Doctors call for food ban

Press, 24 January 1986, Page 6

Doctors call for food ban

NZPA-Reuter Washington A French humanitarian group urged the West yesterday to suspend food aid to Ethiopia pending an investigation of a resettlement programme that it said had killed tens of thousands of people. “The main cause of death in Ethiopia now is not drought but mass resettlement,” Rony Brauman, president of Medicins san Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), told a news conference. “Foreign aid is being used as an instrument of oppression, not of. relief,”

he said. Dr Brauman and Claud Malhuret, ihe group’s executive director who wrote a report on the resettlement programme, said that tens of thousands of people had died because of it. The doctors’ group, which had been working in Ethiopian feeding centres, was expelled from the country last month for publicly denouncing the resettlement programme, which has also been snarply criticised by the United States Government.

Ethiopia’s Marxist Government says the programme — moving some 1.5 million people from areas struck by drought over the last few years to the more fertile and under-populated southwest of the country — is the best solution to the famine. Dr Malhuret said that many of those being resettled had died during the journey from the north and more had died in illprepared resettlement areas, particularly from diseases against which the northern highlanders had

no resistance. “The resettlement programme has nothing to do with humanitarian preoccupations and exists purely for military and political strategy,” his report said. Addis Ababa has been fighting rebels, principally in the northern provinces of Eritrea and Tigre, for up to 20 years. The guerrillas want autonomy. Dr Malhuret said that the resettlement programme was aimed at removing guerrilla supporters from areas of conflict.