By Martin Plaut

Africa editor, BBC World Service

Millions of dollars in Western aid for victims of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 was siphoned off by rebels to buy weapons, a BBC investigation finds.

Gebremedhin Araya (L) says he posed as a merchant, but was in fact a rebel

Former rebel leaders told the BBC that they posed as merchants in meetings with charity workers to get aid money.

They used the cash to fund attempts to overthrow the government of the time.

One rebel leader estimated $95m (£63m) - from Western governments and charities including Band Aid - was channelled into the rebel fight.

The CIA, in a 1985 assessment entitled Ethiopia: Political and Security Impact of the Drought, also alleged aid money was being misused.

Its report concluded: "Some funds that insurgent organisations are raising for relief operations, as a result of increased world publicity, are almost certainly being diverted for military purposes."

Multiple rebellions

The crisis in 1984 prompted a huge Western relief effort, spearheaded by pop star Bob Geldof's Band Aid campaign and Live Aid concerts.

ETHIOPIA FAMINE

Roughly one million Ethiopians died from results of famine Disaster exacerbated by civil war Huge Western relief effort led by pop star Bob Geldof Live Aid concerts raise more than $60m (£40m).

Although millions of people were saved by the aid that poured into the country, evidence suggests not all of the aid went to the most needy.

At the time, the Ethiopian government was fighting rebellions in the northern provinces of Eritrea and Tigray.

Much of the countryside was outside of government control, so relief agencies brought aid in from neighbouring Sudan.

Some was in the form of food, some as cash, to buy grain from Ethiopian farmers in areas that were still in surplus.

Max Peberdy, an aid worker from Christian Aid, carried nearly $500,000 in Ethiopian currency across the border in 1984.

He used it to buy grain from merchants and believes that none of the aid was diverted.

"It's 25 years since this happened, and in the 25 years it's the first time anybody has claimed such a thing," he says.

He insists that to the best of his knowledge, the food went to feed the starving.

 CIA INTELLIGENCE

“ Some funds that insurgent organisations are raising for relief operations, as a result of increased world publicity, are almost certainly being diverted for military purposes ”

But the merchant Mr Peberdy dealt with in that transaction claims he was, in fact, a senior member of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

"I was given clothes to make me look like a Muslim merchant. This was a trick for the NGOs," says Gebremedhin Araya.

Underneath the sacks of grain he sold, he says, were sacks filled with sand.

He says he handed over the money he received to TPLF leaders, including Meles Zenawi - the man who went on to become Ethiopia's prime minister in 1991.

Mr Meles, who is still in office, has declined to comment on the allegations.

But Mr Gebremedhin's version of events is supported by the TPLF's former commander, Aregawi Berhe.

Now living in exile in the Netherlands, he says the rebels put on what he describes as a "drama" to get the money.

"The aid workers were fooled," he says.

He says that some $100m went through the hands of the TPLF and affiliated groups.

Some 95% of it was allocated to buying weapons and building up a hard-line Marxist political party within the rebel movement.

Both Mr Aregawi and Mr Gebremedhin fell out with the TPLF leadership and fled the country.

Much of the money that ended up in the TPLF's hands was channelled through affiliated groups such as the Relief Society of Tigray.

Band Aid's accounts show that it gave almost $11m to the society and other groups close to the rebels, but the charity has declined to comment.

Soviet confrontation

It should not be forgotten that this all took place at the height of the Cold War.

The Soviet Union had poured $4bn into Ethiopia, and provided Soviet officers to direct Ethiopia battles against the rebels.

 In January 1983, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Directive 75, which aimed to confront the Soviet Union across the developing world.

"US policy will seek to limit and destabilise activities of Soviet Third World allies and clients," it said.

In a November 2009 speech, US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates - who was deputy head of the CIA during Mr Reagan's time in office - said that the president's approach was to "impose ever stiffer costs on the Soviet Union for its Third World adventurism".

He included Ethiopia among the states in which "Soviet surrogates soon faced their own lethal insurgencies".

Mr Gates was unwilling to expand on whether the US backed the Ethiopian insurgents.

