“There are no longer any natural famines in the world; all that remains is political famine. If people are dying of hunger in Sudan, Syria or Somalia, it is because certain politicians wanted it”writes academic and historian Yuval Noah Harari in his work Homo Deus. His statement finds particular resonance today in the humanitarian situations of blockaded Gaza, where famine is ” imminent » according to the United Nations, from Sudan, where the civil war has plunged 18 million people into an unprecedented hunger crisis, and in northern Ethiopia, where the specter of famine resurfaces after the devastation of the conflict of Tigray (2020-2022).
Forty years earlier, it was from these same Ethiopian provinces of Tigray and Wollo that apocalyptic images emerged showing a devastating famine, which would cause more than 300,000 deaths. The stark photographs of women and men on the verge of succumbing to hunger in front of journalists’ lenses went around the world, shocked the West and gave rise to an unprecedented surge of solidarity whose most visible manifestations will be the recording records with all the musical elite in the United States, the United Kingdom and France.
The famine of 1984 reached “ biblical proportions », in the words of BBC reporter Michael Buerk, when commenting on his report in an arid and cold valley of Wollo, transformed into a huge open-air camp where hundreds of displaced people, fleeing civil war and hunger , died every night and whose bodies were collected by truckloads in the early morning. He was accompanied by the Kenyan photographer Mohamed Amin, whose photographic archives we are publishing here.
Formidable weapon
These images still stick to that of Ethiopia today. The northern highlands of the country experience more or less pronounced droughts approximately every decade. Ten years earlier, in 1973, a lack of rain had killed around 50,000 farmers in the area, under the indifferent gaze of Emperor Haile Selassie Ier, who even hastened to hide them, at the risk of tarnishing his reputation. Popular anger, driven by a Marxist student revolution, using the Wollo famine to illustrate the selfishness and cruelty of the monarch, precipitated his fall the following year, in 1974.
As Yuval Noah Harari suggests, hunger can serve as a formidable weapon in war and Ethiopia is no exception. If the lands in the north of the country are vulnerable to droughts, the food crises that have occurred there have always been aggravated by revolts and their repression. The news is a painful reminder of this. During the Tigray war (2020-2022), a blockade put in place by the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed – 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner – prevented humanitarian aid from arriving and plunged 90% of Tigray into on the verge of starvation. Today, a year and a half after the peace agreement which ended the conflict, hunger still kills: in the last six months, 1,390 Tigrayans have died, according to regional authorities.
You have 61.77% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.