NEW YORK (UN News Center) – Drought-hit Ethiopians are facing a worsening food situation as the cost of maize soars nearly three-fold in some areas of the Horn of Africa country compared to last year, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) cautioned today.

[The U.N. needs to come out and tell the truth. The current famine in Ethiopia has nothing to do with drought. It is a man-made famine by the US- UK- and World Bank-financed dictatorial regime of Meles Zenawi that is purposely hiding and covering up the problem as the U.K. officials have finally admitted today.]

Migration by people from rural to urban areas in search of food is increasing, it noted, and aid agencies have identified critical malnutrition. A rapid assessment team said it found grave water and pasture shortages in some areas.

Due to reduced rations resulting from breaks in the pipeline have led to reduced rations, whose distribution began in July and will continue until December, OCHA said that it anticipates increased malnutrition and a rise in child labour and begging.

The Office also warned that without adequate October-December rains, food insecurity will continue will into next year.

Earlier this week, OCHA appealed for more than $265 million to fund relief operations in Ethiopia for the next three months to meet the widening scale of the crisis, with some 6.4 million people now estimated to need urgent assistance.

It reported that a recent joint assessment by Ethiopian authorities and the international humanitarian community found that an extra 1.8 million people have been hit hard by the crisis since the last assessment in June.

The biggest increase has been in the country’s south-east, known as the Somali region, where the number of people requiring emergency food aid has almost doubled to 1.9 million since June.

On the front line of an invisible Ethiopian famine, government forces stand between the dying tribes scattered across a closed hinterland and outside aid.

By Damien McElroy
Telegraph.co.uk

The restrictive Ethiopian {www:Woyanne} security regime hiding the worsening crisis in the country’s southern Somali region has infuriated important donors. Western officials privately warn that a damaging stand-off with the country is unfolding.

[It is these same shameless U.K. and other Western officials who are bankrolling the unpopular regime of Meles Zenawi to steal elections and stay in power by committing unspeakable atrocities against the people of Ethiopia and Somalia.]

International relief agencies should be celebrating notable breakthroughs in the rush to stop a fresh wave of mass starvation in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa this week conceded that 6.4 million people were on the brink of death and agreed to open up the worst hit parts of the country to shipments of outside assistance.

But hard-won access to the bleak garrison town of Kebri Dehar in the Somali region, also known as the Ogaden, has unveiled the harsh realities of a regime determined to crush a rebel army.

The government strives to proclaim it has the upper-hand against the vicious insurgency waged by the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The desert raiders have waged a war of ethnic separation from Christian-dominated highlands since peace talks broken down in 2005.

In efforts to bolster its claims to have crushed the group, the government has staged Potemkin scenes in Kebri Dehar. Half-filled hospitals are marshalled by clean but uncrowded schools with plasma screen televisions. Meanwhile the streets appeared to have been emptied.

“The groups have been eradicated and the food is now moving freely,” declared local administrator, Bashir Ahmed Abdi.

Nothing rings true in the boast. Two aid workers were kidnapped near Kebri Dehar just this month and are thought to have been spirited over the border to Somalia. British officials in the town reported it was flooded with Kalashnikov-carrying soldiers as recently as Wednesday. Skirmishes between the army and rebel fighters take place with regularity in the surrounding bush.

Five brigades of the Ethiopian army are based in Kebri Dehar’s garrisons. Those caught in the middle of the war are too afraid to speak out against the government line.

School teacher Abdi Wahadi tried vainly to hide his embarrassment that his class size had been reduced to just six pupils, claiming that 70 were expected to enrol by the end of the week, even though the year started in September.

At the hospital the reluctance to acknowledge the impact of the war was clear in the maternity ward. One lone woman sat with a baby. An aid worker shamefacedly explained that two other women with far more malnourished children had disappeared.

“The others must be taken out,” she said. “I’m not sure where they could have gone because the children are severely malnourished. I hope they are within the city limits.”

A UN official went further. “The people’s movements are severely restricted by the government,” the official said. “If they are starving they get past the roadblocks to get into town; if they have any goats left they don’t go to the watering hole because the army targets these; if they are ill they can’t get into the hospitals to be treated.”

In the town’s market, there are hardly any goods. A diplomat in Addis Ababa said the overstretched Ethiopian army, which maintains an expeditionary force in neighbouring Somalia, has indiscriminately blocked movements in the region.

A government ban on truck has stopped food distribution efforts, according to World Food Programme officials. But it has also cut off supplies of consumer goods and durables that used to be imported from Somalia. “It’s difficult to come here,” said nomad Mohammad Farah, “when we get here we have nothing to sell and nothing to buy.”

Oxfam reported this week that two million people are on the brink of starvation in Ethiopia’s Somali region and that the long-term prospects of recovery were blighted by the loss of 60 per cent of cattle and 50 per cent of goats.

Frustrations over the Ethiopian government’s refusal to throw open the doors to foreign assistance threaten a schism between Addis Ababa and its Western allies. “The events in Somali demonstrate too clearly the flaws in Ethiopia’s willingness to engage with us as government and its actions on the ground,” said a European diplomat. “A lot of governments are awkward on both fronts but by mixing its messages Ethiopia has got away with too much, for too long.”

By Catherine Philp
TIMES ONLINE

KEBRE DEHAR, ETHIOPIA – Britain is to withhold future aid commitments to Ethiopia over concerns that its Government is obstructing efforts to help millions at risk of famine in the drought-stricken Somali region in the east of the country.

Douglas Alexander, the Minister for International Development, flew to Ethiopia on Thursday with a proposal committing millions in funds to the vast African nation over several years.

After visiting the Somali region and hearing the testimony of aid organisations as well as evidence of attempts by the authorities to hide the scale of the crisis, Mr Alexander told the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, that he had reconsidered. “In light of our continued concerns, I said I was now not prepared to make a multi-annual commitment,” Mr Alexander said.

At the moment Britain gives Ethiopia £130 million a year in aid.

He characterised the Government’s reaction to the crisis as “deny and delay,” fuelled in part by Ethiopia’s extreme sensitivity to its global image as a famine-stricken nation, which the Government views as an impediment to foreign investment.

Mr Alexander saw the sensitivity at first-hand on his trip to Somali when he was taken to the infant malnutrition ward in Kebri Dehar hospital to see seriously ill mothers and babies being treated.

Aid workers were surprised to find that the most severely malnourished babies and their mothers had vanished from the ward where they had been for several days, leaving only one mother and her fast-recovering child.

The health worker who had taken them to the hospital expressed fears that the children had been spirited away before the minister’s arrival to avoid “embarrassing” press pictures of starving Ethiopian babies.

“I come here every day and they are always here,” the health worker said. “I don’t know where they are now.”

“They’ve hidden them,” an international aid worker with a lot of experience in the region said.

“The Government doesn’t want to acknowledge this crisis because it’s bad for their image. It’s not the image of Ethiopia they want to project. It doesn’t encourage investment.”

Mr Alexander raised the incident later in his meeting with Mr Zenawi. “If it’s true that they moved severely malnourished children, that is unconscionable,” he said. Mr Zenawi promised to investigate, calling the incident “despicable”.

In Kebri Dehar, Mr Alexander also heard concerns from local and international aid workers that the Ethiopian Government was actively frustrating efforts to reach the worst-affected areas of the region, using the insurgency as an excuse – an allegation that Mr Zenawi denied.

Aid agencies are unable to conduct surveys into the scale of need in the region because they require government permission and military escorts, which the Government is failing to provide.