Ethiopia Homeless Again

The orders came without warning. Late last month Ethiopian officials at Ibnet, one of the largest of the drought-parched country's 200 famine-relief centers, suddenly announced that most of the camp's 58,000 residents had to return, within twelve hours, to their homes. For thousands of the refugees, including old people and some weakened by starvation, the order meant a walk of up to two weeks through some of Africa's most rugged terrain. Hundreds, therefore, resisted the move, protesting that they would rather die in the camp than face the ordeals of the open road. At that, soldiers began herding refugees out of the camp and setting fire to their huts. Two people were beaten to death in a struggle with troopers, and 17 other refugees were found dead near Ibnet once the evacuation began.

The full story of the forced move became clearer last week when foreign relief workers at Ibnet informed a visiting delegation of United Nations and Ethiopian officials. The government of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam denied - the accounts. The evacuation, it said, had actually begun a month earlier, with several thousand people leaving each week. The army had not been involved; as for the fire that consumed shelters, officials variously described it as an accident, a precaution against an outbreak of cholera, and the work of a demented arsonist. The authorities insisted that departing refugees were given rations to sustain them on their walk and that they would receive seeds for planting once they reached their homes.

The explanation did have some foundation. Cholera outbreaks were reported over a month ago in several other famine-relief camps; given the unusually large population at Ibnet, the danger of disease was considered especially acute. The government's encouragement of planting before the seasonal rains also made sense, at least in principle. "If these people are going to harvest in the next few months," said Father Jack Finucane, the field director of Concern, an Irish relief agency, who visited Ibnet last week, "this is the time they should go back home. There is very little hope for them in the camp."

Even so, said Kurt Jansson, the U.N. Assistant Secretary-General in charge of emergency operations in Ethiopia, after inspecting Ibnet, the evacuation was carried out with "too much haste and inadequate preparation." At week's end relief workers reported that at least 30,000 refugees were "missing" and still presumed to be on the road. For half of them, warned M. Peter McPherson, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the walk could amount to a "death sentence."