by Brian Tetley
‘I went back to see Tafari but he had gone away with the Canadian ambassador. I then stormed into the office of the commissioner, who was out at a meeting, so I went into the deputy commissioner’s office and confronted him. He was surprised that we had got the permits and that they had been withdrawn. So he promised to reinstate them and give us permission to go to Mekele. I sat in his office while he called the head of security and various other people and we were finally told to pick them up in the afternoon.’
Peter Searle, director of British operations for World Vision, the Christian relief organisation, says, ‘There was a great deal of renegotiation to make it all happen, which Mo conducted and where he cashed in 20 years of favours and credits.’
There was one more problem. By road, it was a tough, jolting journey through rebel-held territory, which would take several days. ‘We then had to find the means of getting to Mekele,’ says Amin. ‘Perhaps the deputy commissioner knew that it was not just the permit, that we were not going to get there anyway, that none of the civilian planes would take us there.
‘We tried a charter from the only charter company in Addis Ababa, Admass Air. They refused to go. It was then that we went into the offices of World Vision, talked to the person in charge there and asked if it was possible to get their plane. He told me that they’d been trying to get permission to go to Mekele with relief supplies for three months. If I could get permission, I could have the plane.
‘So I went back to the deputy commissioner. He was horrified that we actually had access to a plane, but he was put in a position where he couldn’t really refuse.
‘We left Addis the following morning. Our flight plan was to go on to Lalibela, then Alamata and Mekele. However, once we were airborne, I decided it would be better for us to go straight to Mekele in case something went wrong at Lalibela.’
Something did. At about the time their plane was flying over that ancient city, Eritrean rebels occupied it.
‘If we had landed, we would have had an entirely different story—and it would probably have taken us two to three months to ship the film, since the normal procedure, if you get away, is to walk from the rebels’ front line to the Sudanese border.’
The flight in the World Vision Twin Otter on Friday October 19 took two hours. They arrived in Mekele around midday. The whole day was set aside for filming.
‘We were first brought face to face with the horror of the famine,’ says Mike Wooldridge, ‘in a corrugated iron shelter on the outskirts of Mekele. It was virtually cut off by rebel activity and had almost no food for the tens of thousands of famine victims who had trekked in from the parched countryside around.
‘The shelter was full of people, whose energy had been so sapped that they could only sit or lie on the earth floor surrounded by what few possessions they had brought with them from their homes.
‘It wasn’t just the small children and the elderly who bore the classic haunted appearance of the famine victim. Adults in their 20s and 30s looked the same. They barely reacted to us as we walked among them.
‘They seemed utterly resigned to whatever fate had in store for them. From one corner of the shelter, we heard sobbing. A man was dying, and a grief-stricken woman relative knelt beside him. Mo filmed his death as quietly and unobtrusively as possible.’
As they moved among the pitiful victims of this 20th-century ‘biblical famine’, a phrase that came to mind when the material was first screened in the Camerapix Nairobi editing room on October 22, it was like moving through a living lithograph of the Valley of Lepers. Mohamed Amin felt crushed, demoralised.
Nothing, he was to say later, that he had witnessed in 25 years of covering wars, disasters, riots, and even the previous Ethiopian famine had prepared him for this. ‘Everywhere I pointed my camera, people were dying. Nurses were so short of milk, they literally had to decide which of a hundred or so children out of 5,000 should live.’
Hundreds of millions were made present at these distressing deaths in a way which was bearable only because Mohamed Amin, their eyes at the scene, never intruded on the privacy of the victims. The dignity of the suffering and the dying passed through his camera to viewers everywhere. The anguish and the compassion became transmutable in a rare moment of cinéma vérité reporting.
‘Ethiopia has changed me. Definitely, it’s changed me. Before the 1984 story in Ethiopia, anything that I filmed was to me always just a story. I couldn’t have cared less. There’s not much you can do in most situations. I was just doing a job and that was it.
