At his headquarters in Emperor Menelik’s old palace, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam spent months planning to turn the tenth anniversary of Ethiopia’s 1974 revolution into the most spectacular celebrations the country had ever witnessed. He intended to use the occasion to launch his pet project, the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia, and to announce a new Ten Year Plan with confident projections of economic growth. To signify the importance of the event, he ordered the construction of a new convention hall – the Great Hall of the People – with seating for 3,500 delegates and the most modern conference facilities. With the help of hundreds of North Korean supervisors, he set out to adorn Addis Ababa with triumphal arches bearing revolutionary slogans, with giant stars displaying the hammer and sickle hoisted high on buildings, and with huge posters of Marx, Lenin and – Mengistu. Thousands of delegates from communist parties around the world would be invited to witness the birth of his ‘vanguard’ Marxist-Leninist party. There would be mass marching and dancing and banquets. No expense was to be spared.
But while Mengistu became ever more captivated by the details of the tenth anniversary, Ethiopia was heading for its greatest disaster of the twentieth century – the famine of 1984. Forewarned of catastrophe, Mengistu was determined that nothing should be allowed to get in the way of his celebrations. For months he refused to give the matter any attention. On his orders, relief efforts were obstructed. No mention was made during the celebrations of the masses starving to death north of the capital. When news of the disaster subsequently emerged, it was to inspire an extraordinary surge of compassion and generosity from peoples and governments around the world, prompting the greatest single peace-time mobilisation of the international community in the twentieth century. What was not realised at the time was the extent to which the disaster had been caused by Mengistu’s own counter-insurgency wars, wars that he was determined to prosecute even when the full scale of starvation became clear.
Rural life in Ethiopia was generally precarious. Poor rains or droughts were frequent hazards. A leading historian of Ethiopia, Richard Pankhurst, documented at least one famine every decade between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Famines in 1958, 1966 and 1973 killed tens of thousands on each occasion. Even in the best of times peasant families in Wollo and Tigray – the epicentre of the 1984 famine – lived close to the margin of survival. In recent years, population growth had compounded the difficulties of rural existence, resulting in over-cultivation, deforestation, soil erosion and land degradation.
Mengistu’s agricultural policies had added to this burden. Though the Derg’s land reforms in 1975 had freed peasants from debt and the need to pay rent to landlords, Mengistu’s priority was to ensure that the towns and the army were supplied with cheap food at the expense of the peasantry. Peasants were forced to accept low prices dictated by officials from the state-run Agricultural Marketing Corporation (AMC). In 1984 the fixed price set by the AMC was only about one-fifth of the free-market price in Addis Ababa.
A British journalist, Paul Vallely, reporting in The Times on an incident in the market town of Areka in Sidamo province, described some of the tactics used by AMC officials:
The government men were lying in wait for the peasant farmers in the market place of the small town of Areka. The harvest of teff, Ethiopia’s staple grain, had not been plentiful in the southern province of Sidamo but at least that meant, the peasants thought, that they would get a good price for what little surplus they had . . .
There was almost a riot in Areka that day. The officials from the Agricultural Marketing Corporation waited until most of the peasants had brought their teff into the dusty marketplace and then made themselves known. They announced the official price they had decided on and told the farmers the AMC would buy their entire stocks.
The price was ludicrously low. The peasants protested. Some even began to gather up their grain, saying they would rather not sell it at such a price. The AMC men then announced that no one would be allowed to withdraw his produce. The farmers began to shout and drag their grain away. The AMC men were jostled. Then the government heavies moved in and the peasants knew they had no choice but to comply.
Peasants were also forced to deliver grain ‘quotas’ to state officials, regardless of the circumstances they faced. ‘Even the poorest of the poor had to sell,’ one Wollo farmer told researchers. If they failed to do so, their assets could be confiscated or they could be imprisoned. In numerous cases, peasants had to delve into their own food reserves or sell assets to buy grain on the open market to resell to the AMC at a loss. In Gojjam province in 1983, nearly one-third of farmers failed to grow enough to meet their quotas and had to sell livestock in order to buy grain. In Wollo province in 1984, even though famine was rife, the AMC still insisted on imposing a quota. Other impositions on the peasantry included heavy taxation and mandatory contributions to local development programmes; restrictions on non-farm activities such as petty trading and migrant labour, enforced by a strict system of travel permits; and compulsory unpaid labour on government projects.
