Word: mengistu
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...successful - it raised tens of millions of dollars - because it played on Westerners' sense of obligation to "save Africa" and their sense of guilt for somehow "allowing" the famine to happen. But the reality was far more complex. While Ethiopia was indeed in the grip of a drought, Mengistu Haile Mariam's government, which was fighting an insurgency at the time, restricted NGOs from helping famine victims in certain areas and forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of people from one place to another in a repeat of Soviet-era collectivization campaigns, exacerbating their plight. The rebels, who came to power...
Hunger is a political issue in Ethiopia. Famine helped bring down the regime of Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1974 and the 1984-5 famine, in which one million people died, fatally undermined the Derg regime of Haile Miriam Mengistu, who was eventually overthrown in 1991. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was leader of the rebel movement that toppled Mengistu. He spoke to TIME's Africa bureau chief Alex Perry about Ethiopia's latest food emergency and the value of aid at his offices in Addis Ababa...
Falceto's first trip to Ethiopia in 1985 was not encouraging. Eleven years of military dictatorship under Colonel Mengistu and a dusk-to-dawn curfew had all but extinguished Addis Ababa's nightlife. The few hotels in the capital offering live entertainment were mostly the haunt of business and diplomatic flotsam and hookers, while the music was desultory generic pop, played on cheap synthesizers. "It took several trips and several more years before I understood what had happened," says Falceto. "These big bands were dead. They just didn't exist any more." Incredibly, the vibrancy of Addis's musical life...
International criticism of Ethiopia often centers on human rights. Meles, 52, is a former rebel leader who helped overthrow dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991 and whose Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front has held power since. While the European Union deemed the 2005 general election not credible, the African Union and the Carter Institute declared it free and fair. But when the opposition objected to Meles' victory with mass protests, Ethiopia's security forces cracked down, killing dozens of people and jailing thousands. This month, the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is probing allegations that the security...
...Ethiopia, the Marxist regime of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam has at last begun allocating more trucks to carry food to remote regions of the country. Mengistu has also agreed to permit relief groups to set up several food centers in the northern provinces of Tigre and Eritrea, where he had blocked aid shipments to areas controlled by rebels...