Ethiopia - another famine, another avoidable disaster
Population explosion and a misguided land policy - two reasons why Addis Ababa is the architect of its own misery
Rosemary Righter
August 20, 2008 (The Times, UK) - It was at a railway crossing near Diri Dawa, the provincial capital in the Ethiopian Ogaden desert, that I saw them: small children's hands, blackened by sun, clutching at the slats of a cattle truck dumped on a siding. The year was 1984, the height of the Ethiopian famine that claimed about a million lives. These young things must have expired, hours later, of heat and thirst in temperatures peaking at about 48C, in the truck where they had deliberately been left to die.
I know it was deliberate because I took quick photographs, muttered a few words they couldn't understand, and headed in to Diri Dawa to get help. The famine relief office officials shrugged and directed me to the military police commander. He cut me short: yes, he knew where they were. They were ethnic Somali kids - Somalis, the majority population of the Ogaden, had been in rebellion against Ethiopian rule for years - and they had been caught throwing stones at a train.
But they would die, I persisted. He lit a cigarette. “So what: they knew the risks and they must pay the price.”
You did not have to be caught throwing stones to “pay the price” in 1984. That famine in the Ogaden, the worst-affected region in Ethiopia, was far deadlier than it need have been because, until the international outcry forced it somewhat to relent, the Marxist Mengistu dictatorship blocked food aid to rebel areas, using it as a weapon of war.
What the world saw