instead of aiding peasant farmers, Mengistu diverted government resources into promoting state farms, mainly commercial farms nationalised after the revolution. Between 1978 and 1983 about 60 per cent of the agricultural budget was devoted to state farms. But they were inefficiently run and, despite huge investment, accounted for less than 4 per cent of total grain production. Mengistu also endeavoured to promote collectivisation, supporting collective farms with every kind of technical assistance and equipment. But they too failed. Indeed, the overall result of Mengistu’s agricultural policies was to lower output per capita and to make Ethiopia increasingly dependent on food imports.
But what turned rural hardship into disaster – even before drought struck – were the counter-insurgency measures Mengistu’s army employed in dealing with rebel activity, notably in Tigray and northern Wollo where the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) had become firmly entrenched. During the 1970s the army launched five major offensives against the TPLF. A sixth offensive starting in August 1980 in central Tigray lasted for seven months and caused massive disruption. Using scorched-earth tactics, the army destroyed grain stores and houses, burned crops and pastures, killed livestock and displaced about 80,000 farmers. Aerial bombardment created havoc with rural markets and farm life. A seventh offensive began in earnest in February 1983 in western Tigray, a major surplus-producing area. More than 100,000 residents and 375,000 migrant labourers were forced to flee. In addition to outright destruction, the army requisitioned food and enforced blockades of food and people. Food was routinely used as a weapon of war.
Areas of Tigray and Wollo were thus already awash with destitute refugees when the rains failed. Rainfall between 1975 and 1983 had generally been favourable – at average or above-average levels. Indeed, the national crop in both 1982 and 1983 was among the highest on record. In parts of Tigray and northern Wollo, however, there were local droughts.
Officials from the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC), a government agency set up in Addis Ababa in the aftermath of the 1973 drought, were aware of an impending crisis in Tigray and Wollo. The new head of the RRC, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, a member of Mengistu’s central committee, made a tour of the area in July 1983 and witnessed the plight of thousands of refugees crowding into relief centres. He attributed the cause not to the army’s campaign of repression but to what he insisted was the long-term failure of rains. Nevertheless, on his return to Addis Ababa, he was determined to press the case for government intervention.
Fortuitously, Mengistu was due to preside over a three-day meeting at Menelik’s palace to discuss the annual budget. Dawit took the opportunity to request a ten-fold increase in funds for the RRC. Sitting on an elevated red velvet seat, Mengistu listed the government’s achievements and its future goals, but made no mention of the possibility of famine. Dawit’s request for more funds was rejected. instead of challenging Mengistu openly, Dawit decided a private approach might be more effective. In his memoirs, Red Tears, he wrote:
I approached Mengistu respectfully, making a great effort not to anger him. I told him that his comments had been very interesting and doubtless valid for some parts of the country, but what I had personally observed indicated the makings of a terrible famine if the belg rains [the short rainy season that usually produced 10 per cent of the annual crop] failed to come in February and March. I explained that we needed more money to prepare for the crisis.
He listened impatiently, then told me not to be so panicky – to stay cool. He said the very name of the agency I was heading invited trouble and encouraged begging. ‘You must remember that you are a member of the central committee,’ he said. ‘Your primary responsibility is to work towards our political objectives. Don’t let these petty human problems that always exist in transition periods consume you. There was famine in Ethiopia for years before we took power – it was the way nature kept the balance. Today we are interfering with that natural mechanism of balance, and that is why our population has soared to over forty million.’
He didn’t elaborate on this, but I understood what he meant. ‘Let nature take its toll – just don’t let it out in the open. We need a façade for the outside world, so make it look like we’re doing something.’ He abruptly ended the conversation, patted my shoulder and walked off.
Except for a few scattered showers, no rain fell in the Ethiopian highlands between October 1983 and May 1984. The belg rains failed altogether, wiping out the spring harvest. Scorching drought, combined with the effects of years of military repression, left Tigray and northern Wollo devastated. Desperate to raise money for food, thousands of farmers sold their livestock, farm equipment and household goods, abandoning their farms and heading with their families towards relief centres in the hope of staying alive. But the relief centres – shelters, as they were called – were soon overwhelmed, their meagre resources used up. In February 1984 the RRC recorded that 10,000 people were dying in shelters each week; in March it put the figure at 16,000. In all, it estimated that 5 million people were at risk.
