Description
Humanitarians tend to promote depoliticised narratives of famine so they can prioritise the immediate goal of saving lives. However, in the context of the Ethiopian civil war in the mid-1980s, Oxfam and MSF had to confront the fact that aid was being subverted by the central government as an instrument of oppression against Tigrayan and Eritrean communities. Indeed, the forced resettlement of famine-afflicted communities to the supposedly more fertile South of country was a classic case of what has been called ‘repressive developmentalism’ – spoken of in the language of benevolent agricultural transformation, yet in reality a violent counterinsurgency operation.
How the NGOs reacted was telling – MSF spoke out about humanitarian complicity with resettlement (and was expelled from Ethiopia in December 1985), yet Oxfam stayed silent. Given the recent recurrence of famine caused by conflict in Tigray, this paper demonstrates the urgent need for historical consciousness in current humanitarian policy debates. To do this, it asks two central questions – how did NGOs rationalise the tensions between the short-term alleviation of suffering and the political causes of the Ethiopian famine, and to what extent should we regard humanitarian organisations as distinct actors with agency in a cyclical conflict-hunger nexus?
