CAN THE FOOD TRUCKS GET THERE IN TIME?: INTERNATIONAL NEGLECT, WAR AND THREE YEARS OF DROUGHT HAVE...

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Title: [SW News](The Guardian) CAN THE FOOD TRUCKS GET THERE IN TIME?: INTERNATIONAL NEGLECT, WAR AND THREE YEARS OF DROUGHT HAVE LEFT REFUGEES IN ETHIOPIA AT THE END OF THE AID QUEUE
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Date :[10-Apr-2000 12:00:00 am ]

THE GUARDIAN: CAN THE FOOD TRUCKS GET THERE IN TIME?: INTERNATIONAL NEGLECT, WAR AND THREE YEARS OF DROUGHT HAVE LEFT REFUGEES IN ETHIOPIA AT THE END OF THE AID QUEUE
The Guardian - United Kingdom ; 10-Apr-2000 12:00:00 am

Jason Burke in Gode

In a dusty compound on the outskirts of the Ethiopian desert town of Gode, 300 women and children are squatting in the dirt. There is no shade so the mothers hold their faded robes over their listless children.

Occasionally an aid worker distributes water from a plastic bucket. When the queue moves forward, the shuffling feet raise clouds of red dust.

The queue ends at a pair of scales and a large ruler fixed to the wall of a hut. Here, workers from the Ogaden Welfare Society (OWS) - a local relief agency working for British and US aid groups - weigh and measure every child.

The more lively children hang laughing from the hook of the scale as if on a playground swing. Others, with the hollow eyes and distended bellies of malnutrition, dangle limply in its harness.

The statistics stack up in the register: Fadumo Sabdi is 75% of the normal bodyweight for her age, Xamdi Abdi 60% and Shagri Abdi 55%. Alis Mandid Aqasdir is one year old, and at 4.4kg, just over 9lb, 46% of normal bodyweight.

These are the lucky ones. They will be given high-energy porridge and biscuits three times a day until they are strong again.

The United Nations says 8m people in Ethiopia and another 8m elsewhere in East Africa are threatened with starvation. Gode is in the centre of Ogaden, the region worst affected by the current crisis. For tens of thousands that threat is already a reality.

'It is a very, very serious situation,' said Mohammed Ugo Mohammed, the local director of OWS. 'People are dying every day and unless we get substantial supplies quickly things will deteriorate fast.'

Relief is beginning to trickle through. Last week 30,000 tonnes of food unloaded in Djibouti - the independent port state to Ethiopia's north - had reached the distribution centre of Combolcha, near the eastern town of Dire Dawa.

The aid had been sent by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) was yesterday being transported by trucks chartered by the Ethiopian government towards Ogaden. A second ship carrying 30,000 tonnes will arrive in 10 days and an American ship with 85,000 tonnes of food on board by the end of the month.

'There are trucks heading everywhere,' said a WFP spokesperson. 'The ships are being unloaded in record time and we are getting the relief out to the people who need it.'

One problem is that no one knows how bad the famine is. Most of those affected are semi-nomadic pastoralists who wander the arid areas of the south and east of Ethiopia and surrounding countries, in search of grazing land.

The death toll could be 'only' in the hundreds nationwide, or it could be several thousand in Ogaden alone. Aid workers have visited a few more remote settlements. Some are deserted. In others people are holding on even though most of their cattle are dead. The surrounding desert is littered with animal carcasses.

There are reports of worse problems in war-torn Somalia. And the WFP is very concerned about pockets in southern Borena district close to the Kenyan border and northern Welo province, near the area hit by major famines in 1984.

So far at least this famine is on a far smaller scale than its predecessor. In 1984 a million people are thought to have died. Now it seems there is still time to avert a major disaster.

The question is how many people will perish before sufficient aid reaches them. The Ethiopian government's emergency food stocks have been allowed to run low and the shortfall has caused serious problems in the early stages of the relief effort.

Burhane Gizaw, the deputy commissioner of the government's Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Committee, blames the shortfall on western donors who have failed to deliver promised aid.

'They told us to hand out our own stocks and they would replenish them . . . but they never did,' he said. 'We are now down to less than two weeks supply.'

The WFP has admitted to delays in delivering 52,000 tonnes that were promised early last year and the European Union and the US government - though they have now pledged more than 800,000 tonnes - owe the reserves huge quantities of aid.

The Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, last week criticised the international community for ignoring repeated requests for assistance.

In turn, the Ethiopian government has been attacked for distributing food without proper targeting. The government is unpopular internationally for continuing a costly war with Eritrea. The war has no clear cause. Ethiopia granted Eritrea its independence seven years ago, ending more than two decades of conflict.

But in 1998 fighting flared again after mutual accusations of border violations. It is costing both countries a great deal of money that neither can afford. Addis Ababa recently imposed restrictions on foreign exchange after it became clear that it was running out of hard currency. It is believed the money was spent on weapons.

Privately, western diplomats in both countries say the war is a key reason for the recent delay in aid reaching the region. According to aid officials in Gode, only a major airlift will get enough food in fast enough to prevent hundreds more deaths.

The WFP is hoping to bring in at least two flights of aid early this week. Much of the food will be destined for Dana - a village 50 miles south of Gode. More than 9,000 refugees are camped on the arid plain on its ouskirts. It has not rained for three years.

The refugees have all left their homes in the Ogaden interior and walked for days in the hope of finding food. Aid agencies have been stretched to the limit by the influx. Water tankers run by Save The Children deliver only enough for a litre for each refugee a day and WFP has been able to distribute food to only a third of the families. The rest lie in the shade of their huts, waiting for help. Every day a dozen or so corpses are buried on the fringe of the camp.

