The More Things Change in Ethiopia, The More They Remain the Same
Tekie Fessehatzion
January 10, 2000

Consider the following news items that appeared on the same day recently.

Now dig into the news archives of the seventies and eighties, and you will discover the same juxtaposition of famine and militarism, of generosity of the outside world and the callousness of Ethiopia's rulers. One can accept with some resignation, the constant recurrence of drought as an inescapable act of Nature. But one has to wonder where the callousness in the face of a national tragedy came from. If one could ask a simple question: Weren't the current rulers expected to be more enlightened, and more sensitive to the needs of their people, than the one they replaced? The answer would probably be: "not really". Not if history is any guide. It seems that regardless who is the ruler, in Ethiopia, famine and war walk together in cruel tandem. Indeed, the more things change in Ethiopia, the more they remain the same.

How is it possible that one of the five poorest countries in the world, a country that cannot feed itself, and whose per capita income is rock bottom at US$110 able to purchase sophisticated fighter planes, and helicopter gun-ships? The answer is surprisingly simple. Money is fungible. Through well-established accounting gimmicks, money can be shifted from one budget item to another without leaving a trace or a mark. It's impossible to tell the source of revenues for each expenditure item. All revenues, grants and loans have been aggregated into the same common pot, out of which a budget is constructed. One can't tell whether the price tag for a Su-27 came from the proceeds of coffee export, or money designated by a donor for elementary school instruction.

To illustrate how money can be shifted around without revealing its source, think of two wells in your backyard. You draw water from one. You bottle the water in several unlabelled bottles. Can you tell which bottle came from which well? If you assume the water in each well is the sameQcolorless and odorless, you can't tell which came from where. All you will know is that there's water in the bottles. No point in asking where it came from because there's no way one can tell.

The international donor community has become Ethiopia's bottomless well. Before and after the Algiers OAU Summit in late summer 1999 when Eritrea and Ethiopia accepted the OAU's peace proposal, Ethiopia initiated a furious campaign of mobilization to train and recruit hundreds of thousands of combatants for a military solution to the border dispute. Within a seven month period, between March and October of last year, urgent pleas for help went out to help hunger stricken population whose numbers increased from 4.3 million in March, to 5.3 million in July, and to 7 million in October. The total number has been upped by another million a few days ago. No one is certain how these sorts of estimates are arrived at, but they seem to serve a purposeQthey justified pleas for 414 thousand metric tons of food to feed the hungry since March 1999. February and March 1999 were of course when the largest Ethiopian military offensive occurred. Responding to Ethiopia' plea for assistance, donors provided around US$125 million worth of emergency assistance during the last six months of 1999. The U.S. alone provided 200,000 metric tons of food valued at US$75 million since the conflict started almost two years ago. The donors may not have planned it, but their assistance has been crucial in Ethiopia's mobilization campaign.

Since money is fungible, donors have no way of ascertaining where their money is going. Surely they can supervise the distribution of food assistance, but they cannot compel the Ethiopian government to consider feeding its own people as a matter of the utmost national priority. The coffee earning that are used to purchase Mig 29s and SU-27s could very well have been used to feed Ethiopia's hungry. But using hard currency to feed its own people does not appear a pressing priority for the TPLF; as if Ethiopia's hungry are the donors' responsibility. Few donors will point this out to Ethiopia's leaders since the later are touchy when reminded of giving priority to feeding their people. This is most unfortunate because it has discouraged their friends from leveling with them, and as a result the war rhetoric rages unabated.

The donors, including the U.S., find themselves in the curious position of having to persuade Ethiopia no to go through with her often threatened attack against Eritrea, after the donors, unwittingly, underwrote Ethiopia's war preparations. Out of compassion for the plight of people at risk, and with an eye to persuading Ethiopia to seek a peaceful resolution to the conflict, the donors made emergency assistance available even when it should have been obvious that what Ethiopia was looking for was for a way of financing the frenzied mobilization as a prelude to the coming attack on Eritrea. It was common knowledge among diplomats and aid workers that at the very time TPLF owned trucks, paid by donors in hard currency, were carrying food to the far reaches of the country to deliver donated food, several plane loads of tanks and military hardware were being airlifted into Addis. One has to assume that the airfreight was paid in hard currency, conceivably with recycled donors' dollars. The irony was there for everyone to see. Many chose not to, except the Dutch who, much to their credit, did not wish to see their assistance converted for military use. By November 1999, the Netherlands cut all assistance to Ethiopia until that country accepted the OAU peace plan.

Surely the need for emergency assistance is real. Ethiopia has been hit with severe cases of food shortage, in part as a result of draught, and in part due to internal displacement because of the war. The internal displacement was self-induced. The Relief Society of Tigray (REST), TPLF's principal welfare agency, forced people to move south, ostensibly for their safety but in reality to make it easier for Ethiopian gunners to shell across the border. About four hundred thousand moved, or to be exact, intentionally displaced. After persuading people to leave their home under false pretences, the REST turned around and asked for emergency assistance to help the internally displaced. An emergency situation was manufactured to make the case for more emergency assistance. As always donors responded as they have during most of the last quarter of century, regardless who was at the helm in Ethiopia. It must be Ethiopia's lot that rulers may come and go but human deprivations as well as the callousness of those in power remain unhappy fixtures.

Ethiopia's preparation for a "war that needn't be" has puzzled Ethiopia's friends. After doing so much to facilitate the preparation, it's surprising why they are puzzled. U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia, Mr. Tibor Nagy, found Ethiopia's insistence in resuming the war "incomprehensible." According to Ambassador Nagy the "principles and concerns" Ethiopia had, had already been accommodated on the current peace plan. The U.S. ambassador is not alone in his assessment that the peace plan already is fair, and should be accepted. Virtually the entire international community is united in its opposition to another resumption of the war, when there's no reason to do so. Given the huge social and economic problems Ethiopia is facing, it appears to the international community the height of irresponsibility to persecute a war the region does not need, or cannot afford.

