Three Famines (24 page)

Under the rebels’ political contract, Muslims and Coptic Christians were fed the same ration. Such equity was not pure charity – it was essential for the unity of the rebel front. But nomads, whose nationality was less certain, were also fed. One night, after reaching a spot in which to sleep, in a dry riverbed, the party I was with was woken at dawn by nomads, who had slept in the riverbed too and were pounding mortars with pestles, grinding coffee, all around us. Within half an hour, even apart from the risk of bombing, the riverbed was uninhabitable because of heat. The nomads, members of a tribe named the Hadarab, their coffee drunk, withdrew to a food depot hidden among the trees where, safe from any overview by Antonov bombers, food distribution commenced. Perhaps the EPLF and ERA were trying by these means to give the nomads a sense of being Eritrean, but it did not matter what the motives were – it mattered that the social contract between the rebels and their people be observed and their countrymen not be allowed to starve.

Similarly, the connection between the Tigrayans and the people under their control became a social and political contract – food would be justly distributed by REST in return for loyalty. The rebel forces were also fed from part of this aid, just as Ethiopian forces were on aid Mengistu had commandeered. ERA and REST had stepped in to supply the succour that the emperor and then the Derg would not.

The political-contract approach did not operate under the same degree of moral pretension that characterised some Western aid, and yet it was more effective. Perhaps it should be the future of all government famine efforts, although a tyrannical government like that of Mengistu saw no need to recognise or honour such a contract with its own people.

For voluntary agencies throughout the world, Mengistu’s famine and war raised the question of how far an NGO should go in cooperating with a tyrannous regime. Should a relief agency feed some of the people while fully knowing that food will be diverted and that their intended mercy will not be extended to troublesome regions, people or unpopular tribes?

It has been argued that aid agencies will collaborate rather than be expelled from a region considered favourable for their own fundraising. In Ethiopia, they had the lesson before them of Médecins Sans Frontières – Mengistu had expelled this agency for criticising his policies and his squandering of money on armaments.

Relief agencies compete for every compassionate dollar, are institutional, are afflicted with a corporatist outlook – all these are accusations that have become increasingly common. It is said by some that when aid workers gather for a drink in Asia or Africa, or anywhere else on earth, efficacy becomes a major topic of conversation, with some of them having become doubters of their own processes – efficacy agnostics. This is not to cast doubt on the goodwill of agencies or their
volunteers. But after all this time, it is obvious that emergency and development aid from voluntary agencies have failed to develop Ethiopia beyond subsistence, beyond dependence and beyond the most primitive services of transport and health and education. Ethiopia remains a perpetual sick man, and cynics wonder if this situation does not greatly suit both those holding power in that country, and those agencies who want to operate in, and have news to impart about the place.

I
F MANY IN
the British government approved of the sad but providential scythe that reduced the Irish population to a desirable level, in Ethiopia another version of Providence – Marxist theory as interpreted by Mengistu – was at work. But twentieth-century famines in Russia might be seen as even more nakedly driven by doctrine than Mengistu’s famine.

The initiating principles for the Russian famine of 1921–2 were drought and abnormally heavy frost in 1920, but the regions that were most stricken were those in which armed squads had rampaged in previous years, requisitioning food to feed the cities and the army. In the Saratov province south of Moscow, where a brigade known for its brutality collected the requisition, the food levy left villagers stripped of any emergency supply at all. Methods used to gather more food still included holding children to ransom, and the whipping,
torturing and execution of peasants. Requisition battalions would shoot dead any peasants who resisted them, using as justification the cry that those who were not willing to surrender their essential food were
kulaks
– bourgeois farmers driven by capitalistic motives. Some Red officials in the districts tried to temper the requisition process, and warned Moscow that no more could be squeezed out of the countryside. But no one listened.

One focus of the famine was the Volga region, where the steppes had turned to dust. The big industrial towns of the Don Basin to the south were stricken too. Then there was a second harvest failure in 1921, as in the previous year. Any growth that had occurred was destroyed in large part by rats and plagues of locusts. These alone were not sufficient to cause the famine. There had always been a store of communal grain for the village to fall back on. But it was either taken, or did not exist, because to escape further levies peasants had retreated to subsistence farming – producing just enough for their families to live on. In Samara province nearly two million people, three-quarters of the population, were suspected to be dying from hunger by the autumn of 1921, and the final number of dead was 700,000, there alone.

As people starved, the predictable typhus and cholera became common killers. Peasants ate grass, roof thatch, ground acorns, sawdust, moss and animal manure. They hunted rats and domestic pets. They devoured cigarette butts. Those with enough strength fled to the towns, if possible taking their scarecrow horses with them to exchange for bread. Vast crowds tried to catch trains to Moscow, but the government put limitations on travel to prevent the spread
of famine diseases. The woman of Clonakilty reappeared in myriad form in the Volga region, and madness crept on and cannibalism began. So did it increasingly in other regions. A Russian from the steppes was convicted of eating several children, and in his confession declared that in his village everyone ate human flesh but pretended they didn’t. There were several cafeterias in the village, he declared, and all of them served up the flesh of children.

