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| Posted By: oho Posted On: Feb 24, 2004 Views: 531 | mEDREK AND ETHIOINDEX ARE ANTI-ETHIOPIAN BRITISH F Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 11:28 am Post subject: mEDREK AND ETHIOINDEX ARE ANTI-ETHIOPIAN BRITISH FINANCED S ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- mEDREK AND ETHIOINDEX ARE ANTI-ETHIOPIAN BRITISH FINANCED SITES !!! CHECK THIS AS AN EXAMPLE Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 3:58 am Post subject: Ethiopia sold short again ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- John Vidal: Ethiopia Sold Short Again Michael Buerk's TV return to the 1984 famine was prime-time tosh. Brace yourself for a year of lingering, semi-pornographic images of starving Ethiopian children. By Guardian Newspapers, 1/15/2004 Brace yourself for a year of lingering, semi-pornographic images of starving Ethiopian children. The 20th anniversary of the 1984 famine is coming up and the history books are being rewritten by the BBC, which broadcast the first, shocking pictures from the famine-hit hills of Tigray and Wollo where up to 800,000 died. Last Sunday Michael Buerk returned to Ethiopia, claiming that he, "St Bob" Geldof and the west had largely saved it. In so doing he misrepresented today's country as a nation of "half-starved beggars" who can only produce food for five months of the year. This is all prime-time tosh and deeply offensive to many in Ethiopia. The country has just had one of the best harvests in its history and the markets are overflowing with food to the point where there is real fear that the price of grain will collapse. And far from being the shining white knights riding to the rescue in 1984, the British media, the Tory government of the time and many charities were effectively complicit in the humanitarian disaster. The famine did not come out of the blue, but built inexorably over the months. It was known in the west that the food situation was deteriorating, and even the rotten Ethiopian government had appealed for food aid. But it came as a shock because TV delayed reporting the situation. The tragedy could have been avoided, but a cynic would say that dying babies make news and hungry ones don't. The media and the west played only one highly visible, if important, part in the relief operation and that was to mobilise people and wake up governments. But the BBC failed to credit that Ethiopians in any way helped themselves. In fact tens of thousands, both at home and abroad, raised money, delivered food to the neediest areas across dangerous borders, and helped hundreds of thousands trek to the safety of refugee camps in Sudan. And if the BBC rightly claimed the credit for waking up the world, it certainly did not report some of the less savoury facts that came out after the tragedy. Much of the food sent from British charities is believed to have helped prolong the war, ending up in the bellies of the Ethiopian government's army after being diverted on arrival. And for all the giving and remarkable uprising of global public opinion, Live Aid and the public probably contributed only 5-10% of the grain needed. But that was then. The most offensive part of the BBC's analysis this week was the portrayal of Ethiopia today. Here, we were told, is a basket case that has barely moved on, a country unable to help itself - a land of "iron age farmers", a place without trees, with a capital that "smells of ... desperation". Everyone, said Mr Buerk, had been "betrayed by God", and the "reformed Marxist" government which is now in power "wants its people to remain peasants". Tosh again. Ethiopia has many great problems and is waging an unforgivable, war with Eritrea, but it has changed considerably since 1984. Today it is recognised by western governments as well-prepared, stable, sensible and extremely "pro-poor" - a model for what least developed countries can do for their people. Its highly devolved government has built tens of thousands of health clinics and schools, and millions of trees have been planted. How else could it, last year, have averted a food crisis that threatened three times as many people as in 1984, one which would have buckled almost any government on earth? The reality is not, as the BBC says, that the average family "can only feed itself for five months of the year", but that one in 12 people have never recovered from the 1984 and other disasters, and may now be permanently destitute. But this is as much to do with a barely mentioned ecological disaster created over several generations and current dogmas of the international donors. The fact is that there is plenty of international money for food aid which greatly benefits the US and European growers, but there is precious little for long-term development to make Ethiopia self-sufficient. The IMF now effectively runs the country's economy, private development is favoured over public, and international forces against it are huge. The plunge in world coffee prices alone has left millions closer to desperation and robbed the country of the money that could have built thousands of schools. Instead of blaming God or the government, Mr Buerk and the BBC might have asked the IMF why it has pulled so much aid, why the World Bank has refused to give loans to use the river Nile and its lakes more, and why western governments have refused money for building more grain stores. Live Aid and the 1984 famine changed forever the way that the world saw Ethiopia but it seems to have kept the BBC in a time warp. · John Vidal is the Guardian's environment editor © Guardian Newspapers Limited |