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Re-bump in light of a WHO official suggesting that government could or should go to people’s homes and remove the sick to ‘limit virus spread’... vague reminder of the forced resettlement of Ethiopia that turned into festering refugee camps...

snip....”At least the tsunami was an authentic natural disaster, even though the relief effort may have been put to a wide range of political uses. But Ethiopia in 1985 was a very different case. There the famine was the product of three elements, only one of which could be described as a natural event—a two-year long drought across the Sahel sub-region. The other two contributing factors were entirely man-made. The first was the dislocation imposed by the wars being waged by the central government in Addis Ababa against both Eritrean guerrillas and the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front. The second, and by far the most serious, was a forced agricultural collectivisation policy pursued with seemingly limitless ruthlessness by Mengistu Haile Mariam and his colleagues in the Dergue (committee) who had overthrown emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 (and officially adopted communism as their creed in 1984). This collectivisation was every bit the equal in its radicalism to the policies Stalin pursued in the Ukraine in the 1930s, where, as in Ethiopia, the result was inevitable: famine.

It was this policy that western aid would unwittingly assist, even as it saved lives. Having tried, without a great deal of success, to run aid efforts directly, the organisers of Band Aid and Live Aid channelled millions to the NGOs working in Ethiopia and, to a lesser extent, in Sudan. NGOs welcomed the money, not least because it came without the kind of strings imposed by western donor governments. Indeed, Oxfam used some of these funds to run covert aid supplies to rebel-controlled areas, though officially no major NGO was sending food aid to rebel-held territory—Addis Ababa did all it could to prevent it and this was still a time when state sovereignty was respected by western governments and aid organisations. (It is estimated that about one third of the deaths from the famine were in the rebel areas.)

A strong case can be made for Live Aid’s achievements. According to one Ethiopia expert, Alex de Waal, the relief effort could have cut the death toll by between a quarter and a half. The problem is that it may have contributed to as many deaths. The negative effects of the NGO presence on the government side became more pronounced as the crisis went on. Moreover, the government in Addis Ababa became increasingly adept at manipulating and instrumentalising these Live Aid-funded NGOs. Indeed, a good case can be made that the picture provided to the western public of the Ethiopian famine was at least to some degree manipulated by the Dergue from the beginning.

Until shortly before Buerk and his team were given permission to report from the Wollo region in the north of the country, where, along with Tigray and Eritrea, the famine was at its worst, the Dergue had denied access to foreign reporters. The rationale was that Mengistu did not want reports of the disaster to upstage the tenth anniversary of the revolution that had overthrown Haile Selassie. Both the Tigreans and the Eritreans had called for a ceasefire to allow for food distributions, but Mengistu rejected any truce, however short-lived, and no matter how many lives would have been saved. “We will never negotiate with terrorists,” he declared. It was in the aftermath of this rejection that Buerk was then allowed in. And hard on the heels of the Buerk report, the Dergue determined that some 600,000 people would have to be moved to areas of southwestern Ethiopia where the government was in full control. The rationale? The terrible famine whose images were now ubiquitous in the western media, and which would inspire Band Aid and Live Aid.

This is not to say that the Ethiopian famine was not real. It was all too real. The question, rather, is one of balancing the positive accomplishments of running aid programmes and the effects of that work being exploited by government or rebel authorities. Relief agencies routinely operate in places where governments or insurgents kill their own people. What choice do they have? Yet it is one thing to accept that NGOs can never control the environment in which they operate and quite another to participate in a great crime like the Dergue’s resettlement, even if the purpose of that participation is to to try to mitigate its effects and save lives. The truth is that the Dergue’s resettlement policy—of moving 600,000 people from the north while enforcing the “villagisation” of 3m others—was at least in part a military campaign, masquerading as a humanitarian effort. And it was assisted by western aid money.

The lengths to which the Dergue was prepared to go soon became apparent. Though even Mengistu’s Soviet patrons advised against it, the Dergue, as François Jean of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) put it at the time, chose to employ “shock treatment in order radically to transform Ethiopian rural society.” But one finds no mention of that in any official account of Live Aid, in the speeches of Bob Geldof or the Oxfam website. The Ethiopian terror famine was on a far smaller scale to either its Soviet or Chinese predecessors, and many people in Ethiopia who died of hunger in the mid-1980s were not victims of the Dergue’s campaign in a direct sense. But, as François Jean wrote, all three terror famines “proceeded from the same approach to reality… the same vision of the future, the same extreme commitment to radical social transformation.”

