Three Famines (11 page)

In November 1977, Colonel Atnafu Abate, a Derg moderate, presented himself at the Palace of Menelik for a conference and he, his bodyguards, drivers and assistants were assassinated downstairs in the palace cellar, which one member of the Derg called ‘the revolution’s shooting gallery’.

A by-product of all this slaughter was that Mengistu was killing off a number of independent thinkers who might have helped their fellow countrymen when the famine struck.

To get to absolute power, by 1978 Mengistu had taken an extraordinary toll of prominent figures: three heads of state – that is, the emperor and two chairmen of the Derg – and eight members of the original 120-strong Derg. Having acceded to the chairmanship and to total power, Mengistu expressed a particular admiration for Stalin – for his surgical ruthlessness towards counter-revolutionaries. He had emulated him and continued to do so. Stalin’s criminality in permitting up to 10 million Ukrainians and Russians to die of famine in the early 1930s must also have been, implicitly, admirable to Mengistu, given that it had swept counter-revolutionaries off the map.

By the late 1970s, Mengistu’s behaviour had predictably grown psychotic. He lived in the splendid palace the emperor had occupied, surrounded by servants in livery. The torture chambers and prison beneath the palace and its garden remained in operation, while Mengistu played tennis at ground level and afterwards ordered the assassination in the street of imprudent opponents.

He now began to distribute weapons to the Urban Dwellers’ Associations, known as the
kebeles
. They were made up of Derg supporters, local bullies and sometimes former criminals. His cry to the
kebeles
was, ‘We shall beat back white terror with red terror!’ or ‘Death to counter-revolutionaries!’ At a public rally, he suddenly produced two bottles of what appeared to be blood and smashed them to the ground either side of him, to reinforce his proposition, borrowed from Lenin, that the revolution needed to be fed with the blood of traitors.

The period from 1977–8 would be known as the Red Terror. Members of the Derg, and Mengistu himself, presented to the
kebeles
lists of suspect people for execution or imprisonment. Operatives of the East German Stasi gave the
kebeles
advice on tracking down the enemies of the regime. On the most remote suspicion, young men and women were shot dead in the street, and the
kebeles
, sometimes delivering the dead to the door of the family home, demanded payment for the lethal bullet. Other citizens were summarily executed and their bodies left where they lay. University students and professors were particularly vulnerable. In 1978, high-school students became the target, and 5000 of them were said to have been executed in one week. A Swedish observer saw some thousands of bodies of the young lying on the roads leading from the capital, which, like those felled by the Evil Days, were eaten by hyenas.

In prisons run by the secret police of Legesse Asfaw, guards augmented the torment of prisoners by using a nylon rope called ‘Mengistu’s necktie’ to kill or torment. The bastinado, an excruciating caning of the soles of the feet, was also
a common implement of torture and crippled thousands of Ethiopians.

Again, through his sundry assassinations, Mengistu was eliminating men and women who could have reacted with some efficacy to the coming famine.

Taking advantage of the disorder, Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre invaded Ethiopia in July 1977. The Somalis had been supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, which Mengistu and the Derg now began to court, Mengistu abandoning for good the emperor’s old alliance with the United States. The Soviet and Cuban military abandoned the Somalis, began to equip the Ethiopian army heavily with Soviet arms, and took part in driving the Somalis out of Ethiopia. It was Mengistu’s intention to deploy the tremendous amount of Russian
matériel
he had acquired into the subduing of rebel Eritrea and Tigray. Mengistu’s military association with Russia would have a fatal impact on the Ethiopian people. The falling-out with the West was acrimonious and accompanied by much vituperation on Mengistu’s part.

In the meantime, ‘land reforms’ were reducing the peasantry to a level of grain vulnerability they had not previously felt. Soon after the revolution, the Derg transferred all land to regional Peasant Associations, which would decide how much land a peasant would get for his own use. Though seven million peasant families in Ethiopia were granted land by their associations, the average grant was one-and-a-half hectares. A large amount of a farmer’s time was devoted to communal
labour on the food, which the association sold at a low rate to the state’s Agricultural Marketing Corporation (AMC). This communal, compulsory labour frequently did not leave farmers enough time to produce adequate food for their own survival. Their food production was also intruded upon by compulsory political classes, in which for some hours a day cadres instructed them on Marxist thinking.

Gradually the peasants lost faith in Mengistu and their Peasant Association leaders. They saw that the associations were well supplied with seed, at least until the famine started, but that the committee members cornered it for their own communal or individual use. The individual landholder now earned so little that he could not afford the price of fertiliser.

