[NYTr] Ethiopia blocks food to rebel controlled areas

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

sent by Steven L. Robinson (activ-l)

[Another US ally in the war on terror in action. -SR]

The New York Times - Jul 22, 2007
http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070722/NEWS01/707220383/1002/NEWS01

Officials say Ethiopia is blocking food to rebels

Thousands of people at risk of starvation

By Jeffrey Gettleman

Nairobi, Kenya - The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food
aid and choking off trade to large parts of a remote region in the
eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting
hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western
diplomats and humanitarian officials say.

The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning
off millions of dollars in international food aid, and using a U.N.
polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according
to humanitarian officials, former Ethiopian government administrators
and a member of the Ethiopian parliament who defected to Germany last
month to protest the government's actions.

The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert
on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a
growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by
human rights groups of widespread brutality.

Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial
traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of
support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes,
preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock.
Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated,
unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best
of times.

"Food cannot get in," said Mohammed Diab, the director of the U.N. World
Food Program in Ethiopia.

The Ethiopian government says the blockade covers only strategic
locations, and is meant to prevent guns and other supplies from
reaching the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the rebel force that the
government considers a terrorist group. In April, the rebels killed
more than 60 Ethiopian guards and Chinese workers at a Chinese-run oil
field in the Ogaden.

"This is not a government which punishes its people," said Nur Abdi
Mohammed, a government spokesman.

But Western diplomats have been urging Ethiopian officials to lift the
blockade, arguing that the many people in the area are running out of
time. "It's a starve-out-the-population strategy," said one Western
humanitarian official, who did not want to be quoted by name because he
feared reprisals against aid workers. "If something isn't done on the
diplomatic front soon, we're going to have a government-caused famine
on our hands."

The blockade, which involves soldiers and military trucks cutting off
the few roads into the central Ogaden, comes as Congress is increasingly
concerned about Ethiopia's human rights record. Ethiopia is a close
American ally and a key partner in America's counterterrorism efforts
in the Horn of Africa, a region that has become a breeding ground for
Islamic militants, many of whom have threatened to wage a holy war
against Ethiopia.

The country receives nearly half a billion dollars in American aid each
year, but this week, a House subcommittee passed a bill that would put
strict conditions on some of that aid and ban Ethiopian officials
linked to rights abuses from entering the United States. The House also
recently passed an amendment, sponsored by J. Randy Forbes, R-Va., that
stripped Ethiopia of $3 million in assistance to "send a strong message
that if they don't wake up and pay attention, more money will be cut,"
Forbes said.

Ethiopia's decision on Friday to pardon 30 political prisoners who had
been sentenced to life in prison could ease some criticism. But Sen.
Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., is pushing ahead with measures to more closely
scrutinize assistance to the Ethiopian military. According to human
rights groups and firsthand accounts, government troops have gang raped
women, burned down huts and killed civilians.

U.S. officials in Ethiopia said they were trying to investigate the
situation but that the Ogaden was too dangerous right now for a
fact-finding mission. They said they have heard persistent reports of
burned villages and that the blockade was putting the area on the cusp
of a crisis.

Villagers say that anyone who criticizes the government risks getting
killed. According to Ogaden Online, a Canadian-based news service that
covers the Ogaden through a network of reporters and contributors, some
equipped with satellite phones, four young men who were videotaped by
The New York Times at a community meeting in an Ogaden village in May
were later tortured and executed. The claim could not be fully verified
independently, but their identities may have been discovered by
Ethiopian soldiers who had arrested three journalists for The Times in
the Ogaden and confiscated their notebooks, cameras and computers.

"The army is out of control," said Jemal Dirie Kalif, the member of
parliament who defected.

The blockade has been in place since early June, and thousands of people
have already fled on foot and by camel. Two weeks ago, Abdullahi
Mohammed, a 17-year-old student, walked from his village deep in the
Ogaden to the nearest town with a bus station. He carried with him a
few pieces of bread. He said that when he stopped to ask villagers in
the Ogaden for food, they asked him for some instead.

"They had nothing," he said.

Though good rains this year have nourished the few crops in the area and
provided a little cushion, "The most these people can last without
facing serious problems is one month, maybe two," said David Throp,
country director for Save the Children UK.

Even if relief trucks are allowed in to all the critical areas, the food
might not reach the people who need it.

According to humanitarian workers and several former Ethiopian
officials, including Kalif, food aid is embezzled in two stages. First,
soldiers skim sacks of grain, tins of vegetable oil and bricks of
high-energy biscuits from food warehouses to sell at local markets.

"The cash is distributed among security officers and regional
officers," a former government administrator from the Ogaden region
said in a recent telephone interview on condition of anonymity because
he still works with government officials.

Then the remaining food is hauled out to rural areas where the soldiers
divert part of it to local gunmen and informers as a reward for helping
them fight the rebels.

The former administrator said he also knew of specific cases in which
army officers stole food from warehouses and gave it to the families of
women their soldiers had raped, as compensation.

Several Western humanitarian officials estimated that 20 percent to 30
percent of the donor countries' food aid to the Ogaden - aid that last
year was valued at more than $70 million - routinely disappears this
way. To cover their tracks, the soldiers and the government
administrators who work with them tell the aid agencies that the food
has spoiled, or has been stolen or hijacked by the rebels, humanitarian
officials said.

Relief workers in Ethiopia have known about these problems for several
years, one humanitarian official said, and have tried to set up
committees of local elders to oversee distribution. But that did not
work either, and aid officials eventually concluded that as long as the
majority of the food was getting through, they would not stop the
shipments.

Mohammed, the government spokesman, denied Ethiopian troops were
pilfering or mishandling foreign aid.

"We don't do that," he said.

As the food crisis looms, Western diplomats are also concerned about a
separate plan by the regional government in the Ogaden to divert a
share of its own budget for development projects - like schools and
farming - to the Ethiopian military.

This seems to be part of the Ethiopian government's strategy to do
whatever it takes to crush the rebels, who have deep popular support.
The people of the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct
from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries,
and the long-standing battle over the region has been steadily
escalating this year.

The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned
from a visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to
the ground and several schools that had been converted into military
bases, with foxholes.

Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and
setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the
Ogaden National Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan,
and so the government has turned to other clans to form militias. In
the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.

"Those Ethiopians are smart," Kalif said. "They know Somalis are more
loyal to clans than anything else." Tactics like these, he said, drove
him to defect on June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden,
Germany. He was affiliated with the ruling party, and had been
representing an area in the eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.

He described a scheme with a U.N. polio program, which was corroborated
by two former administrators in the Ethiopian government and a Western
humanitarian official, in which military commanders gave prized jobs as
vaccinators to militia fighters, and in the end, much of the polio
vaccine was never distributed.

"Army commanders are using the polio money to pay their people, who
don't pass out the vaccines, so the disease continues and the payments
continue," said Kalif, 32. "It's the perfect system." U.N. officials in
Geneva said they did not know whether that was happening, but that they
would investigate.

When asked how he knew about the polio scheme, Kalif said: "Everybody
out there knows. They're just too scared to talk."

"If I don't get asylum and they send me back to my country, I'm dead,"
he added. "But I was sick of being a parrot. I have no regrets."