Refugees from Drought : Pain Eased in Ethiopian Relocations

Abeze Belew gave up on the land of her birth two years ago, when the withered soil of Ethiopia’s Wollo province was at its most parched and unforgiving. The elderly widow looked to her future there and saw only more of the past.

The government resettled Abeze and her daughter’s family in this muggy valley, three hard days away by bus, where 75,000 strangers were trying to start new lives without such things as roads, medication or drinking water.

Today that dismal picture has changed. Trim Italian trucks and tractors move along 60 miles of newly graded dirt roads, a water pipeline is being laid and ground has been broken for a $2-million hospital. Freshly harvested teff, the staple grain, is piled high by the roadsides.

Program Suspended

Abeze, still wearing the finely embroidered chema dress of her Wollo homeland, has decided that she is happy enough in Pawe’s Village No. 50. “I have something to eat and I’m with my grandchildren,” she said. “But I miss my friends.”

Pawe was the focal point of thundering international criticism that prompted Ethiopia to suspend its resettlement program after allegations of human rights violations were leveled more than a year ago. Now the Marxist government plans to start moving people across the country again soon, albeit on a smaller scale, and even former critics think the program has a good chance of surviving this time.

In 1985, about 600,000 people from the drought-plagued eastern highlands were moved to the more fertile and sparsely populated western lowlands, and thousands more fled the country to tell of being forced off their land at gunpoint, separated from their families and left in areas rife with malaria.

Moved People Too Quickly

Ethiopia had hoped to resettle 1.5 million people, but even the government now acknowledges that it tried to move too many people too quickly. The goal for this year is 60,000, and even that is flexible.

“We will only take volunteers,” said Mersie Ejigu, minister in charge of the Office of the National Committee for Central Planning in Addis Ababa, the nation’s capital. “With the good rains in Wollo, I expect there will be fewer people who want to move. So we’ll probably end up moving 20,000 or so.”

Western diplomats in Addis Ababa see that as a good sign. “If they keep it small this time, they’ve got a pretty good chance of doing it right,” said a senior U.S. diplomat. The United States was a leading critic of the resettlement in 1985.

The progress made at Pawe, the largest of 40 resettlement areas, since the program was suspended has been encouraging. But it is less an example of what the government of Ethiopia has accomplished than an indication of what a massive injection of foreign assistance and expertise can do.

Population Swelled

Pawe is a sprawling network of 48 new mud-hut villages 200 miles northwest of Addis Ababa on mostly unpaved roads. It is in Gojam province, south of Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile, and one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country.

Pawe (pronounced paw-way) means “empty” in the local Agewo language, a tongue the newcomers did not understand, which was just as well because it was not empty any longer. The once-vacant land had become the third-largest community in Ethiopia virtually overnight.

Shocking Scene

A team of Italian engineers that arrived last April was shocked by the scene: It was as if thousands of people, coming from different cultures and speaking different languages, had fallen from the sky into this tangled wilderness.

“There was nothing here, really, except people,” remembered Paolo Moder, site agent for the project. “We were faced with the very delicate task of helping them survive.”

The government had managed to move them, but nothing was waiting for the resettlers except a few poorly built homes and uncleared land that one day, it was hoped, would be more productive than the land they left.

The Italians had even bigger plans for Pawe. The Italian government had decided to spend $200 million on a two-year program to help Ethiopia turn Pawe into a model community of 100 villages capable of supporting 250,000 resettled peasants.

The Italians first built one of the most modern airstrips in Ethiopia, with an all-weather dirt runway that could accommodate a DC-3. They flew in food, medicine and supplies. Then they began building--bridges and graded roads, a water pipeline, a pipe factory and enough housing for 2,700 Italian and Ethiopian workers.

Twenty agronomists and 120 tractors helped 20,000 resettlers clear and plant about 20,000 acres. The cooperative farming scheme, with the help of the Italians’ machines and advice, produced a harvest that will feed Pawe.

