Three Famines (15 page)

In answering Lord Brougham, the Marquess of Westmeath eroded this sentimentality by saying that a great number of the people had not been evicted but had arrived without relinquishing their land – that is, had simply walked away from it. This created a legal trouble for the landlords, said the marquess, and inhibited their ability to obtain the abandoned land without complication. Obviously legal miscreancy on the part of those who fled muted the compassion the House felt for them.

Between 13 January and 1 November 1847, 278,000 Irish poured into Liverpool, 80,000 into Glasgow and some thousands more into Manchester. Throughout mainland Britain, nineteen relief officers and thirty Catholic priests caught cholera from them and died.

From 1849, when the police started keeping records of evictions, a further 250,000 persons (on top of those evicted in 1846–8) were formally and permanently evicted – the evictions thus continuing until 1854, well after the end of the famine. The most sweeping clearances and evictions recorded from 1849–54 occurred in Clare, Mayo, Galway and Kerry – that is, in the hardest-hit south-western and western counties that made up the collective regions of Munster and Connacht. The concentration of evictions was quite possibly the same in what had been some of the high days of the eviction process – between 1846 and the end of 1848. And the figures may be incomplete, since tenants sometimes feared eviction and clearance so much that they would unroof their own cabins, on condition that they were allowed to take away the timber and thatch, which they would not have been free to do had they been formally evicted.

By the late summer of 1847, some Irish were suddenly willing to emigrate of their own accord, proving anxious to flee a country they now considered accursed. In evictions, women’s grip on their doorposts could only have been loosened by the main force of dragoons and policemen. That so many should now go by their own volition was astonishing. Most of the people making for the ports desired to reach the fabled United States. The ships they boarded were of varying quality, but such was the impetus to escape that people were willing to sign on for dangerous autumn or even winter sailings. Some tenants who wanted to escape left in the middle of the night without telling anyone. On the public works, a name would be called out but no one would respond – this time not because of death, starvation or fever, but because the
owner of the name had gone to look for a ship. Most of those who were thinking of America were people who were not at the bottom of the pit and had some funds left at least to find a place on one of those untrustworthy vessels known as ‘coffin ships’. Few people from County Mayo and other western counties could afford even that.

In the ports, people were cheated out of their remaining funds by being sold false tickets or nautical instruments they were assured they would need at sea. Nor did the Americans look forward to the mass arrival of fever-stricken Irish. In early 1847, two new Passenger Acts were passed by Congress, raising the minimum fare from Ireland to America to £7 and regulating the numbers who could be carried on ships. But ships’ captains seemed to be able to get around the regulations. Through Castle Garden clearing station, just off lower New York, 850,000 Irish would enter that city alone in the next four years. Obviously not every one of them had paid £7 to get there; nor had the Irish accumulating in the streets of Boston or Baltimore, or moving down over the border from Canada.

Early in April 1848, Home Secretary Sir George Grey proposed a bill that would not only prohibit evictions without proper notice to the local Board of Guardians, but would also prevent the pulling-down of huts and houses. Although this bill quickly passed the Commons, it was attacked strenuously in the Lords, especially by Irish peers such as Lord Mont eagle. Monteagle, Thomas Spring Rice, former chancellor of the exchequer, was an interesting case. He saw no benefit in limiting the landlord’s right to evict, but his main reason for opposing the bill was that he was an apostle of the
benefits of emigration and he was in the process of introducing much of his tenantry to it, clearing them off his scattered properties in Shanagolden in Limerick on the banks of the Shannon, and pulling down their houses after they departed.

However, a number of positive signs attest his humanity. When the Office of Public Works was in arrears in his area during the famine, Monteagle advanced £4500 of his own money to keep them functioning, and, according to the letters he received from his apparently grateful former tenants after emigration, he had also tailored their rents during the dark years of the late 1840s. Monteagle estate ledgers show that rent-free accommodation and even pensions were allocated to widows among the tenants. Monteagle’s wife, Lady Theodosia, collaborated with him and did a great deal of what could be called the legwork among their tenants.

