Famines in Africa

The United Nations has officially declared a famine in Somalia, the first since 1992.   Half the population – 3.7 million – are said to be at risk, with another 7 million in Kenya and Ethiopia also in need of help.

As is so often the case in African famines, politics is playing a part.   The Islamist militia, al-Shabab, which is affiliated to al-Qaeda, controls the area where the famine is raging, and two years ago it banned foreign aid agencies.   Even now it is prepared to allow only limited access.

The stricken area had previously included the most fertile part of the country, and the UN says nearly £1 billion in aid is needed.  The USA has said it will send help so long as al-Shahab does not interfere with it, or use it to raise money.

The great Ethiopian famines of the 1970’s and 80’s were also aggravated by politics.   In the first, the Emperor Haile Selassie, responded lethargically (and was promptly deposed), while the second was exacerbated by President Mengistu’s scorched earth campaign against rebels, and his determination that the famine would not spoil a birthday celebration for his regime.

Disaster benefit concerts

The 20 year old American R&B singer Chris Brown is to host a benefit concert for Haiti on May 15 at Richmond, Virginia. It is the latest in a series of disaster benefit concerts that follow the example pioneered by Bengali musician Ravi Shankar.

After what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was hit by the deadliest storm the world has ever seen (see my blog of June 1, 2009), Shankar asked his friend, the former Beatle George Harrison, to help, and they were able to recruit Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and many other big names to perform in New York in front of 40,000 people in August 1971.

Up to one million people had died in the cyclone, and the song George Harrison wrote about the disaster contained the monumental understatement “it sure looks like a mess.” Still, the concert raised a much needed £120,000.

Fourteen years later, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure organised the most famous benefit concert of all – Live Aid – with events in London, Philadelphia and many other places. It was broadcast across the world and was reckoned to have raised about £150 million for famine relief in Ethiopia. This great hunger was also estimated to have cost perhaps a million lives.

Darfur + Stalin

The International Criminal Court has indeed issued a warrant for the arrest of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan (see yesterday’s blog). He is accused of two counts of war crimes and five of crimes against humanity.

The people of Darfur - a region in the west of Sudan that is about the size of France – have suffered six years of murder, rape and destruction, and up to 300,000 have died, while more than two and a half million have fled. The ICC already has a warrant out for Sudan's humanitarian affairs minister (!). President al-Bashir has responded predictably – expelling foreign aid organisations who do what little they can to keep the remaining Darfuris alive, while China and Ethiopia have protested against the arrest warrant.

On this day....56 years ago, Josef Stalin died. The Soviet dictator was one of history’s worst mass murderers – responsible for the deaths of up to 30 million people. The ways in which they died were many and varied. The forced collectivisation of agriculture in the 1930’s killed millions, though as Stalin’s then henchman Khrushchev said later, we do not know how many, because “no one was counting.”

As Stalin grew more and more paranoid, he began an orgy of show trials, with loyal Soviet citizens executed wholesale after admitting imaginary crimes. Then there were the gulags – the labour camps in the bleakest parts of the country – where people were sent to die for the most trivial offences, or for none at all. Many believe that Stalin was on the point of launching another purge when death claimed him.