Victims Flee, Report Forced Labor, Hunger, Death : Ethiopia Resettlement: Tales of Horror

The refugee camp is small and tidy, 100 or more green tents stretching in a crescent through the sparse brush of the eastern Sudanese lowland.

Its inhabitants are mostly from the northern Ethiopian province of Tigre, and at night, when the scorching heat of the day subsides, their songs rise with the moonlight. They are songs, they say, of the homes they hope to return to, from which they were removed by force and deceit.

About 100 new arrivals came into Damazine one recent week. Like most of the 900 who arrived before them, they tell stories of hunger and forced labor in the Ethiopian resettlement camps they fled. They say they were lured from their homes by promises of food and herded off at gunpoint, often forced to leave behind husbands and wives and even infant children.

Their stories are significant because of the controversy surrounding the Ethiopian government’s program, under way since late 1984, to relocate 1.5 million drought victims, mostly from famine-stricken regions of Tigre and Wollo, to southern areas of the country.

By the Ethiopian government’s own estimate, about 600,000 famine victims have been moved to the south of the country. Once there, the Ethiopians say, the people are to be given homes and fertile land to cultivate.

The government argues that mass resettlement is the only way to cope with the environmental ruin brought about by the drought, overpopulation and years of soil erosion made worse by primitive farming practices.

Critics of the scheme charge that it is politically motivated. They say it is a reprisal aimed mainly at the rebellious province of Tigre. They also say the plan is harshly executed. One agency, the French group Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), was expelled from Ethiopia after charging that 100,000 people have died in the resettlement process.

The French agency has not been able to document its claim, but it has led a growing chorus of complaints from other relief agencies and diplomatic missions in Ethiopia of widespread human rights violations in connection with the resettlement.

The U.S. government has refused to take part in the scheme and has forbidden American food aid to be allocated in its support, arguing that relief resources would be more wisely spent in rehabilitation projects. A U.S. senator recently called for a moratorium on U.S. famine relief to Ethiopia until an international team of investigators can look into allegations of human rights abuses.

Critics of the plan have been stymied by the Ethiopian government’s refusal to allow aid workers or diplomats or journalists the freedom to view the resettlement process. Most visitors to the resettlement areas have been taken on guided tours arranged by the Ethiopian government and are denied permission to conduct independent interviews with their own translators.

The refugees at Damazine, in describing their experiences, do much to explain the Ethiopian reluctance to allow foreigners access to the resettlement regions.

Surrounded by Soldiers

“We went to take food from the Red Cross,” said Birhay Gebre-Kedan, 30, a woman who had just arrived at the Damazine camp. “But after we arrive, we are surrounded by soldiers and taken to a military camp.”

Gebre-Kedan, like most Ethiopians, refers to any relief operation as the “Red Cross.” Her story, with only small variations, matches those told by others in the camp.

She and her husband, she said, had left their home village of Adeit, near Aksum in Tigre province, in response to word that food supplies would be handed out in the village center. When they arrived, they were told to line up behind a truck piled high with bags of grain. The food was not distributed. Instead, armed soldiers surrounded the villagers and marched them off to a camp near Aksum.

She said she was among about 1,400 people from her village who were kept at the camp five weeks. “Those who tried to escape were shot,” she said.

Bodies Carted Away

After five weeks, the people were moved by helicopter from the Aksum camp to a larger camp near Makale, the Tigre capital. Gebre-Kedan said that she and her husband spent seven weeks in the camp, called Zibandaero. She said prisoners there received an average of four slices of bread a day. They lived in tents. Others were crowded into tin-roofed sheds, where as many as one in 60 died every day.

“Many died because of the hardship there,” she said. “They took the dead bodies away in a truck three or four times a day.” She said there were 15 to 20 bodies in each truckload.

She said people tried to escape through the barbed-wire fences of Zibandaero camp but that many who tried were killed.

“People tried to run away in the rain, when the guards were not watching, by going through a hole in the fence near the latrine, but many were killed,” she said. Contradicting Ethiopian government claims, she said that none of the Tigreans in the camp were volunteers.

“We were prisoners,” she said.

Eventually, she and her husband were moved on transport planes to the southern district of Gambela, then taken by truck to a settlement called Oala. She said they were told that houses, oxen, tools and farms awaited them in the resettlement area. But there were “no houses, no tools, no oxen and no farms,” she said, and after a few days they were given machetes and picks and shovels and told to build huts for themselves.

Robbed and Stripped

Gebre-Kedan was in a large group of Ethiopians who escaped from Oala in October. However, after crossing the border they ran into a group of armed soldiers, believed to be members of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, a rebel movement that has been supported by the Ethiopian government.

