In July 1985, over a billion people watched Live Aid. Months earlier, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie had written…

In July 1985, over a billion people watched Live Aid. Months earlier, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie had written "We Are the World." All of it was a response to a famine in Ethiopia. Almost nobody remembers who actually caused the famine. 🧵

What the world saw: on October 23, 1984, the BBC aired a report by correspondent Michael Buerk with footage filmed in the Korem refugee camp by Kenyan photographer Mohamed Amin. Within weeks, 425 television stations had rebroadcast those images of starving children to roughly 470 million viewers worldwide.

The crisis was framed almost entirely as a natural disaster, the work of a catastrophic drought striking a poor country. Television footage showed cracked earth, dying livestock, and skeletal children. The government in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, was barely named in Western coverage. Its policies were not named at all.

Bob Geldof started calling musicians. On January 28, 1985, forty-six artists recorded "We Are the World" in a single night in Hollywood. The single sold over 20 million copies. On July 13, Live Aid filled Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia and raised more than 100 million US dollars for famine relief. It was the largest humanitarian mobilization in history up to that point.

What was actually happening: in September 1974, a Marxist-Leninist military junta called the Derg overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. By 1977, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam had killed his rivals inside the junta and taken sole control. He built a Soviet-style state. He nationalized all rural land in 1975 and imposed grain quotas that peasants had to deliver to the state at prices below the cost of production.

This is the mechanism Stalin had used to engineer famine in Ukraine in 1932. The state destroys the production incentive, then extracts grain by force. When drought arrived in northern Ethiopia in 1983, there was no surplus and no buffer. Forced collectivization had already destroyed the country's food reserves years before the rain stopped.

The drought was real. Droughts had hit that region for centuries without killing a million people. What turned a drought into a famine that killed roughly one million Ethiopians was the policy decision to keep extracting food from regions that were already starving.

Tigray and Eritrea were in armed rebellion against the Derg. Mengistu used food as a weapon of war against the civilian populations in those regions. Blocking grain convoys, bombing markets in rebel-held towns, and burning crops in contested territory were state policy. Researchers including Alex de Waal and Human Rights Watch documented this in detail.

Then came the resettlement program. The regime declared it would move 1.5 million peasants from the rebellious north to the south. Médecins Sans Frontières documented what followed: people loaded into trucks and aircraft, separated from their families, dumped in regions with no food, water, or shelter. Deaths during transport and at the destinations are estimated at 50,000 to 100,000.

MSF France denounced the program publicly in October 1985. The Ethiopian government expelled them in December. Investigators later established that a large share of the international aid raised in the West was diverted into the resettlement program itself. The same money raised to save Ethiopians from starvation paid, in part, for the operation that killed between 50,000 and 100,000 of them.

In December 2006, an Ethiopian court convicted Mengistu of genocide. In May 2008, the sentence was upgraded to death. He has lived in exile in Zimbabwe since 1991, never extradited and never tried in person.

If the cause of the Ethiopian famine had been a right-wing regime, it would probably be in every school curriculum alongside Live Aid. The famine that produced the most-watched concert in history was caused by forced collectivization, forced grain seizures, and a deliberate policy of using hunger as a weapon against civilians. Four decades later, that half of the story still does not appear in most accounts of Live Aid.