Cotton Harvest

Home vegetable gardens kept by the resettlers grew thick and leafy. Workers waded through a white-flecked field on a recent hot afternoon to harvest cotton, one of Pawe’s cash crops.

Abeze’s family lives in a hut carved into mud-walled rooms, with separate rooms for cooking and sleeping--a luxury for rural Ethiopians. On two of those walls hang drawings of churches made at school by her grandchildren.

But Pawe still has a long way to go. Clean drinking water is available in only a handful of villages so far. An Italian medical team in November found that about a quarter of the youngsters were “borderline malnourished.”

In one village near a marsh, a quarter of the children had malaria. Health care in that village also was hampered by cultural differences--the residents came from three different regions, speaking different languages, and couldn’t communicate well enough to help each other.

Foreign Aid a Must

Relief workers and Western diplomats who have visited other resettlement sites in recent weeks describe green fields and other signs of slow but steady progress toward self-sufficiency, owing in large part to foreign assistance.

The United States has not given assistance for resettlement, but the State Department has not ruled out such support.

“We have no problem with resettlement in Ethiopia as long as it is voluntary and people are transported in a humane manner,” said a senior U.S. diplomat here.

Other Western governments and private relief agencies have provided continuing assistance in resettlement areas.

“Most everyone here accepts the fact that people who have already been through the horrors of drought and famine in Wollo, and are a long way from their traditions and culture, are people who are worthwhile helping,” said John James, field director for Band Aid Trust/Live Aid Foundation, a private relief agency. The organization, founded by musician and promoter Bob Geldof, spends proceeds from famine relief concerts in the United States and Britain.

‘Extremely Painful’

“Moving families, and children, in a country which is extremely poor is always extremely painful, even if it is done in a planned way with kindness,” said Gregorio Monasta, director in Ethiopia for the U.N. Children’s Fund. “We hope our presence can give the operation a human face.”

Throughout Ethiopia’s 3,000-year history, peasants have left the fertile valleys to live in the highlands, often on the tips of mountains, to better defend themselves against perennial invaders. But centuries of outdated farming techniques, overgrazing and frequent droughts began to ruin the land, triggering a gradual migration from the highlands to the south and southwest that began 25 years ago.

The government’s decision to embark on a crash resettlement program was a response to the drought and famine of 1984-85, and thousands of peasants abandoned their homes and were willing to move across the country to more habitable land.

Forced People to Move

The peasants’ incentive began to wane about the time shipments of emergency food from the United States and other Western countries began arriving in the hardest-hit famine areas during the spring of 1985, relief officials say.

But the political incentive to move them had gained momentum, and local party officials and army officers, apparently carried away by a desire to impress their superiors, began forcing, rather than leading, huge numbers of people into regions ill-prepared to receive them.

“They were literally parachuting people into the jungle and saying, ‘There’s your village,’ ” is how one senior Western diplomat recently put it.

While they are optimistic about resettlement, U.S. officials still are wary about “villagization,” a separate but similar program that has already moved 4 million peasants into 4,000 new villages in Ethiopia. Under villagization, the government wants to move peasants off their productive farms and into villages a few miles away.

Critics Persist

Ethiopian officials say that bringing peasants into villages makes it easier for the government to provide such services as schools and health care, and the peasants can continue to farm land within walking distance. Critics say the government cannot afford to build schools and clinics in the small villages, and they contend that villagization is an attempt to exert more political control over rural areas of the country as a prelude to creating Marxist collective farms.

Some critics accused the Ethiopian government and head of state Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1985 of using resettlement as a political tool in the government’s war against secessionist groups in Tigre and Eritrea. By moving people out of those regions, the critics said, Mengistu was also taking away potential support for the rebels.

But most of the resettled Ethiopians have come from Wollo and Shoa provinces; a smaller number came from Tigre, and very few came from Eritrea, according to relief officials.