With the donor community looking on, loans, grants, and humanitarian assistance have been massively diverted to maintain a one million strong army equipped with some of the most sophisticated arms money can buy. The donors knew all along Ethiopia has been diverting the funds, but chose to keep quiet thinking that Ethiopia could be persuaded to accept OAU's peace plan. Instead Ethiopia pocketed the funds, or more precisely used it on military hardware, and scuttled the peace plan. The donors know they would have a hard time using emergency assistance as a leverage to force the government to sign off on the OAU peace plan. They know too well that the TPLF would not care. In addition it could very well use blackmail to shame donors into continuing assistance. All it takes is a few well chosen horrific videos shown on western television in the donors' home countries would force Western governments to keep the emergency pipe line flowing. REST is an expert at "marketing" its poor and dispossessed to attract sympathy, the way large NGO hawk deplorable conditions in some remote third world country to attract donations from guilt ridden viewers.

Donors have been oblivious to the unintended consequences of their assistance programs to Ethiopia in the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict. The assistance has enabled the government of Ethiopia to continue its "no war no peace" strategy as a proxy of a shooting war against EritreaQto force Eritrea to spend its own resources defending itself. The logic, though fatally flawed, is elegant, at least on paper. Ethiopia believes that it has an insurmountable demographic advantage, 20 to 1, and that it can absorb huge human losses. With a much smaller population, goes the argument; Eritrea won't be able to survive. Through artful manipulation of loans, grants and emergency assistance Ethiopia has been able to shift the financial cost of the war to taxpayers in the donors' home countries. Surely, Ethiopians are paying with their lives, but outside of those who live in the rural areas, not many have been personally affected. As long as people in the urban areas remain largely untouched by the war, or remain substantially unaffected by the economic cost of the warQbecause most of the financial cost has been shifted elsewhereQthe Ethiopian government will think that it has more time to wear out Eritrea's resolve.

Finally, donors continue to enrich TPLF owned and controlled corporations, and indirectly are allowing TPLF to accumulate scarce hard currency. TPLF controlled trucking companies have a virtual monopoly in the transportation of relief supplies to various parts of the country. The trucking companies are paid in hard currency. Since the truckers are paid in kilometers per ton, it becomes financially advantageous to travel the longest distance possible. Thus before the conflict relief supplies could be trucked in from Massawa, say to points in Tigray, only 250 kilometers away. Since the conflict, however, Ethiopia insisted that Eritrean ports not be used as points of entry, which in some cases meant that Mombassa had to be used. But the distance from Mombassa to points in Tigray is ten times the distance between the same points and Massawa. This means the transportation bill for each ton coming through Mombassa would be ten times than it would have been had it come through Massawa.

Since the donors pay the entire transportation bill in hard currency, the TPLF has no incentive for cutting transportation cost. What this means is that the donors are making it possible for the TPLF owned companies to accumulate huge amounts of hard currency by ferrying emergency supplies, sometimes, from the longest distance possible. Unwittingly, then the donors are subsidizing Ethiopia's "no war no peace" strategy at Eritrea's expense. It would not be farfetched to imagine that with the hard currency it has accumulated by providing services to the donors, the TPLF is able to purchase military hardware in the open market. Had the donors insisted that they would only pay transportation cost from the nearest port of entry, the TPLF would have been forced to find ways of cutting transportation cost. What all this adds up to is that, unconsciously, the donors continue to underwrite Ethiopia's mobilization in preparation for the resumption of war. And once Ethiopia feels completely prepared for initiating the invasion, as it does now, it would take a lotQmuch more than we have seen so far-- to convince the TPLF not to go ahead with its plans.

This is not the first time in Ethiopian history that Ethiopia's hunger stricken population have been abandoned and exploited by their rulers. A quarter of a century ago, under a different ruler, Mengistu Hailemariam, the same situation prevailed. The responsibility of feeding the hungry was dumped on guilt-ridden donors while Ethiopia's coffee was used to pay for military hardware from the Soviet Union. Three years after Mengistu Haile Mariam seized power in Ethiopia, he switched alliances from the U.S to the Soviet Union. He was awarded easy credit to purchase Soviet-made military hardware. Between July and December 1977, the Soviets shipped one billion dollars worth of arms. The following year Russia supplied Mengistu 200 T-54, and T-55 tanks, and 48 Migs. The Soviets continued to supply Mengistu with more arms and fighter planes until he was overthrown in 1991. The total bill to Ethiopia? Around US$5 billion.

When war broke out in May 1998, Ethiopia was scheduled to make a payment of US$360 million for the year to the Russians on the bill it inherited from Mengistu. A few months ago Russia agreed to forgive some of the debt and reschedule the rest, knowing full well Ethiopia would never be able to repay the debt in full. The current Russian government, the inheritor of the Soviet government, and the TPLF government, the inheritor of the Derg in more ways than one, are back to doing business the way the Soviets and the Derg didQcontinue to sell Ethiopia more military hardware, except this time it will be strictly in cash, or may be on barter, based on coffee. Something more fundamental, however, remains a permanent fixture: indifference to the peoples' plight, famine and war. Famine and war, Ethiopia's old scourges have often preceded a change of the guard in Ethiopia. It is not clear whether the juncture has been reached yet. But we know this: the more things change in Ethiopia, the more they remain the same.