Anyone who has followed Meles Zenawi’s interviews with foreign media observes
that journalists rarely relent from asking him about the state of famine in
Ethiopia. His answer is always consistent: ‘there has not been a famine
on his watch – emergencies, but no famines.’ It doesn’t matter that
there is massive and near constant starvation. It does not matter that 34
million Ethiopians were chronically undernourished in 2005/2006 alone.[1] It
does not matter that people are dying. That you are pleading for food handouts on
a near constant basis doesn’t matter either. What matters is the
vocabulary. Don’t call it a famine! The word famine is a taboo.
It’s always been so. History is replete
with autocratic rulers trying to hide famines from the eyes of the world. When
the situation goes out of hand, they would still try to trivialize the problem
by calling it ‘not a famine.’ The great Irish famine was not a
famine for the rulers. It was just ‘distress’,
‘destitution’, dearth of provisions’, ‘calamity’,
or so, not a famine. The Bengal famine wasn’t a famine for Winston
Churchill; it was just a curse of sorts befitting people who ‘breed like
rabbits.’[2] But why
do dictators detest the word famine? The main reason is that famine is
anachronistic, and represents backwardness, not just of economic but also
political.