But since there were only a limited number of rebel movements, the suggestion cannot be ruled out that the CIA not only knew about, but supported, the diversion of aid funds to the TPLF.
Story from BBC NEWS: 2010/03/03

=====================================

Lasting legacy of Ethiopia's famine

By Mike Woolridge

BBC world affairs correspondent, Ethiopia

It is now well over two decades since Mesele Adhena gave up all hope of being able to remain in his village of Bezeta, and came to this market town in the highlands of northern Ethiopia.

"Had we stayed," he says, "we would all have died."

As it was, three of his close relatives died in the famine of 1984, that had its epicentre in this region and at the time made the northern Ethiopian town of Korem a byword for starvation on an epic scale.

I was a member of the BBC team that eventually reached here and the town of Mekelle, that resides further north, in October 1984.

“ We did not work night and day before, but we do now. ”

Mesele Adhena, famine survivor

It was a time when the then government had denied journalists access in an attempt to keep the rapidly worsening impact of the famine hidden from their own people - and from the rest of the world.

Tens of thousands of people had already trekked to these government-held towns - that was in the midst of the protracted conflict with Tigrayan and Eritrean rebels - and many more were to follow.

We found scenes that one aid worker memorably described to us as "the closest thing to hell on earth" - exhausted, often woefully thin, hungry people trying to find food.

There were a few corrugated iron shelters for them in Korem and Mekelle, but they were crowded, and as many people seemed to die in the shelters as on the open ground around them.

People had to bear the penetrating chill of highland nights, most in only the flimsiest of clothing.

They had made heroic efforts to survive in their own communities for as long as possible.

But they told us how successive droughts and failed harvests meant that to even attempt to buy food they had to sell off their livestock, and sometimes even the materials they had used to make their homes.

There were also heroic efforts being made to save lives in in Korem and Mekelle, and towns like them, but they were all too often undermined because there was simply not enough food.

There was also the problem of disease in these congested conditions, disease that would easily take hold.
Within weeks, a shocked world was building up an unprecedented aid operation.

But there were still dark, dispiriting days while reporting from relief camps and towns across the famine-affected region.

I recall an occasion when 134 people died during a days reporting I spent in one such camp. There had been an outbreak of measles, and many of the victims were children.

Even though the population is now close to double what it was in 1984, and many people have smaller plots to cultivate, today's Ethiopian government maintains that enough progress has been made in improving the early warning signs of famine.

Helping farmers withstand drought on anything like the scale of 1984 is a priority and could not happen again, it asserts.

Many ordinary Ethiopians would say the same. But there are many, too, whose anxiety deepens with every crop failure, as is happening in parts of the country once again.

Harsh lessons

Mesele Adhena stayed in Korem after the famine rather than return home. He is 47 now and he and his wife have six children.

They live in a small house that has been built on a plain on the edge of the town, where he and so many thousands of others arrived in desperation during 1984.

He grows food in the plot around the house and more in the fields beyond. And he says he has learned a lesson from the 1984 famine - how much more efficiently farmers can protect their livelihoods if they work hard.  "We did not work night and day before," he says, "but we do now."

An hour's drive down an escarpment near the small town of Kobo (also a relief centre in 1984) I talked to farmers who are seeing their crops wither this year - despite doing everything they could to save them.

They said it was the government's food-for-work safety net scheme that had kept their children from the risk of losing their lives.

Much more is known now about how the most vulnerable can be kept from the edge of deadly hunger, and it was the tragedy experienced in Korem and the surrounding region that taught the harshest lessons.

But one man I have met here said he hoped that now - 25 years on - Korem would be remembered by the world as less a place of death and more where so many lives were saved.

BBC NEWS: 2009/10/23

============================

Hunger stalks Ethiopia once again

By Mike Wooldridge

BBC world affairs correspondent, Ethiopia

Dying crops are giving greater urgency to Ethiopia's battle to make its people less vulnerable to hunger - 25 years after the 1984 famine that killed an estimated one million people.

But the current food crisis - that Ethiopia shares with other countries in the region - also risks diverting attention and resources from protecting farming families against potential disaster.

