Three Famines

by Keneally, Thomas

  His festivities, Mengistu complained, were being mocked and denounced by the West, and Ethiopia had become a byword for African ‘unsuccess’. The Ethiopian people had never been aware of the extent of the problem, Mengistu claimed. Now the world was trying to tell them all about it. In a meeting with his politburo, Mengistu raged against the foreign air forces parked at the airport, at the pernicious journalists, who had supposedly come to cover the celebrations but who now seemed interested only in the famine, and at the forty-eight voluntary agencies who were intruding on Ethiopia and whom he could not expel for fear that he would no longer be able to hold power without feeding at least his cities. He asked why it was not possible for them to send all their aid directly through the Ethiopian government, and let them distribute it. But given that he did not acknowledge the famine, how could he be trusted with the distribution of the aid? In any case, he would subvert much of the aid, and exploit and compromise at least some of the agencies.

  In the meantime, visitors from all over the world, from Mother Teresa to the Kennedys to Jesse Jackson’s wife, Mrs Jacqueline Jackson, came to see what was happening. Mother Teresa proposed a feeding centre in the desperate province of Bale, in the furthest south. She visited Mengistu, who seemed to give way to her on the project. But the building of the centre in the province was never permitted to occur. Giorgis asked the party secretary of Bale why there were no developments, and was told that he had orders from Addis to frustrate and discourage the project.

  The schedules of visitors from the West were demanding in terms of time, and Giorgis complained that they took RRC agents away from their work. Again, there was a certain irrationality in this: he had complained that the world was ignoring Ethiopia; now he was complaining that it was giving the country too much attention. He would have been naive if he thought that relief would come without any Western self-congratulation at all.

  Visiting at Christmas 1984, Senator Ted Kennedy was allowed to go wherever he wanted. For once, says Giorgis, here was a politician who was not interested in a political pay-off. Among other locations, Ted Kennedy went to Bati in Wollo province, once a centre of traditional music but now a ruin full of the starving.

  Giorgis was not so impressed with Bob Geldof. He was a city boy, said Giorgis, full of arrogance and vulgarity. Yet neither the regime nor the RRC rejected his input. Giorgis sent him to spend Christmas – in the spirit of the song he had produced – to Lalibela, the fourteenth-century church and monastery cut into the volcanic material of its region, where there was little to be observed. Marion Barry, mayor of Washington, arrived for a less than twenty-four-hour visit to Addis and saw nothing beyond it. According to Giorgis he seemed to want only chances to be photographed.

  Harry Belafonte and his group, USA for Africa, came with a plane full of relief supplies. But instead of showing Belafonte famine victims, under pressure from Mengistu, the RRC directed him towards a mobile hospital unit run by Soviet doctors and technicians. The Russians chatted with Belafonte’s group openly, took them around the hospital, showed them the facilities, and exchanged t-shirts with them. But the patients were not famine victims at all – most were casualties of the war against the TPLF. USA for Africa saw only carefully prepared and selected places. Sometimes party cadres posed as famine victims and sent the foreigners away with a firm sense that everything was under control. Belafonte visited Mengistu but, according to Giorgis, the meeting was uncontroversial on both sides.

  The most meaningful visitor to the victims in the shelters and distribution centres would have been their leader, Mengistu. He did not visit the affected areas until so many outsiders had commented on it that he could no longer avoid it. Some time late in November 1994, he flew to Makale, walked around an area near the airport for a few minutes, then flew to Bati and stayed just long enough to have his picture taken. Mengistu spent about a total of thirty minutes in the afflicted areas.

  In the meantime, Giorgis himself camped at Debre Birhan, only a hundred miles outside Addis, and found that people tried to stave off the highland cold by lying in shallow graves. Overnight there, thirty-one people died.