The AMC did exactly what Haile Selassie had done: its agents bought grain from five provinces to supply three cities: Addis Ababa, the capital; Dire Dawa, the major city in the east; and Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. The five provinces were Showa, the province in which Addis Ababa sat; Arussi, to the south; Gojjam and Wollega, to the west; and Gondar, to the north. It was not, however, for the sake of the Eritreans that Asmara was supplied, but for the sake of the army and bureaucrats stationed there. Just as the emperor had, Mengistu knew that in a primitive society keeping the cities happy would tend to keep him in power.

After the AMC had had its share of a declining farm output, the farmer was allowed to sell his produce on the local market, but found he could not afford cloth, sugar, salt and soap, even where these were available. Such was the system Mengistu had created to replace feudalism, and such was
the system operating, even before the initiator of the famine – drought – struck the landscape.

The failure of the
kremt
rains in mid 1982, and of both the spring
belg
and high summer
meher
rains in 1983, provided more than enough tension. But by then Mengistu’s attention was monomaniacally fixed upon the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution in 1984. At the apogee of the famine, he would ultimately spend $100 million upon the festivities.

When the northern provinces of Wollo and Tigray were afflicted by the failure of rains and then by famine, Mengistu seized on the pretext that their farming areas were environmentally degraded, as was in fact the case, to move thousands of northerners to the south, by force, in a massive program of resettlement. These people, particularly the Tigrayans, had in any case always been rebellious, and Mengistu’s motives were mixed, both ideological and military. The resettlement areas, with their inefficiencies, inequities, brutalities and lack of facilities and food, would bring about the deaths of a million people.

In the same way, Mengistu’s policy of villagisation, which ran parallel to resettlement, gathered together peasants into central villages and towns, often hours’ walk from their individual holdings. Those who resisted were asked, ‘Why should people have a right to be fed when they don’t listen to what we tell them is best?’ Villagisation would also make it less possible for peasants to grow a survival crop from which they could retain a small amount that could be sold for cash so they could buy soap or kerosene or other essentials.

As the anniversary of the revolution approached, people
were being driven onto the roads by hunger or had begun to die of famine diseases. In Addis Ababa, meanwhile, red flags decorated pillars and lamp posts, and images of Mengistu, Marx and Lenin were everywhere. Signs declared, ‘The oppressed masses will be victorious!’ ‘Marxist Leninism is our guideline!’ One slogan half admitted that there were problems out in the countryside: ‘Temporary natural setbacks will not deter us from our final objective of building Communism!’ Highways were constructed from the airport to Addis, and conference halls and a statue of Lenin went up in the middle of the city. A ten-year economic plan was put in place, based on a 680-page document, which did not mention famine. Mengistu insisted, when speaking to Dawit Wolde Giorgis, head of the RRC since 1983, that the drought and famine were mere temporary setbacks. He refused to leave the city and visit the countryside, where, on the 300-kilometre road between Addis and the city of Dessie to the east, he would have seen starving and half-naked people trying to sell their ancestral ornaments handcrafted from silver. Bureaucrats and foreigners drove out of town and bargained with the starving, but Mengistu refused to know anything of this trade outside his door. The drought, he said, had hit many African countries, and thus it was a pan-African event. Yet, though there was drought elsewhere, it was not causing the pain this one was and it was not ‘pan-African’. Given his politics, he could not use the term ‘act of God’, but the implication was that the matter could be left to nature to resolve.

The response from the West was slow, given Mengistu had as strong an antipathy for Western NGOs and relief agencies as the emperor had shown. When they did arrive and begin
their work, he did what he could both to thwart and control it, again diverting supplies to the cities and to his army. His expenditure on MIG jets, Antonov bombers, T-55 tanks and cannonry of all calibre remained an even greater scandal than his anniversary celebrations, but any relief organisation who complained about his bullying or fooling of agencies was expelled. Indeed, it has been an accusation directed at NGOs ever since that because Ethiopia in the mid 1980s was the chief arena for famine, many wanted to keep a foothold there and thus became complicit in Mengistu’s corruption, misdirection of aid and neglect.

G
IVEN THE CAPACITY
and the determination of governments to believe that the news of a famine outbreak is exaggerated, immeasurable lives must have been saved by those who tried to outflank government by alerting the world at large to the scale and gravity of events.

In the Irish case, the correspondents of the
Illustrated London News
, by letting the world know about the Irish famine and thus evoking relief, had a powerful but gradual impact on British and international opinion. The first reference to the famine in the
Illustrated London News
was on 18 October 1845, but its correspondents had covered earlier, related Irish events too, such as the 1842 season of need caused by local shortages, which affected labourers and the weavers in the north and resulted in attacks on potato stores by the hungry.