Ahmed Hashi, a 40 year-old farmer, walked 80 miles to Danan from his village of Palaap with his family. Six of his 10 children have died and two others are too weak to stand. 'I am begging God to help me,' he said.

Aid workers fear the lack of water will lead to outbreaks of disease. Already tuberculosis is rife among the younger children. Mohammed Ugo Mohammed said: 'If the rains do not come this year there will still be a catastrophe. Whole regions of the country will need feeding. They have no animals and no crops.'

________________

THE EXPRESS: HOPES FADE IN DEATH'S WAITING ROOM

IN the corner of a shelter which some call "death's waiting room", a mother
tries in vain to feed her skeletal baby boy. It is inside this hut, made
from twigs and sticks, that the most severely malnourished child victims of
Ethiopia's famine gather.

Reduced to just a few pounds in weight and sick through infection, the
12-month-old boy, Hismanid, rejects the milk his mother, Asha Abdi, squirts
into his mouth with a plastic syringe. She tries again, this time gently
squeezing his hollow cheeks with her thumb and forefinger in an attempt to
make him swallow. But still it is no good.

Asha lays the boy down next to her on a red and white patterned mat and as
she turns away, the look of despair on her face changes to one of
resignation. She has seen two of her other children die and knows that the
famine will soon claim little Hismanid.

If she had agreed to allow the baby to be fed by nasal tubes there would be
a strong chance that the child would survive. "She has resisted this because
she thinks it will kill the baby," said Margarita Clark, a nutrition expert
with Save the Children. "Nothing we can say convinces her. It is the same
with a lot of the mothers here."

Flies settle on Hismanid's shrunken skull. They linger for a few seconds
longer than they ought to because he is oblivious to their presence, too
weak to make even the slightest of movements necessary to disturb them.

Every few seconds he blinks, the only indicator that he is still alive.

The hut, a therapeutic feeding centre, stands on the fringes of Gode, a town
in the Somali region of south eastern Ethiopia, an area the size of Britain
and the worst affected by the famine.

In this region it is thought up to 10 children a day are dying. No one has
the precise figures because no one knows for sure the true scale of the
disaster.

A local humanitarian agency, the Ogaden Welfare Society, runs the feeding
centres in Gode but because of the feeble response to the crisis from the
international community, it has been unable to penetrate the outlying
district where the problem is greater.

The OWS is now feeding some 2,000 children in the area. Hundreds of
thousands more are at risk.

Families, who have seen their crops and, in turn, their livestock completely
destroyed in the last 12 months, walk for miles to reach the feeding centres
in Gode, a town which acts as a magnet for thousands.

Every morning between 8am and 9am these nomadic people - the Holoo Dacado
who wear brightly coloured clothes and headscarves - arrive exhausted at the
OWS's registration centre where they queue for hours. Their children are
measured then weighed in plastic bags before being assigned to a feeding
centre. Those deemed healthy enough are turned away.

Three-month-old baby boy Kaha Hassen was carried into Gode yesterday, barely
distinguishable beneath his mother Nimo's shawl. They had trekked for 15
days with little food and water and the baby now weighs just two-and-a-half
pounds.

"I didn't think he would make it," said his mother. "He has had nothing to
eat for days."

Other less serious cases are taken to nearby shelters where they are fed a
mixture of high protein biscuits and milk.

But the supplies, as the OWS workers continually stress, will not last long,
maybe a matter of weeks.

Only the huge carrion storks, which lurk menacingly on the edge of town
feeding off the cattle, have enough to eat.

For as far as the eye can see carcasses litter the ochre sand in a scene
which, viewed from a distance, resembles a hideous battle ground.

In their weakened state, the children from Gode are prone to diseases such
as measles and tuberculosis. All the TB victims, some 40 of them, are housed
in another wooden hut.

HASSAN Farah, who lost his entire livestock of 200 sheep and 50 cattle, sat
with his five-year-old son Yousef yesterday. The boy barely had the strength
to move even imperceptibly.

"I want to be with him," said his father. "All my life our family has been
strong. We survived the last famine, but now this."

The calm in the shelter is punctuated at regular intervals by the coughing
and spluttering of young children. In the hut where little Hismanid lies
dying at his mother's side, the silence is even more disturbing.

There, the children are too weak to open their lungs to scream and too
dehydrated to shed any tears. "It is a joy when you hear a baby in here
crying," said an OWS worker. "But it doesn't happen very often."

Nearby, Hismanid's mother slowly began to recount her pitiful tale. "Like
all the others our livestock died off," she said. "We had 200 sheep and 50
cattle. There was nothing we could do but move on to try to find an area
where we could get food and something to drink.

"We had seven children with us but two of them died during the journey from
hunger. There was no food and nothing to drink for most of the journey.

"Before the famine we drank only milk and very rarely water. For the first
half we met other families who shared what they had with us, milk and food.
But of course it was never enough and the supplies soon ran out."

Two of the couple's children aged five and three died within a few days of
reaching Gode. "We buried one of them in some bushes at night-time and
rested by the grave before continuing," said Asha.

"The next day another child died and we had to go through the same thing
again. It was so sad that I wanted to die myself, but we had to continue for
our five other children.

"Now I do not know what will happen to us. My husband is in Gode looking for
a job but it is unlikely he will find one."

In contrast to Asha's hut, across town where the children are less severely
malnourished, crying and screaming can clearly be heard.

But death has still devastated the group of mothers who sit with their
children. They too talk of "lost children" in the way more fortunate mothers
would talk of losing household items.

For the next few weeks the wellbeing of their remaining children is assured
because of the remarkable efforts of the OWS.But unless food and supplies
are more forthcoming in the months to follow they too will surely die.

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