Word: ethiopia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is more or less the question that bedevils Western officials as they face the horrors of another famine in the Ethiopia of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. All too clear in the public memory are those televised pictures from 1984-85 of starving children with their matchstick arms, their swollen bellies and their huge, staring eyes. The public may also remember reports of relief shipments being taxed $50 a ton to help finance Mengistu's 225,000-man army, the largest in black Africa, and of sacks of Western grain rotting on the docks or disappearing into the black...
This sense of Ethiopia as a bottomless sinkhole for Western aid inspires some skeptical experts to wonder whether such assistance is really wise. Regular international rescue efforts do little to encourage recipients to learn to feed themselves, the skeptics argue, and a tougher approach just might force Ethiopia to mend its ways. "What will aid do?" asked Britain's Economist last month. "It will strengthen the dominion of Ethiopia's ignorant rulers. The weather is the only calamity not directly caused by Colonel Mengistu . . . and his cronies. Their Russian advisers have taught them to run vast state farms that produce...
...what? "The aid Ethiopians need is diplomatic pressure, not food," says Rony Brauman of Doctors Without Borders, a French charitable organization that was expelled from Ethiopia two years ago for criticizing Mengistu's brutally handled program to resettle residents of rebel-threatened areas. "If we have a duty, it is to pressure the government to change its policies. Otherwise, in two or three years, we're going to see the same bodies, the same TV footage, the same appeals from humanitarian agencies to come to the rescue." But as a French government official asks, "Who is going to take...
Despite the criticisms of Mengistu's regime, some of his heavy-handed policies appear to have rationales behind them. It is true, of course, that rebellious Eritrea, governed as an Italian colony from 1890 until World War II, has a tribal makeup different from the rest of Ethiopia. Yet the country as a whole contains more than 80 distinct ethnic groups, and poverty-stricken Eritrea could hardly survive as an independent entity. It is also likely that Mengistu's motives for forcibly transporting 600,000 peasants from Eritrea and neighboring Tigre to the less populated southern part of the country...
...outside observers think criticism of the Mengistu regime has been exaggerated. One of them is Father Thomas Fitzpatrick, director of Caritas International, the Rome-based Catholic emergency-aid organization. "There was not massive corruption or diversion during the 1984 famine," says Fitzpatrick, an American who supervised Catholic aid in Ethiopia at the time. "There weren't distribution foul-ups to the extent that has been reported. It's true that some ships were backed up in the harbors. True, it rained once unexpectedly, and some grain was exposed and began to rot. But no more than...