Each
Illustrated London News
story throughout the 1840s was accompanied by engravings of artists who travelled
through Ireland with the correspondents. One of these engravings was the picture of the woman begging at Clonakilty, mentioned earlier. The equally famous engraving of Bridget O’Donnell, a hollow-cheeked, withered, but still handsome, famished young woman dressed in rags of cloth, with her arms cast around her two equally thin and ragged daughters is – if the term can be tolerated – a classic image of
an Gorta Mór
. While the government invoked the workings of Providence and of the great economic machine, the correspondents and artists of the
Illustrated London News
brought the British public’s attention to the individual village, the individual sufferer, the individual corpse – whose name they often gave. It was their words and these images created from sketches made in the field by artists that riveted public attention, and that rivet us even now. Through those engravings, we see the deserted and roofless
clachan
, or communal village, the famished children digging futilely for potatoes, the evicted family in a ditch. Much of the credit for reporting the famine so graphically must go to the magazine’s founder and manager Henry Ingram, a printer who had made a fortune out of selling a patent medicine named Parr’s Life Pills and a man in his thirties when, in 1842, the
News
first appeared and he fulfilled his true ambition to own a magazine.

The
Illustrated London News
was probably considered populist and vulgar by the high priests and mediators of both Providence and rationalisation, but it is likely to have influenced the Society of Friends to take up their Irish endeavours and possibly gave impetus to the founding of the British Association by various British merchants and other businessmen
in January 1847 ‘for the relief of extreme distress in remote parishes in Ireland and Scotland’.

The
Illustrated London News
reported at great length from the epicentres of the famine – Skibbereen, Clonakilty and similar West Cork towns and their hinterlands. There were certainly other papers reporting the famine, including
The Vindicator
in Belfast, which covered the general famine but paid a lot of attention to Ulster. ‘The distress in Ballymacarrett [just outside Belfast] was the first cry of want that unhinged the fine philosophy that would starve the poor for the honour of the rich,’
The Vindicator
said on 22 April 1846.

In
The Nation
, the organ of the radical nationalist Young Ireland movement, Miss Elgee, a bourgeois Irish Protestant nationalist from Dublin, and the future mother of Oscar Wilde, wrote excoriating verse under the name
Speranza
.

John Mitchel, the son of a Unitarian Presbyterian from Newry on the border of the north, and a member of Young Ireland, rendered a radical by what he saw on his Irish travels, wrote
a great deal for
The Nation
. In the early summer of 1847, he journeyed through Connacht, where he and his companions came on a village in which they had been hospitably received two years earlier.

But neither Speranza nor John Mitchel nor
The Nation
nor
The Vindicator
were likely to be read by the British. On the other hand, the
Illustrated London News
, with its massive
middle-class readership, was considered by the majority of British readers an undoubted source of reliable news, and its images endowed the British public with a great portion of their sense of the broader world.

Some of the early reports of the
Illustrated London News
were highly dispassionate, but one of the earliest impassioned, intimate and graphic reports that there were ‘stern and striking realities of the sufferings of the people’ which should evoke ‘the sympathy of every well-regulated mind’ was from Cork and Tipperary in the south and south-west, namely the towns of Youghal and Dungarvan, where there had been food riots and ‘turn-outs for wages’, that is, demands for public employment. The reports said that the artist whose engravings appeared in the story was treated roughly while he was sketching in the street, and was asked that he promise mothers that their children, then engaged on public works, would be given wages higher than the five or six pence per labouring child, because it was insufficient to buy Indian meal.

The article mentions a boy called Flemming, who took part in a food protest and was shot in the knee and died slowly. Over fifty men were arrested by the authorities, and the
Illustrated London News
quoted an Irish correspondent as saying, ‘Never have I witnessed any scene so effecting as the meeting of the prisoners and their poor hungry wives and children.’

But at this stage the famine was just beginning, and in the New Year, on 16 January 1846, the
Illustrated London News
reported an increase in famine deaths. Buckley of Ballyderrane and Sullivan of Oyster Haven, first names not given, died with that suddenness that had begun to strike down
famished men and women. Buckley dropped dead on the public works after a journey of ‘three miles before day’. His wife said that she and the rest of her family lived thirty-six hours on wild weeds ‘to spare a bit of the cake for him’.