  Makale, the capital of Tigray, was a front line between the Ethiopian army and the Tigrayan rebels. Here, 40–50,000 people had gathered at the shelters of the RRC and the Catholic Relief Service. Mengistu, after tactful approaches by the Italian ambassador, allowed Ethiopian pilots and Soviet aircraft, using fuel paid for by the Americans, to deliver the food required for them. As well, the RRC borrowed planes from the Ethiopian air force, but it had to pay for the fuel.

  To get to the remoter areas, the RRC and agencies sent into the mountains muleteers with strings of as many as fifty donkeys, each loaded with half a quintal of grain. Later, the RRC, with the help of the UN representative in Ethiopia, Kurt Jansson – a controversial figure whom some would accuse of collaborating with Mengistu – devised a means of dropping sacks of grain in reinforced packaging from 100– 150 feet. Still, much of it was scattered and spoiled on impact. Polish helicopters identified the target areas and prepared the local population for the drop beforehand. The Ethiopian air force transported grain and other materials to Addis. They too charged the RRC for the aviation fuel.

  The RAF and Luftwaffe also flew relief to the drop targets. Grain was bagged and rebagged for strength in 25–35 kilo bundles and placed on wooden pallets. These were pushed out of planes that were often flying as low as ten metres. The effort was seen as symbolic by some. Only 11,000 tons of food were dropped in this international effort, but the exercise attracted the approval and interest of the world.

  In the meantime, the relief shelters became what Giorgis would call ‘meat markets’. Cameramen would search up and down the rows of famine victims, selecting only the most skeletal for filming and, in some cases, waiting for them to die before filming. Giorgis also complained that the voluntary agencies, some of them skilled and sensitive, others utterly insensitive, were squeezing him from one side, while the politburo squeezed him from the other. Many relief agencies brought in staff to do jobs that could equally be done by Ethiopians. Then, as in the Irish famine, religious-based agencies turned the area around the shelters into a mission, proselytising the weak. In March 1985, in the provinces of Sidamo and Showa, close to 700 places of worship built by Western sects were closed down.

  Some of the party’s provincial leaders fought foreign agencies with a fury that would have made Mengistu proud. The party chief in Gondar, Melaku Tefera, was angry with the Joint Distribution Committee, a US Jewish body that worked among the Falashas, the black Jews, who were peasants and artisans who lived in his province. When two US senators, Dennis DeConcini and Paul Trible, visited Gondar, Tefera endured them, but waited until they had left their hotel before turning up, accompanied by aides, to beat up the three Ethiopians who had accompanied the American delegation from Addis. Before they left Addis, the senators heard about the incident. They complained to the politburo about Tefera’s action. The politburo called Giorgis and told him to inform the American delegation that they were liars and that their attempt to besmirch the image of the revolution had failed. Only the RRC apologised to the American senators.

  The Ethiopians began closing their shelters in the spring and early summer of 1985. The argument was the people should be returned to their home areas or newly built villages to avail themselves of the meher rains of 1985 and so grow food. Tefera, on the orders of Legesse Asfaw, ordered the forced ejection by the army of 60,000 desperate people from the Ibinet shelter in south Gondar. News reports around the world expressed outrage, and the RRC was blamed as much as the government. The people from around the shelter were given fifteen days’ rations for the road – not enough to save farming families, said the foreign agencies. Some were sick and likely to die on the road. The evictees were not given tools, seeds, medicine or other supplies.

  Tefera then burned the area around the camp. Huts of grass and straw were destroyed by the thousand. Mengistu claimed later that it was a mistake
of zeal on the part of local officials. Acting outside his appropriate role, Kurt Jansson held a press conference in which he announced that Mengistu admitted a mistake had been made, and this seemed to satisfy Western opinion.

  There were other UN mysteries than Jansson. The executive secretary to the UN Economic Commission for Africa, Adebayo Adedeji, visited Ethiopia only once for a tour with Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar. Neither he nor his representatives attended donors’ conferences on Ethiopia in 1984 and 1985.