‘I’ve got to protect my own ass and make sure that I don’t get shot up while I’m doing a job. So I have never, that I can actually think of, become emotionally involved in an incident. And I’ve seen worse situations than Ethiopia. Where people have just been killed by other people. Just being shot by other people; mob justice and situations like that.
‘But here in Ethiopia, it was different because what we were looking at, simply in terms of numbers, were hundreds of thousands of people who were victims of a situation. First of all, they were dying simply because there was no food. And every time I think of this particular situation, I get tears in my eyes because it’s not imaginable that there are people, particularly in the case of the very proud Ethiopian people, who just took it for granted that they were going to die. They were not going to get the food. They were dying for months and months, probably for some years. The government couldn’t care less. The world couldn’t care less. They were totally helpless themselves. They couldn’t do anything for themselves …’
Says Wooldridge, ‘We saw and filmed other tragic scenes during the times we walked among the five thousand or so people who were gathered in and around the shelter. I remember being called to see the body of a four-year-old boy who had died minutes earlier. His parents had died a day or two before. He left three orphaned sisters and brothers. Whether they are still alive now is anybody’s guess.
‘Some might think filming such scenes is an intrusion, but the hope of church and relief workers on the spot was that it would jolt the world, which of course is precisely what happened. Mo and I were to be similarly horrified two days later when, at dawn, we watched bodies being lined up for burial on the edge of Korem camp.
‘They were the men, women and children who had died during the night. It was bitterly cold, and many people had to sleep out in the open for lack of tents or room in the shelters. Some children had no clothes. Mo filmed the corpses of infants and mothers together, relatives wailing uncontrollably, a camp official fastidiously recording every death.
‘I remember thinking it was like watching bodies being laid out after an air crash. Within an hour, we saw 40, and the average daily toll at that time was around 100. But it seemed even more tragic because these deaths could have been avoided so much more than those in an air crash.’
Mohamed Amin filmed his nightmare images between October 19 and 21, 1984 at three places now as firmly inscribed in the history book of human horror as Belsen and Auschwitz: Mekele, Alamata and Korem. It was impossible to be a cool, detached observer. Amin tried a trick he often uses. He closed his left eye so that all he could see was what his camera let him see. Like watching a movie, the element of reality diminishes because the lens intervenes between the action and the observer. It had worked in the past. It had no effect in Ethiopia.
All that mattered now was to let the world know.
By persuading World Vision to fly them direct from Alamata to Addis on October 21, they were able to leave Addis aboard the 9.30am Kenya Airways flight KQ403 of October 22. It gave time to edit the nine cassettes in the Camerapix office on the Monday evening.
In the editing suite, the images were replayed and once again, the starving lay dying before the editor and crew, as they would, too, in living rooms around the world. Nobody would escape this anguish.
Amin’s telex to Brendan Farrow served notice: ‘Fyi just returned exAddis drought footage stop Situation is worse than ever with thousands of peop
le dying daily stop Will ship material on U-matic tonight stop Will telex detailed dope later in the day. Rgds.’
Shortly after, at 12.30am on October 23, Michael Buerk flew out of Kenya, on a British Airways flight with the edited story. It was shown on the BBC’s lunchtime news bulletin the same day. And the astonishing response began.
Even as Buerk was London-bound, Amin continued work through that fateful night and all day Tuesday, printing up black and white still pictures of the famine victims and writing a 1,250-word news report, which went out that day on The Associated Press wires together with five of his most dramatic still pictures.
The story made page leads in almost every newspaper in the western world and billions of readers shared the same sense of shock as television viewers. This is how the story was filed from Nairobi to New York and then around the world:
Ethiopia Famine 1
With Wirephotos NAI-1 thru NAI-5
Eight people waging battle against starvation of 100,000
[by Mohamed Amin]
Aamata, Ethiopia (AP)—Dr George Ngatiri and seven other medical personnel fight a daily battle to keep 100,000 people alive at this famine relief centre in northern Ethiopia. Every day they lose 90 to 100, mostly children. The people who come here are victims of perhaps the greatest famine in this East African nation’s modern history, caused by a decade-long drought and complicated by two secessionist wars in the north.
