Famine victims a Belsen-like horror scene — cameramen

Press, 9 November 1984, Page 8

Famine victims a Belsen-like horror scene — cameramen

NZPA-AP Addis Ababa

United States and West German cargo planes have begun shuttle flights to refugee centres as part of an effort to speed food to an estimated six million Ethiopian victims of famine. In Glasgow, Scotland, an official of the International Red Cross said Africa’s drought was affecting 150 million people. Cameramen had recorded scenes in the Sudan worse than those they found in Ethiopia. A Red Cross spokesman, George Reid, told a news conference that cameramen photographed scenes more awful than Belsen, the World War II Nazi concentration camp, where inmates starved to death.

Mr Reid said the Red Cross had reports of starving Ethiopian children lying in front of food trucks in an attempt to make them stop, and other children picking up single grains of wheat from the ground and eating them raw. A woman with four children set out to walk 140 km to a feeding station at Bati after her husband died. Three of the children died on the way and the last died two hours after she arrived, he said.

Two four-engine turboprop cargo planes chartered by the United States Government flew about 120 tonnes of food and supplies

to the town of Mekelle in northern Ethiopia on Tuesday. The crew leader, Ralph Requa, of Oakland, California, said each plane was averaging about 39,000 pounds of supplies a trip, and each was making three trips a day. They were carrying wheat, powdered milk, flour, and other supplies. West German Air Force officers said two Transal cargo planes were ferrying food and supplies to Mekelle and Axum, another faminestricken town in northern Ethiopia. A British airlift began this week with two Royal Air Force Hercules transports flying grain from the Red Sea port of Assab to Mekelle and Axum.

Cargo aircraft from Eastern bloc countries East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria,, and the Soviet Union are also involved in the international airlift.

In Geneva, the Ethiopian ambassador to the United Nations Geneva headquarters said his country would need more than one million tonnes of grain in the coming year. Kassa Kebede, also said: “In spite of all efforts made by my Government to mobilise the assistance of the international community, the response received until very recently was discouraging indeed.”