Politicizing Food Aid, the Unabated Behavior of the TPLF Leaders

March 05, 2010
Press Release

On March 3, 2010, the BBC broke to the world the news that millions of dollars in international aid for victims of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 was siphoned off by the TPLF leaders to buy weapons to overthrow the military regime in power. Though it is unclear why it took the resourceful BBC twenty-five long years to investigate a scandal of this magnitude, its recent headline news was familiar to the Ethiopian people. Unfortunately, this criminal behavior of the TPLF leaders remains unabated to this day.

Three former high ranking TPLF officials, Seye Abraha, the man who led the TPLF army to Addis Ababa, Ghebremedhin Araya head of Finance, and Aregawe Berehe founding member of the TPLF, have corroborated BBC’s expose. According to Ghebremedhin Araya and Aregawe Berhe, up to 95% of the food aid was used to purchase arms. In his recent article titled “Politicization of Food Aid under One-Party Rule in Ethiopia”, Seye Abraha acknowledged, “As a veteran politician and an ex-commander of an insurgent army that brought down the Derg military regime, I know relief aid could be misused to purchase ammunition, weapons, spare parts, fuel and other materials.”

In 1985, while the TPLF leaders were misusing food aid, hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans were dying of starvation in Tigray, TPLF’s home base. Twenty-five years after seizing political power in Ethiopia, the TPLF leaders are committing the same heinous crimes of misusing food aid for political goals at the national level. Even though in the last two decades Ethiopia has become the number one aid recipient country in Africa, yet, in the past ten years, more than hundred thousand ethnic Somalis have starved to death in the Ogaden region of Eastern Ethiopia.

In recent months, the TPLF leaders have aggressively used food aid to recruit party members and to buy votes for the upcoming general election in May. In January of this year, Jason Mclure of Bloomberg News, was arrested in Mekele, Tigray region while on assignment to investigate public complaints over government abuses of Safety Net Programs in which opposition party supporters are excluded from cash and other poverty reduction programs run by Donor Nations and the World Bank.

Ginbot 7 believes that using food aid for arms purchase while millions starve to death is tantamount to crime against humanity, and the perpetrators of such crime deserve to be held accountable for their crimes and not be enabled to perpetuate the same crime on a much larger scale. If the TPLF leaders continue to politicize food aid, a very deserving question is - why are the US and the UK governments still pouring millions of their taxpayer’s money into the coffers of a fascist regime that continues to commit such horrific crimes against its citizens?

Ginbot 7 urges the US, UK, Germany and other donor nations to stand for the fundamental values of freedom, justice, and democracy, and stop trading these fundamental values for a delusional stability in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

Ginbot7 Movement for Justice, Freedom and Democracy
Tel +44 208 1335670
pr@ginbot7.org