The British had put in place a scheme by which the money from the sale of Crown lands in Australia was used to pay bounties to ships’ captains for delivery of emigrants to the Australian colonies. To guarantee the health of emigrants on such a long journey, the shipowners were paid for each healthy passenger they landed in the Australian colonies. This was the scheme of which, to a large degree, Monteagle availed himself in order to accomplish a humane, if paternalistic, deportation of his peasantry. He had first made use of it in 1838. It was suspended in 1840 because of a depression in the Australian colonies, but it was renewed in 1847. Monteagle proposed an arrangement by which the tenantry were forgiven arrears, could sell up their effects and receive a grant of money if they quit their land. Should the shipping owners and immigration agents require a deposit, as in
some cases – dependent on family size and health – they did, Monteagle advanced it, the emigrants pledging to repay it out of wages earned in Australia. Monteagle not only put his former tenants on well-founded ships, but organised for their reception in Sydney and Melbourne.

The criteria for emigration under this scheme were well-defined and not everyone could be accepted. Just the same, throughout the remaining famine years and beyond, Monteagle immigrants, now settled in Australia, were able to send back money to enable further emigration, or to support those relatives who could not emigrate.

This does not mean there was not anger and resistance to Monteagle’s plans. A Patrick Trehy refused an offer of £25 to help his family emigrate. When he was evicted, he and a number of his family took advantage of the sum offered and went to Australia, no doubt harbouring bitter thoughts. Yet altogether, by comparison with Palmerston and others, Monteagle’s behaviour, admittedly combined with a desire to clear and agriculturally improve his land, did him considerable honour. A James Fitzgerald wrote to him from Melbourne in 1853, in a letter not uncharacteristic of others written to him by former tenants, in which he said, ‘Your benevolent and very kind letter dated January reached me safely and I can only say I cannot sufficiently thank Your Lordship for the great interest shown in our humble affairs.’ Fitzgerald went on to discuss paying off the £5 he owed Monteagle for the extra sum payable for the passage of his family, but then asked, ‘Permit me to call attention to the enclosed letter of credit for £15 … to defray first the cost of sending out John Dinnene … concerning whom all particulars can
be obtained from the Rev Father Michael McMahon, Parish Priest of Kilcolman.’ It would be preposterous to think of an evictee of Lords Palmerston or Brougham putting such trust in their former landlord’s hands.

Monteagle’s sense of appropriateness was expressed again in 1849, when what now would be called a public relations tour of Ireland was planned for Queen Victoria. He condemned it as a deceit ‘which was intended to give the lie to the appalling condition of the emaciated inhabitants of this country’. Nor was he the only member of the establishment to think so.

In Ireland and Ethiopia, at least, the amount of famine emigration sparked a further, increased emigration in the post-famine era, since emigrants knew that, on arrival, they would be greeted by their relatives who had earlier escaped the famine and its politics, and would find accommodation, jobs and the company of a familiar community of earlier emigrants.

Through death and emigration, the population of Connacht in the west of Ireland fell by nearly one in four by 1851, and that of Munster in the south and south-west by 22 per cent, while Ulster’s fell by 16 per cent and Leinster’s, the eastern region that included Dublin, by 15 per cent. The very mass of this sudden exit would create an overseas population of Irish who urged their siblings and parents to come and join them in some new land and sent money to help them on their way.

Between 1851 and 1861, a further 19 per cent from Munster and 10 per cent from Connacht and even more – 13 per cent – from Leinster, left the countryside of ‘Ireland of the Sorrows’ thinner in people, and more desolate. In 1879–81 another series of bad potato crops, low prices and poor grain harvests also produced chronic hunger, but no mortality on a mass scale. Yet there was a large increase in emigration. The Irish were not willing to risk the possibility of further famine.

