TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/84/84eth28

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                                                                                November 26, 1984

ETHIOPIA  

The Land of the Dead


Emergency relief arrives, but the starving continue to pour in


The round hut, made of roughhewn wood posts and a conical
thatched roof, is known as zawya. In the Afar language, that
means the house of the dead. Although it is not long after
dawn, 26 bodies have already been wrapped in filthy burlap
shrouds on the earthen floor. The air is sickly sweet with the
smell of decay. Inside, in accordance with Muslim custom,
Hussein Yussuf is tenderly washing the shriveled body of a
three-year-old boy. "This is the first water this child has had
for a long, long time," says the 60-year-old man. In the past
four weeks, Yussuf, known as Jenaza-atabi (Cleaner of the dead),
has washed 400 bodies, and, he says, "the numbers keep going
up."  After he has finished his sad task, Yussuf lifts up the
wasted corpse and lays it on a bed of fresh eucalyptus leaves.
Then Sheik Ali Hassan says last rites and prays for the
departed soul.

All around the house of the dead, in a refugee camp in the
small northern Ethiopian town of Bati, more than 25,000 starving
people huddled together last week. Some 210 miles away there
was a similar scene of destitution around the 9,000 famished
people who crowded into the Quiha camp. Shrouded in a pall of
woodsmoke, their new home looked like a medieval battlefield.
The parched, scabrous earth was pockmarked with foxholes in
which hundreds upon hundreds of families crouched for shelter
against the chill mountain wind. The lucky ones had a branch
to cover their dugout; others remained exposed to the elements.
As soon as a foreign visitor appeared, the emaciated people
took him for a doctor, crowded around and clutched at his
trousers and clung to his legs, pleading for help. Half crazy
for food, they trampled each other and knocked down their flimsy
shelters in their rush to get to the foreigner.

The wind whipped across the dry, brown plains, and a man, naked
in his hole save for a flea-infested blanket, died. So too did
an old woman covered with flies. A man named Abigurney, who had
already lost three children, was asked how many had died in his
village. "Too many for me to count," he replied.

There are too many to count. At Bati and Quiha and more than
100 other refugee camps in Ethiopia run by international
organizations like the Red Cross, famine relief has begun to
pour in. But throughout the country, at least 6 million people
live at the brink of starvation. Relief workers expect that
almost a million Ethiopians may die this year alone in what
could become "the worst human disaster in recent history."
After ten years of drought and civil war, twelve of the
country's 14 provinces have been laid waste by a famine of
biblical proportions. More than 40% of the country's 42 million
people are malnourished, and 2.2 million have left their homes
to wander in search of food.

For two years, appeals for aid from relief organizations and
the Ethiopian government of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam
largely fell on deaf ears. Then, last month, the British
Broadcasting Corp. televised and distributed footage that showed
piles of dying babies and row upon row of fly-covered corpses.
The Western world was electrified. Both British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher and Australian Prime Minister Robert Hawke
were said to have broken into tears at the sight. Overnight,
individuals, international charities and governments began
pouring in money and supplies at record- breaking rates.

But the response is too little, and tardy. "It is more than 18
months too late," said Mohammed Amin, the Nairobi-based
cameraman whose pictures finally aroused the world. "Why did
it have to wait for a ten-minute TV film to awaken public
sympathy?"  Nor does the torrent of short-term support by any
means guarantee true relief for the country's long-term
difficulties. Without a program of Western support sustained
over the next few months, said James Ingram, executive director
of the World Food Program, "what is already becoming a chronic
and perennial state of emergency will become a quite intractable
problem. To me this is the biggest challenge facing the
international community over the next few years.

The woes of Ethiopia being brought home last week to television
viewers in the West are all too familiar to some 30 other
African nations. More than 150 million people on the African
continent are threatened by starvation. Chad, for example, has
been suffering through a drought that is proportionally worse
than Ethiopia's. In Mozambique, years of drought were followed
by a hurricane and widespread floods, and guerrilla warfare has
prevented aid from reaching the needy. The continent-wide
tragedy has been compounded as Africans, whose crops have
withered or whose farms have, quite literally, been blown away,
have streamed into areas already overcrowded or afflicted with
disease and malnutrition. So many refugees from Ethiopia and
Chad have flooded into the Sudan that the nation, once expected
to become the breadbasket of the Arab world, now cannot feed 2.5
million of its people.

Although it gave short shrift to the agonies of other African
countries, the sudden press coverage of a starving Ethiopia did
succeed in sparking a serious response around the world.
Stirred by eight, full-color pages of withered bodies in Stern,
the nation's largest illustrated newsweekly, West German
citizens sent floods of support to local relief agencies.
Meanwhile, in Britain, where the television footage was shown
first, the international relief organization Oxfam harvested an
unprecedented yield of cash for so short a period. Within three
hours of televising the pictures of Ethiopia, WBZ-TV in Boston
prompted a record-breaking 900 pledges of support for Oxfam
America. Indeed, from a fund-raising rice lunch by housewives
in Lawrence, Kans., to a money-raising fast involving 3,000
undergraduates at Harvard, Americans across the nation
endeavored to assist the dying Ethiopians.

Governments pitched in with equal fervor. West Germany donated
more than $6 million in aid, Italy promised to build a hospital
in Ethiopia's Mekele province, and Canada and Australia
contributed tens of thousands of tons of grain. Still, much
more is needed.

