Authors: Keneally Thomas
Axum was the pre-Christian capital of Ethiopia, and its temples and its black granite obelisks remain today. These were the tallest pieces of stone ever quarried and erected in the ancient world. Ethiopian legend says that when the Queen of Sheba made her journey to Jerusalem, she was impregnated by King Solomon and bore him a boy who, in later years, stole the ark and brought it to Axum. Not that this meant much to the deprived people of northern Tigray. One of the columns of Tigrayan famine refugees from the region of Axum was attacked by the Ethiopian air force, who were said to have killed 80 to 100 people.
To be villagised or resettled, some surmised, might make people less vulnerable to such attacks. But many others knew that, once moved, they would be permanently under the thumb of the same regime that permitted the army to run wild and that, as well, however inadequate it might be to feed them at the present, they would lose control of their land forever.
In the manner of other governments and other famines, Mengistu believed that the people of the north, in their resistance to resettlement and villagisation, had brought their troubles on themselves. Chief of security Legesse Asfaw travelled to the towns of Makale in Tigray and Dessie in Wollo, both of them centres of the famine, and urged the
hungry into making a move, promising that their salvation lay in the new resettlement location, where they would be given tools and food and shelter. The hungry he addressed did their best to repeat Asfaw slogans: ‘Down with imperialism! Down with capitalism! We shall overcome nature! Long live Mengistu!’
It was not only Ethiopian cadres who believed in these two great goals of Derg policy – resettlement and villagisation. There were some outsiders who believed in resettlement as an idealistic if imperfect process, and a solution to Ethiopia’s pain. With good intentions, some Western voluntary agencies, such as Band Aid, the relief body founded by musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, helped to support the process with food. Band Aid believed that resettlement was necessary, but at the same time that it should not occur with coercion. Coercion, however, by hunger or the state, was the essence of the process.
Mengistu’s original resettlement plan in November 1984 was that 300,000 families should be moved, but he quickly adjusted it to 500,000. ‘As I looked up to the sky, it appeared to me too light,’ went a song from Wollo. ‘It seems they have taken Allah too for resettlement.’ The resettlement sites were to be near Asosa in Wollega province, Gambella in Illubabor, Pawe in Gojjam and Mettima in Gondar – all these regions being in the west or south-west. Resettlement sites, said Dawit Wolde Giorgis after his defection to the west, were in many ways the equivalent of the gulags of Russia. For resettlement often occurred and was maintained under the barrel of a gun. Like the priest Wolde Selassie, mentioned above, farmers who came to market towns to buy grain and salt or
to sell animals and cheese, cattle or honey were captured and forced into lorries by soldiers with quotas to fill.
One man was rounded up on his way to get treatment at a hospital. Some Tigrayan peasants said they had to leave for the resettlement sites after the military deliberately poisoned large areas of their land with insecticides, while over 80 per cent of the Wollo people interviewed later in refugee camps in the Sudan said that they had been rounded up while attending mandatory government meetings. There would be no registration of such people, no records of who was sent to which camp, and so, as had happened in the Bengali round-ups, families were often separated with no chance of knowing where their relocated family members were. Among the Tigrayans in the resettlement camps, the average family was only two, which seemed to bespeak either that many had died of hunger or disease, or else families had been split. The latter was not a universal case: sometimes families were resettled together. One refugee claimed that when he went on his own to collect a rumoured ration, he was told that he must bring his whole family. ‘When I returned with my family, they took us to the airport.’ One farmer who lived near the ancient city of Axum declared that after he had heard about food relief for the twelfth time, ‘We decided not to let the soldiers eat all the food so we went to Axum’, where, of course, they were rounded up.
But those left behind in their home province starved in great numbers in a desolate and partially depopulated landscape, from which in many cases those on whom they depended had been removed. Often these abandoned trekked to the nearest relief depot.
Patterns of resettlement life developed. Party cadres and militia members led out the resettled each day to hoe the earth – a crisis of pride for the northern farmers. ‘We became oxen in Asosa,’ lamented a Wollo man transplanted to the west. ‘We became tractors. The cadres told us, If you have finished your flour, eat soil and come to work.’
Asosa resettlement camp, further to the north of Gambella, lay between tributaries of the Blue Nile. Asfaw decided that here he would mix up the Wollo people and the Amharics, the latter considering themselves the true Ethiopians. He hoped that the influence of the Amharics would make the others more loyal. In fact, the mixture created camp conflicts. The Wollo people, meanwhile, claimed they were hungrier in Asosa than they had ever been in Wollo. ‘I lost two children in Asosa. In Wollo I knew there would be drought, but the majority of the hunger is in Asosa. I can eat my one month’s ration in two weeks.’
Tens of thousands of Tigrayans were transported by plane to Gambella in Wollega province, towards the Sudanese border. The resettlement area was located within what was called the Gambella National Park, where animals the highlanders had never seen before were sometimes visible around the Baro River – venomous snakes, hippopotamuses and elephants. ‘We were living with lions,’ one survivor declared, even though the psychological impact seems to have been greater than the casualty level. With a tendency that the Irish showed – to remember past times of relative hardship as a golden age – a farmer would say, ‘At home we kept our meal times. No one died of hunger. But in Gambella the hunger brought disease, and we died.’
Gambella was tropical and sparsely populated, chiefly by Anuak farmers and fishermen who worked the waterways of the Baro, and who themselves would soon be subjected to villagisation. There was also a pastoral population of Nuers, who were darker, a Central African people who crossed the Ethiopian–Sudanese border as they chose in search of pasture. These locals of Gambella were said to have resented the sudden appearance of a new population descending from the sky onto their land. The highlanders were lighter-skinned and thus somehow suspect in the eyes of the Nuers, and the lowland Anuaks had always suspected such highland, northern people with a regional and ingrained passion.
As for the idea of escape from resettlement areas, 500 people were executed while trying to escape Gambella, and about 1000 perished while trying to walk back to their homes in the north. Even so, 5000 managed to get home again and hide – some of them joining the TPLF, since they were barred from joining the local Peasant Association and from getting any of their land back. As well, 10,000 taken to Gambella managed to cross the border to refugee camps in the Sudan.
The journey to the Sudan from a region such as Gambella took between fifteen and thirty days of walking in unfamiliar country. Those who tried to escape would often take their elders with them, at the elders’ own urgent request, but in the hard and panicked conditions along the track, the tired, and those stricken with fever, were left beside the way. Some of these groups of escapees were attacked by armed militias from across the Sudanese border, and the younger women were sometimes abducted, along with any boys who might be suitable as soldiers. When ambushed by men emerging from
the bush, the escapees did not know which army was attacking them, or which splinter group of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, itself fighting for the oppressed southern Sudanese people, and in need of finance. Thus, some such groups traded escapees back to the Ethiopians in return for money or ammunition. Indeed, elements of the Sudanese rebels were tolerated within the Ethiopian border, as long as they acted as bounty hunters.
Many escapes were abortive. One farmer said that he and his family twice attempted to flee and were caught. They were beaten by cadres and imprisoned in a lock-up full of ‘dust and insects’. They were not fed for the first five days of their detention. ‘During the day we dug latrines. They beat us with whips, fifty lashes twice a day for one month.’
Escaping from Asosa was easier because the journey to the Sudanese border was only three to eight days. People tried to travel in large groups for fear of lions and hyenas, and, arriving in Oromo villages, they found that inhabitants were willing to help them along their way just to get them out of town.
There were stories that officials chose the resettlement sites cursorily and from the windows of helicopters. And in the country selected, in the midst of the national famine, under the severe care of Mengistu’s Marxist cadres and militias – in country unfamiliar as to climate and soil, and in which there were often no buildings, no implements nor anything else necessary for proper habitation or agriculture – people were to remake their lives. A third of the best producers of food in the country had
been removed from their accustomed land. One of them spoke for hundreds of thousands when he said that he wanted to die ‘in the land where his umbilicus was buried’. Many of those like him would, in one way or another but also from the effects of malnutrition, never leave this place of exile.