“ It is God who has been feeding us all this time ”

Yangago Bunja

In two of the 12 districts of this part of southern Ethiopia, the authorities say there has been a complete failure of the latest maize crop.

They say other districts are relatively better off at the moment - but Wolayta has a population of about 1.6 million so any shortfall in food production can have a serious impact.

In Duguna Fango, one of the worst-hit districts not far from the local capital Sodo, farmer Yangago Bunja explained what the loss of his burnt and withered maize meant for his family.

Forty years old, he has eight children ranging in age from four months to 18 years old.

"We have nothing. We have a really big problem," he said.

The last three years had been the same, he said.

Mr Yangago said he had tried to fend for his family by working in other places as a daily labourer.

But his children were losing weight and two of them were sick. He said sickness among the children was a problem for their whole community.

The only other way he could get food was to borrow from somebody - but lenders want interest.

"It is God who has been feeding us all this time. We are just praying," he said.

On the way to Wolayta there are a good many other fields where the maize crop has been lost to a lengthy drought and erratic, inadequate rain - sometimes, oddly, right alongside a plot where the maize looks much healthier.

The failure of crops and the loss of pasture for livestock is sufficiently widespread in Ethiopia for an expected announcement by the government to call for emergency food aid to feed 6.2 million people.

Some aid officials believe that could prove to be a conservative figure.

And it is on top of the food aid to support more than seven million people under a scheme for those who are most chronically vulnerable to hunger during lean periods of the year.
 
It also comes as the UN's food agency has warned that - across the world - there are more hungry people and there is less food aid than ever before.

Ethiopian officials accept that the devastating famine of the mid-1980s is part of the country's history but they are anxious that the abiding images of starvation from that time should not be a prism through which the country's prospects are viewed today.

Government spokesman Bereket Simon talks of the efforts being made to improve agricultural productivity, to conserve water and soil and generally to help farmers become more capable of resisting the more frequent droughts that are part of the impact of climate change.

Enabling more farmers to have the benefits of irrigation would, of course, be part of that, too.

Iconic image

In his hard-hit part of rural Wolayta, Mr Yangago says some farmers in the area now have pumps to irrigate their land but he cannot afford to do so.

And given that his main crop has now failed again, it seems even less likely to happen in the near future.

It is not just the strategies for supporting farmers with failing crops that will be tested in the coming weeks. So will the new approach to trying to save the lives of children who become severely malnourished.

The feeding centres of the past were an iconic image of the 1984 famine.

They have given way to mothers collecting Plumpy'nut - a mix of peanut butter, sugar and nutrients - from their local health post and feeding it to malnourished children at home.

The most vulnerable children are supposed to be sent to stabilisation centres.

Abebech Adabbo's 12-month-old son is being treated this way. The child has scarring on his head that a health worker said was the result of malnutrition.

And Abebech Tafesse hold her four-year old boy in her arms. He still has thin legs but she fells he is improving.

The mothers said it was shortage of food that had weakened the two children - two among many on the front line as Ethiopia faces the challenge once again of preventing a crisis becoming something worse.
BBC NEWS: 2009/10/22

=====================

Ethiopia asks for urgent food aid

The Ethiopian government has asked the international community for emergency food aid for 6.2 million people.

The request came at a meeting of donors to discuss the impact of a prolonged drought affecting parts of East Africa.

The UN's World Food Programme says $285m (£173m) will be needed in the next six months. Some aid officials say the numbers of hungry could rise.

Aid agency Oxfam has called for a new approach to tackling the risk of disaster in the country.

Drought costs $1.1bn a year 70% of humanitarian aid from US 6.2m need emergency food aid 7.5m others chronically food insecure Sources: WFP/Oxfam

In a report marking 25 years since the famine that killed around one million Ethiopians, Oxfam said that imported food aid saves lives in the short term but did little to help communities withstand the next shock.

The report, named Band Aids and Beyond, called on international donors to adopt a new approach focused on preparing communities to prevent and deal with disasters before they strike.

"Drought does not need to mean hunger and destitution," said Penny Lawrence, Oxfam's international director, who has just returned from Ethiopia.

"If communities have irrigation for crops, grain stores, and wells to harvest rains then they can survive despite what the elements throw at them."

'Total wipe-out'

Ethiopia has been hit by the food crisis affecting a large part of East Africa and the Horn.

ANALYSIS

Martin Plaut, Africa analyst There is no doubt poor and erratic rains have hit the Ethiopian harvest. But large parts of the country have not been hit by drought. So why the current crisis?

It is in part the result of policies designed to keep farmers on the land, which belongs to the state and cannot be sold. So farms are passed down the generations, divided and sub-divided. Many are so small and the land so overworked that it could not provide for the families that work it even with normal rainfall.

At present only 17% of Ethiopia's 80 million people live in urban areas. Keeping people in the countryside is a way of preventing large-scale unemployment and the unrest that this might cause.

Last month Oxfam launched a $15m (£9.5m) emergency appeal for the whole East African region, where it is suggested that 23 million people in seven countries are under threat.

The WFP, which is also calling for aid to the region, says cuts in its funding have made it more difficult to feed people.

It says it is particularly concerned about Eritrea, where it is unable to collect data because of restrictions on movement.

The drought, brought on by four years of bad harvests, has been made worse by conflict, climate change and population growth.

BBC Africa analyst Martin Plaut says Ethiopian government policy banning land sales to keep people out of urban areas has also contributed.

All these other factors combined are at least as important as lack of rainfall, he says.

Fields of maize, burnt and withered by the sun, are the evidence of an emerging crisis, says the BBC's Mike Wooldridge in the Ethiopian town of Mekele.

In both the hardest-hit south of Ethiopia and in places in the north, farmers have told the BBC they face a total wipe-out of their harvests.

Some said they planned to sell their livestock, so damaging their livelihoods further.

Many aid officials say the figure of 6.2 million affected could rise further when the government makes its next assessment in mid-November.

On its website the WFP gives a figure of more than 10 million people in total affected by drought in Ethiopia.

The problem is compounded by high food costs, the WFP adds, with cereal prices doubling on many markets.

But the UN body's greatest concern is that there is currently no funding at all for a feeding programme to prevent moderately malnourished children from slipping into severe malnutrition and the risk of death. 
BBC NEWS: 2009/10/22

======================

BBC's Ethiopia arms report denied

Ethiopian officials and an aid agency have denied a BBC report that millions of dollars in aid for Ethiopian famine victims in the 1980s went to buy arms.

Abadi Zemo, a senior member of Ethiopia's ruling coalition, described the allegations as nonsensical.

The charity Christian Aid said its "investigations do not correspond to the BBC's version of events".

The BBC report said millions of dollars in Western aid had been siphoned off by Ethiopian rebels to buy weapons.

It quotes former rebel leaders as saying they had posed as merchants in meetings with charity workers to get aid money during the 1984-85 famine.

They used the cash to fund attempts to overthrow the government of the time, the report said.

One rebel leader estimated that $95m (£63m) - from Western governments and charities, including Band Aid - had been used for military purposes.

An assessment by America's CIA at the time said aid was almost certainly diverted.

'Rubbish'

Mr Zemo, who was the head of the humanitarian wing of the rebel Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in the 1980s, dismissed the allegations in the BBC report, saying they were not new.

He also rejected the claim that current Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, a leading TPLF member in the 1980s, had ordered that only 5% of the aid fund should go towards feeding the hungry.

"Do you think the TPLF could tolerate such a thing, do you think could do such a thing? No, this is rubbish."

ETHIOPIA FAMINE

Roughly one million Ethiopians died from results of famine Disaster exacerbated by civil war Huge Western relief effort led by pop star Bob Geldof Live Aid concerts raise more than $60m (£40m).

Meanwhile, Christian Aid, which was involved in delivering aid to Ethiopia at the time, said in a statement: "There are allegations in the [BBC] story which are against all of Christian Aid's principles and our initial investigations do not correspond to the BBC's version of events."

Nick Guttmann, the agency's director of emergency relief operations, said that the "story has to be put into context".

"We were working in a major conflict, there was a massive famine and people on all sides were suffering.

"Both the rebels and the government were using innocent civilians to further their own political ends. But that is not what humanitarian agencies like ourselves were doing. We were there to help the people in the greatest need and did so.