Travelling up the road from Addis Ababa to Dessie in Wollo province, Dawit witnessed ‘miles of starving, ragged people, begging for a bowl of grain, a scrap of cloth, pleading for their lives. Many of them were selling their traditional ornaments, handcrafted from silver long ago.’ On his way to Korem, a hill station on the main road to Asmara, he recorded how every village he passed through was in desperate straits. ‘Everywhere we saw people carrying corpses, digging graves, grieving, wailing and praying.’
Driving up the escarpment to Korem, he came across columns of starving and exhausted people trudging along the road in the hope of finding food there.
People who had not eaten for days, weak and deathly ill, were climbing the mountain in an endless, winding stream of suffering. As our cars passed them, we saw their strength failing; saw them collapse and die before our eyes, their lives slipping away where they dropped. Some of the stronger ones carried children, the sick or the aged. We saw the terrible agony of people forced to choose between leaving their dying wives, husbands or children behind, or staying to die with them.
Korem itself was a place of suffering and death. In normal times it was a small town of some 7,000 people, with a church and an army barracks. But the population had grown to 100,000. The shelter there, run by the relief agency Save the Children, could cope with no more than 10,000. The rest were left to fend for themselves.
Most had only rags to protect them from the chill highland nights. At night they huddled together for warmth as best they could in the open fields. The exhausted relief workers held the power of life and death as they walked through the crowds selecting only the most needy to receive what food there was, while the unlucky thousands watched grimly and waited another day.
The shelters and the open field near the warehouse were packed to overflowing with the sick and dying. We pushed our way through the hordes of groaning people, grieving mothers, whimpering children with the faces of old men and women, listless faces crawling with flies, faces without hope. The smells and sounds of death were all around. There were corpses everywhere, lined up in rows in ragged sackcloth shrouds or still uncovered in the midst of the crowds. Others were dying of slow starvation as we watched. Some bodies twitched helplessly, some writhed in agony as hunger ate away their living tissue, some lay still, alive but barely distinguishable from the dead. It was like walking through an open graveyard.
In view of Mengistu’s refusal to take any action or sound the alarm, Western donors felt no inclination to treat the crisis with any sense of urgency. Western governments were distrustful of Mengistu’s communist dictatorship, alienated by his constant anti-Western rhetoric and critical of both his lavish spending on the tenth anniversary celebrations and his spending on defence in general – more than half of Ethiopia’s budget was directed towards maintaining an army of 300,000 in the field. Western officials were determined to ensure that Western aid was not used in a way that would allow him to concentrate his resources on fighting wars, keeping his regime in power while leaving the West to deal with the consequences of famine. Western relief agencies took a similar view. ‘Agencies were tired of helping a government that seemed to do so little to help itself,’ remarked Tony Vaux, an Oxfam official.
Donors were also sceptical about Dawit’s role, disliking his rude and abrasive manner and his overt antagonism towards the United States. They expressed doubts about the accuracy of his forecasts of the amount of aid that Ethiopia required, the more so since the government itself refused to acknowledge it even had a problem. Dawit’s assessment in March was that to get through 1984, Ethiopia needed 900,000 tons of grain. An assessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation put the figure at 125,000 tons.
In April Dawit set off on a month-long tour of Europe and North America to canvass for greater international support. Addressing the United Nations, he spoke of a ‘severe drought of unprecedented magnitude’ afflicting Ethiopia. ‘Starvation is currently the lot of over 5 million of our population.’ He gained little attention and returned to find Mengistu livid that he had aired Ethiopia’s difficulties so publicly.
I went to his office and truly, he was furious. Anyone who knows Mengistu can tell when he is angry. Before he says anything his cheek bones tremble furiously as he holds in his rage. I nervously braced myself for his attack . . .
