Ethiopia Flight From Fear

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First they arrived in a trickle, which quickly became an ever increasing stream, then a flood. Gaunt, starving, often dressed in rags, thousands of Ethiopian refugees continued to stagger across the drought-stricken northern wastelands of their country last week. Their destination was neighboring Sudan. On their heels came disturbing reports of Ethiopian air force planes strafing refugee columns and bombing villages. As makeshift relief camps sprang up and swelled with alarming rapidity on the Sudanese side of the border, yet another specter began to haunt Africa: the threat that the exodus of starving people would overwhelm the meager resources of Sudan, whose population of 21 million already has been increased by 600,000 Ethiopian refugees. Sudan, after all, is also beleaguered by Africa's great drought.

All the evidence pointed to an ominous new stage in the Ethiopian calamity, in which 7.5 million people hover on the brink of starvation. Some 3,000 Ethiopian refugees are descending each day on Sudanese relief centers, and anywhere from 250,000 to 350,000 additional refugees may arrive in the next < two months. Says Nicholas Morris, representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum: "We have had 125,000 new arrivals in the past year, 70,000 since November. We need food as fast as we can get it."

Despite its magnitude, the Ethiopian evacuation is relatively orderly. Traveling on foot for as long as eight weeks from their homes in the drought- ridden northern provinces of Eritrea, Tigre and Welo, the refugees stop at makeshift rest camps provided by two of Ethiopia's major antigovernment guerrilla organizations, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (E.P.L.F.) and the Tigre People's Liberation Front (T.P.L.F.). The refugees move largely at night; otherwise, they might be attacked by Ethiopian air force planes. In one widely reported strafing run on a refugee column last month, Ethiopian jets killed 18 travelers and wounded 56 others. Says Abadi Zeno, an official with the guerrilla-supported Relief Society of Tigre (REST): "It is not food that the Ethiopian government is distributing. It is bombs."

Zeno's comments highlight the fact that behind the images of famine, drought and disease that flicker across television screens in the West, there is another cause of Ethiopia's disaster: civil war. Many of the refugees are fleeing not only starvation but the policies of the Communist government of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam as it pursues a harsh strategy aimed at subduing two long-festering insurgencies centered in the country's northern provinces. In the process, the Soviet-backed government stands accused of violating promises that it made to Western aid donors, particularly the U.S., that it would distribute food aid to all starving Ethiopians.