"In all emergency relief operations, Christian Aid produces a budget which states how much food we can afford to buy and how many people this will reach. This is always followed up with monitoring visits to see the projects and account for every penny," Mr Guttmann said.

Separately Irish rock star Bob Geldof - who spearheaded the Band Aid campaign and Live Aid concerts - described the BBC report as rubbish.

Aid workers 'fooled'

The crisis in 1984 prompted a huge Western relief effort to Ethiopia.

Although millions of people were saved by the aid that poured into the country, evidence suggests not all of the aid went to the most needy.

At the time, the Ethiopian government - backed by the Soviet Union - was fighting rebellions in the northern provinces of Eritrea and Tigray.

Much of the countryside was outside of government control, so relief agencies brought aid in from neighbouring Sudan.

Some was in the form of food, some as cash, to buy grain from Ethiopian farmers in areas that were still in surplus.

Max Peberdy, an aid worker from Christian Aid, carried nearly $500,000 in Ethiopian currency across the border in 1984.

He used it to buy grain from merchants and believes that none of the aid was diverted.

CIA INTELLIGENCE

“ Some funds that insurgent organisations are raising for relief operations, as a result of increased world publicity, are almost certainly being diverted for military purposes ”

"It's 25 years since this happened, and in the 25 years it's the first time anybody has claimed such a thing," he says.

He insists that to the best of his knowledge, the food went to feed the starving.

But the merchant Mr Peberdy dealt with in that transaction claims he was, in fact, a senior member of the TPLF.

"I was given clothes to make me look like a Muslim merchant. This was a trick for the NGOs," said Gebremedhin Araya.

Underneath the sacks of grain he sold, he says, were sacks filled with sand.

He said he had handed over the money he received to TPLF leaders, including Mr Zenawi.

Mr Gebremedhin's version of events was supported by the TPLF's former commander, Aregawi Berhe.

Now living in exile in the Netherlands, he said the rebels had put on what he described as a "drama" to get the money.

"The aid workers were fooled," he said.

He said that some $100m had gone through the hands of the TPLF and affiliated groups.

Some 95% of it was allocated to buying weapons and building up a hard-line Marxist political party within the rebel movement.

Both Mr Aregawi and Mr Gebremedhin fell out with the TPLF leadership and fled the country.

BBC

=======================

Timeline: Ethiopia

A chronology of key events:

2nd century AD - Kingdom of Axum becomes a regional trading power.
4th century - Coptic Christianity introduced from Egypt.
1530-31 - Muslim leader Ahmad Gran conquers much of Ethiopia.
1818-68 - Lij Kasa conquers Amhara, Gojjam, Tigray and Shoa.
1855 - Kasa becomes Emperor Tewodros II.
1868 - Tewodros defeated by a British expeditionary force and commits suicide to avoid capture.
1872 - Tigrayan chieftain becomes Yohannes IV.
1889 - Yohannes IV killed while fighting Mahdist forces and is succeeded by the king of Shoa, who becomes Emperor Menelik II.
1889 - Menelik signs a bilateral friendship treaty with Italy at Wuchale which Italy interprets as giving it a protectorate over Ethiopia. Ethiopia rejects this interpretation, later renounces the treaty and repays a loan.
1889 - Addis Ababa becomes Ethiopia's capital.
Italy invades
1895 - Italy invades Ethiopia.
1896 - Italian forces defeated by the Ethiopians at Adwa; treaty of Wuchale annulled; Italy recognises Ethiopia's independence but retains control over Eritrea.