At resettlement sites, the local peasantry had already been put to work building
tuqals
to house the incoming settlers, who began to arrive by the thousands in February 1985. The arrivals were nonetheless to find camps lacking in genuine buildings, agricultural tools or hospitals. Churches or mosques were not permitted. The newcomers were organised into work brigades by party officials. From the first arrivals in the camps, the cadres had chosen the militias to police the population – if necessary they were to act as enforcers, perhaps a lesser version of the Jewish
kapos
in the Nazi system.
The resettlement camps themselves contributed notably to the starvation rate. According to refugees, in a site of 500 people, thirteen or fourteen people died each day. In another resettlement village of 6000 people, twenty to twenty-five deaths occurred every day. In a resettlement site known as Amba 9, it is claimed that 1500 people out of 7000 died in the first two and a half months. These figures came from those who abominated the regime to the extent that they had been willing to seek refuge in other countries, but if they are half-true, they show that, far from enlarging the lives of those resettled or villagised, the camps and villages managed to kill a proportion.
An Ethiopian farmer originally from the north of the country but resettled by military force to the south, uttered a typical complaint: ‘This is why we are starving. One day we
are told to farm for the militias and on another day for the regional Peasant Association chairman, and on the other day or week (until finished) we plough for the Woreda Peasant Association representative, etc., etc. And on it goes.’
The food so produced did well enough to support party cadres, and was often shipped away, so for the individual displaced farmer in Mengistu Haile Mariam’s tyrannical Ethiopia, the reality was that while he worked for others, ‘our [own] crops will be infested with weeds, and sometimes our teff will be reduced because it was not cut and harvested and collected when it was ready’. In the midst of food production, the resettled farmers and family members they had with them began to starve and to depend on foreign aid for survival.
The conditions of labour on the collective land controlled by the Peasant Associations and militia were severe. ‘If a woman gave birth, they wouldn’t give her a ration until she started working again,’ an Ethiopian refugee later said. ‘If you were sick one day,’ said another, ‘and didn’t get a paper to excuse you from work, the militia was sent to beat you.’
In western Ethiopia near Goba, the villagisation program was implemented simultaneously with government military sweeps that displaced people, in many cases from relatively flat, fertile lands, which the government then turned into state farms.
As part of villagisation, every farmer’s equipment was confiscated by the cadres, which caused many who were villagised in Harar province in the east to cross into Somalia. All animals belonged ultimately to the Peasant Association. ‘All our animals are registered, even chickens. They register crops,
too: the only thing they didn’t register was our clothes. They took all our property, our livestock and our crops.’
The Anuak, a more Central African-looking people from the south, were themselves forcibly villagised. They told stories of houses being pulled down in old villages while women inside were giving birth. A number of Anuak people who fled to the Sudan, declared when interviewed by Cultural Survival, an American non-profit human rights group, that they had been hungry before villagisation, but now they starved as they cut trees and slashed grass. Anuak were pushed off their land to make room for resettlement and this disrupted their normal food supply, and in any case the militia confiscated the Anuak gardens prior to their being villagised. As in Ireland with the Indian maize, the Anuak found that once their normal harvest had been shipped away by truck they had to live on unfamiliar wheat. ‘Wheat is strange to Anuak; we cannot pound it. Fishing was prohibited in the river. Those who fished risked being beaten.’
The Anuak lost their cattle because they were no longer allowed them. The government also curbed hunting. One of those interviewed escaped to the Sudan in order to avoid being arrested on suspicion of hunting. The Anuak of course had begun to flee in reaction to villagisation much earlier than the famine, though the famine accentuated their movements.
When Anuak men got married they gave their wife a large bead, valued at $1.50, and two cows. The government began to forbid this practice and to collect the beads by force. Those
who refused to hand them over were beaten. Clothing was standardised by the Derg and Anuak women were required to cover their breasts.