Starv­ing civil­ians as a weapon of war­fare is pro­hib­it­ed under UN Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil Res­o­lu­tion 2417, and is recog­nised as a war crime.
So, what is a Nobel Peace Prize win­ner who does just that?
And what are the gov­ern­ments who sell him weapons?

The cur­rent war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region begs an answer to both those questions.

Under the head­line “Steal, Burn, Rape, Kill”, Alex de Waal, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the World Peace Foun­da­tion, not­ed that even as the Ethiopi­an and Eritre­an gov­ern­ments are shop­ping for drones and oth­er sophis­ti­cat­ed arma­ments, “for now their most reli­able weapon is hunger: they aim to starve Tigray into sub­mis­sion and keep it per­ma­nent­ly depen­dent on an inter­na­tion­al aid pipeline that they can switch on and of at will.”  (Lon­don Review of Books 17 June 2021)

As for switch­ing off the flow of weapons — in the arms bazaars of Chi­na, Bul­gar­ia, Israel, Ukraine and oth­ers, the only con­cern is: “How much can you pay?”

And while they’re fill­ing their shop­ping carts, Ethiopi­an forces dri­ven back by the Tigray People’s Lib­er­a­tion Front (TPLF) have cut elec­tric­i­ty lines and destroyed two bridges that are key for the deliv­ery of aid.

It’s not as if the world can say “we didn’t see it coming”.
In his 1988 book “Sur­ren­der or Starve: The Wars Behind the Famines”, renowned polit­i­cal and trav­el writer Robert Kaplan not­ed that to a sig­nif­i­cant degree the mid-1980s famine in the Horn of Africa was “a manip­u­lat­ed con­se­quence of war and eth­nic strife”.
(FULL DISCLOSURE: Robert Kaplan has been a friend for near­ly 40 years, and quotes me in the book)

                             STARVATION AND A PRIZE LIE

 Today, more than three decades lat­er, the U.S. and aid agen­cies esti­mate that as many as a mil­lion peo­ple are starv­ing again in Tigray.
Ethiopi­an Prime Min­is­ter Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize win­ner, insists there is “no hunger” there.
The prime minister’s bald-faced lie would be laugh­able were it not so wicked. Deter­min­ing the exact scale of the star­va­tion is impos­si­ble under the cir­cum­stances, but his­to­ry and avail­able evi­dence make the num­ber of vic­tims more than credible.

                               NO STRANGERS TO CONFLICT

War is part of the warp and weave of Tigray.
In “The Blue Nile”, author Alan Moor­head not­ed that when the Scot­tish explor­er James Bruce vis­it­ed the area in 1770, there were “end­less march­ings and counter-march­ings of futile lit­tle armies”.
Tigrayans rebelled against Emper­or Haile Selassie in the 1940s. In the mid-1970s the TPLF launched a guer­ril­la war against the bru­tal Derg regime that had oust­ed the emper­or. By 1991 the TPLF was in the cap­i­tal, Addis Ababa.

In 1985 three col­leagues and I spent near­ly a month trav­el­ing with the TPLF.

By def­i­n­i­tion, that makes main­tain­ing objec­tiv­i­ty, sort­ing wheat from chaff in the infor­ma­tion giv­en and what you get to see and video­tape a challenge.
But acute hunger and the rav­ages of war are just plain obvi­ous. So were the Ethiopi­an air force jets that prowled overhead.

                             A LAND OF RAVAGED BEAUTY

The land­scape we trav­eled through was spec­tac­u­lar, and brutal.
Brown, dust-dry ter­raced hill­sides were bereft of crops, or any poten­tial to grow them until the drought broke and the war stopped. Vil­lages lay in ruin, many of them aban­doned by peo­ple who’d had no option but to walk away in hope of find­ing food aid.
It was a sad fate for the leg­endary birth­place of Ethiopia’s first emper­or, Mene­lik I, the son of the Hebrew King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

At one point we came upon a fam­i­ly of five strug­gling down a steep cliff­side path.

The father was bur­dened with a bun­dle of pos­ses­sions, and lead­ing a small boy by the hand.
His wife had a baby on her back and bun­dles in each hand.
A lit­tle girl in a ragged dress strug­gled to keep up.
By the time we reached the bot­tom, my legs told me hoist­ing her onto my shoul­ders had been a bad idea.
The family’s shy smiles told me otherwise.

Three weeks of trav­el across Tigray led me to report that the Ethiopi­an government’s “only con­tri­bu­tion to hunger is bombs.”  And so it remains today.

               NO ABSOLUTE GOOD GUYS

And lest it seem the TPLF are angels, twen­ty-five years after our trip to Tigray, it was dis­cov­ered that mil­lions of dol­lars hand­ed over to them to buy food, was divert­ed to pur­chase weapons. In hind­sight, it might have occurred to me that the TPLF was too good to be true.
On the oth­er hand, I think the aspects of their oper­a­tions that we saw, includ­ing clin­ics and food dis­tri­b­u­tion, were a gen­uine reflec­tion of their pos­i­tive side. And I doubt the peo­ple we trav­eled with knew what was being done high­er up their organisation.

Unless the out­side world steps in, stops the flow of weapons and insists on unhin­dered access for aid agen­cies, the peo­ple of Tigray are right back where they were in the 1980s.

And for the Prize liar and the arms sup­pli­ers, it looks very much like “busi­ness as usual”.

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