|
Papers > Politics > Famine in Ethiopia
Featured Papers from Direct Essays |
|||
1. Ethiopia and Their Culture
|
|||
This is a preview of a paper to view the full text you need to signup and login.
Famine in Ethiopia |
|||
|
Famine in Ethiopia In “Revolution, War-Famine, and Two Models of Relief” Alex de Waal wrote of the mid-1980s famine in northern Ethiopia that “one of the most written-about famines is one of the least understood” (1997: 132). ... The added “complication” of the civil war in Ethiopia, how it related to the famine and how poorly it is understood even now, calls into question the possibility of creating a “unified” history of the famine at all. Perhaps by sifting through the accounts that were published both during the famine and shortly after it officially ended, and cross-referencing them with accounts that can be given now that the opposition in the civil war is more or less firmly in power, someone could make a coherent story of what happened. ... This paper will look at three different accounts of the famine in terms of the specific agendas of their authors and what they reveal of the events of the time in light of their understandings of concepts such as “famine,” “relief,” and even “Ethiopia.” The three accounts – Fau: Portrait of an Ethiopian Famine by James Waller; Politics and the Ethiopian Famine 1984-1985 by Jason W. ... Holcomb, and Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia by Dawit Wolde Giorgis – were selected because each one is a product of a different faction involved in the famine relief operations, and each one reveals a different set of understandings and interpretations of the events that can help us to see why the question of what “really” happened is so problematic. Additionally, each account is professed to be based on first-hand knowledge of the famine, either as directly experienced by participants in the relief operations (Waller and Dawit ) or as reported by refugees in Sudan (by Clay and Holcomb). ... I will focus on the approach each writer takes to the famine and its story, as well as how some of the major actors in the story (the international relief agencies, the Ethiopian government, the opposition movements, and the famine victims) are depicted and the assumptions that are thus revealed. James Waller’s Fau: Portrait of an Ethiopian Famine, according to its introduction, “deals with the Ethiopian famine in a broad, historical sense, but focuses its attentions primarily on the 40,000 refugees at Fau as a microcosm – a portrait of the famine” (p. ... Fau was a set of three refugee camps opened in Sudan in December 1984 to accommodate refugees from northern Ethiopia, particularly the region of Tigre. ... He lived and worked at Fau for 1 ½ years, longer than any other relief worker at that camp: “I was the only field worker to be present at the Fau refugee camp from the beginning to the end; to see the arrival of the refugees at Fau, the death and desolation of the early months, the establishment of the medical and feeding programs, the refugees’ gradual return to health, and finally the dismantling of the camp and the refugees’ departure back to Ethiopia” (ix-x). ... The story of Fau is a story of triumph against the odds, the perseverance of the forces of good (the relief workers and the innocent victims) over the forces of evil (famine and the “conditions”). ... Before delving into Waller’s account of the famine, a few words should be said about the IRC. ... (One connection to think about here is that Sudan was also the main route for funneling the Falasha, Ethiopian Jews, out of Ethiopia into Israel at the time of the mid-1980’s famine. ... The IRC refugee camps in Sudan are not mentioned in the organization’s history as given at the website, although they are mentioned in an article on current involvement in Sudan, and another article on current involvement in Ethiopia mentions “a massive relief effort in Ethiopia during its famine in 1984. ... He gives brief, somewhat dramatized accounts of their lives, which also give the reader a quick glimpse at certain aspects of life in northern Ethiopia – arranged marriages, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the rural diet. ... His account of Goay Gabrehewit’s life is the most detailed of the three, recounting her marriage and the fortune of her family before and during the famine, up to their decision to join a group going to Sudan organized by the Relief Society of Tigre (REST), the humanitarian arm of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), one of the secessionist movements operating in Ethiopia at the time. ... By individualizing and personalizing the experience of the famine in this way, Waller seems to be trying to get the reader to think of the 40,000 refugees in the Fau camps as individuals, each with similar tragic stories to tell. ... Aside from the other two refugees whose stories are told in the beginning – Kasai Maskal, a young man studying to be a priest until he “gave up forever his lifelong vocation of becoming a servant of God” in order to help REST move famine victims to Sudan, and Ngistie Abraha, a young woman whose children die and whose husband contracts a serious case of malaria during the journey to Sudan – Waller peoples his account with plenty of individuals. ... Like Waller, though, we never get to know these people outside of their status as “famine victims. ... But this only adds to their heroism as they strive to overcome these highly unpleasant and dangerous elements to help the famine victims (who are also putting up with these hardships, in addition to their malnutrition). Waller’s view of the famine and its causes is worth examining. His first sentence gives what he seems to believe is the major cause: “Three successive years of crop failures led to the great Ethiopian famine of 1984-85” (ix). His “Background” section discusses the causes of the famine exclusively in terms of drought and resulting crop failure. The three famine victim biographies in the beginning of the book emphasize Tigre’s arid landscape. ... ” Thus, the famine was caused exclusively by drought, and the severity of its effects resulted from the drought’s duration. ... No one was starving; there was no danger of famine during the coming year. (121) The coming of the rain eliminated the “famine,” while other problems that had arisen which could impair food production, such as the deaths of farmers and oxen, were not considered to be causal factors of starvation. ... In justifying the lack of international response to a famine warning issued by REST in January 1983, Waller indicates that REST was seen as a branch of the TPLF, and that no international organization would have wanted to be seen helping “a little-known guerilla group” (24). ... He goes on to say that REST was generally not trusted by Western officials because the organization was thought to fabricate warnings of famine in order to get support. The behavior of the Ethiopian government went in the opposite direction, denying the existence of famine in order to make the socialist regime seem capable of handling its problems. ... In spite of this, the government apparently remained the only “legitimate” channel for international aid to the famine victims. ... The fact remains that he would probably never have met any of these refugees if REST hadn’t led them from Tigre into Sudan as “an act of desperation” springing from lack of government or international reaction to the famine conditions in Tigre (30). In the end, REST was responsible for bringing over 300,000 famine victims from Tigre to Sudan. ... In a subsequent telephone conversation, IRC’s Deputy Director of Operations worldwide, “perhaps moved by NBC’s broadcast [of BBC famine footage] a week earlier, exclaimed, ‘To hell with budgets! ... (116) Lest we should doubt the remarkable success of the IRC efforts, Waller situates it in a larger scale: There had been a general improvement in most of the famine-affected areas of Africa over the past year. ... In Ethiopia, in the Sudan, assistance was even getting through to Chad. ... The Fau camps, and specifically the IRC’s efforts there, were an exemplar of famine relief operations. One last area that remains to be explored is Waller’s attitude towards the Ethiopian government and its role in the famine. The other two accounts, Dawit and Clay and Holcomb, implicate government policies as at least partial causes of the famine. We have already seen that in Waller’s view, the failure of the rains for three successive seasons was the cause of the famine; he does not examine the impact of any government policies that may have exacerbated the situation. We have also seen, in his discussion of international responses to the famine, that he saw the Ethiopian government as the only avenue for delivering aid within the country (in spite of their bombing of refugees headed for Sudan), and that the activities of the TPLF prevented effective relief in large areas of Tigre. In his final chapter, he briefly describes the Ethiopian government’s relocation program, because 200 escapees from a relocation center in southern Ethiopia arrived at Fau, “after being forced there from their homes in Tigre by Ethiopia government troops” (119). Waller describes the relocation program as the Ethiopian government’s response to the famine. ... “The idea held merit: famine victims would be removed from densely populated areas of rocky, overcultivated, overgrazed and depleted soil and limited access and be deposited in areas of low population density, lush vegetation, and fertile soil, and easy accessibility” (119). ... Waller even reports that Mèdecins Sans Frontiers was expelled by the Ethiopian government in December 1985 “for publicly charging that between 50,000 and 100,000 famine victims had died as a result of being transferred forcibly to the south. ... He wants to believe in the nobility of the foreign relief agencies, so in cases where they might be implicated in exacerbating the situation, he focuses on their good intentions and their position between a rock (the famine) and a hard place (politics). ... Clay and Holcomb, in their study of Politics and the Ethiopian Famine 1984-1985, have a very different approach to these issues. ... As they explain in their preface, this book was initially written as a report for relief agency personnel involved in famine relief in Ethiopia. It mainly contained information that they thought was “necessary to discern the impact of humanitarian assistance on agricultural production in the context of the Ethiopian famine” (xi). The second edition of their report was written to address the needs of a more general audience when they found that there were many other people who wanted “first-hand accounts of the Ethiopian famine from peoples directly affected by it” (xi). ... 2 billion spent on humanitarian assistance to Ethiopia in a single year. ... This belief led them to seek out refugee testimony, as the refugees were the only people “with access to first-hand knowledge of the conditions that led to the famine in areas inaccessible to outside observers” (5). Holcomb apparently worked among the Oromo of Ethiopia at some point as well, because it is mentioned that she speaks Oromifa, the language of the Oromo. One section of Chapter II, “The Creation of the Ethiopian Empire: Background to the Current Crisis” is devoted to the situation of the Oromo of Wollo Administrative Region, one of the areas affected by the famine, and their suffering under Amhara nationalism from the rule of Theodoros (1855) onwards. Quite a lot of attention is paid to the Oromo throughout the study, with chapters VII, VIII, and IX devoted largely either to Oromo refugees from resettlement camps in Ethiopia or refugees in camps operated by the Oromo Relief Association (ORA) in Sudan. ... Politics and the Ethiopian Famine has a very different approach and feel from Fau. ... Whereas Fau was intended to tell a fairly limited story about the success of a specific refugee relief operation, Clay and Holcomb are trying to fill a perceived gap in information about the causes of the famine and the impact of government policies and relief efforts on agricultural productivity in the famine areas. ... For example, they explain that they were not able to interview people in Ethiopia because of restricted access; nor did they interview any Eritreans in Sudan, who were at different refugee centers from the ones visited for this study. ... It presents an overview of the 1984-85 famine and the international response to it from its “discovery” by the Western media in October 1984. The immediate large-scale response to the airing of BBC footage in the West was a cause of concern “for persons who were familiar with Ethiopia and its problems…about the incompleteness of the public record regarding [the famine’s] causes” (1). ... (This approach to famine relief is evident in Waller’s account.) The main story of the famine for the Western public was the delivery of food, but by 1985, questions about political and military “complications” arose, though “the issues of how the wars had contributed to food shortages and famine and how food assistance was used as a weapon were not clearly spelled out” (4). Clay and Holcomb also explore the explanations of the famine offered by the media, which were basically failure of the rains and the peasants’ inability to respond because of poor farming practices and general underdevelopment. ... They found that the organizations did not want their names associated with anything that might criticize the Ethiopian government: A typical response was, “We depend upon this type of information to plan our programs, yet we cannot collect it or even be seen to support its collection without jeopardizing our relief efforts in Ethiopia. ... This was our introduction to the subtle yet highly effective silence that surrounded the transfer of unprecedented amounts of relief supplies into Ethiopia. (6) This necessitated that their research be funded independently from any group involved in famine relief in Ethiopia, and set them apart from the “relief establishment,” able to pursue their own agenda. ... “Many of the causes of the famine are rooted in the relations between historically constituted nations, something which became clear through the course of the research” (10). Their history of Ethiopia begins with Menelik II’s expansion and consolidation, military victories which created boundaries “no less arbitrary than those created by competing European colonial powers in the rest of Africa” (11). The historical background that Waller provided in Fau only touched on the feudal land tenure system under the Emperor Haile Selassie, the 1943 revolt of the Tigrean National Movement, and the 1973 famine that precipitated the military coup overthrowing Haile Selassie. His description of the land tenure system was fairly simple: “Throughout the ages in Ethiopia, landless peasants, or serfs, have cultivated and worked the fields, receiving only one-fourth of the harvests. ... Rather than a single, unified state extending back in time for centuries, Clay and Holcomb argue that Ethiopia should be seen as an empire of diverse national, cultural, and religious identities which were brought together relatively recently by force, and which continue to exist in a state of conflict. Humanitarian assistance in the 1984-85 crisis, they argue, became just another way of coercing peasants: “famine policy, including resettlement and villagization, must be seen in light of the history of interactions among the peoples of the Ethiopian empire,” which is a history of subjugation and resistance (35). At this point, before we have even reached the results of the surveys, we can already see the authors’ perspectives on the causes of the famine. ... The authors report that “Joseph Collins (personal communication) and numerous other observers driving east and south from Addis Ababa during the crucial 1984-85 famine witnessed unharvested fields even near the main roads” (25). This is very different from Waller’s emphasis on the failure of the rains as the single cause of the famine. Determining the short- and long-term causes of the famine should be, according to the authors, central to effectively designing and implementing relief programs. ... Ethiopian government statements about the causes of the famine included drought and other natural factors, and the failure of the West to provide aid when the rains initially failed. ... The relationship between the 1984-85 famine and Dergue policies and practices is further developed in the subsequent chapters, which present the survey results. For example, in a section entitled “The Impact of Army Activities and Government Policies on Agricultural Production in Tigray – Causes of Famine,” the authors state that “when asked directly why there were food shortages in their village, refugees indicated, in order of importance, that insects, drought, and the army were responsible” (61). ... ) In their conclusion, the authors discuss the dimensions and the long-term causes for the famine. ... They distinguish long-term causes of famine from causes of hunger in 1984-85. ... In the southwestern regions of Wollega, Illubabor, and Kefa, “the intensification of resettlement, which required indigenous people to supply land, houses, food, equipment, and services to arriving settlers, introduced famine where it had not been known recently, and displaced families within Ethiopia as well as across the border into Sudan” (192). Even though the goal of Clay and Holcomb’s research was to provide data to assess the efficacy of relief programs currently operating or being planned in Ethiopia, their report contains little information on these programs. ... They reiterate that governments and agencies offering humanitarian assistance do not have an adequate understanding of the famine’s causes. “While their assistance, they claim, feeds the hungry, they fail to address the issue of whether their assistance will eradicate or exacerbate the conditions that led to the present famine. ... Because Ethiopian government policies are responsible for the famine-related deaths, “the provision of ‘humanitarian’ assistance, with no questions asked, helps the Ethiopian government get away with murder” (193). ... In Clay and Holcomb’s account, the liberation fronts saved people by removing them from famine-stricken areas, helping to run the refugee camps and holding centers in Sudan, and, in parts of Ethiopia held by them, redistributing land to improve agricultural productivity. ... We already know from Waller’s account that they were among the first to try to warn the international community about the impending famine conditions. |
|||
To link to this page, copy the following code to your site:
Paper Information |
|||||
Title: Famine in Ethiopia
|
|||||
Signup & Login |
|||||
If you don't currently have a login then Signup here |
|||||
| Pre-Written Papers | |||||
|
|||||
| Custom Papers | |||||
|
|||||
Copyright 2003-2008 doingmyhomework.com. All rights reserved.