From: Jim Rosenfield <jnr@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african
Date: 05 Oct 92 21:37 PDT
Subject: Re: 9/27 Wire stories on hunger
Nf-ID: #R:cdp:1471700153:cdp:1471700156:000:7020
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!jnr    Oct  5 21:37:00 1992


/* Written  9:46 am  Sep 27, 1992 by jnr in cdp:hunger.general */
APn  09/27 1202  Horn's Homeless

Copyright, 1992. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

By WILLIAM C. MANN

FERFER, Ethiopia (AP) -- It was here in the Ogaden desert 15
years ago that the Horn of Africa's reputation as a place of
brutality, mindless violence and desperate, dying people began.

That war over a wretched expanse of red sand and scrub between
Ethiopia and Somalia, two of the world's poorest countries,
lasted off and on for 11 years. But it was only a precursor of a
seemingly never-ending march of war and famine that have
devastated the region.

The disasters are a creation of man and nature, human violence
greatly exaggerating natural vagaries like drought. Poverty and
political inexperience make many Third World peoples prey to
famine and other natural disasters. But in the Horn, violence has
made their suffering that much worse:

--Somalia started, then lost, the Ogaden war. Turmoil followed,
civil war leading to clan wars leading to anarchy. Close to 1
million Somalis have fled in the 1990s. Two million more are
starving at home. More than 100,000 already have starved to
death.

--Ethiopia's civil war caused hundreds of thousands to flee to
Sudan and Somalia in the 1980s, many to starve. A million died of
famine at home. The government forcibly relocated up to 900,000
more, purportedly for their benefit but more likely to get rid of
potential rebels. Many died in the process.

--A third of the 6 million southern Sudanese have trudged north
or into towns to escape a civil war that began in 1983. With
nobody left to farm, famine ensued. Estimates of the dead in
1987-88 alone range from 250,000 to 500,000.

--Kenya has long boasted one of Africa's most stable societies,
but nearby violence brought so many refugees that it was unable
to overcome food shortages from this year's drought. In Kenya, as
in the other Horn countries, gangs have taken to plundering
relief supplies.

Arthur Kibisu, director of the Hagadera refugee camp just inside
Kenya near the border with Somalia, said the region's problem --
in Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan -- is "too many warlords."

The solution?

"A very crude way of saying it is to chop all the heads of those
leaders," Kibisu said.

Multitudes of skeletal people set out across borders in search of
sanctuary even during the Ogaden war. After a decade and a half
of famine-causing conflict, the world is being called on to save
a third of Somalia's 6 million survivors and hundreds of
thousands of Somalis, Sudanese and Ethiopians dispersed through
the region.

Marwan Khoury, a Lebanese who is spokesman for the U.N. refugee
effort in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, said international
pressure must be exerted "to convince the governments, the
warlords, to find a solution to these problems."

"The war going on in southern Sudan -- that's one problem. The
wars going on in Somalia -- another problem. As far as drought is
concerned in southern Ethiopia, for the last three years every
year has been worse than the last," he said.

The world is most focused on the crisis in Somalia, which began
with a civil war that grew out of the war in the Ogaden. The
country struggled through the January 1991 ouster of longtime
dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, then degenerated into the anarchy of
clan fighting that has made Somalia a nation in name only.

Gunmen steal aid shipments. Fighting prevents nomads from
reaching urban markets with their livestock to trade for grain
and from water and grazing lands. Farm families, unable to plant
because of a lack of both rain and security, survive by eating
seed grain and work animals. Lack of food kills other animals.
Starvation follows.

Osman Hussein, 48, was a sorghum farmer in central Somalia. He
fled the drought with his wife, Ebela, and their nine children to
seek help in Belet Huen, 30 miles south of the Ethiopia border
crossing at Ferfer.

In the family's first two months at Belet Huen, the two eldest
children died. The eldest surviving daughter, 12-year-old Doley,
wears a red plastic band on her bone-thin right arm, put there by
Britain's Save the Children to show she is among the most
severely malnourished.

"The drought came from Allah," Hussein said stoically, hunkered
down with two other refugee men outside his tukul, an igloo-like
hut made of sticks. "It's punishment for our wars, with everybody
killing his brothers."

Somalia is far from unique.

Both sides in the vicious Sudanese rebellion that began in 1983
use food as a weapon, denying relief to the starving for
political reasons. The war caused famine by driving people from
their farms and sent hundreds of thousands into neighboring
countries.

In widespread areas of Ethiopia, rebels whose own civil wars had
simmered since the early 1960s exploited the Marxist government's
Ogaden turmoil and went on the attack in the late 1980s. After
President Mengistu Haile Mariam fell to a united opposition in
May 1991, the victors forced into Sudan up to a half-million of
the Marxist regime's soldiers and Sudanese rebels and
sympathizers who sheltered under a friendly Mengistu government.

Ethiopia has been a constant emergency since long before the
official end of the Ogaden war in 1988, said Khoury, the U.N.
refugee official. "People have forgotten that it's been like this
for a long time. This is the same emergency."

Only now it envelops all the Horn from west of the White Nile in
Sudan, south to northern and eastern Kenya and east to Djibouti
and the Gulf of Aden. All of Somalia, which is the point of the
Horn jutting into the Indian Ocean, is included. Everywhere,
people are on the move.

"We've had droughts before, but this is one of the first times
there's been such a huge movement," said Panos Moumtzis, a U.N.
official in Nairobi, Kenya. "And we've never had fighting on the
scale as that now in Somalia."

"People think of this as just another African famine. It's not,"
said Phoebe Fraser, an Australian who oversees CARE
International's relief effort at Baidoa, Somalia. "It's worse
than anything I've seen. Worse than anything a lot of people have
seen."

Western nations stepped up emergency aid in August, but the
relief effort so far has only kept the death toll from becoming
even more horrendous.

"Each one of these people has a mother or a father, or mothers
die leaving children," Miss Fraser said of the hundreds who die
every day in Baidoa. "We can never even begin to deal with the
psychological impact of this."

In Nairobi, Moumtzis said: "One thing that's hardly been touched
is the psycho-traumatic fear, the pressure on women who have seen
their husbands killed, who have buried their children. And the
earlier malnourishment occurs, the more likelihood of a lack of
brain development, of schizophrenia, of other brain damage."

But the immensity of the famine means that all efforts have to go
to keeping people alive, Moumtzis said. 
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