So Ireland became the only nation in northern Europe to decline in population, to the extent that the all-Ireland population of 1841 declined from 8 million to a little over 5 million by 1881 and a little over 4 million by 1946. Though there had been considerable emigration from Ethiopia and Eritrea since the 1970s, and although a similar set of factors caused relatives of earlier emigrants to leave and settle in many countries on earth, it did not produce a decline in population comparable to Ireland’s. In 2003, the UN estimated the Ethiopian population to be 71.5 million (with an average life expectancy of 45 years). A 2009 estimate was 80 million, twice the number registered in the Derg’s imperfect census of 1984.

By the time normal life returned to Ireland in 1853 and 1854, the Irish population was two million fewer than in 1845. This made for a shortage of labour and a rise in wages. Families did not any more farm the small plots named ‘conacre’ in return for which they gave their labour to their landlord. The former owners of small farms targeted by the Gregory clause were, in large number, dead or had fled or – if they remained – were agricultural labourers. Since farms were larger, barley, oats, wheat and other grains were grown in unprecedented quantity, and that and the continually reducing numbers of
Irish remaining at home kept prices reasonable. So people did not depend on the potato as their major staple any more. The Lumper potato was, in any case, replaced by smaller crops of tastier ones, and ultimately bigger potato harvests occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after Louis Pasteur and Alexis Millardet had discovered at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1882 that bluestone (copper sulphate) solution could be sprayed on plants as a great preventative of fungal attacks on potato, grape, and other susceptible crops.

No such change in the land system occurred in Bengal. Whereas in Ireland by 1851 two million people had vanished – one in four people – the no-less horrifying Bengal famine killed one in twelve, the Ethiopian one in thirty. In neither place did the land system change as obviously as in Ireland. Rice remained the staple in Bengal, teff and cattle the staples of Ethiopia.

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EPTEMBER
1984 Ethiopia officially became a Marxist-Leninist state, with Mengistu Haile Mariam as secretary general of the newly formed Workers’ Party of Ethiopia. His position of secretary general, like his past eminence within the state, gave him added energy to pursue policies already under development, of the kind that had been tried earlier in the century in Russia, at massive human cost. These were policies he certainly believed in as an ideologue, but that would also have value in his war against rebels.

The evictions that occurred in Ethiopia at the height of the mid 1980s famine went under the titles of resettlement and villagisation. They were forms of Soviet-style collectivisation and, even though some Ethiopian peasants reluctantly and under pressure of hunger volunteered, both resettlement and villagisation were, in general, massively opposed by them.

Resettlement was one of Mengistu’s answers to the famine
and his other problems. Many outside observers argued that there was a sense in which the exhausted northern soil of Tigray and Wollo made resettlement from these regions an option for any responsible government. But, as run by the Derg, it was a debacle in which apparatchiks overrode the advice of experts in the Department of Agriculture. Under the pretext of resettlement, Mengistu was able to remove, as well as peasants, those he suspected of helping the revolution of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). He could use resettlement areas as rehabilitation centres for politically undesirable people. Administered not by experts in the field but by the chief of Mengistu’s secret police, Legesse Asfaw, resettlement would leave the Tigrayan rebels alone in a vacated landscape, one in which all their support had been stripped away.

Part of Mengistu’s desire for collectivisation and resettlement was frankly stated in these terms in a document produced by the Derg’s Council of Ministers. ‘Almost all of you here realise that we have security problems … the people are like the sea and the guerrillas are like fish swimming in that sea. Without the sea there will be no fish. We have to drain the sea.’

A further objective of resettlement was the desire to integrate the various Ethiopian tribes and nationalities. The fact that many Ethiopians favoured their ethnic identity over their national Ethiopian one was a great problem in Mengistu’s mind, as in the minds of the emperors before him. Over 60 per cent of Ethiopia’s 1,119,683 square kilometres was occupied by nomads who had no revolutionary sense at all. Properly mixed up among other ethnic groups by resettlement, people
would discover their common Ethiopian-ness. Also, Mengistu had an unquestioning Marxist belief, uninformed by much knowledge of what happened in the disastrous case of the Soviets, that the very act of resettlement would lead to the growth of abundant crops and new food surpluses. Finally, it could be used to remove the unemployed from the cities.