On 30 January an engraving appeared of a funeral at Skibbereen, a young corpse flung on a primitive dray accompanied by men in rags, one of them beating a bony horse. The accompanying story went as far as to challenge and even mock the remarks of the lord lieutenant governor of Ireland, Lord Clarendon (lord lieutenant governor was a post under the Crown, equivalent to that of the viceroy in India), on the terrible state of agriculture in Ireland. Clarendon declared that there was a problem, in that the Irish peasants ‘now prefer working on the roads, like convicts in a penal colony’, as if out of a perverse desire to avoid irregular and ill-paid day-labouring on farms. For the instruction of British readers, the correspondent wrote, ‘If one pound of meal per day keeps these people upon the roads to break stones, a higher rate of wages than is usually offered to them by those who hire labour … might draw them from the roads and the pound of meal’, that is, from the ration of corn permitted every day and paid for out of the money earned on the roads. But ‘the large farmers and gentry’ offered labourers only three pence or four pence a day, without any allowance of food. This wage of four pence could buy them even less food than they would get in the workhouse, said the
London Illustrated News.

The same article alerted the British middle class to the fact that the peasantry was full of fear because of the prosecutions proceeding for rural ‘outrages’ in Ireland – the government had the means to place informers throughout the country
and to reward them for results. ‘Even though innocent of insurrectionary sympathies, they fear an accusation.’ A man one of the correspondents spoke to near a railway line in Cork trembled when he was asked questions, for fear the
Illustrated London News
reporter was an informer, or a policeman in disguise.

The
Illustrated London News
trusted the information it was given in the field by a Cork physician named Dr Donovan, who was a respected and energetic medical practitioner and relentless reporter of the famine. It reprinted a report of Dr Donovan’s from the
Cork Southern Reporter
of 23 January 1847.

As evictions became more common through 1847 and 1848, the
London Illustrated News
took up this issue as well, producing an illustration on 16 December 1848, just in time for Christmas, of the unroofing of a cottage by force and the eviction of the family. In this engraving, sheriffs and constables and hired toughs (themselves in need of pay) look on, while the evicted father and his daughter plead with the
mounted bailiff, who retains the writ of eviction in his right hand against his saddle. A further engraving shows the father, mother and daughter ‘after the ejectment’, living in a shelter made of hay, a wagon wheel and other oddments. The father’s head lies on his forearm. ‘Those who laboured to bring those tracts [of farmland] to the condition of what they are, capable of raising produce of any description,’ said the
News
, ‘are hunted like wolves, or they perish without a murmur. The tongue refuses to utter their most deplorable, their unheard of sufferings.’

Such illustrated news brought the reality of the famine to many respectable British hearths in a manner few other media could achieve, and many were stirred to compassion.

A British newspaperman named Ian Stephens, who had lived in India for a considerable time and respected Indian culture, was the editor of the Calcutta English-language newspaper
The Statesman
of Calcutta, an organ that predictably enough had been a strong supporter of the British war effort in the East. It was Stephens who broke ranks to talk about what the government in Delhi was unwilling to. After the Bengal famine, he would write eloquently about the fact that it had not made an appropriate impact on the public or the civil authorities, and attributed some of the reason to the nature of starvation itself:

The Statesman
’s first editorial on the famine appeared on 22 August 1943, and Stephens had, from the point of view of the authorities, the gall to publish pictures of famine victims in the streets of Calcutta in the same edition. He was breaking no secret – the destitutes were there to be seen – but, as he said, human sensibility could get very much accustomed to them. He wanted to deliver the most permanent of records, and no doubt he wanted to influence Linlithgow in the dying days of his position as viceroy. He believed he was demonstrating the problem in the most potent manner, in a form in which both friends and enemies of Britain might read it.

The late emergence of a public stance by the press was very much influenced by the prior demands of war and of British loyalty, but also by the threat that the chief press adviser might close the newspaper down. Stephens would later say that the chief press adviser’s activities involved doing everything his office could to prevent the word of famine getting out. Cables from India to Britain were vetted to make sure words such as ‘famine’, ‘corpse’, ‘starvation’ were erased. At New Delhi’s instruction, the Bengal government ceased reporting daily deaths by starvation. Stephen’s bravery was all the more remarkable against such a background, and given
the fact that the previous editor of
The Statesman
had been removed by the authorities for ignoring their strictures.

The
Amrita Bazar Patrika
, a nationalist newspaper published in Bengali throughout the region, but also in English in Calcutta, more predictably, but with no less bravery, also published famine photographs, in the teeth of the chief press adviser’s warning that the newspaper was ‘very near the borderline and might get into trouble’.