In Washington, as elsewhere, politics and compassion often
collided. The U.S. has been the most generous benefactor of all
foreign nations, contributing $97.5 million in food aid to
Marxist-Leninist Ethiopia since Oct. 1 alone. Last Friday, M.
Peter McPherson, administrator of the Agency for International
Development, said that the U.S. is sending Ethiopia 85,000 more
tons of food, worth $37.5 million. But Washington remains
cautious about providing long-term development aid. Earlier
this year, Congress killed an economic- policy initiative that
would have provided Africa with $75 million for development next
year. Why? the Administration had insisted that the money go
only to governments that reject socialism.

Many critics in Washington charge that Ethiopia's government
has withheld food from rebel-occupied areas or simply
misdirected government funds. While hundreds of thousands
starved, Ethiopian officials spent more than $100 million
sprucing up their capital and erecting triumphal arches for
September's tenth anniversary of the military coup that
overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie.

Nor have Mengistu's political allies seemed greatly concerned
about the wasting drought. As recently as last month, according
to local sources, when Ethiopia appealed to its East European
allies for aid, it was flatly turned down. The Soviets
reportedly even warned that Mengistu should nor use military
equipment for relief work until he had finished paying for it.
Stung, perhaps, by the outpouring of concern from the West, the
Soviets have sent Ethiopia more than 400 trucks, 16 planes and
24 helicopters. But Moscow was having problems explaining away
its client state's need for aid. The government newspaper
Izvestiya ascribed the famine not to drought "but to the
colonial structure of agriculture imposed on Ethiopia."  The
flood of Western aid was, claimed the paper, nothing more than
an expression of imperialist guilt.

Getting food into Ethiopia is only half the problem. A
moonscape scarred with treacherous canyons and inhospitable
mountains, the country is a logistical nightmare. Half its
people live a two-day walk from the nearest road. There are
only about 6,000 trucks in the entire country, and, so far, no
more than a few hundred of them have been used for relief. Even
now some villages have water but no food, the refugee camps food
but no water. In Bati, which became the country's most
death-ridden camp last week, new arrivals kept flowing in faster
than supplies. "We are getting more than a thousand refugees
a day," said Sigridur Gudmundsdottir, a Red Cross nurse from
Iceland. "We are barely holding our own."

In Bati last week more than 1,000 women and children were
packed together in one tin-roofed shed. An eerie silence hung
over the entire assembly. In one corner Janet Harris, a British
nurse, was feeding vitamin-and salt-enriched water to children
too weak to help themselves. It was a dispiriting, and often
futile, task. "You can tell who will live and who will die,"
she said. "The dying ones have no light left in their eyes."

The Intensive Feeding Center, as the shed is known, was
restricted to those children who were 70% below normal weight
for their age. They were given pink wristbands and fed four
times a day. Those children who were just a little further from
death were given red bands and taken to a second shed to be fed
twice a day. The doors to both sheds had to be guarded at all
times against the crush of hungry people desperate to gain
entry. But even the thousands who squatted outside on the
excrement-splattered ground could consider themselves lucky.
"The ones who make it to this camp are the strong ones," said
Miles Harris, a British doctor. "The other 80% are dying up in
the hills, too weak to move."

Despite such harrowing assessments, some encouraging
developments began last week to suggest that the relief pipeline
was growing more effective. The country's main port, Assab,
where supplies had been fatally logjammed last month, began
processing shipments at ten times its former capacity. Two
elderly but effective British Hercules transport planes shuttled
supplies between the capital and the devastated areas. The
government also waived handling charges on all ships and planes
bringing relief. Yet even if all of Ethiopia's food needs were
met, it seemed unlikely that more than 20% of those gripped by
famine could be reached before they died.

More important, there is wide agreement by specialists that
Ethiopia's agricultural plight could be reversed only by a
program of sustained, substantial and intense long-term
assistance. However much aid is shipped into the country during
the next year, more will be needed to help Ethiopia, and its
neighbors, return to productive harvests. Many officials assume
that the present torrent of sympathy will subside quickly as
memories of the TV footage begin to fade and world attention
turns to other matters. The results would be grim.

Even while supply planes raise huge clouds of dust in the bleak
landscape, small groups of skeletal figures continue to make
long, hobbling journeys to the relief camps. Most of them are
little more than bones covered with skin, their faces reduced
to huge-eyed skulls. By night, when the temperature can drop
into the 40s, they huddle close together in their foxholes; by
day, they sit in tiny squatting areas marked off by stones,
their meager possessions arranged around them. When shipments
of food arrive, local officials, armed with long staves, round
up survivors and hand out a few pounds of flour or cereal.

Almost as fast as the newcomers arrive, others depart. Each day
in Quiha, grieving parents wrap the bodies of their children in
burlap parcels tied with string and carry them to the Ethiopian
Orthodox Church in the neighboring village. There, as priests
under bright umbrellas chant ageless prayers, the tiny bodies
are placed in a long trench. And each dusk in Bati, when the
sun burns red and fierce, four men carry bodies from the house
of the dead up a steep hill to their common grave.

--By Pico Iyer.  Reported by James Wilde/Bati, with other
bureaus