‘We shouted, who was going to take care of our cattle?… They answered that it would be no loss if we lost our cattle, the government was going to resettle us and would replace our cattle in the new settlement.’ This proposition did nothing for the people the men had left behind.
Locked up with other candidates for resettlement in a holding camp in Adowa, each farmer was fed two pieces of bread a day. The group saw the soldiers who guarded them feeding themselves out of bags of emergency grain marked with the logo of the European Economic Commission and the governments of Canada and West Germany. After eleven days, Soviet pilots transported Wolde and the others by helicopter south from Adowa to Makale – trucks would not have got through because the TPLF controlled the countryside – where a great holding camp for eventual resettlement was situated. (Another was at Debre Birhan, north-east of Addis in that city’s home province, Showa.) One of the survivors said that an uncountable number died at Makale of exposure and disease. Wolde and his fellow cattle owners lived under guard in an open field without shelter. The night’s dead became visible at dawn. Those who escaped at night were killed, ‘sometimes as many as a hundred each night’.
Next, a relay of Soviet-made Antonov transports moved Wolde and thousands more to Bole Airport in Addis Ababa. These planes were unpressurised and were designed to carry fifty paratroopers, but 300–350 of the candidates for resettlement were crammed aboard each flight, the soldiers forcing aboard even the sick. At Bole Airport, those capable of standing came off the plane, then troops carried out the dead bodies and those incapable of movement, and the fire brigade hosed the pools of vomit and piss from the floor of the plane. Each peasant was now given one cup of water and then squeezed onto buses for the journey to Wollega province to the west of the country. Ninety-five per cent of the country’s buses would be used to accomplish the great clearances from north to south, from east to west.
Many more died during this next journey of two days or longer, in an atmosphere in which survivors said there was not enough room to breathe and where people were forced to relieve themselves on the floor. Wolde and the others finished their journey at the town of Asosa, humid jungle country in the lowlands near the Sudanese border. As another Wollo farmer would say, ‘For five days and nights we travelled by moonlight, darkness and daylight, and then they dumped us into the grass.’
Life in the artificially created villages would be testing and fatal for some, but living in their traditional villages before that had frequently been harsh too, because of military barbarism, the racial hatred that often spurred it, and the confiscation and destruction of food.
‘They destroyed our house and burned the Koran,’ claimed one Oromo man. ‘I have beautiful daughters that were raped. The Amharas did this.’
Such outrages against women were regularly reported. ‘The militia told the men to go to some place and the women to another. No Muslim men were allowed to be with their wives. Then five militia took each woman.’
The soldiers particularly liked to rape the wives of Coptic priests. Teenage boys were taken for the army, but younger boys were often shot or forced to dance around the bodies of their mothers.
Most of the refugees to Somalia and the Sudan claimed to have been arrested at various times and held to ransom by the army. The amounts involved were up to one hundred Ethiopian dollars, a relatively small amount, except for a farmer’s wife.
Villages suspected of supporting the Oromo Liberation Front were destroyed, and to the Oromo and other targets, the Amharic and the army were simultaneous entities. Yet, despite the blaming of the Amharic ethnic group, the government militias also contained Christian Oromo. ‘Three years ago,’ observed another Ethiopian refugee in the Sudan, ‘we were bombed because we were suspected of supporting the OLF. Before that we were bombed because we were suspected of supporting the Somalis.’ Even in the beginning of the famine, the army and government militias were still doing their terrible work.
The army’s activities made the situation worse, according to refugees: ‘The Derg is one of the reasons people are hungry … I can’t even remember all the people who have had their crops burnt. The government always comes during harvest. The army took five hundred cows and oxen from my village, they burned people’s houses, and took honey, butter, and anything made of leather … they didn’t bother to carry the grain; they just burned it. The militia, their farmers from the area, they take our tools so they can use them … the army burned my grain in 1983 and they took twenty-four tons of honey.’
In 1984, said one refugee, the government had arrived at night, had burned his house and taken three cows. The military killed young people who might join the Tigrayan rebels, so that each village had to develop an armed guard, who kept watch and warned the people when the army was on the way. Another farmer refugee claimed that the Derg bombed local markets so that merchants would not go to them any more. It was because of the Derg that they were in Sudan, he said. Even with droughts, he claimed, he would have been able to trade and make a living. But not with the army.
According to the Tigrayan refugees, who came from the far north, from places like the ancient town of Axum, many escaped from the trucks when the army came to get them, but the good thing about the TPLF, they said, was that they did not prevent people from going back to their area to feeding centres, if they chose to. After all, apart from the danger of them being captured for resettlement, though that happened rarely in food distribution centres, it was appropriate to the TPLF to have their sympathisers fed under the aegis of Mengistu.
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.’