Within Mengistu’s Ethiopia, resettlement, or at least concentration on a smaller scale, had been in progress for some time, since the mid 1970s. Between 1975 and 1981, thousands of young men who were guilty of political impulses had been picked up on the streets of the cities and taken to a sweltering area named Humera near the Sudanese border to work on collective farms and act as a defence force against the incursions of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Most of those sent to Humera, or to Hamer Koko in Kafa province, which was in the southern corner of Ethiopia between Sudan and Kenya, died of hunger or disease. Those who found their way back to Addis were rounded up and returned to their camps in the wilderness.

Similarly, Dawit Wolde Giorgis had himself once tried to resettle 40,000 Ogadenian nomads in the Harar province. These were pastoralists who crossed from Ethiopia to Somalia and back again according to habit, rainfall, and available pasture. The reason for their resettlement was to improve their sense of Ethiopian national identity. Giorgis moved these people from the dry lowlands to a more tropical region, where, for the first time in their lives, they beheld and were terrified by crocodiles. He heard an elderly nomad woman proclaim, ‘In thirst or in hunger, oh Allah, content am I to suffer and die in the land and under the skies of my ancestors.
There is nothing like home.’ Subsequently, as dawn revealed one morning, all the nomads disappeared from the resettlement site. No such swift and easy departure would be available under Mengistu’s resettlement.

No one was to be resettled from the Ethiopian-held parts of Eritrea in the far north. If the process had begun there, the populace would have fled north
en masse
, into the sectors controlled by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, the Ethiopian rebels fighting for an independent Eritrea.

Resettlement would not only bring great pain but would reduce the amount of food being produced in the time of famine, and thus drive up prices while gouging the resettled Ethiopians.

The rationale for Mengistu’s other great plan for upheaval, villagisation – the drawing together of country people into newly built and gratuitously placed larger villages, which had not existed until now – was, according to the publicly proposed objective, to provide people more easily with schools and medicine and markets. Again, villagisation resembled the sort of collectivisation that occurred in the first decade of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and which there had created the catastrophic famine of the early 1920s. The Ethiopians hated it because it took and kept most of them a long way from their farms, as well as their churches and mosques, on whose succour they depended in bitter times. But for Mengistu it also had the benefit of clearing the countryside so that rebels were bereft of support and stood out in a vacated landscape. The hated new villages into which people were moved were called
safaratabia
– fake or artificial hamlets.

Wolde Selassie Ghebremarian was a Coptic priest from the north of the country who was affected by Mengistu’s series of forced resettlements. He had been living in an area held by the TPLF. The region’s cattle had been struck by disease in 1984, and the government spread a message that it would vaccinate all cattle free of charge at Adowa, an historic town in the north of Tigray. So the farmers rounded up 750 head of cattle and started out on the road. Wolde and the rest left their families behind in their village – in his case, a wife and three children. The group arrived in Adowa on 6 December 1984, took their stock to the cattle market and were at once surrounded by soldiers.

‘We shouted, who was going to take care of our cattle?… They answered that it would be no loss if we lost our cattle, the government was going to resettle us and would replace our cattle in the new settlement.’ This proposition did nothing for the people the men had left behind.

Locked up with other candidates for resettlement in a holding camp in Adowa, each farmer was fed two pieces of bread a day. The group saw the soldiers who guarded them feeding themselves out of bags of emergency grain marked with the logo of the European Economic Commission and the governments of Canada and West Germany. After eleven days, Soviet pilots transported Wolde and the others by helicopter south from Adowa to Makale – trucks would not have got through because the TPLF controlled the countryside – where a great holding camp for eventual resettlement was situated. (Another was at Debre Birhan, north-east of Addis in that city’s home province, Showa.) One of the survivors said that an uncountable number died
at Makale of exposure and disease. Wolde and his fellow cattle owners lived under guard in an open field without shelter. The night’s dead became visible at dawn. Those who escaped at night were killed, ‘sometimes as many as a hundred each night’.

