Devastated Ethiopia Tallies Cost of War

The garbage of war lies scattered around the airfield of this small town in the Ethiopian heartland.

Grenades, bullets, mortar shells and other ammunition litter the ground outside the bombed-out ruins of a terminal building.

At one corner of the runway stands a pile of bombs for MIG fighters. At another, dozens of fuel tanks to give the Soviet-made planes extra range are stacked haphazardly.

The turret of a burned-out tank peeps over a nearby hill.

All this abandoned hardware must be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars--more than this impoverished town could ever dream of seeing.

“It is just incredible how much equipment there is, everywhere you go,” one U.N. official said during a recent tour of the site.

While his country slumped to become one of the poorest in the world--income per capita is a mere $120 a year--former Marxist dictator Haile Mengistu Mariam lavished at least $11 billion on the war effort, creating in the process black Africa’s largest army.

Today military detritus litters the country, testimony to the huge cost of years of civil war, and villagers eke out a life of excruciating poverty.

Dozens of young beggars descend on any newcomer. The sick and the homeless sleep on the side of the street.

Bahr Dar is a picturesque town on the shores of Lake Tana, source of the Blue Nile. Its fall last March along with the nearby air force base was a devastating blow to the now-deposed military leader.

It was a major turning point in the 17-year war with northern-led rebels and resulted a few weeks later in the complete encirclement of the capital, Addis Ababa.

By mid-May Mengistu had fled into exile in Zimbabwe, and soon afterwards the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) swept triumphantly into the capital.

In a recently published report titled “Evil Days,” the human rights group Africa Watch says the war affected every single province in the country. It was the major cause of the terrible Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 that drew world headlines.

“The famines in Ethiopia have been largely man-made and have killed a minimum of 600,000 people,” the report said.

Now, a fragile peace has arrived and it is time for reconstruction. But the tasks facing the EPRDF-dominated transitional government are formidable.

After years of hard-line Marxist rule that wrecked agriculture and industry the country is bankrupt.

World Bank sources say the new rulers have little more than $3.5 million in the bank. Much of the country’s infrastructure--power stations, bridges, roads--has been destroyed.

With coffee exports not yet resumed, the country’s sole sources of hard currency are the national carrier Ethiopian Airlines and the Addis Ababa Hilton Hotel.

Political analysts say that to ensure peace and stability in the country the new rulers must get the economy moving again.

Without growth, many analysts fear ethnic tensions will resurface and threaten the new leadership’s stated aim of establishing democracy and ensuring basic human rights.

The EPRDF has quickly distanced itself from past associations with hard-line Marxism and asserted its commitment to free market policies.

Prime Minister Tamrat Layne, in a draft economic policy now being debated by the national assembly, spoke of “lifting our country from the abyss.”

The World Bank is waiting for the economic policy to be adopted before granting an emergency aid package to “jump-start” the economy.

One looming problem area is how to demobilize some 350,000 ex-soldiers from Mengistu’s army, most of them destitute and many homeless.

At a camp near here housing some 18,000 of them, victims of anti-personnel mines turn down the offer of artificial limbs donated by international aid groups for fear that it will reduce their earning power when they hit the streets as beggars.