Famine and Foreigners

As with Georgia (and Sudan) we didn’t really know much about the country before we came.  So I was pleased to borrow a book from the other volunteer Fran about Ethiopia called “Famine and Foreigners – Ethiopia Since Live Aid” by Peter Gill and English Journalist.  I found it really interesting and thought I would summarise it here.  Do you remember Live Aid?  When it actually happened I mean?!  It was 1984 and I was 23 with a one year old son, just pregnant or about to get pregnant with my daughter and like many, many people was horrified by the pictures of the starving people in Ethiopia and totally caught up in the Live Aid phenomenon.  What was so exciting was young musicians full of disgust at the lack of action by world politicians took matters into their own hands to respond to the suffering.  I didn’t like the fact that the Americans got in on the act (although of course that was entirely separate to the fact that money was being raised)!  I still can’t hear the song by The Cars “Who’s gonna drive you home tonight?” without seeing the face of that little child, from the video, covered with flies and close to death.  I watched the concert and pledged but didn’t actually pay-up (I was one of those) because we were very short of money and once the moment went I thought more about my own immediate needs and consoled myself with the fact that millions had been raised and my £10 wasn’t going to be missed.

So I was quite interested in the book’s strap line – Ethiopia since Live Aid. This is what the book was about.  I have used Peter Gills own word and paraphrased where I can, so no credit please for me!

For Richer or Poorer

Ethiopia is one of the richest countries on earth – in its civilisation, history and culture.  For as long as Europe has known of a wider world, Ethiopia has held our imagination.  The story of King Solomon’s seduction of the Queen of Sheba and the birth of a boy was the foundation of an imperial line which was only extinguished by the murder of Emperor Haile Selassi in 1975.  The Greeks gave modern Ethiopians their name “burnt faces’ and applied it to anyone living south of Egypt.  Ethiopia became of the powers of the world, a century before Christ and converted to Christianity before Rome and has strongly resisted attempts to convert from Ethiopian Orthodox to Roman Catholicism.  This independence has been sustained.  In 1935 Mussolini bombed and gassed Ethiopians and Emperor Haile Selassie was forced into exile.  The old League of Nations did nothing to halt the march of fascism and Ethiopia’s independence was restored in the aftermath of the Second World War.

In the past 29 years, instead of its glorious past and rich culture we now associate Ethiopia with famine.  It has become the iconic poor country.

In 1984, the World Food Council of the United Nations said “Hunger today is largely a man-made phenomenon: human error or neglect creates it, human complacency perpetuates it and human resolve can eradicate it.”  Since then we have had (from 1985) “Make Poverty History in 2005” and Christian Aid in 2009 ran a campaign “Poverty Over”.

However the hunger persists, people still die of starvation and no country in the world confronts the threat of famine more frequently than Ethiopia.  Ethiopians ask themselves why it has become so difficult for the country to feed themselves, like it is rocket science.

So twenty five years on was hunger becoming history in Ethiopia?   When Peter Gill was researching this book in 2008, it was a time of optimism shared by Ethiopian government and the foreign aid givers. But in 2009 when he returned he found that the situation had changed.  There were still achievements to be recognised but things were slowing down and the effectiveness of foreign aid was being seriously questioned and the role of the aid-givers in doubt.  While it is agreed that world poverty is to be shared another principle is that poor countries can only emerge out of poverty when they take full charge of their destiny.  Ethiopia has always believed this an d Peter Gill asks whether there is sufficient Ethiopian institutions and policies in place to actual deliver what is known as ‘development’.

In the 1990s the Ethiopian Government (it overthrew a powerful communist dictatorship) set out to build a new Ethiopia and has diligently pursued it strategy for development.  The government has also insisted on retaining a vision of its own in the face of changing western perspectives on how to tackle poverty.  Aid-receivers and Aid-givers have often clashed with each other.

One lesson of Ethiopian history is that foreigners with ambitions for the country do not have Ethiopia’s interest at heart.

1. There was a famine in 1973 but the Haile Selassie Government did not want the embarrassment of this to be released to the rest of the world, preferring to see the situation as normal.  Although it was reported by UNICEF there was a lack of response from the donors (foreign officials) who were unwilling to jeopardise their jobs or comfortable relationship with Haile Selassie’s government.  The UN took the position that until the government said it was a problem then it wasn’t.  A student movement set out to publicise and protest at the famine but this was eventually hijacked by the army.  Celebrations for the Emperor’s 80^th birthday were still taking place and it was media coverage of this shown with footage of the unfolding famine that was the downfall of the Emperor.  The army arranged for special showings of this around the town and in the end the army dethroned the Emperor, drove him off and he was never seen again.

2. Once in power, the Derg began a sweeping and murderous crackdown on the political parties that grew out of the student movement.  For months on end, the ‘Red Terror’ arrested people and dumped the bodies in the street the next morning.  Many fled the country or to the mountains to avoid capture.  Regional freedom movements, notably in Tigray, came into existence.  Unlike the 1973 famine, the situation in 1984 had been researched and reported n the media for months; but still there was national negligence and international indifference.  After TV media coverage in the UK, Britain came under pressure to respond to the famine.  However, Thatcher’s view of Ethiopia was that it was a wasteful and bureaucratic socialist state in military alliance with the Soviet Union and did not want to give aid.  Why hadn't Oxfam responded sooner?  In the 1980s, Oxfam had been determined to move from relief to development.  This was the era of ‘Give a man to fish and he can eat.  Teach a man to fish and he can make a living’ an inappropriate observation in famine conditions where rivers have dried up.  Oxfam chose to focus on development and not relief even when the prospects of famine were already apparent.

3. Hunger as a weapon.  Within weeks of the television reports of a catastrophic famine and as foreign aid began to trickle in, Ethiopia’s military government launched its own anti-hunger program.  If people were starving in the highlands then it would pack them off to the lowlands where land was plentiful and they could start again.  This resettlement program was applied so ruthlessly that the Colonel Mengistu was likened to a pocket African Stalin.  The starving peasants were considered to be 5^th columnists , undermining the government and supporting those political groups who wanted to overthrow the government.  Now they could be sent to re-settlements where they could be controlled.  The people suffered terrible hardships in the settlement camps and promises of land etc were not met.  The aid agencies did not want to publicise this as they would be liable for expulsion.  In the post Band-aid era, income for all agencies had increased dramatically and  they did not want to put themselves at risk.  Medecins sans frontiers did raise the issue and was expelled.  They estimated that 100,000 had died through insanitary conditions, lowland diseases and lack of food.  Even worse was the claim that 6,000 children died in one camp where they were denied help on the grounds that not enough adults had agreed to be resettled. 

This little project of mine; summarising this really interesting book, fell at the first hurdle!  It is taking me as long to summarise as it did read it in the first place and I am running out of time!  besides Fran needs her book back for her own research and I guess i will have to get my own copy!  if you read it let me know what you think!