That winter, people stacked the dead in barns as a food source. Corpses were even stolen from graveyards. If any of this was worse than Bengal or Ethiopia or Ireland, it has to be taken into account that the Russian peasant was already demoralised by the reality of Bolshevik collectivisation. It was often compassion for one’s family, as well as the individual derangement of starvation, that drove people to cannibalism. One doctor who committed cannibalism wrote of ‘the insuperable and uncomfortable craving’ which people acquired for the flesh of the dead.

All the requisitions of food in the countryside did not save the middle class of the cities. At Moscow University, said one survivor, a professor hanged himself, Russia’s foremost geologist took potassium cyanide, and as for the rest of the faculty, they were dying of influenza, pneumonia and cholera.

There was the familiar late acknowledgement of famine’s existence by government. Maxim Gorky, however, wrote an appeal to the world, which began, ‘Tragedy has come to the country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mendeleyev, Pavlov, Mussorgsky, Glinka and other world-prized men.’ The All-Russian Public Committee to aid the hungry was founded as a result of Gorky’s appeal to Lenin. Constantin Stanislavsky
was a member, as was Alexandra Tolstoya, the writer’s daughter, who had already suffered at the hands of the Cheka, the secret police. Prince Lvov, former Tsarist cabinet minister, collected aid in France. President Herbert Hoover offered to send the American Relief Administration (ARA) to Russia, on the conditions that it was allowed to operate independently of government and that US citizens be released from Soviet gaols. But Lenin was furious at the offer. Even the Gorky-instigated public committee was closed down for having received American aid. All its office holders except Gorky and one other were arrested by the Cheka and accused of counter-revolutionary activities. Gorky, admired universally, was urged by Lenin to go overseas for his health. Shocked by the way the authorities had handled the famine, Gorky left Russia.

The ARA did manage to operate in Russia and at the height of its activities was feeding ten million people a day. Its donations of seed made it possible for a new harvest to be planted, and the harvest of 1922–3 helped bring an end to the famine. The Bolsheviks – perhaps not entirely without some justification, but certainly with paranoia – accused the ARA of spying and of trying to discredit and overthrow the Soviet regime. So the central government interfered relentlessly with ARA’s operations – again a pattern that would be seen in Mengistu’s Ethiopia later in the century.

Seven million children would become the orphans of the famine. Some of them had been abandoned by their parents. They lived in railway stations, abandoned houses, building sites, dumps, cellars and sewers. Nearly all of them became child prostitutes.

If anything, ideologically induced famine would be more naked still with Stalin in the 1930s. There was a bad harvest in 1932. Stalin kept up grain exports from Russia throughout the famine years that followed. Cannibalism was common in this period as it had been in the early 1920s. But police and army and party officials were set the task of ensuring that the economic and political changes made by Stalin and the politburo in 1928 would stay intact. These had given priority to heavy industry at the expense of the production of food. Marxist theory overruled extremities of want. By December 1931, peasants were again eating dogs, horses, bark and rotting potatoes. An American Communist visited a village near Kharkov in the Ukraine. He found only one mad woman left alive, and rats feasting on the dead. Just the same, on 6 June 1932, Stalin and Molotov issued a joint statement to the effect that no deviation regarding amounts of food or delivery deadlines could be permitted. Stalin saw the famine as an affront to him and the Central Committee. He wrote, ‘The Ukraine has been given more than it should get.’ He suggested to one of the Central Committee who had reported on the famine that he was simply a good storyteller, ‘fabricating such a fairytale about famine!’ He urged that the man, Kaganovich, who had had a great deal to do with the planning that created the famine in the first place, should join the Writers’ Union, where he could concoct stories and fools could read them. But other members of the Central Committee knew what was happening in Ukraine – the people in the countryside boarding trains for Kiev and arriving there as corpses. Stalin remained firm in denial, speaking of the ‘glaring absurdities’ of the news of the emergency.

No one knows how many died for the sake of feeding those who built smelters and tractors, but it may have been as high as 10 million, as Stalin himself seemed to believe. During World War II, he told Churchill that he had been forced by famine to destroy 10 million. It was fearful, he confessed, and the process lasted four years. But, ‘It was absolutely necessary … it was no use arguing with them.’ Naturally, at the time of the famine, there was an anti-government political reaction in the regions, which the state security police, the OGPU, repressed by its customary vigorous methods.

In northern China, drought was a great trigger for famine. The mountain regions to the west of the northern Great Plain were always treeless, barren and blighted by low rainfall. Elsewhere, however, flood was the destroyer.