Ethiopia’s Marxist government estimates the drought has affected life for 7.7 million in this country of 33 million, forcing 2.2 million from their homes and threatening 5.5 million with starvation.
Every day, hundreds more arrive at this recently established camp along the border of Tigray and Welo provinces. Last week, 36 miles northeast of Alamata, Tigrain rebels claimed the capture of the town of Lalibela.
Reporters, who visited the Alamata camp, 700 kilometres north of the capital of Addis Ababa, found Dr Ngatiri, one other doctor, three nurses, and three nutritionists working with 100,000 starving people.
Twelve miles to the north, thousands more huddled at another emergency relief camp at Korem. Ngatiri, a Kenyan, said at least half the victims are children. This day, the doctor had turned away a group of mothers and their frail, emaciated babies—victims of pneumonia, scabies, relapsing fever, and marasmus, the Latin medical term for starvation.
‘I’m sorry,’ he told them, speaking through an interpreter. He had no food or medicine for the new arrivals. With more than 90,000 waiting outside the camp, he had supplies for only 3,000.
‘There is nothing I can do. I know your children need treatment,’ the Kenyan physician told the mothers. ‘I have to treat them. But I have nothing to treat them with. Come back in five days.’
As the interpreter translated into Amharic, Dr Ngatiri held up the extended fingers of one hand to indicate five.
‘Those turned away would have to wait out in the open. During the day, the tropical sun pushes temperatures to 100° Fahrenheit. At night, at this elevation of 12,000 feet, temperatures fall to below 50° Fahrenheit. Most of the displaced people have no more than thin, worn sheets and ragged clothing to keep themselves warm. Those accepted inside the camp run by World Vision International must leave at night—even the 100 or so patients on intravenous drips. Ethiopian officials said they risk attack by the rebels if they remain inside the camp.
World Vision International, a US-based interdenominational relief group, is the only agency at work at Alamata. At the Korem camp, Catholic Relief Services, Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, and other groups have had more time to organise relief efforts.
But even at Korem, there wasn’t nearly enough food to go around. A reporter who visited Korem in March found 10,000 people going hungry. In late October, there were up to 100,000.
About 80,000 people are camped outside Mekele, 90 miles north of Korem.
British nurse Claire Bertschinger said this camp feeds about 500 children a day on a special, high-energy diet of powdered milk and biscuits prepared in Britain. But every day, she said, 300 more arrive and there’s not enough powdered milk and biscuits to go around.
Reporters visiting Mekele saw an old man die before their eyes as he took a drink of water.
At Korem, relief agencies are feeding nearly 17,000 children daily, said medical coordinator Brigitte Vessot of France. She said there are at least another 200,000 famine victims within a 60-mile radius of the camp, though all estimates are really guesses.
An Ethiopian man wearing a cowboy hat walked through the huddled masses at Korem and marked people on the head with a felt pen, apparently at random, to determine who received clothing and food.
And yet both Eurovision—Europe’s prestige TV news exchange network—and NBC America initially turned down Amin’s film material. NBC’s London staff saw the film as soon as it was run by BBC. Donna Ryan, duty producer in the London office, was so moved that she rang Cheryl Gould, Nightly News foreign producer in New York, and made a pitch to get the piece on the air that night before Gould had even seen it. She met resistance.
Paul Greenberg, executive producer of Nightly News remembers, ‘You say, “Yeah—terrible and horrible,” and then you get back to your business, the election, and worrying about who did what to whom in Nicaragua.’
But NBC’s general manager of news in Europe, Joseph Angotti, picked up the telephone and called Greenberg personally. ‘We heard from New York that it was a really busy news day and there were all kinds of things going on and that they might wait until the next day to put it on. I called Paul and said that I just wanted to be sure that he understood how very, very exceptional this material was.’
