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| The 1985 Live Aid concert under the banner of “feed the world”. PHOTO: Chris Evans |
Much of the 250 million dollars donated, through Live Aid, to help save lives during the internationally-publicised 1984 Ethiopian famine were systematically stolen by those who are running the country today who used the money to buy weapons, a major Australian newspaper reports.
The report published last week in the nationally circulated The Australian newspaper says substantial amount of funds raised through the world-famous “Live Aid project were siphoned from the mouths of Africa's starving into the arms of guerillas fighting the then Ethiopian government”.
The newspaper made this revelation having spoken to a former senior associate of the governing EPRDF party, who, it says, resides in Perth – the capital of the state of Western Australia.
The damning news report, titled: “Ex-rebel says Live Aid millions stolen”, quoted Gebremedhin Araya of the former head of finance of the Tigray People's Liberation Front as saying: "I received a great amount of money from the NGOs and automatically it was taken by (rebel leaders). This is a heavy trick, assigned by the top leaders.
"I was acting as a merchant, as a Muslim, and they (NGOs) don't know me because my name was Mohammed," he was quoted as saying.
"The money, much of it, the leaders put it in their accounts in Western Europe . . . Some of it was used to buy weapons. The people did not get half a kilogram of maize,” he told the newspaper.
The governing EPRDF party has now been in power for almost 20 years and Gebremedhin Araya is one of many who had a fall out with the party just before it came to power in 1991.
They won power having overthrown the then socialist regime that reigned in Ethiopia for the preceding17 years.
Gebremedhin Araya also makes a claim in this report that “instead of the cash and food being handed out to the poor and dying, the vast majority of it went into the pockets and bellies of the warlords, who were also being supported by the CIA”.
The famine of 1984 was an unfortunate event that presented Ethiopia to television audiences across the world as a place where people starve and die.
Suffering and dyeing Ethiopian children were filmed and shown to the world and the event was dubbed: “one of the worst catastrophes of the twentieth century”.
Those television pictures destroyed Ethiopia’s image in the minds of many across the world while they evidently helped the guerrilla fighters achieve they goals.
Although the EPRDF made pledges to eradicate hunger from Ethiopia, they have consistently been asking for “emergency aid” almost every two years for the last 20 years.
For many Ethiopians, this has been regarded as money-making trick using Ethiopia’s image as a famine-prone country.
The last time the Meles Zenawi regime asked for “urgent food aid” was just five months ago in October 2009.
The BBC reported the message of the regime on 22 October 2009 saying: “The Ethiopian government has asked the international community for emergency food aid for 6.2 million people.”
The Meles Zenawi regime sent this message just three days before the 25th anniversary of the 1984 famine.
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