Three decades ago, Jonathan Dimbleby came out of Ethiopia with harrowing images of hunger that claimed at least 100,000 lives. Now he returns to find despair has been replaced by hope that the country can escape the new famine.
In Ethiopia the images always linger. This time, in the summer of 2002, three little children standing arm in arm outside their hovel by our hotel in Dessie smiling and waving goodbye as we swept out of their lives on our way back to Addis Ababa.
The first time, almost 30 years ago, likewise in Dessie: also three little children, but they were lying entwined on a wooden pallet of branches, naked, eyes wide open, skin like parchment over empty bellies, the flies tormenting their dead bodies.
That was in 1973, when I stumbled on a famine which had already claimed upwards of 100,000 lives but which the government had concealed from the outside world. The film of this holocaust, which I made with a team from the ITV programme This Week, ricocheted around the globe. It was the first 'television' catastrophe of its kind and it soon raised over $150 million - in today's money - which triggered a huge international relief operation.
A few months later, The Unknown Famine, as we called our report, became a catalyst for the overthrow of the quasi-feudal regime of Haile Selassie. Crudely recut to include scenes of high life at the imperial palace and retitled The Hidden Hunger, our footage was used to devastating effect on Ethiopian television to soften up the Emperor's subjects for the military coup which brought Comrade - later President - Mengistu to power.
For doing what any other journalist would have done, I became a kind of hero of the Ethiopian nation. It was both a heady and embarrassing experience, but it also meant that I was virtually the only foreign reporter allowed to witness the convulsions which then began to bring this ancient and proud nation to its knees: further famines, a vicious and self-destructive military campaign in Eritrea, and a pogrom in the name of 'revolutionary Marxism' against rivals and dissidents during which thousands of young people, including my friends, were murdered and left on the streets with tags on their necks warning others to take note. It was known colloquially - and with no sense of irony - as 'red terror'.
After five years of this, I could stomach no more and said so as loudly as possible - not least on the BBC World Service and in these pages. The accidental hero became officially a 'traitor to the revolution' and I was denied a visa for a decade.
By the time I was allowed in again (only to be banned again) Ethiopia had virtually disintegrated. By then, the combination of the 'Bob Geldof' famine of 1984-85 and the blood which had been shed in Eritrea by both sides had imprinted on our collective memory an indelible image of Ethiopia as a nation of skeletons and savagery. By 1991, when Mengistu fled to Kenya (where his good friend, Daniel arap Moi, still gives him sanctuary), Ethiopia was indeed on its knees.
Today this beautiful and beleaguered country is still one of the world's poorest states and by far the largest in that desperate category. With a per capita income of around $100 a year - a third less than what is regarded as starvation levels of income by the UN - and a population that has more than doubled in 30 years to more than 65 million, Ethiopia is getting poorer year by year.
This prospect - for those who love this country and admire its people - is unendurable; I imagine it is the same for any other thoughtful member of the human race.
According to the World Food Programme, this year - which is better than last year in this always hungry land - more than five million people will need food aid to ward off starvation (and that figure, as yet unnoticed by the media, is in addition to the widely publicised 12 million people 'at risk' in southern Africa). For all these reasons, it is not difficult to perpetuate an image of Ethiopia as some kind of African 'basket case'. But to the growing frustration of its proud, resilient and independent people, this wicked phrase (originally used by Henry Kissinger about Bangladesh) is not only to dehumanise a nation, it is also to miss the point.
It is true: I am not detached about Ethiopia. Perhaps I have witnessed too much hunger, disease and poverty for it to be otherwise. But modern Ethiopia (not quite a contradiction in terms) is, I believe, both the same as it always was and yet - at last - fundamentally different.
Of course, Dessie - dreadfully, stinkingly poor Dessie - is still the most impoverished town of its size (100,000 population) in Ethiopia, perhaps in Africa. It still has only one hospital and five doctors to serve a continuing catastrophe of sickness and disease in a far-flung community of five million people.
Even in a part of the world which displays an absolute absence of wimpishness or self-pity, this is mission impossible. But - and it is the biggest 'but' of my life - it is almost safe to say that we will not again see mass starvation here or anywhere else in the Northern Highlands, the epicentre of the 1973 and 1984 famines.