He said that imperialist elements would do everything possible to thwart our efforts, to embarrass us, to destroy the gains of the revolution. One way of trying to embarrass us, he said, was by exploiting the drought. The menace in his voice was unmistakable. He told me that I had to be careful not to fall into their trap. My statement to the UN was inaccurate, exaggerated, he said; it showed Ethiopia in a bad light because it told only of disaster and nothing of governmental achievements or efforts to overcome the crisis. I had not emphasised that it was a natural disaster – a drought, not a famine – and that if it were not for this natural setback the Ethiopian people would have made great strides in overcoming food shortages . . .
I tried to tell him the reality as I saw it, as so many others saw it. Mengistu would not listen. He repeated again and again that it was only an ordinary food shortage being used as a ploy. Finally, he angrily ordered me to hold no more public meetings or donor meetings, to go on no more fund-raising tours to Europe or America, but to stay put and to do whatever I could without attracting attention.
Mengistu also ordered famine areas to be closed to all foreign visitors and banned donor representatives and journalists from travelling there. Throughout the summer, while thousands starved to death in Tigray and Wollo each week, no mention was made in the Ethiopian press about the disaster. Newspapers were filled instead with glowing descriptions about preparations for the founding congress of the Workers’ Party and the tenth anniversary celebrations. When the summer meher rains failed, causing even greater peril, still no alarm was raised. Destitute peasants arriving in Addis Ababa were rounded up and expelled from the city.
In a five-hour televised speech to the Workers’ Party congress, delivered in its new convention hall in Addis Ababa on 6 September, Mengistu lavished praise on the achievements of the revolution. He spoke in vibrant terms of ‘the success of the measures taken to raise production in the agricultural sector [that] has helped especially to alleviate the shortages of food crops’. But he made no mention of the crisis that Ethiopia faced and made only a passing reference to drought. ‘We must put an end to the problem that threatens the lives of millions of our people every time it fails to rain in parts of our country,’ he said. ‘From now on, our slogan, “We shall control the forces of nature”, must be put into action. We must mobilise our collective efforts to free agriculture from the effects of natural disaster.’
On the same day Mengistu unveiled a monument called ‘Our Struggle’, built around a set of massive bronze friezes depicting the evil times of the old feudal regime that the revolution had overthrown. The central villain was a landlord on horseback, his face partly hidden by a bandit’s kerchief, portrayed rejecting the entreaties of his starving tenants, in scenes remarkably similar to the current plight of Ethiopia’s peasants.
There followed four days and nights of ceremonies, banquets, parades and gymnastic displays. Slogans abounded everywhere: ‘Forward with the Revolutionary Leadership of Comrade Mengistu Haile Mariam’; ‘The oppressed masses will be victorious’; ‘Marxism-Leninism is our guideline’; ‘Down with American imperialism’; and ‘Temporary setbacks shall not deter us from our final objective of building communism’. In all, Mengistu spent an estimated $150 million on the celebrations. Western journalists were invited to Ethiopia for the occasion but when they asked for permission to travel to the north to report on famine conditions, they were refused.
The scale of the disaster, however, had become too great to hide for much longer. At the end of September the Christian Relief Development Association, an umbrella organisation for relief agencies in Addis Ababa, sent a direct appeal to the UN’s Disaster Relief Organisation asking for ‘immediate and extraordinary action’, warning that otherwise ‘hundreds of thousands of people will die’. A few days later, realising that his reputation might be damaged, Mengistu finally gave attention to what he called ‘the drought problem’ and relaxed travel restrictions on donor representatives and foreign journalists. In October a Kenyan television cameraman, Mohamed Amin, arrived in Korem. ‘There was this tremendous mass of people, groaning and weeping, scattered across the ground in the dawn mist,’ he recalled.
Amin’s seven-minute film, together with a commentary by Michael Buerk, broadcast on the BBC on 23 October, had a dramatic impact:
Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth. Thousands of wasted people are coming here for help. Many find death. They flood in every day from villages hundreds of miles away, dulled by hunger, driven beyond the point of desperation . . . 15,000 children here now – suffering, confused, lost . . . Death is all around. A child or an adult dies every twenty minutes. Korem, an insignificant town, has become a place of grief.