Minor Ethiopian government functionaries, a few of whom have defected and fled to Damazine, say the rebel group has been instructed by the Ethiopians to turn back any refugees caught fleeing.

Leteharwari Gebre Yessus, 27, was among a group of escapees caught by the rebels. She said the rebels robbed them and stripped them of their clothing. The men were sent back across the border, and the women and female children were kept by the rebels, either as concubines or as household workers.

Gebre Yessus said that a group of about 60 Ethiopian women were kept by the rebels for about two months. They were released when the rebels heard that an armed group of Ethiopian rebels, possibly Tigreans armed by their sympathizers in the Oromo Liberation Front, were on their way to rescue them.

Yibrah Alemayeh, 54, a Tigrean relocated to Oala camp in Gambela, said most of the men were forced to work long hours every day building houses for Ethiopian officers.

“If we don’t work,” he said, “we are imprisoned and given no food.”

Some of the Ethiopians in Damazine escaped from the Asosa area, in Welega province, a district north of Gambela. Most of the Gambela escapees had to walk for as long as six weeks to reach safety in Sudan, but the Asosa escapees could make it in one or two weeks. They also told of forced labor and inadequate rations of food.

“We preferred death to living in Asosa,” said Yishima Mekonen, 48, who was rounded up with her husband in Wollo province, leaving behind two teen-age children.

She told of traveling for four days on a bus to Asosa. Many of the passengers were sick, she said. If a passenger seemed on the verge of dying, she said, the soldiers on the buses simply threw him off, leaving him to die by the side of the road.

In Asosa, she said, they were organized into work parties and forced to labor from dawn until dark, putting up village buildings and houses for the “political cadres,” or party workers.

‘No Rest, all the Day’

“There is no rest, all the day,” she said. “We ask when we can eat, and the guards tell us they don’t care if we eat.”

A party worker who recently defected and fled to Sudan confirmed that food was not given in adequate amounts to the relocated Ethiopians. The worker, who asked for anonymity to protect his family in Ethiopia, said that food supplies were divided between the refugees and the Ethiopian soldiers. Food supplies were also given to Sudanese rebel troops, he said. Most of this food, he said, had been donated by foreign relief agencies.

“Most people who were sick,” he said, “were sick from hunger or malnutrition. People were getting 500 grams of food a day, but they are expected to work very hard, so it is not enough for them.”

The Gambela area, which the Tigreans referred to as “the jungle,” is hot and humid, far different from the mountain climate of their homelands. Malaria was rampant, even though the Ethiopian government apparently endeavored to distribute malaria medication.

Tribal Conflicts

Another problem mentioned by virtually all the refugees interviewed was the difficult state of relations between the resettled peoples and those Ethiopians already resident in the area.

In Asosa, the Tigreans complained of frequent fights with families of the indigenous Oromo tribe. In Gambela, they came in conflict with the Anuak people.

A priest of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, relocated from Makale to Gambela, told of attempts to force him to marry a pagan Anuak woman. The priest said he refused, even though the Ethiopian soldiers forced the Anuak woman, who usually did not wear clothes, to dress for the occasion.

To the Ethiopian soldiers, the incident might have been carried out for amusement, but the Ethiopian priest did not appreciate the humor. He escaped not long afterward, wandering for weeks through the bushland of southern Sudan before he found refuge.

He was further embittered, he said, at the memory of about 300 priests, like himself from the holy city of Aksum, who he said were killed by Ethiopian soldiers during the weeks of imprisonment in Makale before he was shipped south to Gambela.

The defected Ethiopian political cadres said the resettlement effort is also hampered by the collective farm system in which most of the resettled farmers are supposed to work.

No Time to Work Garden

“Everyone is supposed to work on the collective farm,” one of them said. “For themselves, they have only a small garden around their huts and they have no time to work on them. None of the people like it. They want to run away.”

To some relief agency experts working on the Sudanese side of the border, the wonder is that more Ethiopians have not fled from Gambela and Asosa. One explanation is that those who have tried to escape and been turned back have discouraged others from making the attempt.

The Ethiopians who have arrived at Damazine say that about two-thirds of the people they escaped with have become lost in the bush or were captured by the Sudanese rebels. Some may have been taken back to the camps in Ethiopia.

Relief workers in Sudan have been on guard for a larger influx of refugees fleeing resettlement, but the flow has remained fairly steady at 60 to 100 a week.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reports that 700 to 1,000 refugees are fleeing daily from Ethiopia’s eastern border into Somalia to escape a government “villagization” scheme in Hararge province. About 27,000 of these refugees have fled to Somalia since December. The U.N. office reported outbreaks of cholera in the camps last week, with 17 deaths reported so far.