Surrender or Starve
Kaplan, Robert D.
SURRENDER OR STARVE: THE WAR BEHIND THE FAMINE Robert D. Kaplan/Westview Press/$24.95 Carroll Doherty T f you were a careful reader of a I major U.S. daily newspaper this fall, you might be...
...locusts threaten crops in the Sahel...
...The frustrating reality is that, as Kaplan puts it, "although God may cause drought, famine in Africa is caused by the power relationships among Africans...
...daily newspaper this fall, you might be aware of the deteriorating situation in Sudan...
...But the competition, according to Robert D. Kaplan's new book Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind the Famine, was over how to "make the U.S...
...Perlez, reporting from Kenya, managed to make the front page with one of her Sudan stories...
...This fall was a busy season for the U.S...
...Ethiopia was, most of all, a television story, and it demonstrated, according to Kaplan, "television's increasing ability to control the direction of a story and, by this very power, to intimidate the print media into following television's lead...
...has provided the government with millions of dollars in military and economic assistance, and over which, unlike Mengistu's regime, the U.S...
...deaths from AIDS mount in Central and East Africa...
...assistance...
...And this is a country where the U.S...
...Yet few people, even among those who consider themselves well informed, are aware that food is being used as a weapon, with catastrophic consequences, by both sides in the Sudanese civil war...
...public feel starvation," rather than understand the causes of it...
...Kaplan avoided the made-for-TV scenes at the government-run refugee camps, and instead trekked to less accessible, guerrilla-held areas in the provinces of Tigre and Eritrea, which THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 39 received but a small share of the food aid provided by the West (although as many as half the peasants threatened with starvation lived in those areas...
...Donor nations are forced by circumstance to secure the cooperation of all manner of governments, even thug regimes like Mengistu's...
...There was a handful of other journalists (Kaplan, to his credit, cites them liberally) who reported on what was actually happening in Ethiopia, and what responsibility the Mengistu government bore, throughout 1984-85...
...press, what with the presidential campaign coming to a climax, the Israeli election, and three whales trapped in the ice off Alaska...
...One would think that if U.S...
...IWo million lives at risk...
...has been reduced to using moral suasion...
...He provides extensive interviews with victims of the regime's brutal resettlement and "villagization" programs, under which millions of peasants were uprooted and relocated in government-controlled communities...
...After the French group was expelled following its report on the resettlement program, for example, the Western relief community was largely silent...
...The regime of Lt...
...As a result, they are generally reluctant to criticize aid recipients publicly, much less provide weapons to their opponents...
...to rectify that situation—by selling the EPLF anti-aircraft weapons—Kaplan raises some difficult policy issues...
...private volunteer organizations (PVOs) from working in Ethiopia...
...Because donor nations rely so much on the cooperation of the host government, they are left with little leverage to limit the barbarism that occurs in many recipient countries...
...In making the case for the U.S...
...the dispatch I cited above, its length no more than 600 words, ran on A-3...
...Rather than creating the conditions for a coup, military aid for the EPLF could as easily result in a decision by the Mengistu government to prevent U.S...
...But those reports, and the pieces Kaplan filed for the New Republic and The American Spectator, were overwhelmed by the pictures...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989...
...Unfortunately, it is far from certain that a strengthened EPLF would topple the regime or force it into concessions...
...strategic interest in the continent, again excepting southern Africa, and the cultural ties that bind us to Europe are perceived to be absent there, even though more than 20 million Americans possess an African heritage...
...W hat the major media missed by concentrating almost exclusively on the drought, writes Kaplan, were the "African killing fields" created by Ethiopia's Marxist government...
...Kaplan views that silence as "spinelessness...
...And the stakes are enormous...
...T he question of how the U.S., or any potential donor government, should approach a country where millions are threatened with starvation, but where the regime is, at best, impervious to the needs of most of its people, is indeed a sensitive one...
...The Ethiopian death machine rolled on," Kaplan writes...
...That is a far more complicated, and ultimately depressing, message than the one captured in those first awful pictures broadcast from Ethiopia in 1984...
...Carroll Doherty, the former editor of Washington Report on Africa, is a Washington writer...
...In Eritrea, the battleground for Africa's longest-running war, Kaplan found the most effective relief agency "in all of Africa" run by the rebels...
...Once again, the context was ignored...
...There is little U.S...
...Mengistu Haile Mariam had, "through crop requisitions, the fixing of market prices, the forced collectivization of peasants, and the unwillingness to halt a war in which fields were burned and livestock decimated, brought its people to a point of such unprecedented, graphic deprivation that human suffering was all the media cared to go on...
...An October press release from the Agency for International Development states rather diplomatically, "We call on all parties to the conflict in Sudan to avoid interference with the movement of emergency relief operations so that the hungry might be fed and the sick attended...
...With aggressive reporting, Kaplan fills in many of the gaps left by the dailies and networks...
...But it is also understandable: PVOs did not want to jeopardize their feedingprograms in the midst of a famine...
...He also found a guerrilla army, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), which "is doing more to bleed the resources of a Soviet-backed regime than are the contras in Nicaragua or the Angolan rebels led by Jonas Savimbi," without the benefit of U.S...
...For the pictures let viewers believe that if only sufficient aid were provided quickly enough, a disaster would be averted...
...He argues that "the EPLF only might have to fight a degree or two better than it presently is in order to create the conditions necessary for a coup or policy shift in Addis Ababa...
...conditions that millions of tons of Western-donated grain have not been able to create...
...Thus while the horrifying pictures galvanized the public into donating millions of dollars in relief aid, the Ethiopian famine became for the media "another disaster story, like the Mexican earthquake...
...Unquestionably, hundreds of thousands of lives were saved because of the massive Western relief effort, but in the end the outpouring of aid changed very little...
...Interestingly, two of the publications most critical of the government were Spin, a rock magazine, and the Nation...
...Jane Perlez, reporting from Nairobi, Kenya, for the New York Times, began her October 3 piece this way: "Increased fighting in the Sudanese civil war, which international relief workers say threatens two million people with starvation, has resulted in a sudden government setback...
...In the ongoing war in Sudan, where both sides regularly interrupt food shipments, the U.S...
...should be able to exert some influence...
...It was one of the rare instances in recent decades when there was actual competition for a story in black Africa...
...After the numbers of dead or those at risk are duly reported, usually on the inside pages, the stories cease completely...
...At least 100,000 people died from the consequences of forced resettlement, according to a 1985 report by the French humanitarian group A/Mdecins sans Frontiêres, which was expelled from Ethiopia after going public with its criticisms of the program...
...So African stories (with the exception of South African news) have received little play, even if, as in this case, two million people might die...
...news organizations ever had the chance to do a bit better, to provide at least some context for the mortality statistics, it would have been during the Ethiopian drought and famine of four years ago...
...coverage of Africa begins after a while to look like the crime reports in the local section of the paper: 5,000 dead in tribal warfare in Burundi...
...It is generally that way with news from black Africa...
...Kaplan characterizes villagization this way: "Rarely in modern times have so many people had their human rights abused in so organized a fashion with hardly a whimper of real protest or sustained media coverage...
Vol. 22 • January 1989 • No. 1