  Before, during and after the Mengistu famine, the Eritreans had their own aid agency. The Eritrean Relief Association (ERA) was founded in the early 1970s during the emperor’s famine. With the tacit permission of the Sudanese government, it was able to transport food that landed at Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast across a desolate quarter of the republic of Sudan and into the highlands of Eritrea, where it was distributed throughout rebel-held parts of the region. In 1978, the Tigrayans founded a similar body, the Relief Society of Tigray (REST).

  The reason these organisations were established was that the distribution of food aid to the non-rebel-held areas of their provinces was scarcely permitted, and in the rebel-held areas themselves hardly any aid at all trickled through. In 1985, when Ethiopia received 1.2 million tonnes of food relief, a mere 90,000 tonnes were distributed by the UN agencies cross-border into non-government-held areas of Tigray and Eritrea, even though a third to a half of the famine victims were found in such areas. Giorgis himself thought the government-held areas of Eritrea were being deliberately punished by the withholding of supplies.

  Many traditional relief agencies maligned and resented ERA and REST because they reduced their areas of operation. The relief agencies also accused the rebels of attacking food convoys. In reply, ERA and REST argued – it seems with some justice – that under government coercion agency food-relief trucks were mixed in with Ethiopian military columns in such a way that the rebels could not know which was which.

  In the areas they held, ERA and REST proved typically more adaptive in the way they managed to supply aid, and were efficient distributors of food. Both attracted more and more local support as it became clear that Mengistu was misusing food on a heroic scale and spending exorbitantly on his military.

  In ERA’s case, there was little wastage and pilfering. I observed myself the way ERA operated. The Sudan, at the time I first went to Eritrea, was a democratic nation led by Sadiq al-Mahdi. A traditional enemy of Ethiopia, Sudan was willing to allow the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) to run clinics for war wounded and warehouses for ERA operations in Port Sudan and in Suakin, an old Turkish-built port south of Port Sudan. Aid for Eritrea would arrive in Port Sudan and be stored there by ERA officials, then transported south and into Eritrea in Mercedes trucks from donor countries. The trucks were not allowed to fall apart but were serviced by ERA mechanics in garages in Port Sudan. The strain on the vehicles was enormous, for the aid had to be carried south across desert and then over empty riverbeds full of boulders and up the rough switchback roads of the mountains of Eritrea.

  Trucks loaded with ERA food provided by aid agencies from the US, Australia, Canada and the Scandinavian countries began rolling out of their depot south of Port Sudan before noon, so that they would reach Eritrea by nightfall, when they would be safe from the Derg’s daytime bombing raids. If they had not finished the journey to their appointed depot by dawn, they hid for the daylight hours in camouflaged bays dug into hillsides, and continued the following evening. Once the food was cached in every area, often in camouflaged warehouses dug into the sides of mountains, or else in bunkers in the torrid lowlands, ERA officials had to depend on distribution lists drawn up by the local village assemblies. In a warehouse bunker in a lowland village, under a roof that seemed to concentrate heat and amidst bags of flour and other aid, I saw, for example, a young ERA man in army fatigues working on his lists before making an evening distribution. In the bunker, among the food bags piled to the ceiling, there was very little space left over for his bed.

  The distributions were done with some dignity – the desperate scurry of hungry people around aid trucks captured on television in other emergencies was not a characteristic of the many food distributions I saw at night, or by day under cover, in Eritrea. Such well-ordered and systematic distributions could and should have taken place in Ethiopia.

  Under the rebels’ political contract, Muslims and Coptic Christians were fed the same ration. Such equity was not pure charity – it was essential for the unity of the rebel front. But nomads, whose nationality was less certain, were also fed. One night, after reaching a spot in which to sleep, in a dry riverbed, the party I was with was woken at dawn by nomads, who had slept in the riverbed too and were pounding mortars with pestles, grinding coffee, all around us. Within half an hour, even apart from the risk of bombing, the riverbed was uninhabitable because of heat. The nomads, members of a tribe named the Hadarab, their coffee drunk, withdrew to a food depot hidden among the trees where, safe from any overview by Antonov bombers, food distribution commenced. Perhaps the EPLF and ERA were trying by these means to give the nomads a sense of being Eritrean, but it did not matter what the motives were – it mattered that the social contract between the rebels and their people be observed and their countrymen not be allowed to starve.