HAILE SELASSIE

Emperor of Ethiopia and god to the Rastafarian movement Born in 1892 Became king in 1928, emperor in 1930 Died in 1975
1913 - Menelik dies and is succeeded by his grandson, Lij Iyasu.
1916 - Lij Iyasu deposed and is succeeded by Menelik's daughter, Zawditu, who rules through a regent, Ras Tafari Makonnen.
1930 - Zawditu dies and is succeeded by Ras Tafari Makonnen, who becomes Emperor Haile Selassie I.
1935 - Italy invades Ethiopia.
1936 - Italians capture Addis Ababa, Haile Selassie flees, king of Italy made emperor of Ethiopia; Ethiopia combined with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland to become Italian East Africa.
Haile Selassie's reign
1941 - British and Commonwealth troops, greatly aided by the Ethiopian resistance - the arbegnoch - defeat the Italians, and restore Haile Selassie to his throne.
1952 - United Nations federates Eritrea with Ethiopia.
1962 - Haile Selassie annexes Eritrea, which becomes an Ethiopian province.
1963 - First conference of the Organisation of African Unity held in Addis Ababa.
"Red Terror"

MENGISTU HAILE MARIAM

Thousands were killed under Marxist dictator's "Red Terror" Born in 1937 Head of state 1974-91 Exiled in Zimbabwe 2006: Convicted, in absentia, of genocide
1973-74 - An estimated 200,000 people die in Wallo province as a result of famine.
1974 - Haile Selassie overthrown in military coup. General Teferi Benti becomes head of state.
1975 - Haile Selassie dies in mysterious circumstances while in custody.
1977 - Benti killed and replaced by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam.
1977-79 - Thousands of government opponents die in "Red Terror" orchestrated by Mengistu; collectivisation of agriculture begins; Tigrayan People's Liberation Front launches war for regional autonomy.
1977 - Somalia invades Ethiopia's Ogaden region.
1978 - Somali forces defeated with massive help from the Soviet Union and Cuba.
1984-85 FAMINE
Almost one million people died after crops failed
1984-85 - Worst famine in a decade strikes; Western food aid sent; thousands forcibly resettled from Eritrea and Tigre.
1987 - Mengistu elected president under a new constitution.
1988 - Ethiopia and Somalia sign a peace treaty.

After Mengistu

1991 - Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front captures Addis Ababa, forcing Mengistu to flee the country; Eritrea establishes its own provisional government pending a referendum on independence.
1992 - Haile Selassie's remains discovered under a palace toilet.
1993 - Eritrea becomes independent following referendum.
1994 - New constitution divides Ethiopia into ethnically-based regions.
1995 - Negasso Gidada becomes titular president; Meles Zenawi assumes post of prime minister.
1998 - Ethiopian-Eritrean border dispute erupts into armed clashes.

War with Eritrea

1999 - Ethiopian- Eritrean border clashes turn into a full-scale war.
2000 June - Ethiopia and Eritrea sign a ceasefire agreement which provides for a UN observer force to monitor the truce and supervise the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Eritrean territory.
2000 November - Haile Selassie buried in Addis Ababa's Trinity Cathedral.
2000 December - Ethiopia and Eritrea sign a peace agreement in Algeria, ending two years of conflict. The agreement establishes commissions to delineate the disputed border and provides for the exchange of prisoners and the return of displaced people.

WAR WITH ERITREA

Tens of thousands perished in a conflict over disputed borders
2001 24 February - Ethiopia says it has completed its troop withdrawal from Eritrea in accordance with UN-sponsored agreement.
2002 April - Ethiopia, Eritrea accept a new common border, drawn up by an independent commission, though both sides then lay claim to the town of Badme.
2003 April - Independent boundary commission rules that the disputed town of Badme lies in Eritrea. Ethiopia says the ruling is unacceptable.
2004 January-February - Nearly 200 killed in ethnic clashes in isolated western region of Gambella. Tens of thousands flee area.
2004 March - Start of resettlement programme to move more than two million people away from parched, over-worked highlands.
2004 November - Ethiopia says it accepts "in priniciple" a boundary commission's ruling on its border with Eritrea. But a protracted stalemate over the disputed town of Badme continues.
2005 March - US-based Human Rights Watch accuses army of "widespread murder, rape and torture" against Gambella region's ethnic Anuak people. Military angrily rejects charge.
2005 April - First section of Axum obelisk, looted by Italy in 1937, is returned to Ethiopia from Rome.

