THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Friday, December 28, 1984
Editor's note: The Jewish News sponsored
Elsa Solender's recent trip to Ethiopia,
during which she investigated conditions
for the Ethiopian Jewish population as well
as the impact of the famine in northeastern
Ethiopia. This is the first of two reports on
her findings:
Ethiopia — "Auschwitz must have
looked like this..the people are living
skeletons...death is all around...when you
are there and breathing it, it is absolutely
horrifying."
Congressman Gary Ackerman (D-NY),
his complexion ashen, his voice subdued,
had just returned from inspecting the
Korem famine relief camp in Ethiopia with
a U.S. Congressional delegation. Korem is
more than a thousand miles north of the
Addis Ababa Hilton Hotel where we were
now seated comfortably in a plush suite.
It was 11 p.m., one hour before the curfew
that has been imposed by the Marxist mili-
tary government of Mengistu Haile Mari-
am, and strictly enforced.
Our delegation of 16 North American
Jews had been traveling for a week under
auspices of the National Jewish Communi-
ty Relations Advisory Council. We had ini-
tially come to visit villages in the Gondar
Province, 850 miles northwest of Addis,
where most Ethiopian Jews now cluster.
We had expanded our agenda to investi-
gate famine conditions as well, not only to
assess the potential impact of the disaster
on Ethiopian Jewry, but also to be able to
advise the U.S. and Canadian organiza-
tions and communities that we represent-
ed about the extent of the devastation and
the relief effort.
We had met with numerous relief offi-
cials from the Ethiopian and other govern-
ments, and from various relief organiza-
tions, international and non-governmental.
We had also been pressing for space on a
government plane traveling north to the
famine areas. You need to go by plane: the
Mengistu government only controls the
cities, the country's two Red Sea ports and
the relief camps. Large sections of the
rural countryside are in the hands of the
three revolutionary groups challenging
Mengistu's rule.
Overland travel is very treacherous in
any case, over the Ethiopian terrain, a
series of long, sparsely populated plateaus
bordered by impassible rock canyons.
Besides, there are only two paved roads
north from Addis in this country with
three times the territory of California. Ac-
cess to the northern famine areas is thus
heavily restricted by geography as well as
by government control of the means of
transport.
The U.S. Congressional group had
brought their own airplane. Despite the
fact that Ethiopia and the United States
do not maintain diplomatic relations, Air
Force Two could be seen just down the
runway at the Addis airport from where
a group of hijackers had been holding a
Somalian airliner, its crew and its passen-
gers hostage for several days. They want-
ed their comrades released from Somalian
jails. Despite these two rather unusual fac-
tors, airport traffic was otherwise pro-
ceeding normally.
The hotels of Addis were bursting with
government and relief officials from
around the world, as well as a full comple-
ment of media people and their equipment.
The famine is a big story, right now, any-
way. Officials worry that the western pub-
lic, barraged with heartrending reports of
the death and desolation in Ethiopia, may
soon develop what they politely call "com-
passion fatigue." Another term for the
condition is boredom.
There was no visible shortage of food in
Addis Ababa, the seat of government and
Mengistu's stronghold. A week earlier the
Organization of African Unity had met at
the United Nations conference center
there. There is, in fact, a U.N. plan to
upgrade the conference center at a cost of
$72 million, a situation some observers
have seen as cynical in light of pleas by
other U.N. agencies to focus more massive
relief on famine and agricultural develop-
ment.
No austerity measures seemed to have
been imposed on the city population, al-
though it was common knowledge that the
diseased and handicapped beggars of Ad-
dis had been rounded up on trucks by the
army, driven away and deposited nobody-
knew-where before the OAU sessions.
Earlier that evening our group had dined
in the crowded Hilton restaurant. Some
had selected their meal from the lavish
Chinese buffet. Others ordered pasta or
pizza — Mussolini's fascists occupied
Ethiopia for six years during World War
II, buiding those two roads to the north,
and teaching the deluxe hostelries to
prepare Italian cuisine during that period.
The gigantic market of Addis, the Mer-
cato, as well as the sprawling street
market in Gondar which we had visited,
had displayed abundant food. Oranges
were stacked up on streetcorners for sale
by vendors in Addis. The soldiers in the
ubiquitous army installations that we saw
around the country invariably looked well
fed.
But poor mothers and children in the
supplementary feeding center run by the
Catholic Relief Service in Addis were not
showing the nutritional improvement us-
ually demonstrated after their food intake
has been increased to 1,400 calories per
day. "They must be getting less food at
home," a worker at the center told us.
We had first encountered Congressman
Ackerman, a plump, usually jovial ex-
teacher, in Gondar, where he had been
traveling under auspices of another Jewish
group, the North American Council on
Ethiopian Jewry (NACEJ). It is one of
three non- or anti-Establishment organiza-
tions that have been pressing for rescue
and transportation of the Falashas to
Israel over the past decade (the other
groups are the Canadian Association for
Ethiopian Jewiy, CAEJ, and the Ameri-
can Association for Ethiopian Jewry,
AAEJ).
Ackerman had left the NACEJ group to
rendezvous with his Congressional party
in Addis. Meeting with us directly after he
had returned from the Korem camp, Ac-
kerman was armed with facts and figures,
much the same as the other government
and organizational representatives we had
interviewed; but perhaps because he is no
This is not a one-shot
disaster relief effort
which can be concluded
in a couple of months.
The entire region is
confronted by an
overwhelming problem
of underdevelopment.
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