Peter Worthington of the good Toronto Sun joins the right-thinking (well actually, he didn’t have to “join”, he was already right) about Live-8 (see previous two blog entries), and says of Canadians, “we never learn”, which, if you think about it, is an ironic waste of breath.
TWENTY YEARS ago when Ethiopia was in famine, Bob Geldof invented the Live Aid concert to attract the world’s attention to misery there.
It was an astonishing success, raised millions, caught the humanitarian emotions of the world, contributed to him being knighted—and achieved absolutely nothing for the wretched of Ethiopia.
That country’s homicidal Marxist regime of Col. Haile Mariam Mengistu even charged duty on aid that was donated by the outside world. Appropriately, Mengistu today has sanctuary in Zimbabwe, where his Marxist soulmate, Robert Mugabe, has savaged one of Africa’s most hopeful economies and made tyranny endemic.
In the 1980s, food aid to the starving of Ethiopia was diverted to the Ethiopian army, although the Geldofs and aid bureaucrats of the world were in ferocious denial. Filmmaker Rob Roy and I were with fighters in Eritrea when they routed and ransacked an Ethiopian division. In the army kitchens we found sacks of Canadian wheat flour that was intended for refugees.
I took photographs, reported the findings, but the Canadian government wasn’t interested. It refused to see the truth about humanitarian aid.
So much for Geldof’s passion then. Now there’s something of history being repeated with a series of Live 8 concerts around the world, timed for this week’s G8 summit meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland. This time the concerts are more ambitious than just raising money for Ethiopia. This time it’s all Africa, especially the 14 African countries that are among the world’s 18 poorest.
We never learn.
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