40 years ago, the “Sud Ouest” report on the famine in Ethiopia

It's 7 o'clock. Addis Ababa airport wakes up in the rain. It started falling yesterday, with the night. RAF Hercules will not take off towards Korem. Too heavy for the dirt track of Alamata transformed into a quagmire.

Opposite, the Soviet Aeroflot Antonov-12s are also motionless. They are, it is true, intended for other missions, only assigned to the movement of disaster-stricken populations. Our guide, Wouhibé Mariam Getatcheou, reacted instantly. Let's go see the World Vision guys! » Bright idea. At the Ethiopian Hotel, on the first floor of which the sect has its quarters, Steve Reynolds, angelic blonde and friendly eyes, after repeating the RAF's “Sorry”, announces: “Gooo new! » The twelve-seater propeller aircraft will attempt three round trips to Alamata.

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He left at 6 a.m. for a first test with three nurses from Doctors Without Borders on board. Time passes, the sky darkens, and approaches the track. Finally, at 9:30 a.m., a roar that restores confidence. Tiny, the plane pierces the gray mass, grows and lands. Four men get out. The pilot, a red-haired Canadian, does not lose himself in vain considerations. “Quickly, let’s get on board!” »

The villages of vertigo

Rise in the mash, then blue sky and sunshine. It rocks, it cracks, but it relieves. The horizon opens onto a phantasmagorical landscape, revealing a succession of plateaus and peaks tiered between 2,000 and 3,000 meters above sea level. The device brushes past them and plays with the currents, tossed and turned and always in balance. Tightrope piloting. Everywhere, very close to us, the villages and hamlets of vertigo. Four, five, ten huts are placed on inaccessible platforms, cut off from the world. We see an acre of turned over earth, a few cows, a column of ants. Families have lived there forever. Splendid isolation. Terrible isolation.

In a grandiose cirque, surrounded by steep mountains, a city of corrugated iron, green, orange and black canvases distributed by Unicef, is the last refuge of 52,000 Ethiopians.

After an hour of flight, the immense Alamata basin appears. Soft landing. At the edge of a field, bare as the back of a hand, a few kichib, graar, dere and kitkita, trees of the region; straw huts and a solid house in front of which soldiers in shorts, armed with machine guns, squat, indicate the proximity of a large village.

An RRC jeep takes us on board, bumping along a track lined with an endless procession of children, women, men and animals. In the built-up area, the driver makes his way with his horn. Eritrea is not far away. The human tide bristles with guns and sticks. Convoys supplying the disaster areas agitated by the guerrillas leave from here. Korem is still 25 kilometers away, three quarters of an hour of climbing on a stony path strewn with ruts. At 2,500 meters above sea level, the village. At the entrance a tree trunk, another barrier. After examining the permit, the soldiers raise the barrier.

At the other end of the roller coaster street, crowded with people, trucks and herds, you have to go to the security headquarters. A civil servant as flexible as an adjutant's croquenots, light suit and set face, recites his lesson in a monotone. “Korem, Wofla district, Wollo province. 300,000 inhabitants are affected by the Shelter (1) by the regulation. 200,000 people were helped by the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, Doctors Without Borders and the Save the Children Fund (2). In Korem, there are 8,992 people in the Shelter and 15,000 without Shelter, in the open field (3). They come from Wollo and Tigray. Some return home after receiving their grain ration. Main problems of the camp: 1. Food; 2. Clothing and blankets; 3. The means of cooking food; 4. Water; 5. Tents and plastic, motor pumps and generators. Despite everything, today everything is OK. »

A few hundred meters more, the discovery of the camp sweeps away the figures and reports of the administration. In a grandiose cirque, surrounded by steep mountains, a city of corrugated iron, green, orange and black canvases distributed by Unicef, is the last refuge of 52,000 Ethiopians.

Amdé: 200 kilometers on foot

Amdé was a shepherd, in the north, in the mountains, 200, 300 kilometers away, whatever. Distance is measured in days of walking. He had a few cows, six sheep, chickens and a piece of land that he was trying to turn into nothing. He first sold two cows, ate the others, then the sheep and chickens until the last one.

The population lives to the rhythm of the distribution of grains and powdered milk, of illness and death.

When there was nothing left, two months ago, he gathered his belongings, his old father, his wife and his five children. Direction Korem, where they knew, through a mysterious telephone, a miracle from heaven, that they were “giving food”. Amdé and his people walked for a month, feeding on roots. Along the way, they buried two children aged 6 and 8. They will never appear on the civil status register, nor on the list of missing people. Their story is that of the 5,000 refugees from Korem.

They arrived today by the dozens. Worn out, shaky but dignified, stingy with their actions to conserve their last strength. Directed towards a green plastic shelter, they submit without a word to the ceremonial of mowing and showering administered using tin cans cut in two. Folded in a blanket, they suffer with the same fatalism the spraying of disinfectants.