With the help of the UN, the European Union, the United States and numerous international charities, the Ethiopian government has finally established a food storage and distribution network which two years ago managed to deliver emergency relief to no fewer than 10 million hungry people; an extraordinary achievement in a country whose infrastructure still belongs more to the Middle Ages than the twenty-first century.
But none of that should be of more than momentary comfort to anyone who is either affronted by the grotesque inequities that make Africa 'a scar on the conscience of the world' or who realise that the 'war against terrorism' must become 'a war against poverty' or we will all be done for.
You do not need much imagination to appreciate the significance of the relevant UN statistics for Ethiopia. Despite a host of imaginative rural development programmes (devised and administered by Ethiopians and international agencies working together in genuine partnerships), the heart sinks to discover that in 2002 only 25 per cent of the people have access to safe water and only 15 per cent have access to adequate sanitation; or that Ethiopia is so poor that 49 per cent of the population - more than 30 million people - are undernourished; or that 47 per cent of the little children - that in Britain we call 'the under fives' - are grievously underweight, their physical and intellectual growth permanently stunted. If you were prone to self-indulgence, it would make you weep.
The Ethiopian government cannot afford such sentiment. Its answer is 'education, education, education' and Meles Zenawi - who led the guerrilla campaign that finally overthrew the Mengistu regime - has made this his personal crusade.
It has already made a difference. When he became Prime Minister of a country traumatised by civil war, only 30 per cent of children were enrolled at primary school; in the past five years that proportion has risen to 42 per cent. But this is still the lowest rate in Africa - and almost half of these drop out before the end of the first year.
It is not hard to understand this. In a country where 80 per cent of adults lead life on the land that in the West would be judged as better suited to a beast of burden than a human, children are regarded by parents as a crucial economic resource: needed to mind the sheep and the goats, to till the soil, to fetch water and firewood. Then, if they overcome that hurdle, there is the journey to school: a barefoot walk of perhaps three hours - with the ever-present risk, if you are a girl, of abduction or rape.
Invariably hungry and listless from lack of nutrition, these seven-year-olds finally reach their destination to find themselves crowded into a classroom designed for 30 but filled with a hundred other children, often without books or pencil and paper - where they are taught by rote and never allowed to speak.
By European standards their teachers are woefully ill-trained, and even by Ethiopian standards they are low-paid. They enjoy little respect, their morale is abject and most of them truant for much of the day searching for more financially - and psychologically - rewarding jobs.
But what I like about the new Ethiopia - at federal and regional level - is its openness about all of this; officials no longer pretend or obfuscate. They know that education is a disaster area and they say so, even in the most official of official papers. For example, the Education Bureau for the Amhara region (where Dessie is located) admits that its primary school enrolment is below the national average and concedes 'a lot has to be done to enrol the remaining 60 per cent of school-age children'. There is precious little spinning in Ethiopia.
Nor is there despair. Instead, Meles is instituting a programme of radical reform. I was in Ethiopia as president of VSO, which meant I sat in on meetings between some of our 60 volunteers and their Ethiopian counterparts, working together at every level to transform teaching methods and the curriculum. Our VSOs have spent far too many years in British classrooms to be starry-eyed, but those I saw are convinced the government is on the right track - though they doubt whether Ethiopia has any chance of meeting the UN target of 'universal primary education' by 2015.
As a freedom fighter who 'came out of the bush' to rescue Ethiopia from the vortex, Meles allows himself no false dawns. He came to power promising freedom and democracy.
Ten years on, the electoral process is far from flawless and the abuse of human rights persists. Students have been shot dead at political demonstrations; newspaper editors have been imprisoned without trial for allegedly belonging to one or another of the small terrorist groups which seek 'liberation' from the federal state; members of opposition parties have faced harassment and beatings; and last year an internationally respected human rights campaigner, Professor Mesfin Wolde-Mariam, was detained for allegedly 'inciting' students.
Such heavy-handedness troubles the Prime Minister's allies in the diplomatic community who, like me, are inclined to believe that he is a man of integrity. When I first met him four years ago, I suggested that, if he was genuine about creating a democratic Ethiopia, he should look forward to the day when he was removed from power in a free election. He did not hesitate: 'If that does not happen, I shall have failed.'
