Dawit Wolde Giorgis
We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So let’s start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me
(Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones
March 7, 1985 USA for the historic collaborative appeal to the world to support the starving in Ethiopia).
The Great Famine and Universal Empathy
Forty years ago, Ethiopia was devastated by the Great Famine, brought about by natural disaster and human indifference. In a country where the vast majority of people live on what they grow year-to-year, when the rains fail, it means hard Times. When the leadership ignores the situation, it is a death sentence. When the international community also looks away, it is the end of the world as they know it.
Famine is never far away in the Horn of Africa, but advanced planning and generous governments can avert the worst. In 1984, however, Ethiopia’s Marxist regime had alienated the West, and worries about the spread of communism gave donor governments pause. Why should they feed a country spitting poison at them every day? As the government official in charge of famine relief, I tried to walk the tight wire of convincing the West to help while at the same time staying on the good side of a dictator who wanted nothing to do with the West and who denied there was a famine at all.
Although the build-up to the famine had been covered by some news outlets, everything changed on October 23, 1984, when the BBC broadcast a second television news report by Michael Buerk, which was subsequently seen by an estimated 470 million people around the world. Filmed at a relief camp overwhelmed with dying refugees, his report was not about politics, but people—starving men, women, and children, many of whom would be dead by the time the footage was shown. Buerk called it ‘a biblical famine’, ‘the closest thing to hell on earth’, and described ‘wasted people …, dulled by hunger, driven beyond the point of desperation’. His unforgettable words and the horrifying imagery from cameraman Mo Amin turned a forgotten tragedy into a global crusade.
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Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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Dear Dawit,
Warm greetings from Mamo at proudlystuck @ gmail.com.
Great respect for the quality of the writing. You write with the solemnity of someone who has watched history die and hopes it can still be resuscitated by memory. You remind the world of 1985, the year compassion thundered through satellite signals and shook loose the wallets of the world. You speak as one who stood in the ruins, begged for help, and received it. We thank you for your witness.
But memory, Dawit, is not a shrine. It’s a courtroom. And when you testify, we must also examine the record.
You mourn the collapse of compassion. But compassion did not collapse, it was neglected, manipulated, and outsourced, often by those who once lit the revolutionary fires. Including your generation.
You romanticize the age of famine-era solidarity while sidestepping the political rot that made the famine possible. You grieve the silence of the West while muting the failures of the Ethiopian state. Not just today’s… yours. You lament Trump but never interrogate Mengistu.
You served under the Derg. You helped overthrow Haile Selassie. You watched the empire fall, but what did your generation rise to build? A better Ethiopia—or a bloodier one? You stood in the revolution’s spotlight, but did you also stand in its aftermath, when ideas gave way to executions, and slogans replaced strategy?
You write as if the West stopped caring. But many of us wonder: Did Ethiopia ever start caring for itself?
We’re not questioning your sorrow, Dawit, we’re questioning your silence.
Why does your essay skip past the regimes you served?
Why does your critique skip from Haile Selassie to Trump as if nothing happened in between?
Why does every collapse happen to Ethiopia, but never through Ethiopia?
We are “proudly stuck”, not because we disrespect elders, but because we remember what they forget. We remember that every regime blames the last, and every intellectual mourns a future they helped bury.
You speak of famine with gravity. But famine is not just drought—it is a failure of governance, foresight, and courage. That failure was shared.
So no, Dawit. The collapse of compassion is not just a Western tragedy. It is also an Ethiopian inheritance. A generation that was handed the bones of an empire and the hopes of the hungry, and still managed to produce a country that has neither food nor freedom.
To be “proudly stuck” is to say: we remember 1985. And we remember who was in the room.
Respectfully,
Proudly stuck—between selective nostalgia and unclaimed responsibility.
Thank you for reading and commenting on the article:
This article is about the decline of universal comapssion since (40 years) the international humanitarian response to the great famine in Ethiopia. It is not about the politics of the time and my own involvement. I have sufficiently dealt with the
issues you raised and other related issues in the 400 page book titled Red Tears published in 1989. If this was just an excuse to jab me I accept it with grace. The truth is with me and God. Me and my colleagues were honestly trying to help our people, and we remain proud of our collective achievements under difficult circumstances
Dear Dawit,
Thank you so much. Your response carries the weight of a chapter forged in hardship and hope, and I honor that. My comment wasn’t a jab, nor an attempt to unwrite the sincerity or courage of those days.
My voice doesn’t indict… it inherits. When the world poured its breath into Ethiopia to resuscitate her, what did we do with that second wind? Did we rise or rehearse? Move forward, or circle back with a flag and a flash drive?
Don’t get me wrong. You are the kind of voice the country still needs, grounded in service and sacrifice. But the country also needs something more: a vision not only rooted in memory, but fertilized by present realities. Nostalgia can inspire but when it crystallizes, it forgets how to build.
In short, if anything, I was trying to hold a mirror, not throw a stone. That’s the ache. The wondering. Not at you…but at us.
Respectfully
Proudly stuck between what was survived and and what still needs to be lived.
Major Dawit,
“We are the World” is a Double-Edged Sword: It humiliated Ethiopia(ns) and tarnished Ethiopia’s image! I bought the DVD set to support victims but never had guts to watch.
Whites’ ‘Sympathy’ for Blacks: Most Whites mistreat & traumatize Blacks→ (1). A white woman kept following me and whistled “We are the World” [on 2 training trips]; (2). Child Simone Biles Case in Ireland: youtu.be/_v29zu3CccY?t=46
‘Famine Cherry-Picking’(?!): Your omission of the Haile-Selassie’s Monarchy [H-S M] Era Wollo Famine is sad. Didn’t it even trigger H-S M’s fall & bring in the Brutal Derg?
Greed/Incompetence/Indifference (?!): I wonder why H-S M failed to airdrop 100g [10¢] Shewa Bakery bread to avert the Wollo Famine. H-S M humiliated Ethiopia(ns) for good.
Adanech’s Addis: She turned Ethiopia’s Capital from “World’s Open Sky Public Toilet” to “Marvelous World’s Third Diplomatic Capital”. She feeds ≥ 1 million school kids, too.
Abiy’s Ethiopia: He turned Ethiopia from “World’s Poster Child of Poverty & Famine” to “World’s Poster Child of Greenery & Prosperity.” He feeds ≥10 million school kids, too.
Derg Era Famine: Ethiopia’s turmoil worsened by West’s embargo and these actors→ CIA/KGB, EPRP/Meison, Egypt’s Proxy Wars [EPLF/ELF/TPLF; Ethio-Somali], etc.
Casualties & Beneficiaries: TPLF & Co. reaped millions! However, Birhan Woldu [the Tigray Famine Poster Child] and Tigray were left in the cold the minute the cameras left.