Badia and her family aren’t the only people forced by catastrophe to make hard choices. Politicians in Ethiopia and neighboring states have far more consequential decisions to make, even if they, personally, have less at stake. The countries of the African Horn, known for two of the worst famines in memory, are now facing another major food shortage: the United Nations estimates that up to 16 million people, half of them in Ethiopia, need urgent food and medical aid to avert widespread death by starvation. The proximate cause of the disaster is severe drought, which has persisted for three years in some areas. But this natural calamity is compounded by war in the Horn–and by the rivalries, fears and misplaced pride of regional leaders.
Take the spat over the ports. The most efficient way to get emergency food to Ethiopian hunger zones is via the port of Assab in Eritrea, which once handled 75 percent of Ethiopia’s imports. But there’s a problem: Ethiopia and Eritrea are at war. Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki has vowed to allow all necessary food aid for Ethiopia to pass through Assab: “This is not politics to us,” he told NEWSWEEK in a recent interview. “The ports are open… any time they want to send the food.” But Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi will hear nothing of it. In a two-hour meeting last week with Catherine Bertini, the U.N. World Food Program director, Meles was mostly cooperative. But he refused to accept food via his enemy.
Meles didn’t spell out why, exactly. One reason may relate to an incident in the summer of 1998. A large shipment of food destined for Ethiopia disappeared from Assab at that time, in circumstances that are still in dispute. Ethiopia says Eritrea “looted” the food; the Eritreans maintain that it decayed at the port, in part because of bombing by Ethiopia. Meles told Bertini that, according to his estimates, all of Ethiopia’s food needs can be met by shipping food via Djibouti and the Somaliland port of Berbera. The WFP disagrees. Current assessments of Ethiopia’s food needs are based on data collected in November, Bertini says. But since that time, the expected rains have failed again, meaning even more people are at risk. At the end of their meeting, Meles and Bertini agreed to bring food via Djibouti and Berbera for the time being, but to revisit the issue as needed.
Deeply involved in trying to mediate an end to the Ethiopian-Eritrean war, American officials don’t want to point fingers. “The tragic reality here is that these two countries are involved in a political dispute that is very heated, very dangerous, and which doesn’t make things as easy as they might be,” says a senior U.S. official. Washington remains hopeful that the two sides, which have reached tentative agreement on several issues, can be persuaded to resume peace talks in Algiers shortly.
Some aid officials and diplomats are less sanguine. “This is a savage war and it’s taking resources away from the famine,” says John O’Shea, head of GOAL, an Irish development agency. A Western diplomat in Addis Ababa estimates that Ethiopia’s military expenditures are roughly $1 million a day on average. That includes about $500,000 for salaries, and the recent purchase of new Russian-made SU-25 and SU-27 fighter planes. The same diplomat expects a major new offensive by Ethiopia on the plain of Zalambessa, which is occupied by Eritrea, before rains expected (and hoped for) in June: “It’s going to be a bloodbath,” he says.
Even if a new outbreak of fighting is avoided, relief officials warn that more than food is needed to spare the country a major tragedy. Children are dying now of secondary infections brought on by malnutrition. Yet medicines and basic medical equipment are in short supply. “We need more of everything,” says Dr. Tajudin Ahmed, medical director of Gode’s only hospital, which has no power or running water. The mortality rate for children has quadrupled to four or five a day during the past five weeks, Ahmed says, yet the hospital has run out of the needles and plastic tubes used to deliver intravenous solution to kids.
The food emergency isn’t limited to Ethiopia. More than 1 million people are at risk in Somalia, which has been dominated by rival warlords ever since the central government collapsed in 1991. Millions more people are affected in eight other countries. In the worst-hit areas, hundreds of children have already perished. (No reliable numbers exist on the overall death toll.) Yet the calamity is fighting for attention with other crises in Africa–the spread of AIDS, as well as wars in the Congo, Angola and several other countries.
That said, there is still time to stave off a major famine. Nongovernmental relief agencies operating in Ethiopia issued a joint statement last week emphasizing that the current crisis was “not yet a repeat” of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85, when 1 million people perished: “A widespread crisis can still be averted, with prompt and appropriate action.”
The crowning irony of this disheartening debacle is that Ethiopia and Eritrea were regarded as two of the most hopeful countries on the African continent only a decade ago. In 1991 separate rebel movements in Ethiopia and Eritrea had jointly defeated the armies of communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. But instead of turning on each other and fighting over the spoils, as so often happens, the rebel leaders decided that peace was more important than unity. Eritrea, which had been colonized by Italy and claimed a separate national identity, was allowed to split off from Ethiopia without a shot.
That sensible agreement was regarded as a model for Africa. Now, however, the two sides are engaged in a border war fueled by ethnic and economic rivalry; tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed, and famine is looming. Many hard decisions, on Ethiopia’s parched plains and in its government offices, are still to come.
