a diplomatic officer called the reports “fabricated” and asserted that Dawit has telephoned frequently, most recently on Friday. “He is in constant touch with us,” said the diplomat, who refused to give his name.

Tesfa A. Seyoum, executive director of the New York-based Eritrean Relief Committee, said that if Dawit talks publicly about events in Ethiopia, he will “tell the American people that the regime is inhuman.”

Resettlement Defended

Ethiopian government officials have said the controversial resettlement program is designed to move 1.5 million people from drought-prone northern areas, where they would starve, to more fertile land in the south. However, critics have charged that the effort actually is designed to provide workers for state farms and to reduce the number of potential rebels in the northern provinces of Eritrea and Tigre, where civil war rages.

Seyoum and other private relief officials charge that the Ethiopian government burns the homes of Ethiopians and denies them food supplies in order to make them move to resettlement camps. Furthermore, they say, the government refuses to allow food and other supplies into Eritrea and Tigre.

“If you want to kill the fish, you dry up the pond,” Seyoum said.

Kevin Conway, director of development and outreach at the Eritrean Relief Committee, said the Addis Ababa government “has a policy of starving people into submission.” He cited charges by the French medical organization Doctors Without Borders that 100,000 people have died in Ethiopia as a result of the government’s actions. Ethiopia expelled the medical group earlier this month.

‘Bombing . . . Like Crazy’

Seyoum, who toured Eritrea in late November, said the Mengistu regime, using Soviet-supplied planes, is “bombing the Eritrean population like crazy” and that testimony from a high government official like Dawit would embarrass the government and “make a difference.”

In Cambridge, Mass., Jason Clay, director of Cultural Survival, an organization of anthropologists, said Dawit’s defection, if it takes place, would probably be based in part on his realization that in Ethiopia “he would have to face an increasingly hostile foreign press” reporting on the regime’s actions. Clay described these tactics as “using food as bait in a trap” to lure people to resettlement camps with deplorable sanitary conditions.

The Ethiopian Embassy official denied the charges and said Ethiopia’s handling of the relief effort “is an open book.”

Sister in Los Angeles

Meanwhile, several U.S. relief officials said they know people who have seen Dawit in Orange, N.J., where a sister-in-law lives. They added that Dawit has a sister, a nurse, in Los Angeles. The officials said they have been unable to locate either woman.

In addition, there have been reports that Dawit was seen with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who visited Ethiopia last year to dramatize the plight of famine victims. One source said Kennedy was “an insurance policy” for Dawit and had escorted him to Immigration and Naturalization Service offices in Washington last week. A Kennedy spokesman said he knew nothing about such contacts.

Dawit reportedly left Addis Adaba in October on a fund-raising trip to Britain, Belgium, West Germany and the United States.

At the Catholic Relief Agency, spokesman Beth Griffin said that on Nov. 19, Dawit met in New York with an official of her agency, along with officials from other relief groups and the United Nations. Griffin said defection was not discussed at the meeting.

Amid rumors that several other highly placed Ethiopians, including the foreign minister, were also seeking asylum abroad, Conway of the Eritrean Relief Committee said, “I suspect the whole thing (Mengistu’s government) is coming unglued.”