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Ethiopia: An African Cambodia?
| Article
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10576 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
3,961 Words |
| Author
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J.A. Parker
J.A. Parker is president of the Lincoln Institute for Research
and Education in Washington D.C., and editor of the Lincoln
Review. He was director of President Reagan's transition team
of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission |
The concern of Americans - and others - about wrongdoing in the world is increasingly selective. While demonstrators appear regularly in front of the South African Embassy to criticize that country's system of apartheid, surely a legitimate cause of concern, there has been hardly a word said about the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women, and children in Ethiopia. When black Africans are abused and mistreated by white Africans, the world is up in arms. But when other black Africans are murdered by the thousands by black African Marxists, financed and supported by the Soviet Union, the response is silence.
At this very moment, the Marxist regime in Ethiopia is in the process of forcibly moving 1.5 million peasants in the north of the country to resettlement camps in the south. This forced relocation program is creating "a man-made disaster" in Ethiopia that may be as deadly as the famine that claimed up to a million lives this year, the State Departments declared. M. Peter McPherson, director of the Agency for International Development (A.I.D.) stated that, "Some of our worst fears have been confirmed . . . from shocking eyewitness accounts."
A study recently completed by Cultural Survival, Inc., a Harvard-based human rights organization staffed largely by Harvard professors, concluded that, "If even the most conservative estimates of the death rate are true, then 50,000 to 100,000 of those resettled in this massive program may already be dead."
The director of research for Cultural Survival, Jason W. Clay, calls the document "devastating." Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Robert D. Kaplan noted that: "The worst fears concerning resettlement are justified as the document makes it difficult to avoid comparison with Cambodia in the mid-1970s, when the Khmer Rouge 'resettled' an entire nations. The inescapable conclusion though not stated, is that Ethiopian ruler Mengistu Haile Mariam is an African equivalent of Pol Pot."
Deteriorated Situation
The death rates reported by the escapees interviewed for this study are between 33 and 270 per 10,000 each day. These are higher than those at the Sudanese refugee camps at the height of the famine emergency in the winter of 1984. in the Sudan, most of those dying were children and the aged. At the present time, young and middle-aged men and women represent the bulk of the deaths, indicating how much the situation has
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