Ethiopia - Lessons in How to Run a Famine

​Volume 2 1987

After seizing power in 1974, Ethiopia’s Marxist-Leninist Dergue (Armed Forces Co-ordinating Committee) launched a campaign against ‘Capitalism’. They prohibited the private sale of farm products, executed thousands of students and skilled workers, imprisoned tens of thousands more, and caused over 2-million refugees to flee from their homeland.

With the encouragement of their 4 000 Soviet, 2 000 East German and 15 000 Cuban ‘military advisors’, the Marxist government used foreign aid to underwrite its military build-up to the, point where today Ethiopia has the largest standing army in Africa —300 000 troops.

The Ethiopian government gains its hard currency and foreign exchange by charging Western Relief agencies ‘import tax’ on all the free relief aid being brought into the country to feed the millions of starving victims of Socialism. The Marxists demand that the relief agencies supply new Mercedes trucks for distributing the food and still charge 100% ‘import tax’ on them, in addition to demanding that the trucks be handed over to the Ethiopian government after two years.

Over a million people have starved to death in Ethiopia while the Marxists have exported food to Egypt and the Soviet bloc! Food has actually been seen rotting on the docksides while the trucks were being used to ferry Cuban troops to burn down villages. Yet the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation has just promised Ethiopia R12-million more in aid.

Dr Tedla, a former cabinet minister in Ethiopia, told me how the Marxists deliberately manipulated the famine in order to punish unco-operative tribes, to force their re-location policy and to starve out opposing tribes like in the Tigre and Wollo regions. He said that during the Red Terror of 1977-78 over 30 000 people were executed publicly — with the parents or relatives of the victims being forced to pay for the bullets! “The concentration camps and death camps are all over the country,” he said.