Much of the land is desert, and rainfall is uncer-
tain, so that surviving even at subsistence level is
difficult. Famine has stalked the region and
claimed more than a million lives. Five million
remained in danger in the early 1990s. Only
Libya has reaped untold riches from below this
desert, in the form of oil, but it fell under the
maverick rule of Colonel Gaddafi, who properly
used a part of these riches to benefit the Libyans
but also fanned conflict among his neighbours
and elsewhere in the world. Gaddafi remained
unpredictable. Libya’s wealth did not help the
whole region; indeed, its neighbours Chad and
Somalia are among the poorest in Africa.
Authoritarian regimes in Ethiopia and Somalia,
characterised by corruption and economic mis-
management, added to the misery. But it was,
above all, the tribal and civil wars of the region
that were responsible for the sufferings of millions
of helpless people. Precious resources and aid
were used to pay for weapons to fight these wars.
The West and East, when their priorities were dic-
tated by the Cold War, supplied them. Yet these
were the countries ‘liberated’ by the United
Nations from European colonial rule, their inde-
pendence intended to signal a new era for the
suppressed peoples of the world. What went so
dreadfully wrong?
The first African nation rescued from colonial
dependency was Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia),
thanks to the internecine Second World War
between the European colonial powers. In 1941
it was liberated from Italian occupation, which
had begun in 1936, and Haile Selassie was
restored as feudal emperor. Ethiopia alone had
successfully resisted by force of arms European
colonial partition in the nineteenth century as the
Italian army, advancing inland from the colony of
Eritrea on the Red Sea, was defeated in 1896.
When Haile Selassie returned in 1941 he bene-
fited from the modernisation and centralisation of
the Italian occupation and launched an Ethiopian
drive to try to bring his backward kingdom into
the twentieth century. Progress was impressive in
education, and a small start was made in setting
up some factories and in industrialising. With the
assistance of the US a properly equipped and
trained army was created. These developments,
however, undermined the old structures of the
monarchial state. By the early 1970s new shocks
resulted in government and society falling apart.
The year 1973 proved disastrous. The rise in
oil prices hit the poorest countries especially
hard. This coincided with a calamitous drought.
There was famine in the Tigray province and the
royal army was defeated by Eritrean freedom
fighters. The rising, which turned into revolution,
began in the spring of 1974. Behind it was a
group of officers, army mutineers, who were
joined by students and teachers in the capital,
Addis Ababa. Gradually the revolution became
more radical. The 83-year-old emperor was
deposed in September 1974 and imprisoned; later
he and his family were murdered. Strife within theChapter 65
WAR AND FAMINE IN THE HORN
OF AFRICA