The film was subsequently broadcast by 425 television stations around the world, causing a tidal wave of public horror. Governments and politicians scrambled to respond, pledging aid and dispatching air force transport planes. In Britain an Irish pop singer, Bob Geldof, organised the recording of a fund-raising record, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, that received massive support. In the United States the singer Harry Belafonte called up a galaxy of stars to record ‘We are the World’, a song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and arranged by Quincy Jones. A televised day-long rock concert – Live Aid – staged jointly in Britain and the United States and watched in 108 countries, raised more than $100 million. In just over a year, more than $1 billion was raised and allocated for relief assistance to Ethiopia by government and non-government agencies in the West.
A deluge of visitors descended on Ethiopia on fact-finding missions – politicians, churchmen, singers and actors. But Mengistu himself showed little interest in relief work. He paid just one brief visit to the disaster area, touching down in two locations for a total of thirty minutes. He had devised his own solution to the problem and was far more preoccupied with implementing it.
Mengistu’s plan, announced in November, ordered the resettlement of 300,000 families – 1.5 million people – from drought-stricken areas of Tigray and Wollo to more fertile regions in the south-east of Ethiopia, to be carried out within a year. The gradual movement of people from the overpopulated north to the less populated south had been a long established practice, but nothing had occurred on such a scale, over such a short period and with so little previous planning. Mengistu’s motives, moreover, were related not so much to any concern for the welfare of famine victims as to his drive to establish new collective farms in the south and his interest in depopulating areas of rebel activity as a means of winning the war.
At a meeting of government and party officials attended by Dawit, Mengistu explained his purpose. Resettlement camps, he said, were to be ‘the core of our socialist rural structure’. He continued: ‘The future success of collectivisation very much depends on their success.’ He was even more explicit about the connection to his war aims.
Almost all of you here realise that we have security problems. The guerrillas operating in many of these areas do so with great help from the population. The people are like the sea and the guerrillas are like fish swimming in that sea. Without the sea there will be no fish. We have to drain the sea, or if we cannot completely drain it, we must bring it to a level where they will lack room to move at will, and their movements will be easily restricted.
Mengistu approached both Western diplomats and Soviet-bloc officials for help with the programme. At a meeting with the French and German ambassadors, he remarked, to their shock, that only the able-bodied would be resettled; the old and young, he said, would be left in drought-stricken areas. Most Western governments shunned the programme. A senior United Nations relief expert, Kurt Jansson, warned: ‘It would usually take between five to seven years to get a programme of this size going.’ But the Soviet Union responded rapidly with huge Antonov transport aircraft, helicopters and a fleet of 300 trucks with military crews.
Famine victims were told they would be provided with new homes, running water, electricity, in fertile land, capable of producing three harvests a year. Encouraged by such offers, many volunteered to go, but found themselves in an alien environment with little support. When the number of volunteers dwindled, Mengistu ordered forced resettlement. Field workers at the Save the Children shelter in Korem witnessed a battalion of Ethiopian troops surround their camp and seize several hundred people. Tens of thousands were rounded up, weak and emaciated, and packed tightly into Russian transport planes and trucks. Some suffocated; some were crushed to death; pregnant women miscarried; families were split apart. Starving peasants fled in droves from the shelters rather than face deportation. Hundreds of thousands took refuge in Sudan. Thousands tried to escape the resettlement camps despite the risk of being shot. ‘If I can go home and spend one night with my family, I’ll go, and if they kill me after that it doesn’t matter because life here is useless for me,’ one deserter told researchers. By February 1986, when the resettlement campaign was stopped, some 600,000 people had been moved; an estimated 50,000 had died in the upheaval. Dawit, given charge of the programme, subsequently wrote that it was ‘perhaps the cruellest chapter of the entire famine’. Rather than free people from ‘the terror of want’, it became ‘an even greater cause of terror’.
Perhaps a million people died in the Ethiopian famine of 1984–5. No one knows how many. Western aid helped save the lives of countless thousands of peasants. But much of it was prevented from reaching huge areas of Tigray where TPLF guerrillas held sway. Despite strenuous efforts by Western diplomats, Mengistu adamantly refused to allow ‘safe passage’ for relief to 3 million civilians living there. In an exchange over the issue with the US chargé d’affaires David Korn, the acting foreign minister Tibebu Bekele blurted out: ‘Food is a major element in our strategy against the secessionists.’
For the people of Tigray there was to be no respite. In February 1985, even as the relief operation was struggling to cope with the disaster, Mengistu launched the Eighth Offensive in Tigray, bringing yet more devastation.