Disputed poll

2005 May - Disputed multi-party elections lead to violent protests over months.
2005 August-September - Election re-runs in more than 30 seats: Officials say the ruling party gains enough seats to form a government.
2005 December - International commission, based in The Hague, rules that Eritrea broke international law when it attacked Ethiopia in 1998.
More than 80 people, including journalists and many opposition leaders, are charged with treason and genocide over November's deadly clashes.
2006 May - Six political parties and armed groups form an opposition alliance, the Alliance for Freedom and Democracy, at a meeting in the Netherlands.
Several bomb blasts hit Addis Ababa. No organisation claims responsibility.
2006 August - Several hundred people are feared to have died and thousands are left homeless as floods hits the north, south and east.

Somalia tensions

2006 September - Ethiopia denies that its troops have crossed into Somalia to support the transitional government in Baidoa.
2006 October - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urges Eritrea to pull back the troops it has moved into the buffer zone on the Ethiopian border. The UN says the incursion is a major ceasefire violation.

CAMPAIGN IN SOMALIA

Ethiopian forces helped to oust Somalia's Islamists
War of words between Ethiopia and Islamists controlling much of Somalia. Prime Minister Meles says Ethiopia was "technically" at war with the Islamists because they had declared holy war on his country.
2006 November - UN report says several countries - including Ethiopia - have been violating a 1992 arms embargo on Somalia by supplying arms to the interim government there. Ethiopia's arch enemy Eritrea is accused of supplying the rival Islamist administration.
Ethiopia and Eritrea reject a proposal put forward by an independent boundary commission as a way around a four-year impasse over the demarcation of their shared border.
Ethiopian troops enter Somalia, engage in fierce fighting with Islamist controlling large parts of the country and capital. The Islamists disperse.

Somalia invasion

2006 December - Exiled former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam is convicted, in absentia, of genocide at the end of a 12-year trial. He is later sentenced to death.

CONTROVERSIAL DAM

Critics fear the possible impact of sub-Saharan Africa's second largest hydroelectricity dam, which is due for completion in 2011
2007 February - Around 50,000 Somalis have crossed into Ethiopia in the past six months to flee instability at home, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports.
2007 March - A group of British embassy workers and their Ethiopian guides are kidnapped in the northern Afar region bordering on Eritrea. They are eventually released in Eritrea.
2007 April - Gunmen attack a Chinese-owned oil facility in the south-east Somali region, killing 74 people working there.
2007 June - Opposition leaders are given life sentences over mass protests that followed elections in 2005, but are later pardoned.
2007 September - Ethiopia celebrates the start of a new millennium according to the calendar of the Coptic Orthodox Church.
2007 November - Ethiopia rejects border line demarcated by international boundary commission. Eritrea accepts it.
2008 June - Peace agreement signed between Somali government and rebels provides for withdrawal of Ethiopian troops within 120 days.
2008 July - UN Security Council votes unanimously to end UN peacekeeping mission monitoring disputed border between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
2008 September - Celebrations held to mark completion of reassembly of 1700-year-old Axum Obelisk, looted in 1937 during the Italian conquest and returned by Italy in three parts after 2005.
2008 December - Police re-arrest key opposition leader Birtukan Medeksa, who was jailed for her role in the opposition protests after the 2005 polls, and freed under a government pardon in 2007.

Somalia pullout

2009 January - Parliament passes bill banning foreign agencies from work related to human rights or conflict resolution, as well as severely restricting foreign funding for local agencies, in move seen as effort to clamp down on unwanted foreign interference.
Ethiopia formally withdraws forces from Somalia.
2009 June - Ethiopia admits to "reconnaissance missions" in Somalia, but denies re-deploying troops there.
2009 August - Ethiopia, Etritrea ordered to pay each other compensation for their 1998-2000 border war.
Ethiopian troops reportedly capture central Somali town of Beledweyne.
2009 September - Chinese firms secure deal to build several hydro-power dams and wind farms.

2009 October - Government says 6 million need food aid, mainly because of drought.

2009 November - 26 found guilty of coup plot.
2009 December - Rebels of the Ogaden National Liberation Front claim capture of several towns in the east in a month of heavy fighting.
2010 January - Ethiopian Airlines plane crashes into the sea after taking off from Beirut, Lebanon, killing all 90 on board.

BBC NEWS:
Published: 2010/02/03