Initially, the authorities called for volunteers to make up the 100,000 heads of household the resettlement plan called for. Few came forward. The response was swift. A campaign of systematic round-ups in towns and villages across the three targeted provinces began. Those caught up in these sweeps were either airlifted south or transferred by land, sometimes in vehicles the authorities had requisitioned from international relief agencies—vehicles that were there to transport foodstuffs. The trip usually took five or six days. To this day, no one knows how many people died en route. The conservative estimate is 50,000. MSF’s estimate was double that.

As the deportations intensified, Ethiopian officials began to raid refugee camps and feeding centres that had been set up by mainstream relief agencies like MSF and Oxfam. There was nothing secret about what was going on. But donor governments and mainstream relief NGOs chose to turn a blind eye. In this, too, Live Aid almost certainly played a role, in the sense that the popular pressure generated by Geldof and his colleagues could not simply be “turned off” by governments. And yet, reports of the Dergue’s use of resettlement as a means of defeating the Tigreans and the Eritreans appeared widely in the press in western Europe and North America during the high watermark of Live Aid euphoria. Le Monde, Libération, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, and Time magazine all featured such reports prominently. Initially at least, they had little or no effect on public opinion in the west or funding decisions by western donor governments. The narrative that Geldof had championed, and that the mainstream NGOs had endorsed, was that while the moral dilemma was hard to deal with, the only choice was to stay—resettlement policy or no resettlement policy.

The NGOs and the UN specialised agencies—above all the Oxfam/Save the Children alliance that was then the major actor in the British relief world—defended this position even when the US, perhaps acting out of enmity to the Dergue that had overthrown its ally and protégé, Haile Selassie, tried to pressurise other donors not to support the resettlement programme. The head of UN development activities in Ethiopia protested against America’s “politicisation” of resettlement. According to Rony Brauman of MSF, a UN official insisted that he had no reason to believe that people were being forcibly taken out of refugee camps and resettled against their will.

Most relief workers did not go that far. But for them, the nature of the Mengistu regime, while it was to be regretted, was beside the point. As one wrote later: “Sure, Mengistu was a sick bastard… but what has that got to do with feeding poor, hungry, defenceless people?” As the debate raged, and as the NGOs that were determined to stay in Ethiopia began to face criticism in the press, Geldof leapt to their defence. “The organisations that are participating in the resettlement programme should not be criticised,” he told the Irish Times on 4th November 1985. “In my opinion, we’ve got to give aid without worrying about population transfers.” Asked about the estimates that 100,000 people had died in the transfers, he replied that “in the context [of such a pervasive famine in Ethiopia], these numbers don’t shock me.”

To this day, Oxfam has not officially retracted the policy of working with the Dergue that it pursued. The most it has ever been willing to do has been to speak out against the “haste, scale and the timing” of the resettlement. Some aid officials went much further in accommodating the reg-ime’s policies. Jack Finucane of the Irish relief NGO Concern hosted a dinner in Addis Ababa in late 1985 for foreign relief workers, attended by Bob Geldof, at which he defended the resettlements. Finucane reportedly demanded that western donor governments stop being so squeamish and put money into the project. When Geldof (departing somewhat from the attitude he expressed to the Irish Times) queried Finucane about a Wall Street Journal article that claimed somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Ethiopians had died as a result of the resettlement policy, Finucane responded: “I’ve read it; I don’t believe it.” The UN took much the same tack. Kurt Janson, the chief UN representative in Ethiopia between late 1984 and late 1985, took the opportunity of a farewell press conference to appeal publicly to western donor governments to help Ethiopia with the resettlement programme.

Of all the NGOs, only the founding (French) section of MSF refused to go along with the pro-Dergue consensus. Once expelled from Ethiopia, however, MSF/France was free to talk publicly about what it knew about forced deportations. “We are witnessing the biggest deportation since the Khmer Rouge genocide,” said MSF’s president, Claude Malhuret, in late 1985. For MSF, the decision of aid agencies, UN institutions and donor governments to help a totalitarian project like the Ethiopian resettlement programme was an exercise in deadly compassion and dangerous pity. As Claude Malhuret put it, Ethiopia demonstrated that it had become imperative to “clarify the complex relations that humanitarian action forms with a totalitarian regime; to mark out the indistinct but very real limit beyond which aid to victims was unwittingly transformed into support to their executioners.”..../snip