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ERITREA : HAS ERITREA, WHERE AFRICA’S FAMINE BEGAN, BEEN FORGOTTEN? : Ethiopia’s Rebellious Northern Province Has Gotten Only a Few Dollars From the Pop Charities--And the Misery Goes On

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The full-page ad in Billboard magazine displayed a familiar image--a big-bellied, spindly limbed African baby, naked except for a T-shirt.

The headline read: NO ROCK STAR IS SINGING FOR THIS CHILD.

It was a strikingly ironic message in an era when rock and famine seem to go together like bread and butter. But this child wasn’t from the African famine featured on MTV and the network news.

He was from Eritrea, a California-size province of Ethiopia along its northern border, where the killing famine of 1984 began. These children continue to starve, 15 months after “We Are the World” dropped off the Billboard record chart.

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“I feel that the American public did great as donors,” said Tesfa A. Seyoum, executive director of the Eritrean Relief Committee, which placed the Billboard ad.

“But an (relief) agency is like a corporation, responsible to the stockholders,” he said. “The donors are the stockholders. They have not been irresponsible. It is the people who took the stockholders’ money who have completely failed.”

Pop charities such as USA for Africa and the Band Aid Trust/Live Aid Foundation have been supersensitive to criticism, direct or indirect. USA for Africa Foundation procurement and distribution director Tracy Gordon saw the Billboard ad and called Seyoum to complain that the ad seemed to be critical of the foundation.

Seyoum told Calendar, “The USA for Africa people were mad. We killed the ad right away.”

Killing the ad seemed to compound a basic irony: It was the slow and some say deliberate starvation of as many as 2 million Eritreans that launched the plethora of pop relief efforts two years ago. Yet little of the $160 million raised by “We Are the World” albums and Live Aid concerts made it to the former Italian colony on the Red Sea:

Of the $46.1 million that USA for Africa raised for Africa, only $80,000 was granted to Seyoum’s committee to establish a medical laboratory for a hospital in Orota, at the center of the province. (The grant is about a 10th of the committee’s entire annual budget--$799,714 last year.) According to foundation spokesman Dave Fulton, USA for Africa has given $350,000 to organizations that aid Eritrea--all for medical expenses.

Of the $110 million that the Band Aid Trust/Live Aid Foundation has earned, $1.3 million has been spent directly on Eritrea for poultry, agricultural equipment, health clinics and training programs.

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Pop charity officials say they’re not numb to Eritrea. It’s just that the Ethiopian province has virtually no network of roads and has been at war with the central government in Addis Ababa for the past quarter century.

That is, it’s safer and easier to deliver food and medicine to regions that aren’t subject to regular air raids, observed committee development and outreach director Karen A. Hauser: “It is the longest-running war in Africa,” she said. “There are 700,000 displaced people.”

Little of the famine aid routed through Addis Ababa has actually found its way to the rebel-controlled provinces of Tigray and Eritrea. And, charged Hauser, the Ethiopian government doesn’t want it to get there.

“But it goes beyond the attempt of the Ethiopian government to withhold Western relief supplies,” she said. “The drought was a contributing factor, but the war is a bigger one. There’s an air war going on. They’re strafing Eritrean villages. They’re poisoning wells, dropping napalm, white phosphorus, cluster bombs.”

When the story of the Ethiopian famine broke over “The NBC Nightly News” two years ago this month, one major missing element of the reports was the civil war. Broadcasts on the three major networks spoke of the drought and the cholera epidemics and the dehydration, but sidestepped the fact that the Ethiopian government--with the largest standing army in Africa--has waged a starvation and bombing war against the desert-dwelling rebels of the north for years.

Some relief experts say that subsequent Western aid has probably hurt, rather than helped, the Eritreans.

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“In northern Eritrea, because of the war, things are still extremely bad,” said Nick Van Praag, an official with the U.N. High Commission on Refugees. “It would not be a good example of the development approach to solving the long-term problems of Africa that USA for Africa and Band Aid have taken.”

Both charities have earmarked most of their remaining funds--roughly $50 million between them--to construction projects, irrigation efforts and agricultural rehabilitation experiments. Ideally, these projects would “help Africans help themselves,” according to Band Aid/Live Aid trustee Harvey Goldsmith. That would help prevent a future famine.

But officials like Goldsmith concede that success for such efforts is limited where there is war.

The Eritrean problem exasperates USA for Africa executive director Marty Rogol. He points out that his and other agencies have helped the war and famine refugees who have emigrated across the northern Ethiopian border into the Sudan. There they are safe from the war and politically neutral organizations like UNICEF and the World Food Program can feed them.

At one point during the height of the famine last year, officials of the U.N. commission estimated that these Sudanese border camp refugees from Eritrea and its sister province, Tigray, numbered more than 1 million.

But Rogol said he prefers to spotlight those African countries where hunger can be fought successfully rather than war-torn Ethiopia, where the famine began.

“It’s important that people know that Ethiopia is not (all of) Africa,” said Rogol. “They need to know the good that their dollars are doing in other countries in Africa.”

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Rogol ticks off on-going projects in Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso and a half dozen other nations. If Eritrea has been a failure, there are hundreds of USA for Africa-funded success stories.

This month Ethiopia formally became a member of the Soviet Bloc. The Red Sea coastline, including the two ports of Assab and Massawa, are occupied by Ethiopian troops and their Soviet advisers, even though both ports are in the province of Eritrea.

