Interviews with farmers who escaped Ethiopia’s famine resettlement camps

 

 

The Times, October 10, 1985

 

Paul Vallely reports from Damazin in Sudan on the broken Ethiopian families fleeing the tyranny of government resettlement camps

 

For two weeks the middle-aged man and his fragile little daughter hid, naked, in the forest. At first they ate berries to keep themselves alive, but eventually hunger overcame their fear. Moving at night to avoid the government soldiers they set off on the six-week walk towards safety.  They were still naked when they arrived.

 

 His name was Gesesaw Hailu, a peasant from the province of Tigre in northern Ethiopia.  He was 55 and too old for a journey which would have tested the stamina of a young man.  His daughter, Azenegash, was at seven hardly better equipped; old enough, however, to sense that she would probably never see her mother again.

 

 It was a year ago that Gesesaw and his wife Aweshu finally surrendered the belief that the growing season would produce anything from the land that had supported their people for 5,000 years.  There was nothing left to eat in their bare grass tukul,  nothing to borrow or beg in their village of Enderta.

 

Then came the word that food had been brought in sacks and drums to Mekele, the capital of their remote and mountainous province, oneand-a-half days walk away.  The couple prepared their six children and set out.

 

There was indeed food at the Red Cross camp in Mekele, but before the family got to it they met the soldiers of the governing Dergue, not men of Tigré but from the Shoan plateau around Addis Ababa.  They cornered Gesesaw, told him about a new place, where crops and peace prospered.  Then they seized him and took him – with Azenegash, who had been beside him, clinging to his robe – and forced them into a lorry, then an aircraft, on a journey 1,000 miles to the south.  Behind him Gesesaw left his wife and five children.

 

 On the aircraft the girl became ill with a fever.  It worsened on a further two-day lorry ride from Addis Ababa to a resettlement camp near Jimma into which Gesesaw was consigned with 800 other unwilling northerners.  There was no doctor there and the cadres from the Ethiopian Workers Party refused permission for Azenegash to be taken to hospital.  Her father nursed her as best he could between long hours of coffee-picking for which he was paid about 20 pence a day and a cup of grain.  

 

 Mercifully, the child began to recover.  When she was well, her father began to save a little each day of their ration.  After three weeks they left the camp in evening darkness.  

 

 The pair walked for four days before they were captured by soldiers who were so  angry that they did not return the fugitives to Jimma but threw them in prison.  As an added disincentive to escape they removed all their clothes.  After two weeks, however, their captors guard slipped and Gesesaw and his daughter sneaked out of the jail and off into the nearby forest.  There they lay low, hoping that the soldiers would expect them to be on the move.  

 

 Two months ater they crossed the border intoSudan and arrived at the camp in Damazin where their skeletal nakedness shocked even the paramedics of the Relief Society of Tigré who run a refuge for about 1,400 people who have escaped from Colonel. Mengistus “voluntary” resettlement scheme.  

 

 But Gesesawus tale is only one from a shameful catalogue.  Under the thorn trees, in whose spikes lengths of cloth have been entangled to provide some flimsy shelter from the noon-time temperatures of more than 120 degrees, the members of this dispirited congregation sat and told their stories.  

 

 There were two merchant priests (the occupations are not exclusive within Abbysinian Christianity) who had been taken for resettlement on their way to market.  So old are Keshi Teklehaymanot and Abba Taddese that the only motive in selecting them for farming in the resettlement areas could have been to purloin their cargo of onions and gayshu leaf (from which a local beer is made).  They escaped from Asosa resettlement after getting permission to visit the local hospital and once out of the gates asking the way to Sudan.  

 

 Aragay Garamadheen escaped from the same camp, with its meagre cup of grain a day and no doctor, in December with 170 others.  The Dergue soldiers discovered them hiding in a forest and tried to smoke them out.  In the fire 20 died but the rest made it across the border.

 

 Beli Hailu was betrayed to the resettlement soldiers in church by the leader of his local community.  At the transit camp in Mekele he shouted to a group of foreign visitors who then crossed to askhim his grievance; when they had gone he was beaten with sticks and thrown in prison.  

 

 Ala Musefa arrived in Dama-zin with an axe.  He had escaped by running away from a tree-felling party sent to clear the forest for cultivation around Anibasi.  

 

 The details differed but always the plot was the same: tricked away from rebel controlled areas into the government held towns with the lure of food; separated from wives and children; thrust upon an arduous journey south.  

 

 One group who had arrived that day had set out to walk 1,000 miles back to Tigre from Illubabor.  In Wollega they were set upon by soldiers; some 45 were recaptured, 50 disappeared and have not been seen since.  Three made it to Damazin.  

 

 One of them was Yahansu Nevay, a young woman of 20, who had carried her two-yearold son on her back for five weeks.  She was listless, bereft of hope.  The boy had diarrhoea and the disease of the scabs, she said.  But now he would be well.  I could not believe her.  Soon she would take him back to Tigre to find his father, she said, without a smile.  This time it was she who could not believe.