Excursion into Wollo

The day started inauspiciously. At around 8 in the morning, we were all sat in an old DC-3 parked in a corner of the main Addis Ababa airport. Some two hours later, we were still in the same situation.

   The worst of it was that at one point we had even begun taxi-ing out for take-off. Official word was then put through to the crew working for the Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation Commission that ''the Western journalists'' should stay to hear an important speech that the head of state was going to make.

    There were about 20 of us, and we groaned. After several false starts, we had hoped finally to witness the terrible famine that the world wanted to learn more about, and here we were being frustrated again. In the name of the top man of the regime, Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, moreover.

    It was beginning to get hot in the old Dakota standing in the sun, and nerves were beginning to be tested all round. But we refused to budge, determined to get the story we had come for, and the business about Mengistu’s speech could not sway us. Finally, because we had held out, the plane did take off.

    There were several understandable reasons why our Ethiopian hosts would have preferred not to fly us up to our projected destination, which was Alamata and then Korem, in the north of Wollo province. 

    We were a jokey, merry lot, or so I thought, especially the Aussies. It was only about a year later when I again met the IItalian photographer from United Press International and she said how “nervous” I had seemed that I realised I had perhaps not been taking it quite all in my stride. I guessed then how loudly and bitterly I must have complained at being kept in that plane that morning...

    The old DC-3 was crudely fitted out in plain, military fashion, un-upholstered and also unpressurised, which made it hard on the ears as well as our backs and bottoms. Pressed into service by the unfolding famine disaster, it constituted the home contribution to a highly heterogeneous fleet of aircraft and crews from around the world which was taking to the Ethiopian skies to help bring relief.

    The flight to Alamata over the fantastic crags and canyons of the Ethiopian highlands was uneventful -- until the moment we landed. And we landed for just a moment, mere seconds. Hardly had we touched down upon the apparently deserted airstrip when the pilot made a sudden decision and abruptly took the plane straight back up again.

   The Ethiopian officials accompanying us seemed shaken and unable to give a coherent explanation for the change of plan. One of them inadvertently provided a good reason, however. It was, he said, “not a question of security”!

    The next day I learned that all flights to Alamata, and notably those bringing famine relief aid, had been halted until further notice. The explanation was, I later confirmed in Addis Ababa, that there had been rebel activity in the area. A consequent panic had apparently sent the airstrip’s ground staff scurrying away.

   Meanwhile, Lt-Col Mengistu had given his speech. It was in fact a three-hour press conference, which fortunately for me and my employers, the French news agency Agence France-Presse, was covered by our highly-valued local correspondent in Addis at that time, Seyoum Ayele, before his tragedy.

   Mengistu, Ethiopia’s “strongman” and redoubtable head of the ruling Dergue, now long since ousted by those same rebels, had in the course of his press conference made reference to them, affirming that “terrorists are not an obstacle to the implementation of relief efforts”. That was just about the opposite of what I reported.

    As a result of the change of flight plan that day, our “minders”, under the political direction of a keen young man introduced as Comrade Amare Mickel, decided to take us to another famine-hit area some distance away to the southeast. We landed at Kembolcha, not far from Dessie, the Wollo provincial capital.

    “No photographs please, this is a military installation!” said Comrade Amare as we stepped down from the plane. His plea was in vain. Again, he had managed to put us on the scent rather than steer us away from sensitive matters, and soon the cameras were busily clicking away at the interesting assembled hardware. 

    The airport at Kembolcha was situated on a dead-flat plain of several square miles surrounded on all sides by mountains. It was a base for helicopter gunships, some of which bore apparent battle-scars, and it also held a lot of artillery pieces.

    But it was now handling civilian Soviet helicopters, seconded along with their Aeroflot crews as part of Moscow’s response to its client state’s hour of need. They were going to parts of the country that others could not reach.

    From Dessie we had a couple of hours’ journey through the  mountains by minibus to reach Bati, where a memorable sight greeted us.

    Stretched all over one side of a large hill of bare brown earth opposite the small town was a famine relief camp. Established just a couple of weeks before for some 10,000 people, it already held twice that number. Some were in proper tents, some merely had pathetic little rags draped over sticks.

    Some of these people had walked for days from as far as the Danakil desert to reach Bati, and for many the effort had been too much and the succour too late. Starving people were arriving at the rate of up to 700 a day, and dying at the rate of at least 50 a day.

 By 3.30 p.m. on that Friday in November 1984 when we arrived, 55 had died since morning.

    It seemed to me that we literally raced through that camp in our haste to get our stories -- I think we were the first Western journalists to get to that site -- noting, interviewing and snapping away right, left and centre for all we were worth.

     The camp was ringed at a discreet distance, conveniently camouflaged by trees, with a line of armed soldiers standing guard.

    Caring for the people were two doctors: a Briton, Miles Harris, sent by the International League of Red Cross Societies, and an Ethiopian, Daniel Fekade. They were assisted by three Scandinavian and three Ethiopian nurses and an Ethiopian field-worker. The big international aid agencies were not on the scene yet.

     Of the 27 children in his tent that afternoon, said Dr Harris, five would be dead by the end of the day.

     But it is the images, the smells, my own shockingly twisted emotions, ripped up out of the depths -- material that I did not really use in my despatches -- that I remember best now.

    Those starving people, how terribly, wrenchingly beautiful they were, especially the women, with their elaborately braided hair and glittering eyes among the dust and rags. And the pervading excremental odour that I would soon learn to associate with people displaced by war and famine.

    At the entrance to the camp was a pump raising water from a deep well that had been sunk to supply the site. The to and fro of water carriers and a general seepage had left beside the pump a muddy pool of water, bright green with algae.

    As we left the camp under the hot afternoon sun to return to Dessie, I took with me a most enduring and vivid image: that of a naked, heavily pregnant woman assiduously bathing her limbs and belly in that muddy green pool.

                      

    By the time we got back to Dessie, the early African dusk was already falling and the crew of our plane could not or would not fly by night.

    We stayed in the town’s main hotel, the Ras, but there were not enough beds for all of us. Somehow or other, I ended up sleeping in a dirty broom cupboard hard by some ancient urinal, and I think that as a result I displayed more of the “nervousness” that the Italian photographer had noted.

    But by a miracle of modern communications, I was able that night to telephone my bureau chief in Nairobi, who told me that Paris had accepted my proposed project to go directly from Addis to the Sudan to check out the famine there too. Actually, my main aim was to get into contact with the Ethiopian rebels based there.