unitex@rubbs.fidonet.org (unitex) (09/16/89)
Harar Journal; Ethiopia Drives Its Peasants Off the Good Earth
Posting Date: 09/14/89 Source: UNITEX Network, Hoboken, NJ, USA
(New York Times, September 12, 953 words, BYLINE: JANE PERLEZ)
With rows of Marx and Lenin volumes in his bookcase and piles of
tracts on his desk, Ali Youssef, the head of the ideology
department here, explained the alacrity with which the process
being called ''villagization'' had been accomplished in his
region.
In seven months, he said, half a million houses for more than
two million people were built. ''There is systemization; there
is mobilization,'' he said, lifting some of the argot from his
desktop literature. ''They used to construct at midnight.''
It is precisely the speed and authoritarianism of the
Government's villagization program - the relocation of peasants
from their traditionally scattered homes in nearby areas to new
villages established in gridlike patterns - that have caused
many of its problems, Ethiopian and Western agricultural experts
say.
Villagization was heralded by President Mengistu Haile Mariam in
1984 as the answer to many of the difficulties of the
impoverished, drought-stricken
Ethiopian peasantry, who make up 90 percent of the country's
population. By being grouped together, the argument went,
peasants would be able to produce more and have easier access to
such services as schools and health clinics.
Resettlement Also Introduced
Unspoken, but more to the point, in the view of many Ethiopian
and Western researchers, villagization was an effort to increase
the power of the state by marshaling people in more easily
controlled groups.
Experiments in consolidation and forced resettlement have been
tried elsewhere in Africa, most notably under President Julius
K. Nyerere in Tanzania, with results that are debated widely.
Along with villagization, which now affects about 40 percent of
Ethiopia's population, the Government also introduced
resettlement, a program under which thousands of people were
moved long distances from one arid region of the country to a
more fertile one. This program, smaller in scale and often
carried out forcibly, has largely been halted, not because of
second thoughts but because of its expense for the war-ravaged
and virtually bankrupt economy, Ethiopian officials said.
Both villagization and resettlement have been criticized by many
Western countries. The two policies are among the reasons that
the United States gives for refusing economic aid to Ethiopia,
as distinct from humanitarian aid.
This year, the Swedish Government's aid agency, the Swedish
International Development Agency, traditionally one of the most
generous donors to Ethiopia, withdrew its support of a major
agricultural project in Arsi Province because it concluded ''the
actual purpose of villagization was political.''
A 'Frightening' Development
President Mengistu himself acknowledged in an address to the
congress of the Workers Party of Ethiopia last November that his
* Origin: UNITEX --> Toward a United Species (1:107/501)
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