What's in a name?

The work week begins with the standard staff meeting. In the main it is filled with the usual office minutia: confirming the emergency duty officer for the week, discussing trips scheduled, upcoming meetings etc. Nonetheless, it is brief and to the point. One agenda item followed closely by all, however, is the weekly “security/political briefing”. These run the gamut from tribal cattle rustling and resultant unrest, to fighting following border incursions. The weeks since my arrival have seen “increased incidents of Acute Watery Diarrhea (AWD)” with steadily increasing confirmed deaths. The difference between AWD and cholera? Politics.

For similar reasons it is “resettlement” and not ethnic cleansing. Hence the report was that some 10,000 Amharans are being “evacuated” from the Southern Nation and Nationalist’s Peoples Region (SNNPR) and are being resettled in Amhara. Ethiopia is divided into eleven autonomous regions, each with a president and a parliament. The Amharans had been resettled in the region now designated as the SNNPR during the previous regimes. With over 50 different languages spoken in the SNNPR (over 80 in the countrywide) the region could hardly be considered ethnically united. Haille Selassie, an Amharan, imposed Amharic as the national language. The leaders of the communist regime that deposed him, also Amharans, engaged in a wholesale resettlement program. The only surprise is probably that it didn’t happen earlier.

“Declaring a famine is a political decision. While it can galvanize public opinion and bring millions into aid programs, it is widely seen as a political failure. President George Bush challenged his officials to avoid the word, a policy known as "No famine on my watch". Ethiopia's Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission is charged with preventing famines of the 1984-85 type, the sort that bring down governments, argued Tufts University academics Sue Lautze and Angela Raven-Roberts in a 2004 paper. Dismissing the warning signals, Ethiopia's Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, said earlier this month that there was no danger of famine this year. And Berhanu Kebede, Ethiopia's ambassador to Britain, said at the weekend: ‘We are addressing the problem. Food is in the pipeline.’”

The above piece is excerpted from an article in the UK newspaper The Independent, which can be found here.

Edited and posted by Elspeth, whose father needs to learn to use quotation marks (inverted commas, whatever) better, and to leaven his stories of death and disease with chicken sightings.