Band Aid Campaign; Live Aid Revisited
In the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency, in 1985, alleged that international humanitarian aid funding was being misused in Ethiopia. With the thought uppermost in mind that millions of Ethiopians were facing starvation, would that intelligence insight have made much of a difference to the masses of people who responded to an appeal to help?The CIA assessment: Ethiopia: Political and Security Impact of the Drought, read in part: "Some funds that insurgent organizations are raising for relief operations, as a result of increased world publicity, are almost certainly being diverted for military purposes." They would have known, of course. And possibly it would have represented a no-brainer.
Of course those eminent personages who were involved in the fund-raising to begin with, and who celebrated the wild success of their public appeal would deny any such thing. As has done a then-worker with Christian Aid who insists there was "a complete separation" between the rebel army and the "logistics" of procuring food from local farmers.
"It's 25 years since this happened, and in the 25 years it's the first time anybody has claimed such a thing." But someone now has. And more than merely one 'someone'. Among whom is one of the traders who claims to have sold grain directly to this very same Christian Aid worker. And who was, in reality, a senior rebel commander. "I was given clothes to make me look like a Muslim merchant."
And the sacks of grain he sold to the trusting aid workers? Why, he says now, they were sacks filled with sand, on top of which were sprinkled grain. "The aid workers were fooled", said also a former rebel commander; that roughly $100-million of the international funds raised went directly through the rebel groups with 95% used to purchase weapons and to build political support.
That political support and those weapons worked very well indeed. The rebel group, which fought against the Marxist government of Haile Mengistu Mariam was the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front. And because the government refused to permit food to pass through to the drought-caused, famine-hit people in the north of the country, food was shipped through Sudan to the provinces of Tigray and Eritrea.
The investigation by the BBC now points out that the over three million copies of the single Do They Know It's Christmas that were sold in late 1984, the work of Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof, to feed the 38-million Ethiopians facing starvation went directly through the rebel group. And because they siphoned off a hefty $100-million in food aid dollars, some one million Ethiopians died of starvation.
But all is well that ends well. The rebel soldiers may have disguised themselves as grain traders, handing over sacks of sand hidden beneath a believable layer of food in return for cash representing Western donations, but Ethiopia got a bargain out of the transaction. For the very rebel group which successfully overturned the Marxist government, took control of the country.
Ethiopia's current Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi and his ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front is no longer a rebel group; they represent the government of Ethiopia. Didn't western aid do well for the country? Gifting Ethiopia with a tyrant with no respect for human rights.
Whom U.S. President Obama scolded at the April 2009 G20 meeting in London, for the deplorable, unacceptable human rights conditions in Ethiopia.
Labels: Africa, Human Rights, Political Realities
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, March 04, 2010
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