As a result, Greenberg asked the London bureau to transmit the BBC version of Amin’s report with Buerk’s moving elegy, which arrived at 5p.m., New York time, just as the newsroom was busily assembling the night’s broadcast. ‘There are very few times that a newsroom can be brought to complete silence,’ Greenberg says, ‘but this was one of those occasions. All the side talk and worried preparations for the evening broadcast, all the gossip and talk of the political campaign and concern for the night’s stories just stopped.
‘Tears came to your eyes and you felt as if you’d just been hit in the stomach.’
The ‘problem’ with the famine story, the perception—as NBC’s anchorman Tom Brokaw put it that night, that it was just words from far-off places—was resolved. Now there were pictures, devastating, compelling pictures. ‘I remember Brokaw saying, “We’ve got to put this on,” recalls Greenberg. The decision was made.
All around the world, the impact was immediate and overwhelming, first within the profession, a small tight circle of normally hard-faced and seemingly hard-hearted cynics and then among the general public. Amin’s film had broken all barriers.
His colleagues in the BBC and Visnews were the first to react. From BBC TV News came an urgent message sent at 2.28p.m. GMT: ‘Please accept the warmest congratulations from all at SBC TV news for your most impressive and moving coverage from Ethiopia. You clearly overcame the problem of covering a subject that has become all too familiar yet still telling the story in a highly graphic and compassionate manner. We ran 5.19 in news afternoon with 7.30 planned for Six O’Clock News and about five minutes plus for the Nine O’Clock.’
From Brendan Farrow at Visnews: ‘Allow me to congratulate your outstanding and superb coverage of Ethiopia. Buerk voicer undoubtedly excellent but your pictures caused nothing less than shockwave of horror throughout western broadcaster world. To eventual benefit those affected by famine. Newsbiz so often seems to end with recording disaster; it must be immensely gratifying to you personally to know the positive side of your work from this grim story. Marvellously well done.’
From Kevin Hamilton, managing editor, Visnews, at 3.45p.m. GMT: ‘Along with everybody else at Visnews, I watched your Ethiopian pictures on the BBC lunchtime news today with a feeling of pride and admiration as well as horror. To the BBC’s credit, they wer
e put together extremely well and Mike’s commentary was superb. But equal credit must go to you, not only for your camerawork but for the logistical efforts which obviously went into the entire exercise. I’m sure you’ll be proud to know that we are breaking with all existing precedent and running all five minutes of your first piece on all our satellite feeds tonight. I have no doubt they will provoke the international reaction which the situation in Ethiopia warrants.’
From Brian Quinn, managing director Visnews, at 4.50p.m. GMT on October 25: ‘Apart from the profound reaction it has produced in the UK, the level of camera journalism was very high. The departure of the villagers with their dead was outstanding work and your discipline on wide angle during the rush for the “imagined” food arrival was technique of the highest order. You will know of the flood of support it caused in Britain but it was fed to Japan with a vignette of the British reaction and produced in turn a flood in Japan. Well done.’
In the daily report issued by Visnews on October 25: ‘Mohamed Amin’s first report on the appalling state of the drought victims of Ethiopia has already brought an overwhelming response of horror and concern as well as offers of aid. Mohamed Amin’s exclusive cover from Tigray Province being aired today is having similar impact. Eurovision, who had turned down the coverage yesterday, took both the first and the second report today once word of the state of the disaster in Ethiopia had spread.’
What this achieved was the greatest act of giving in history, unleashing a chain reaction that grew ever bigger and bigger throughout more than 18 astonishing months, highlighted by the British Band Aid recording session and the USA for Africa album.
An unlikely Irish pop star, Bob Geldof, remembers watching Amin’s film that evening in October. It changed his attitude to life. In chapter 13 of his autobiography Is That It?, entitled ‘Driven to Tears’, Geldof recalls his anguish: