Gradually the peasants lost faith in Mengistu and their Peasant Association leaders. They saw that the associations were well supplied with seed, at least until the famine started, but that the committee members cornered it for their own communal or individual use. The individual landholder now earned so little that he could not afford the price of fertiliser.
The AMC did exactly what Haile Selassie had done: its agents bought grain from five provinces to supply three cities: Addis Ababa, the capital; Dire Dawa, the major city in the east; and Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. The five provinces were Showa, the province in which Addis Ababa sat; Arussi, to the south; Gojjam and Wollega, to the west; and Gondar, to the north. It was not, however, for the sake of the Eritreans that Asmara was supplied, but for the sake of the army and bureaucrats stationed there. Just as the emperor had, Mengistu knew that in a primitive society keeping the cities happy would tend to keep him in power.
After the AMC had had its share of a declining farm output, the farmer was allowed to sell his produce on the local market, but found he could not afford cloth, sugar, salt and soap, even where these were available. Such was the system Mengistu had created to replace feudalism, and such was the system operating, even before the initiator of the famine – drought – struck the landscape.
The failure of the kremt rains in mid 1982, and of both the spring belg and high summer meher rains in 1983, provided more than enough tension. But by then Mengistu’s attention was monomaniacally fixed upon the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution in 1984. At the apogee of the famine, he would ultimately spend $100 million upon the festivities.
When the northern provinces of Wollo and Tigray were afflicted by the failure of rains and then by famine, Mengistu seized on the pretext that their farming areas were environmentally degraded, as was in fact the case, to move thousands of northerners to the south, by force, in a massive program of resettlement. These people, particularly the Tigrayans, had in any case always been rebellious, and Mengistu’s motives were mixed, both ideological and military. The resettlement areas, with their inefficiencies, inequities, brutalities and lack of facilities and food, would bring about the deaths of a million people.
In the same way, Mengistu’s policy of villagisation, which ran parallel to resettlement, gathered together peasants into central villages and towns, often hours’ walk from their individual holdings. Those who resisted were asked, ‘Why should people have a right to be fed when they don’t listen to what we tell them is best?’ Villagisation would also make it less possible for peasants to grow a survival crop from which they could retain a small amount that could be sold for cash so they could buy soap or kerosene or other essentials.
As the anniversary of the revolution approached, people were being driven onto the roads by hunger or had begun to die of famine diseases. In Addis Ababa, meanwhile, red flags decorated pillars and lamp posts, and images of Mengistu, Marx and Lenin were everywhere. Signs declared, ‘The oppressed masses will be victorious!’ ‘Marxist Leninism is our guideline!’ One slogan half admitted that there were problems out in the countryside: ‘Temporary natural setbacks will not deter us from our final objective of building Communism!’ Highways were constructed from the airport to Addis, and conference halls and a statue of Lenin went up in the middle of the city. A ten-year economic plan was put in place, based on a 680-page document, which did not mention famine. Mengistu insisted, when speaking to Dawit Wolde Giorgis, head of the RRC since 1983, that the drought and famine were mere temporary setbacks. He refused to leave the city and visit the countryside, where, on the 300-kilometre road between Addis and the city of Dessie to the east, he would have seen starving and half-naked people trying to sell their ancestral ornaments handcrafted from silver. Bureaucrats and foreigners drove out of town and bargained with the starving, but Mengistu refused to know anything of this trade outside his door. The drought, he said, had hit many African countries, and thus it was a pan-African event. Yet, though there was drought elsewhere, it was not causing the pain this one was and it was not ‘pan-African’. Given his politics, he could not use the term ‘act of God’, but the implication was that the matter could be left to nature to resolve.
The response from the West was slow, given Mengistu had as strong an antipathy for Western NGOs and relief agencies as the emperor had shown. When they did arrive and begin their work, he did what he could both to thwart and control it, again diverting supplies to the cities and to his army. His expenditure on MIG jets, Antonov bombers, T-55 tanks and cannonry of all calibre remained an even greater scandal than his anniversary celebrations, but any relief organisation who complained about his bullying or fooling of agencies was expelled. Indeed, it has been an accusation directed at NGOs ever since that because Ethiopia in the mid 1980s was the chief arena for famine, many wanted to keep a foothold there and thus became complicit in Mengistu’s corruption, misdirection of aid and neglect.
9
Whistleblowers
GIVEN THE CAPACITY and the determination of governments to believe that the news of a famine outbreak is exaggerated, immeasurable lives must have been saved by those who tried to outflank government by alerting the world at large to the scale and gravity of events.
In the Irish case, the correspondents of the Illustrated London News, by letting the world know about the Irish famine and thus evoking relief, had a powerful but gradual impact on British and international opinion. The first reference to the famine in the Illustrated London News was on 18 October 1845, but its correspondents had covered earlier, related Irish events too, such as the 1842 season of need caused by local shortages, which affected labourers and the weavers in the north and resulted in attacks on potato stores by the hungry.
Each Illustrated London News story throughout the 1840s was accompanied by engravings of artists who travelled through Ireland with the correspondents. One of these engravings was the picture of the woman begging at Clonakilty, mentioned earlier. The equally famous engraving of Bridget O’Donnell, a hollow-cheeked, withered, but still handsome, famished young woman dressed in rags of cloth, with her arms cast around her two equally thin and ragged daughters is – if the term can be tolerated – a classic image of an Gorta Mór. While the government invoked the workings of Providence and of the great economic machine, the correspondents and artists of the Illustrated London News brought the British public’s attention to the individual village, the individual sufferer, the individual corpse – whose name they often gave. It was their words and these images created from sketches made in the field by artists that riveted public attention, and that rivet us even now. Through those engravings, we see the deserted and roofless clachan, or communal village, the famished children digging futilely for potatoes, the evicted family in a ditch. Much of the credit for reporting the famine so graphically must go to the magazine’s founder and manager Henry Ingram, a printer who had made a fortune out of selling a patent medicine named Parr’s Life Pills and a man in his thirties when, in 1842, the News first appeared and he fulfilled his true ambition to own a magazine.
The Illustrated London News was probably considered populist and vulgar by the high priests and mediators of both Providence and rationalisation, but it is likely to have influenced the Society of Friends to take up their Irish endeavours and possibly gave impetus to the founding of the British Association by various British merchants and other businessmen in January 1847 ‘for the relief of extreme distress in remote parishes in Ireland and Scotland’.
The Illustrated London News reported at great length from the epicentres of the famine – Skibbereen, Clonakilty and similar West Cork towns and their hinterlands. There were certainly other papers reporting the famine, including The Vindicator in Belfast, which covered the general famine but paid a lot of attention to Ulster. ‘The distress in Ballymacarrett [just outside Belfast] was the first cry of want that unhinged the fine philosophy that would starve the poor for the honour of the rich,’ The Vindicator said on 22 April 184
6.
In The Nation, the organ of the radical nationalist Young Ireland movement, Miss Elgee, a bourgeois Irish Protestant nationalist from Dublin, and the future mother of Oscar Wilde, wrote excoriating verse under the name Speranza.
‘There’s a proud array of soldiers – what do they round your door?’
‘They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.’
‘Pale mothers, wherefore weeping?’ ‘Would to God that we were dead –
Our children swoon before us and we cannot give them bread.’
John Mitchel, the son of a Unitarian Presbyterian from Newry on the border of the north, and a member of Young Ireland, rendered a radical by what he saw on his Irish travels, wrote a great deal for The Nation. In the early summer of 1847, he journeyed through Connacht, where he and his companions came on a village in which they had been hospitably received two years earlier.