Today Ethiopia remains - in practice - a one-party state, so I ask the same question and he gives the same answer. But in his patient and measured way, he is scathing about those of his critics who want him to go further and faster. Do they not understand that in a country as battered as Ethiopia, democracy and human rights cannot be conjured out of thin air merely by exhortation? Do they not realise that until the civil service, the judiciary, the police service, and the nation's intelligentsia all understand the concepts and embrace the culture, these Western values will not take root?
Some of the Prime Minister's supportive critics in the diplomatic community say that he should spend less time in his office and instead - security permitting - should get out and find out first hand what people think of him and his government. Meles's response is telling: 'Africa's downfall has always been the cult of the personality. And their names always seem to begin with M. We've had Mobutu and Mengistu and I'm not going to add Meles to the list.'
I should have countered with Mandela, but I thought of it too late.
If he were to pay Dessie a visit, he would, I think, find cause for encouragement. I notice that people now speak openly to me in front of others; that they no longer drop their voices when they criticise the government. And where not so long ago officials were terrified to think for themselves, there is a new confidence, a willingness to explore ideas and debate controversial questions that a mere decade ago would have been unthinkable.
And yet I find myself thinking about 11 September, or more precisely of Bill Clinton's warning, echoed by Tony Blair and elaborated by Chris Patten, about the need for an all-out war on poverty in Africa. Meles is as eloquent as any of the three.
'Where there is economic and social decay, there is bound to be political turmoil,' he told a recent conference of African leaders - '11 September has conclusively proved that you cannot have a desperate ghetto next door to a prosperous safe haven; in a globalised environment, security is indivisible'.
If Meles is right, then the West had better offer more than 'recycled peanuts' as its contribution to a new partnership with Africa. Ethiopia has signed up for the free market - there is no alternative - but has yet to reap any of the dividends.
How can anyone doubt the need for radical reform of the world trading system when Ethiopia has met all the demands of the IMF and the World Bank but is still getting poorer and poorer? Or when the price of coffee on the world market crashes by 40 per cent?
'I don't suppose you noticed the difference at Starbucks,' an Ethiopian friend said, 'but we have. And as coffee is our principal export, 15 million people are directly affected.' The truth is that Ethiopia is at the mercy of a system which, so far, has enriched the rich by impoverishing the poor. And that is simply not sustainable.
Which takes me to the girls waving goodbye as we left Dessie. They were three of Ethiopia's Aids orphans. They now live in a shack in a red-light district, but are surrounded by caring neighbours. A few months ago a priest offered to move and look after them, but the neighbours became suspicious. They talked to the eldest girl (who is 14) and she said he had tried to do nasty things to her. The priest was beaten up and run out of town.
Those girls were fortunate. There are now almost one million Aids orphans in Ethiopia (more than anywhere in Africa) and since most of them face destitution they are very vulnerable.
Of course, if Ethiopa had access to the drugs routinely available in the West their young parents might still be alive. I wonder how is it that those who sit on the boards of the giant pharmaceutical companies - who dispose of life and death in the marketplace - can live with the fact that they have imposed a death sentence on millions of innocent people by clinging to 'intellectual property rights'; by doing all they can to prohibit the manufacture of cheap generic alternatives to their branded life-savers; and even by refusing to forego some proportion of their vast profits to make anti-retrovirals available at below cost price to those countries that need them.
I would like to take these people to meet those little girls in Dessie. The eldest would produce a photograph of their parents. And she would probably ask these important visitors why their parents did not get those special drugs. And I hope their visitors would be shamed into silence. The desperate truth is that in Ethiopia, as elsewhere in Africa, the scourge of Aids is destroying the future.
Almost 30 years ago, I ended The Unknown Famine with the words, 'these people need food, medicine and blankets - and they need these things now'. Today I would say 'they need justice and fairness - and they need these things now'. And, mindful of 11 September, I would add: 'Or else.'
· The first of Jonathan Dimbleby's two radio documentaries, 'Ethiopia: Beyond Hunger', is on BBC Radio 4, tomorrow at 8pm.
© Guardian News & Media 2008
Published: 7/27/2002
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