There had been great works as early as 200 BC to protect areas against flood and to use water creatively. The Chengdu Plain in Szechuan to the south was irrigated and referred to as ‘the garden of western China’, and there were great flood-mitigation works in Shensi province, neighbouring Shansi and in Hunan.

In modern times, the crops the Chinese planted were diverse and included an array of wheat varieties: spring wheat, winter wheat-millet, another winter variation named
kaoliang
. Other crops were Szechuan and south-western rice, Yangtze rice and tea. The floods that regularly wiped away such lowland crops had caused famines throughout Chinese history, most notoriously on the banks of the Yellow River.
Under the old imperial regime, the conservancy of the Yellow River was under the control of only one bureaucrat, who reported directly to the Emperor. It was not enough.

Whenever the Huai River in eastern and central China flooded, there was a loss of food on a level that would affect the lives of tens of millions. In the 1920s, a scholar declared that from the point of view of famine distress, no area was in greater need of flood prevention than the Huai. Catastrophic floods occurred every few years in Hebei region, south of Beijing, as well.

A total of 435 famines across twenty provinces occurred between 1850 and 1932, and most were created by flood. For much of the nineteenth century, and even earlier in history, particularly under the incompetent and corrupt Manchus, Chinese provinces were ruled by warlords who were totally indifferent to the issue of food, drought or famine. Peasants did not attribute famines to mayhem and rapacity, but to the anger of the river gods. Perhaps the gods were also to blame for the locusts, which were a regular blight.

After the overthrow of the emperor in 1911, a sum equivalent to £3 million was devoted to flood mitigation in the entire country. But each provincial governor had charge of his section of the river and there was no unified control. This system, of course, contributed to the famine in the early 1920s.

A weak central government, both under the Manchus and the republic, spent its money on ammunition, artillery and aircraft. Epochs of resultant hunger in the countryside generated banditry. The bandits, former peasants or defeated members of warlords’ forces, became unproductive raiders of other people’s food, burning villages and towns.
In the nineteenth and twentieth century, many people left their homes and withdrew into the mountains, some to die because of the operation of bandits. As well as the predatory bandits, the army lived off the provinces in which they were garrisoned, and were considered just as bad as bandits. Domestic animals were seized to pull wagons loaded with ammunition and supplies for the army. Meanwhile, there was heavy and unpredictable taxation by various officials. Farming families were thus victims of plunder after plunder, exaction after exaction. In many provinces people turned to growing opium, though every acre producing the Lethean chemical was taxed as well, and provincial officials took a share of, or frequently control of, the opium traffic. The growing of opium, of course, further reduced the amount of land under food cultivation.

In the famine of 1921, the funds distributed by the central government in Peking (Beijing) were too small to lengthen life by more than a few days. Most philanthropic societies were restricted in what they could give, despite their wish to do more. The American Red Cross adopted a plan for employing able-bodied members of stricken families – an echo of Ireland. In return for a day’s labour on public works, it was hoped that sufficient relief would be provided to support the labourer and his dependants. The wages paid on a piece-work basis were intentionally kept below the normal wage scale to prevent exploitation of the charity. The non-foreign China International Relief Commission was founded after the particularly massive famine in northern China in 1921, and its personnel resisted corruption and worked in the manner the Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation
Commission was meant to. It offered loans and investments rather than handouts.

Still in existence under the Communists, its efforts would not ultimately prevent a further, astonishing famine in 1958–61. According to government statistics, there were 15 million excess deaths in those three years, to which the government referred as the ‘three years of natural disasters’. It powerfully resembled Stalin’s famine of the early 1930s. Forced collectivisation and the preference for heavy industry over agricultural work, with millions of peasants taken from the land and relocated to the factories in a process named the Great Leap Forward – all this was the true cause of the famine. One contemporary wrote that in Xinyang in western China, people starved at the doors of the grain warehouses. As they died, they shouted for the Communist Party and Chairman Mao to save them. Indeed, had government granaries been opened, no one need have died.

‘I went to one village and saw one hundred corpses,’ wrote a witness in a generic famine passage that could stand for any of the famines narrated here, ‘then another village and another one hundred corpses. No one paid attention to them … People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs have long ago been eaten by the people.’

The provincial mess halls for party officials absorbed and wasted supplies of food during this Chinese famine of the Great Leap Forward. Over 2 million tonnes of grain were requisitioned in some provinces and sent to feed the cities. In formerly agricultural areas, over-fervent party officials sucked up rural labour into small, backyard ironworks, massive irrigation and other labour-intensive work. Less food was planted,
and calorie needs rose and were not answered because of the heavy labour that ambitious party officials, on probation with the party, demanded from conscripted peasant workers. The same earnestness had been shown by Mengistu’s cadres in Ethiopia in their demands for labour from peasants whose food supplies were similarly on the decline. In both cases, the party seemed to offer the official a
lien
on the gratitude of his masters.