Quick-fix humanitarianism

National Review, June 28, 1985 by Mona Charen

YOU'VE HEARD the song. You've seen the video. Perhaps you've even seen the movie on the making of the video. Fifty or so of America's leading pop singers, calling themselves U.S.A. for Africa, assembled to record a tune to raise money for the relief of famine in Ethiopia. The whole enterprise--from the choice of lyrics, to the prom-night atmosphere of the recording session, to the self-congratulatory inanities of the participants--altogether forms a serviceable metaphor for the lazy innocence and ignorance of America in the world. It would be so comforting to think, as this song and its accompanying atmospherics suggest, thta all we need do to relieve suffering humanity is rouse our consciences and dig into our pockets. But the truth is that our consciences (if not our wits) are fully awake. The same cannot be said of the criminal Marxist regime in Addis Ababa, which is deliberately starving and strafing its own people. We are not the world, but we are most assuredly the children.

Seven million Ethiopians are in danger of slow death by starvation in the next 12 months--if they do not succumb first to exposure, disease, or bullets fired by governemtn troops. Hundreds of thousands have already perished. This is not an act of God. It is a most unnatural disaster. All of sub-Saharan Africa has suffered a serious drought, but only in Ethiopia have people been intentionally starved to death.

In 1982, the Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation Commission issued a report predicting the impending famine. The regime of Mengistu Haile-Mariam was unperturbed. Many of the victims would be rebellious Tigreans and Eritreans, about whom the Marxist government was, to say the least, unsentimental. Almost as soon as the world learned of the scale of the famine, stories also began to surface about government obstruction of relief efforts. Convoys of food from Western nations were halted in the mountains of the north. Refugees fleeing into the Sudan were bombed and strafed by the Ethiopian air force. In 1984, while the West was mobilizing resources to cope with the emerging disaster, the Mengistu government staged an enormous pageant in Addis Ababa to celebrate ten years of Marxist rule. Attention at the parade naturally centered on the towering portrait of Mengistu, but there were toasts as well for visiting dignitaries Grigory Romanov of the USSR and Erich Honecker of East Germany. Estimates put the cost of the party at $250 million.

Sub-Saharan Mao

THEN AGAIN, even if Mengistu and plowed all of that money into agriculture instead, it would have done little to alleviate the famine so long as his government's agricultural policies were still followed. Under Mengistu, Ethiopia has pursued agricultural collectivization with a ferocity unseen since Mao. And collectivization has spawned there what it sprawns everywhere: declining productivity. Denied seed, fertilizer, and fair prices since the introduction of state farms and coerced cooperatives, private farmers have taken to producing only enough to feed themselves and no more. The state farms, meanwhile, have been lavishly funded by Addis Ababa, but, like the skinny cows in Paraoh's dream, they have consumed the fat cows and yet remained skinny. State farms absorb 90 per cent of the available resources and produce 6 per cent of the nation's food. Timorous Americans balk at the suggestion that Mengistu's Communist agricultural policies are responsible for the famine. They point to the war in Eritrea and Tigre provinces and to the drought. But this is to confuse proximate cause with cause in fact. It is like setting sail in a paper boat and blaming the drowning on the wind and the waves.

Of course, fixing blame becomes secondary when lives are at stake. Consistently with a long tradition of munificence, the United States responded early and generously to the danger of "We Are the World" wafted across the airwaves the United States Government, along with private voluntary organizations, had undertaken a massive emergency relief operation far outstripping that of any other nation. Figures on cereal-food aid pledged as of January 1985 demonstrate the disproportion. The United States donated two million tons of wheat, rice, and coarse grains. No other country comes close. Next on the list is the combined contribution of the European Economic Community, at 1.3 million. Cuba has contributed five thousand troops to Ethiopia--but not a stalk of wheat. The USSR has weighed in with 3,500 tons of rice.

To list the Soviet contribution of food aid, however, is not to do justice to its contribution to the Ethiopian famine. The USSR has provided the Ethiopian regime with 12 military transport planes for use in the massive resettlement program undertaken by Mengistu to depopulate the provinces of Eritrea and Tigre. The policy has been so brutal in conception and so ruthless in excution that even conscientiously neutral private groups have issued public complaints. It's food as bait. The starving are lured to feeding centers by reports of Western aid packages and then loaded by the thousands onto Soviet transports and flown south. The planes fly without pressurization and are reportedly so insanitary that they are spreading cholera to the densely packed passengers. Families are separated and possessions confiscated. The people are told that upon arrival in the south, they will be directed to fecund farmland, with equipment and draft animals. In fact, they find nothing in the south but others of the relocated--their own insubstantial shadows.