Next, a relay of Soviet-made Antonov transports moved Wolde and thousands more to Bole Airport in Addis Ababa. These planes were unpressurised and were designed to carry fifty paratroopers, but 300–350 of the candidates for resettlement were crammed aboard each flight, the soldiers forcing aboard even the sick. At Bole Airport, those capable of standing came off the plane, then troops carried out the dead bodies and those incapable of movement, and the fire brigade hosed the pools of vomit and piss from the floor of the plane. Each peasant was now given one cup of water and then squeezed onto buses for the journey to Wollega province to the west of the country. Ninety-five per cent of the country’s buses would be used to accomplish the great clearances from north to south, from east to west.

Many more died during this next journey of two days or longer, in an atmosphere in which survivors said there was not enough room to breathe and where people were forced to relieve themselves on the floor. Wolde and the others finished their journey at the town of Asosa, humid jungle country in the lowlands near the Sudanese border. As another Wollo farmer would say, ‘For five days and nights we travelled by moonlight, darkness and daylight, and then they dumped us into the grass.’

Life in the artificially created villages would be testing and fatal for some, but living in their traditional villages before that had frequently been harsh too, because of military barbarism, the racial hatred that often spurred it, and the confiscation and destruction of food.

‘They destroyed our house and burned the Koran,’ claimed one Oromo man. ‘I have beautiful daughters that were raped. The Amharas did this.’

Such outrages against women were regularly reported. ‘The militia told the men to go to some place and the women to another. No Muslim men were allowed to be with their wives. Then five militia took each woman.’

The soldiers particularly liked to rape the wives of Coptic priests. Teenage boys were taken for the army, but younger boys were often shot or forced to dance around the bodies of their mothers.

Most of the refugees to Somalia and the Sudan claimed to have been arrested at various times and held to ransom by the army. The amounts involved were up to one hundred Ethiopian dollars, a relatively small amount, except for a farmer’s wife.

Villages suspected of supporting the Oromo Liberation Front were destroyed, and to the Oromo and other targets, the Amharic and the army were simultaneous entities. Yet, despite the blaming of the Amharic ethnic group, the government militias also contained Christian Oromo. ‘Three years ago,’ observed another Ethiopian refugee in the Sudan, ‘we were bombed because we were suspected of supporting the OLF. Before that we were bombed because we were suspected of supporting the Somalis.’ Even in the beginning of the
famine, the army and government militias were still doing their terrible work.

The army’s activities made the situation worse, according to refugees: ‘The Derg is one of the reasons people are hungry … I can’t even remember all the people who have had their crops burnt. The government always comes during harvest. The army took five hundred cows and oxen from my village, they burned people’s houses, and took honey, butter, and anything made of leather … they didn’t bother to carry the grain; they just burned it. The militia, their farmers from the area, they take our tools so they can use them … the army burned my grain in 1983 and they took twenty-four tons of honey.’

In 1984, said one refugee, the government had arrived at night, had burned his house and taken three cows. The military killed young people who might join the Tigrayan rebels, so that each village had to develop an armed guard, who kept watch and warned the people when the army was on the way. Another farmer refugee claimed that the Derg bombed local markets so that merchants would not go to them any more. It was because of the Derg that they were in Sudan, he said. Even with droughts, he claimed, he would have been able to trade and make a living. But not with the army.

According to the Tigrayan refugees, who came from the far north, from places like the ancient town of Axum, many escaped from the trucks when the army came to get them, but the good thing about the TPLF, they said, was that they did not prevent people from going back to their area to feeding centres, if they chose to. After all, apart from the danger of them being captured for resettlement, though that
happened rarely in food distribution centres, it was appropriate to the TPLF to have their sympathisers fed under the aegis of Mengistu.