But why do we not see the smoke curling from those lowly chimneys? And surely we ought by this time to scent the well-known aroma of the turf-fires?… What reeking breath of hell is this oppressing the air?… Had we forgotten that this was the Famine Year? And we are here in the midst of those thousand Golgothas that border our Ireland with a ring of death from Cork Harbour all round to Lough Foyle … Yet we go forward, though with sick hearts and swimming eyes, to examine the Place of Skulls nearer. There is a horrible silence: grass grows before the doors; we fear to look into any door, though they are all open or off the hinges; for we fear to see yellow chapless skeletons grinning there … we walk amidst the houses of the dead and out of the other side of the cluster, and there is not one where we dare to enter. We stop before the threshold of our host of two years ago, put our head, with eyes shut, inside the door-jamb, and say with shaking voice, ‘God save all here!’ The strong man and the fair, dark-haired woman and the little ones, with their liquid Gaelic accents that melted into music for us two years ago; they shrunk and withered together until their voices dwindled to rueful gibbering, and they hardly knew one another’s faces.
But neither Speranza nor John Mitchel nor The Nation nor The Vindicator were likely to be read by the British. On the other hand, the Illustrated London News, with its massive middle-class readership, was considered by the majority of British readers an undoubted source of reliable news, and its images endowed the British public with a great portion of their sense of the broader world.
Some of the early reports of the Illustrated London News were highly dispassionate, but one of the earliest impassioned, intimate and graphic reports that there were ‘stern and striking realities of the sufferings of the people’ which should evoke ‘the sympathy of every well-regulated mind’ was from Cork and Tipperary in the south and south-west, namely the towns of Youghal and Dungarvan, where there had been food riots and ‘turn-outs for wages’, that is, demands for public employment. The reports said that the artist whose engravings appeared in the story was treated roughly while he was sketching in the street, and was asked that he promise mothers that their children, then engaged on public works, would be given wages higher than the five or six pence per labouring child, because it was insufficient to buy Indian meal.
The article mentions a boy called Flemming, who took part in a food protest and was shot in the knee and died slowly. Over fifty men were arrested by the authorities, and the Illustrated London News quoted an Irish correspondent as saying, ‘Never have I witnessed any scene so effecting as the meeting of the prisoners and their poor hungry wives and children.’
But at this stage the famine was just beginning, and in the New Year, on 16 January 1846, the Illustrated London News reported an increase in famine deaths. Buckley of Ballyderrane and Sullivan of Oyster Haven, first names not given, died with that suddenness that had begun to strike down famished men and women. Buckley dropped dead on the public works after a journey of ‘three miles before day’. His wife said that she and the rest of her family lived thirty-six hours on wild weeds ‘to spare a bit of the cake for him’.
On 30 January an engraving appeared of a funeral at Skibbereen, a young corpse flung on a primitive dray accompanied by men in rags, one of them beating a bony horse. The accompanying story went as far as to challenge and even mock the remarks of the lord lieutenant governor of Ireland, Lord Clarendon (lord lieutenant governor was a post under the Crown, equivalent to that of the viceroy in India), on the terrible state of agriculture in Ireland. Clarendon declared that there was a problem, in that the Irish peasants ‘now prefer working on the roads, like convicts in a penal colony’, as if out of a perverse desire to avoid irregular and ill-paid day-labouring on farms. For the instruction of British readers, the correspondent wrote, ‘If one pound of meal per day keeps these people upon the roads to break stones, a higher rate of wages than is usually offered to them by those who hire labour … might draw them from the roads and the pound of meal’, that is, from the ration of corn permitted every day and paid for out of the money earned on the roads. But ‘the large farmers and gentry’ offered labourers only three pence or four pence a day, without any allowance of food. This wage of four pence could buy them even less food than they would get in the workhouse, said the London Illustrated News.
The same article alerted the British middle class to the fact that the peasantry was full of fear because of the prosecutions proceeding for rural ‘outrages’ in Ireland – the government had the means to place informers throughout the country and to reward them for results. ‘Even though innocent of insurrectionary sympathies, they fear an accusation.’ A man one of the correspondents spoke to near a railway line in Cork trembled when he was asked questions, for fear the Illustrated London News reporter was an informer, or a policeman in disguise.
The Illustrated London News trusted the information it was given in the field by a Cork physician named Dr Donovan, who was a respected and energetic medical practitioner and relentless reporter of the famine. It reprinted a report of Dr Donovan’s from the Cork Southern Reporter of 23 January 1847.
The following is a statement of what I saw yesterday evening on the lands of Taureen. In a cabbage garden I saw … the bodies of Kate Barry and her two children very lightly covered with earth, the hands and legs of her large body entirely exposed, the flesh completely eaten off by the dogs, the skin and hair of the head lying within a couple of yards of the skull, which when I first drew my eyes on it, I thought to be part of a horse’s tail … I need make no comment on this but ask, Are we living in a portion of the United Kingdom?
As evictions became more common through 1847 and 1848, the London Illustrated News took up this issue as well, producing an illustration on 16 December 1848, just in time for Christmas, of the unroofing of a cottage by force and the eviction of the family. In this engraving, sheriffs and constables and hired toughs (themselves in need of pay) look on, while the evicted father and his daughter plead with the mounted bailiff, who retains the writ of eviction in his right hand against his saddle. A further engraving shows the father, mother and daughter ‘after the ejectment’, living in a shelter made of hay, a wagon wheel and other oddments. The father’s head lies on his forearm. ‘Those who laboured to bring those tracts [of farmland] to the condition of what they are, capable of raising produce of any description,’ said the News, ‘are hunted like wolves, or they perish without a murmur. The tongue refuses to utter their most deplorable, their unheard of sufferings.’
Such illustrated news brought the reality of the famine to many respectable British hearths in a manner few other media could achieve, and many were stirred to compassion.
A British newspaperman named Ian Stephens, who had lived in India for a considerable time and respected Indian culture, was the editor of the Calcutta English-language newspaper The Statesman of Calcutta, an organ that predictably enough had been a strong supporter of the British war effort in the East. It was Stephens who broke ranks to talk about what the government in Delhi was unwilling to. After the Bengal famine, he would write eloquently about
the fact that it had not made an appropriate impact on the public or the civil authorities, and attributed some of the reason to the nature of starvation itself:
Death by famine lacks drama. Bloody death, the deaths of many by slaughter, as in riots or bombings, is in itself blood-bestirring; it excites you, prints indelible images on the mind. But death by famine, a vast slow dispirited noiseless apathy, offers none of that. Horrid though it may be to say, multitudinous death from this cause regarded without emotion as a spectacle, is, until the crows get at it, the rats and kites and dogs and vultures, very dull.
The Statesman’s first editorial on the famine appeared on 22 August 1943, and Stephens had, from the point of view of the authorities, the gall to publish pictures of famine victims in the streets of Calcutta in the same edition. He was breaking no secret – the destitutes were there to be seen – but, as he said, human sensibility could get very much accustomed to them. He wanted to deliver the most permanent of records, and no doubt he wanted to influence Linlithgow in the dying days of his position as viceroy. He believed he was demonstrating the problem in the most potent manner, in a form in which both friends and enemies of Britain might read it.
The late emergence of a public stance by the press was very much influenced by the prior demands of war and of British loyalty, but also by the threat that the chief press adviser might close the newspaper down. Stephens would later say that the chief press adviser’s activities involved doing everything his office could to prevent the word of famine getting out. Cables from India to Britain were vetted to make sure words such as ‘famine’, ‘corpse’, ‘starvation’ were erased. At New Delhi’s instruction, the Bengal government ceased reporting daily deaths by starvation. Stephen’s bravery was all the more remarkable against such a background, and given the fact that the previous editor of The Statesman had been removed by the authorities for ignoring their strictures.