Memories return as Geldof visits Ethiopia
In the midst of lush green hills and fields of young corn, Bob Geldof came face to face with victims of Ethiopia’s latest drought, 19 years after the Irish star first called for help for the millions hit by famine in the Horn of Africa nation.
The 51-year-old singer turned activist saw tiny infants on the brink of death in a therapeutic feeding centre where dozens of children lay waiting for high-energy food to keep them alive.
He said it brought back memories of his first visit to Ethiopia in 1984 at the height of a famine caused by both drought and civil war in which hundreds of thousands died.
The Band Aid fund and Live Aid concerts Geldof, a singer in the former Irish punk band The Boomtown Rats, helped organise raised millions for the victims of the 1984-85 famine.
But large amounts of relief food were withheld from regions sympathetic to a rebellion against Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, who was later ousted in 1991 by rebels led by Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s present Prime Minister.
The UN children’s fund, Unicef, which has organised Geldof’s five-day trip to publicise the effects of the current drought, says some 80,000 children in the impoverished nation of 65.5 million are near death from lack of food.
The Awassa region, 170 miles south of the capital, Addis Ababa, is one of the hardest-hit by the drought, which humanitarian officials say has already claimed 30,000 lives since late last year.
Ironically, the feeding centre that cares for 156 children is surrounded by green hills and cornfields is in a region that has now been hit by what aid officials call “green famine” – a situation where food planted has not ripened in time, leaving thousands to go hungry until the next harvest expected in September.
“Why do all this elaborate work in bringing all these people back to health if all we are going to do is send them back out to nothing?” Geldof said at the feeding centre.
“It probably isn’t a famine yet. I keep going on about it, and I don’t understand it.”