Any Eritrean-bound goods unloaded at either port are unlikely to get to famine victims, Seyoum said. He cited the case of the Band Aid Star--one of five cargo vessels operated by Irish rock star Bob Geldof’s Band Aid organization--as an example:

Last May in Assab, government troops confiscated 51 tons of medicine, blankets, food, bedding and clothing bound for Eritrea aboard the Band Aid Star. Soldiers justified the action on grounds that the goods were destined for Eritrea, a province of Ethiopia. They said the cargo--valued at $900,000--had to be offloaded in Assab, not its final destination of Port Sudan.

Eritrea never saw the confiscated goods, said Seyoum, though Band Aid eventually followed up with a second shipment.

The bulk of the millions of dollars in pop relief money raised during the last two years has been filtered through such agencies as Catholic Relief Services, the Red Cross and World Vision, which cooperate with the Ethiopian government, Seyoum said. As a result, Eritrea has seen very little of that money, he said, adding quickly that he wasn’t suggesting criticism of USA for Africa for giving funds to agencies that operate from the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.

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“I guess what they (USA for Africa) wanted to do was not put all their eggs in one basket,” Seyoum said.

But much of the blame for the meager aid for Eritrea lies in the shortsightedness of relief agencies in general and the attempt of pop charities to please everyone, Seyoum said.

Those agencies defend their cooperation on grounds that no presence in Addis Ababa could mean that the Marxist government would have no Western conscience at all keeping watch over their abuse of Eritrea, Tigray or other famine-afflicted areas of the country.

Ralph Wright, a Los Angeles-based Red Cross representative, visited Ethiopia recently and told Calendar upon his return that the same refugee camps he visited a year ago are now green with vegetation and vastly improved, largely due to the pop charities and Western relief agencies like his own.

One agency, France’s Doctors Without Borders, was expelled from Ethiopia in December for speaking out against the Ethiopian government relocation policies. The government has transported as many as a million refugees from the two northern provinces to Marxist collective farm communities in the Addis Ababa-controlled south. According to officials from Doctors Without Borders, as many as 100,000 died during their transport in the “villagization” process. Thousands more are believed to have died in the unfamiliar terrain once they arrived.

In the October issue of Reader’s Digest, Dr. Rony Brauman, 36, a physician-member of Doctors Without Borders, openly accuses Ethiopian dictator Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam of Eritrean and Tigrayan genocide through the villagization process.

“We have told (Ethiopian government authorities) that, if they want recovery or development money from us, it can’t have anything to do with villagization,” said USA for Africa’s Rogol.

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While they applaud the moral courage of Doctors Without Borders’ institutional outspokenness, Wright, Rogol and other relief professionals point out that the organization can no longer do anything within Ethiopia to aid famine victims.

“It’s not good enough to dump famine assistance on somebody’s doorstep,” said H. Candy Miller, West Coast executive director of the U.S. Committee for UNICEF. “It’s misguided for us to think that we can just deliver famine assistance. If you don’t mobilize from within a country, all the mobilizing from outside doesn’t do a damn bit of good.”

Doctors Without Borders may have blown the international whistle on the government’s role in inducing the Eritrean tragedy, said Miller. But the organization has lost any power it had to save lives inside Mengistu’s Ethiopia.

The Ethiopia-vs.-Eritrea controversy that erupted with the French agency’s expulsion began at about the same time that the U.S. and other Western countries began to lose interest in African famine.

One widely reprinted article in the rock tabloid Spin in May even went so far as to criticize Geldof and his Band Aid Trust for indirectly supporting Mengistu’s regime.

Spin accused Geldof of allowing Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission to control a large portion of the supplies, food, trucks and other goods purchased with the $110 million earned by the Live Aid concerts and the hit Band Aid single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” The magazine even called a Manhattan press conference last June, featuring representatives of Doctors Without Borders, to draw media attention to the story.

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Following the press conference, Geldof told Calendar that the Spin article was counterproductive, simplistic and based on out-of-date information. He vowed that his organization would continue to work with any government, regardless of politics, in order to end mass misery in Africa.

“They were trying to goad Geldof into doing a big interview and, basically, we decided not to help them raise their circulation,” said Band Aid trustee Goldsmith.

Both Geldof and USA for Africa’s founder, Ken Kragen, turned their energies away from Africa after temporarily devoting all of their attention to pop relief. A year ago, Geldof claimed to be broke. Kragen had lost several clients of his Hollywood management firm. Both men have returned to the rock ‘n’ roll industry that spawned them.

But spokesmen for their organizations say they have not forgotten Africa in general, nor Eritrea in particular.

The Band Aid Trust/Live Aid Foundation was to be phased out of existence at the end of this year, but Goldsmith told Calendar two weeks ago that the pop charity still had about $40 million left to spend. As a result, he said, the organization will continue to dole out African aid well into 1987 “until its all spent,” Goldsmith said.

Sudanese cross-border operations into Tigray and Eritrea will probably continue to be among the projects Band Aid will fund, he said.

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Just last month USA for Africa announced 11 grants totaling $1.4 million for African medical projects, including $67,720 for emergency medical supplies for Eritrea and Tigray.

Seyoum is not as discouraged as he once was.

“When we agreed to kill the (Billboard) ad, (USA for Africa procurement director) Tracy Gordon told me they would welcome any proposal from us,” Seyoum said.

Seyoum said the latest reports he has had from Eritrean Relief Assn. headquarters in Khartoum, Sudan, puts the need for additional oxen in Eritrea at about 3,000 in order to see his people through 1987.

“It is about $250 for an ox now so we will ask for 2,000. We are committed to work for $500,000. We will have to have the money within the next two months in order to have the oxen ready in May when they are needed,” Seyoum said.

USA for Africa will get a written request for $500,000 within the coming weeks, Seyoum said, and he has every hope that the foundation board will act upon it quickly.

“You ask me if the ad had impact? I say I think the ad had a lot of impact in a true sense,” Seyoum said.

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