From “emaciated” refugees to crops burned on the brink of harvest, starvation threatens the survivors of more than two months of fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
“There is an extreme urgent need — I don’t know what more words in English to use — to rapidly scale up the humanitarian response because the population is dying every day as we speak,” Mari Carmen Vinoles, head of the emergency unit for Doctors Without Borders, told the AP.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said seven trucks brought medicines and medical equipment for 400 wounded as well as relief supplies to Mekele, a city of half a million that had been all-but cut off to foreign aid since the conflict began on November 4.
The convoy arrived as the United Nations expressed growing alarm over the plight of nearly 100,000 Eritrean refugees in Tigray and appealed for urgent access to assist them and 600,000 others dependent on food rations.
About 2.3 million children are struggling to obtain essential humanitarian aid, including treatment for malnutrition, vital vaccines, emergency medication and water and sanitation, the children’s rights organisation, the United Nations child welfare agency, UNICEF, said on Tuesday.
The crisis also worries almost 100.000 people Eritrean refugees in Tigray. UNICEF called for “urgent, sustained, unconditional and impartial humanitarian access” to the affected families and called on the Federal Government to make the freedom of movement possible for civilians who wish to seek protection elsewhere possible.
By awarding the 2020 Nobel peace prize to the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), the Nobel committee said that it wanted to “turn the eyes of the world to the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of hunger”. Among its reasons for awarding the prize were WFP’s “efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict”.
Hunger has been used as a weapon of war for many years, but the issue has recently risen to prominence because of the increased risk of mass starvation in today’s conflicts.
The Ethiopian famine of 25 years ago was the greatest humanitarian disaster of the late 20th century, killing more than 600,000 people before the world took notice. Peter Gill was the first journalist to reach the epicenter of the famine in 1984 and he returned at the time of Live Aid to research the definitive account of the disaster, A Year in the Death of Africa.
Now, in Famine and Foreigners, Gill returns to Ethiopia to piece together the real story of the last 25 years, drawing on interviews with leading Ethiopians and with an army of foreign aid officials. He conducted extensive interviews with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and the leading development economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs. Most important of all, Gill has traveled throughout the country and interviewed scores of Ethiopia’s dignified but still hungry farmers. What stands out in these pages are the graphic encounters with these Ethiopians–the supposed beneficiaries of western aid–who still struggle on the knife-edge of existence. What also emerges is the often tense relationship between official aid-givers and recipients–whether in the area of economic reform or the modern demands for “governance” and political change. Twenty five years on, we can say that we did feed the world. But did we change the face of poverty, did we close the gap between rich and poor, did we fulfill the promise of “development?”
Given the conversation view that the imperial Ethiopian government knew very little about events in rural Ethiopia and was usually misinformed by its officials about famine, what was the contribution of U.S.-Ethiopia relations, especially the security dimensions Of that relationship, in shaping the ideology and politics of famine in Ethiopia?
“We learned a terrible thing in Mengistu’s time. We learned non-compromise. In 1974 people who could have taken up arms submitted themselves to the Derg. The Emperor himself did so. These people had no idea of the catastrophe that was to come. The Derg taught us: don’t wait for justice, not with any government. That’s what is behind the intransigence of the opposition parties. That’s why the opposition press won’t acknowledge anything good about this government.”
“Politics in this country was essentially armed politics,” he said, “and so you don’t usually win through arguments, through logic, you win through shooting straighter than the other guy. So victories and defeats were to a large extent total. And even if they were not total they were perceived to be total. That does not encourage compromise—live and let live and so forth.”
In the famine of 1984, as Ethiopians died by the thousands in the countryside, Mengistu hosted a lavish celebration of the Derg’s 10th anniversary in Addis Ababa, hiding the emergency from the world. And when international relief agencies revealed the extent of the famine he used relief supplies as a weapon, diverting food away from needy rebel areas and selling the country’s grain reserves to buy Soviet arms. In international human-rights circles, the trial of the Derg, which had been three years on preparation, was being spoken of as an African Nuremberg. Mengistu himself fled to Zimbabwe, where he remains. For the Amhara elite of Ethiopia, the double shock of the loss of the province of Eritrea and the ascendancy of the Tigrayans has had a disorienting effect. It is as though Soviet Communism had been overthrown not by Russians but by Ukranians, and the Ukranians had taken power in Moscow.
For the past thirty years under both Emperor Haile Selassie and President Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia has suffered continuous war and intermittent famine until every single province has been affected by war to some degree. Evil Days documents the wide range of violations of basic human rights committed by all sides in the conflict, especially the Mengistu government’s direct responsibility for the deaths of at least half a million Ethiopian civilians. The Ethiopian army and air force have killed tens of thousands of civilians. The notorious urban “Red Terror” of 1977-78 was matched by indiscriminate violence against rural populations, especially in Eritrea and Tigray. Counterinsurgency strategies involved forcibly relocating millions of rural people and cutting food supplies to insurgent areas. Also, these military policies were instrumental in creating famine, and the government used relief supplies as weapons to further its war aims. There is now a prospect of lasting peace, but concerns remain such as the demand for justice and the future protection of human rights.
If you’re looking for the worst government on Earth, look no further. Mengistu has combined a murderous assault on human rights with an economic program that has made Ethiopia the world’s poorest nation. He has also prosecuted an endless war against secessionist rebels in two provinces, Eritrea and Tigre. Well, not quite endless: The rebellion in Eritrea began when John Kennedy was president.
Americans will be surprised to learn that the villain is not a lack of food. Vast supplies, including a quarter of a million tons sent by the U.S. government, now sit in Ethiopian ports, waiting to be delivered to those in need. Blocking the way is the Ethiopian government, which uses starvation as a weapon in a monstrous war against its own people. An estimated 7 million people are in mortal danger.
