Surrender or starve : the wars behind the famine

BCH074

Surrender or starve : the wars behind the famine

eng

a-cb---, f-et---

188 pages

Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1988

Bibliographic record from: Holocaust and genocide bibliographic database. -- Jerusalem : Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, 1994 (ver 2.2)

Kaplan, Robert D.

This study of Ethiopia from late 1984 through early 1987 exposes the connections among civil war, direct mass killing of civilians, and famine. In the preface, Kaplan states that "Famine in the Horn [ of Africa]is both a tool and an aspect of ethnic conflict, with the Ethiopian Amharas of the central highlands pitted against the Eritreans and Tigreans of the north," (p. ix)In the chapter titled "Th e African Killing Fields," the author examines two government policies against peasants - resettlement and villagization - that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. Resettlement involved forcibly moving people from the northern, rebel-controlled region to the south, under inhumane conditions. According to Kaplan, "It is possible that more blacks were killed in the [resettlement]program than ha d been killed directly by South African security forces in forty years. The manner in which Ethiopians died evoked the well-known slaughter of millions of the Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in the mid- 1970s."(p. 115)Villagization involved forcing millions of peasants throughout the nation to dismantle their villages and then "to walk, with the remnants of their homes on their backs to a new, centra l location that had been selected by the party cadres." (p.

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