Resettlement project slowed, says Ethiopia

Press, 7 February 1986, Page 7

Resettlement project slowed, says Ethiopia

NZPA-ReuterAddis Ababa

Ethiopia had slowed the pace of its controversial programme to move more than one million people from drought-prone areas to more fertile lands, a senior Government Minister told an Australian Parliamentary delegation yesterday. Berhanu Bayih, a politburo member of the ruling Workers’ Party of Ethiopia in charge of labour and social affairs, said the slow-down in the programme, under which 600,000 people have been resettled, would help consolidate what had been achieved.

“The resettlement programme is currently under review with the intention of strengthening and consolidating what has already been achieved,” he told the delegation led by Senator Kerry Sibraa (Labour).

But resettlement would continue because the Government believed there was “no viable alternative.”

The programme has come under severe criticism in the foreign news media recently and from the French aid group, Medicins. Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Boundaries).

The group was expelled from Ethiopia last year after its spokesmen al-

leged that 100,000 of the 600,000 people had died during the resettlement The deputy head of the Government’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, Major Berhane Deressa, condemned yesterday a recent article in “The Wall Street Journal” for allegedly likening the resettlement programme to the Nazi holocaust

In a letter to the paper, Mayor Berhane described the comparison as “both an affront to the conscience of man in general and a cruel way of eclipsing a dark page in human history by a simple stroke of the pen.” “To the Ethiopian nation, which was among the first victims of the Nazi-Fascist axis encroachment of the 19305, the attempt at parallelism between the rehabilitation of the drought victims and the Nazi horror is indeed most depressing,” he said. Some errors may have been made in the initial stages of the resettlement programme “because of the ambitious nature of the exercise that started in haste... to save the lives of people who faced imminent death,” he said. He strongly denied that the programme had been forced upon drought victims and said the Government had taken “corrective measures” against the earlier errors.