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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, NOVEMBER 21, 1984
being abandoned for political expediency."
cial, who insisted on anonymity, put it:
"politically sticky."...
PAGE 13
As another aid offi
Eritrea's famine is
Until 1974, when emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown, the
United States supported the Ethiopian ruler against leftist in
surgents. Today it is the Soviet Union which supports the now
Marxist Ethiopian regime against the Eritreans with $2 billion in
arms aid and 1,500 Soviet military advisors.
When pressed, some agency spokespeople concede that their organi
zations have decided that the geopolitical high seas around
Eritrea are simply too dangerous to be navigated safely.
And
despite Ethiopia's pro-Moscow tilt in recent years, many agencies
still have a large investment in resources in Ethiopia, an in
vestment which they are reluctant to jeopardize.
"We're concerned that the government (of Ethiopia) would be very
upset if we worked directly with the Eritreans," concedes Jim
DeHarport of the Africa Programs section of Catholic Relief
Services. "That could jeopardize our on-going work in the rest
of Ethiopia."••.
There are also liberal agencies like the American Friends Service
Committee and Oxfam who have so far refused to help the Eritreans
for fear of joining in what they feel is Washington's cold war
against the Soviet Union and its allies like Ethiopia•••.
To be sure, not all aid groups have allowed their political bias
or organizational self-interest to stand in the way of aid to
Eritrea. One organization that has opted for a strong Eritrea
involvement is the Mennonite Central Committee, even though five
members of an Ethiopian group associated with it languish in
Ethiopian prisons••••
Some agencies cite other reasons for refusing to work in Eritrea.
The United Nations-sponsored World Food Program, for example,
says it will work only with legally recognized governmental
entities••••
Humanitarianism, it seems, has had to learn to adapt to a highly
political world.
Indeed, nowadays the dollars and human
resources of the international aid comiii'unity trail after the
storms of political conflict, picking
£P
the human wreckage left
behind, and in some cases also picking sides.
Nearly all experts believe that Africa's food crises will only get steadily
worse, rains or no rains. Nothing substantial is being done to eliminate
the root causes in the social and economic fields. And warfare threatens to
undo what could be done anyway. Famines "in divers places" may just be with
us from here on out.
--Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau