webmaster
© Copyright DEHAI-Eritrea OnLine, 1993-2010
All rights reserved
From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Sep 07 2010 - 09:26:39 EDT
The Hazards Of Doing Good
>From Live Aid in the mid-1980s to today, Western attempts to help
famine-plagued Ethiopia have had little effect. Peter Gill explains why in
"Famine and Foreigners." William Easterly reviews.
By WILLIAM
<http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=WILLIAM+EASTERLY&bylinesear
ch=true> EASTERLY
SEPTEMBER 7, 2010
If it were possible to sum up in one sentence Ethiopia's struggles with
famine over the past quarter-century, I'd suggest this: It's not the rains,
it's the rulers. As Peter Gill makes clear in "Famines and Foreigners," his
well-turned account of the country's miseries since the 1984-85 famine and
the Live Aid concert meant to relieve it, drought has not been as
devastating to Ethiopians as their own autocratic governments.
Ethiopia is a classic example of Amartya Sen's dictum that famines don't
occur in democracies, only under tyrannies. The "foreigners" in Mr. Gill's
story either didn't know about this sad fact of life or chose to ignore it.
In any case, the celebrities and humanitarians who rushed to the aid of
starving Ethiopians in the mid-1980s unwittingly supported the very people
most responsible for those grim days.
The Derg, the brutal Marxist junta running Ethiopia at the time, contributed
to the 1984 famine by forcing farmers to sell crops to the state at low
prices. Many farmers instead consumed much of what they grew. The tradition
of Ethiopians in areas with surplus food selling it to those in
famine-stricken areas was thus disrupted.
The Derg, who had come to power in the mid-1970s after a famine discredited
Emperor Haile Selassie, further exacerbated the country's hunger problems
with a military campaign-against rebels from the Tigrayan region in the
north-that deliberately targeted food production and trade. A government
official said at the time: "Food is a major element in our strategy against
the secessionists."
And then the Derg forced people to resettle in the southern lowlands from
the parched northern highlands, partly in an effort to undermine the
recruiting efforts of the Tigrayan rebels. One instrument of coercion: the
relief supplies sent by well-meaning foreigners. The Derg denied food and
medicine to anyone who refused to resettle. The refugees arriving in the
lowlands found unfamiliar diseases and unsanitary conditions. The veteran
aid writer Alex de Waal, assessing this era in Ethiopia, concluded:
"Resettlement certainly killed people at a faster rate than the famine." The
aid also allowed the government to reduce its own spending on the domestic
emergency and instead buy imported arms, which amounted to billions of
dollars at the height of the famine. It took until 1991 for the guerrilla
alliance to finally oust the regime.
Fast-forward to the present: Although Stalinist Marxism is done, not much
else has changed. The former Tigrayan rebels, led by Meles Zenawi, now rule
Ethiopia. The country's agriculture remains in what Mr. Gill calls "a state
of almost permanent crisis." A famine in the south in 2000 escaped much
international notice while the government was busy prosecuting a war against
neighboring Eritrea. In 2008, the Ethiopian army conducted a
counterinsurgency campaign in the south, attempting to put down a rebellion
in its Somali region amid a food crisis there. Human Rights Watch accused
Mr. Meles's forces of "demonstration killings," torture, torching
villages-in sum, "war crimes and crimes against humanity."
Mr. Gill captures the brutality of the Meles regime, but he does not say as
much as he might about the government's failure to address Ethiopia's
perpetual food shortages. He supportively describes Mr. Meles's decision to
continue the Derg's policy of government ownership of all land. One searches
in vain for a suggestion that letting farmers own their land might be a good
idea, giving them incentives to prevent erosion and invest in soil
fertility.
Mr. Meles's authoritarian stripes make life awkward for Westerners who want
to aid Ethiopians. Mr. Gill quotes Mr. Meles's writings on the
"developmental state," which conveniently for the ruler "will have to be
undemocratic in order to stay in power long enough to carry out successful
development." Elections in 2005 were almost certainly rigged, and critics
were jailed in the aftermath. Public protests were suppressed, with hundreds
killed. Mr. Gill speaks to a source "surprisingly close to government" who
tells him that security forces opened fire "deliberately to show who was in
charge."
The timing could not have been worse. In 2005, Mr. Meles was also serving on
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Commission on Africa, a high-profile
panel whose report called for increased aid to Africa. The G8 summit in
Gleneagles, Scotland, in July 2005 was focused on Africa-particularly in
response to the Blair commission's report. The Live 8 concerts held at that
time were an homage to the Live Aid concert two decades earlier and aimed at
mobilizing public pressure for the G8 to indeed increase African aid.
Yet few reporters covering the G8 summit, and surely few members of the Live
8 concert audiences around the world, seemed to grasp the key role played by
Mr. Meles, an autocrat who had just rigged an election, killed demonstrators
and imprisoned opponents. It was the political cluelessness of Live Aid all
over again.
In recent years donors have steered aid away from Ethiopia's central
government and toward local governments. Such efforts have had little
effect, though, since the former controls the latter. If anything, the Meles
regime has become harsher still. In "Famines and Foreigners," Mr. Gill shows
us the nexus of politics and aid at the core of Ethiopia's famines. Surely
little good can come of Westerners offering their help to Ethiopia in
ignorance of the cruel way the country is governed.
Mr. Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University, is the author
of "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done
So Much Ill and So Little Good."
bkrvfamine
Famine and Foreigners
By Peter Gill
(Oxford, 280 pages, $27.95)
----[This List to be used for Eritrea Related News Only]----