Word: aid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...strike Ethiopia with apocalyptic force. Westerners watched in horror as the images of death filled their TV screens: the rows of fly-haunted corpses, the skeletal orphans crouched in pain, the villagers desperately scrambling for bags of grain dropped from the sky. What started out as a trickle of aid turned into a billion-dollar flood. The U.S., the largest donor, sent $500 million, and that does not include millions in private contributions. Irish Rocker Bob Geldof enlisted the help of his fellow musicians, dubbed his crusade Band Aid and raised $140 million. The rescue effort was plagued by delays...
...situation in Ethiopia is not yet as bad as it was two years ago, when hundreds died daily of hunger and disease in mass feeding camps. As of last week there was enough food to last for a month and enough promised in the international aid pipeline to nourish the country through April. While thousands of peasants have been temporarily uprooted from their villages, they have learned the lesson of 1984-85 and have gone in search of food before they are too weak to travel. U.N. officials say that for the moment there are no permanent feeding camps, where...
...response from the West has again been generous. Last week BBC Correspondent Michael Buerk, whose reporting first alerted the world to the scope of the last famine, led an appeal that raised $650,000 in five days. Weeks before the latest drought attracted publicity, the major private food- aid agencies -- the Red Cross, Oxfam, Caritas, Care and Catholic Relief Services -- were shipping food by sea and air and distributing it to the needy...
Geldof, who received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for his Band Aid efforts, was back in Ethiopia last week, and his indictment of Mengistu's role in the new famine was harsh and to the point: "I would say that the cardinal responsibility of any government is to feed its own people, and any government refusing to do that is irresponsible...
...rebels assert that the real motive behind the program is to persecute Eritreans and Tigreans and drain the rebel fronts of potential recruits. Dr. Frederick Machmer, head of the U.S. relief team in Addis Ababa, believes the rebels are disrupting the aid effort so the international community will accept "that they are a force to be reckoned with and that they control areas of the north." Geldof, whose organization owned some of the trucks blown up in October, finds the tactics of both sides despicable. Said he last week: "To attack food trucks and seal off roads in these conditions...