Doctor Saematio Scheffaiwo, head of the health organization and Mr. Eyassu Behshah, administrative director, supervise the reception formalities. Elsewhere, in the 400 tents, the 1,844 bamboo huts, the 10 sheds measuring 50 by 10 meters, or on the dirt floor, often with their skin shirts for their checking bags, the population lives to the rhythm of grain distribution. and powdered milk (200 quintals per day, clearly insufficient) from illness and death.

En chants: « Farangi, farangi! »

Outside, hordes of laughing children kick paper balls, chase each other and jostle without aggression. Gathered in an enclosure at powdered milk time, there are three hundred of them, perhaps more, who, when we appear, chant “Farangi, Farangi!” » (4) at the top of his voice. A box of film that is pinched to send the cap into the air illuminates three hundred faces with indescribable happiness. They extend their hand without begging and do not jostle a lucky heir to a brand new toy.

Inside the hangars, Doctors Without Borders doctors and nurses fight against dysentery, paramibiasis, bronchial pneumonia, relapsing fevers, malaria, typhoid, liver and intestinal cancers, gangrene and typhus. Huddled in groups of four, five, six, on dirt beds lined with stones and covered with plastic, starving men, women and children open their immense eyes to the unfathomable. Few moans, no screams, a few silent cries. Too resigned or too exhausted to waste the illusion of energy they are holding back.

What can we do but continue to fight?

“Measles killed 20% of children. We have reduced the rate to 10%. Two hundred are acutely hospitalized (medical reasons). Some who, at 2 years old, weigh 4 kilos, show what we call marasmus. Most are less than 70% of their normal weight. What can we do but continue to fight? »

“They are weak because they are malnourished,” explains Pierre, from Lyon, “the kids die of hepatitis, measles, chickenpox. » There are seventeen from Médecins sans frontières (MSF), six in the Shelter, two in the open field (3), one in the laboratory, three in the Children Clinic, located in the village — one thousand six hundred kids — three in the neighboring Kobo camp and two logisticians. Since their arrival last spring, they have been fighting. In September, mortality reached more than a hundred people per day. It was ninety in October. It fluctuates between twenty-five and fifty in December.

“Measles killed 20% of children. We have reduced the rate to 10%. Two hundred are acutely hospitalized (medical reasons). Some who, at 2 years old, weigh 4 kilos, show what we call marasmus. Most are less than 70% of their normal weight. » What to do, if not continue to fight? For surgical procedures, patients are transported to the hospital in Dessié, the nearest town. “But what is usually an emergency elsewhere is no longer one here,” murmurs Pierre.

Nearby, in a yellow canvas village, more than two hundred orphans no longer know who or what, they are waiting. The night spreads its shroud over the circus of Korem. Night of insomnia or peopled with nightmares on the wet and icy earth. The frost shines under the moon. Here the curfew makes no sense. Under the tents, the howling of the air currents stifles groans and dreams.

The dead child in her arms

At 6:30 a.m., the sky turns white. Outside the Shelter, the piles are falling apart. The gray silhouettes unfold carefully. The refugees rise with the day. Here and there, the death of one of their number wakes them up. He is a father, a mother, a child whose last breath was frozen in the night. On the horizon, the sun sets the mountain crests ablaze. On the ground, myriads of individual hearths glow red and cakes pile up. Makeshift stretchers and bodies of children in the cradle of paternal arms thread their way through the maze of the camp and converge towards the morgue, a plastic cube set up below.

How can we forget the look of Jébré the orphan, how can we forget the long walk from the father to the dead child?

While the officiants carry out the washing of the dead, the priests, mourners and families squat around. A stretcher comes out, a silent procession forms and moves away. Follows a father. Tall, with an impassive mask, he carries his child wrapped in a burlap bag on his forearms. Without a backward glance, he heads towards the hill, with a broad, almost aerial step. His wife and two little daughters accompany him. They go there, beyond the hill and the lake, far away, to bury their dead child and brother in the grove nestled at the foot of the mountain. Alone. There will be around twenty of them that morning for whom the grove will be the last shelter against suffering and hunger.

The camp comes alive. The autoclaves, hearths, clay ovens and makeshift forge smoke. Everyone is busy, life goes on for 52,000 refugees. In front of the infirmary where the doctors are waiting, the crowd is growing. More stretchers, motionless children, adults crawling in, wandering skeletons. The consultation will be long.

Off to the side, a 12-year-old boy asks for advice. He doesn't know who to contact. Huge eyes, features of feminine delicacy and nobility. It’s Jébré Tadik; his parents died in Korem. How can we forget the look of Jébré the orphan, how can we forget the long walk from the father to the dead child?

(1) Shelter: shelter, also designates the camp itself. (2) Save the Children Fund: English foundation ensuring the nutrition of children measuring less than 1.10 m (according to an agreement with the RRC, commission for the relief and rehabilitation of disaster-stricken populations) but biased towards helping the maximum number of people. (3) Openfield: literally, open field or open-air settlement area around the camp. (4) Farangi: this is how they designate, by a curious contraction of the word Frenchies, all people of the white race.