  Similarly, the connection between the Tigrayans and the people under their control became a social and political contract – food would be justly distributed by REST in return for loyalty. The rebel forces were also fed from part of this aid, just as Ethiopian forces were on aid Mengistu had commandeered. ERA and REST had stepped in to supply the succour that the emperor and then the Derg would not.

  The political-contract approach did not operate under the same degree of moral pretension that characterised some Western aid, and yet it was more effective. Perhaps it should be the future of all government famine efforts, although a tyrannical government like that of Mengistu saw no need to recognise or honour such a contract with its own people.

  For voluntary agencies throughout the world, Mengistu’s famine and war raised the question of how far an NGO should go in cooperating with a tyrannous regime. Should a relief agency feed some of the people while fully knowing that food will be diverted and that their intended mercy will not be extended to troublesome regions, people or unpopular tribes?

  It has been argued that aid agencies will collaborate rather than be expelled from a region considered favourable for their own fundraising. In Ethiopia, they had the lesson before them of Médecins Sans Frontières – Mengistu had expelled this agency for criticising his policies and his squandering of money on armaments.

  Relief agencies compete for every compassionate dollar, are institutional, are afflicted with a corporatist outlook – all these are accusations that have become increasingly common. It is said by some that when aid workers gather for a drink in Asia or Africa, or anywhere else on earth, efficacy becomes a major topic of conversation, with some of them having become doubters of their own processes – efficacy agnostics. This is not to cast doubt on the goodwill of agencies or their volunteers. But after all this time, it is obvious that emergency and development aid from voluntary agencies have failed to develop Ethiopia beyond subsistence, beyond dependence and beyond the most primitive services of transport and health and education. Ethiopia remains a perpetual sick man, and cynics wonder if this situation does not greatly suit both those holding power in that country, and those agencies who want to operate in, and have news to impart about the place.

  17

  Other Catastrophes

  IF MANY IN the British government approved of the sad but providential scythe that reduced the Irish population to a desirable level, in Ethiopia another version of Providence – Marxist theory as interpreted by Mengistu – was at work. But twentieth-century famines in Russia might be seen as even more nakedly driven by doctrine than Mengistu’s famine.

  The initiating principles for the Russian famine of 19
21–2 were drought and abnormally heavy frost in 1920, but the regions that were most stricken were those in which armed squads had rampaged in previous years, requisitioning food to feed the cities and the army. In the Saratov province south of Moscow, where a brigade known for its brutality collected the requisition, the food levy left villagers stripped of any emergency supply at all. Methods used to gather more food still included holding children to ransom, and the whipping, torturing and execution of peasants. Requisition battalions would shoot dead any peasants who resisted them, using as justification the cry that those who were not willing to surrender their essential food were kulaks – bourgeois farmers driven by capitalistic motives. Some Red officials in the districts tried to temper the requisition process, and warned Moscow that no more could be squeezed out of the countryside. But no one listened.

  One focus of the famine was the Volga region, where the steppes had turned to dust. The big industrial towns of the Don Basin to the south were stricken too. Then there was a second harvest failure in 1921, as in the previous year. Any growth that had occurred was destroyed in large part by rats and plagues of locusts. These alone were not sufficient to cause the famine. There had always been a store of communal grain for the village to fall back on. But it was either taken, or did not exist, because to escape further levies peasants had retreated to subsistence farming – producing just enough for their families to live on. In Samara province nearly two million people, three-quarters of the population, were suspected to be dying from hunger by the autumn of 1921, and the final number of dead was 700,000, there alone.