ASK MICHAEL BUERK: LIVE DISCUSSION TX: 11.01.04 2230-2300 NEWSHOST: PHILIPPA THOMAS Philippa Thomas: Hello and welcome to This World Interactive, a live discussion following Michael Buerk's programme that's just finished on BBC 2, about his return to Ethiopia 20 years after the 1984 famine. I'm Philippa Thomas and Michael's here with me in the studio to answer your questions about the programme. Thanks for taking part Michael. We've already received around 2,000 questions but of course you're welcome to keep them coming. You can send questions via your digital satellite set top box or e-mail us, the address is: thisworld@bbc.co.uk or send a text message to 83981. Well of course we've had many, many questions from viewers asking about the situation in Ethiopia today, what's happening now. Niraj in London says: Could 1984 happen again? And Jack from Redcar asks: How close is the current situation from slipping into another catastrophic famine? Michael Buerk: It shouldn't happen again for lots of reasons. First of all the wars, which as you saw from the film, in 1984 and '85 the civil wars that cut these people off and made it so difficult to actually get food to them are over, or at least largely over. Secondly, there's a very elaborate early warning system that's been put in place, so they're monitoring the price of food and so on and what's happening in the villages, so it's an early warning system too. And thirdly, the experience of all that, they've got a more benign government, at least, than existed in 1984. But having said that the underlying situation is deteriorating - the population is rising, the ability of the land to feed them is falling - and that deteriorating situation is creating from year to year a really difficult situation and it could happen that the food doesn't get there in time - just got there in time this past year, just enough, just in time. But it's possible to see a situation which it didn't and which might produce the same sort of situation as we had in 1984/85. Philippa Thomas: Just standing back a little bit, we've had this question from Manchester from Belay Kahsay saying: Why does Ethiopia face famine more often and on such a devastating scale compared to other African countries? Michael Buerk: Well there is a large concentration of the population in the highlands, it's a very old society, a very large number of people on land that is being eroded and the more the balance between the people and the land gets out of kilter the more that land is being eroded, the more vulnerable those people are. I think that's the main reason why they are uniquely vulnerable in a continent where there is vulnerability all over. Philippa Thomas: Now Michael we'll come back to the reasons for the famine in just a moment but hundreds of viewers want to ask about your return to Ethiopia. Ricardo Gonzalez says: How do you feel - how did you feel returning this time? And Neil Vincent in Manchester said: Were you shocked by the fact that more people are facing starvation now than 20 years ago? Michael Buerk: I don't know about shocked, I was really quite surprised I think because you know you hear about dependency and so on. But going back well it was strange really because of all that happened over the years in Ethiopia, you tend to have - even though you fight against it as a reporter because you have to be neutral in many ways and you have to be as detached as you can possibly be but I've had so many experiences in Ethiopia that you do tend to get emotionally vulnerable yourself. So when you go back and find people queuing up in that sort of way - tens of thousands of people, millions of people in fact queuing for food in that vulnerable situation, you do wonder who's going to stop this, who's going to change this, is it our responsibility, is it their responsibility, what is going to change this paradigm, what is going to stop the vulnerability, what is going to stop the possibility of 1984 happening again? Philippa Thomas: Of course as you're always saying you can't help but get involved and get emotional about it and so many questions but Vicky Read from Middlesex, for example, saying she thinks you're so brave, she wants to know how you cope when you see what you see? Michael Buerk: Vicky I appreciate the thought but it's ridiculous to say a tourist, a reporter who is a kind of tourist with a purpose, who ends up not in that hotel but another hotel at the end of the assignment is being brave when there are so many millions of people going through the sort of things they're going through, this junction is a very uncomfortable one for a reporter anyway. I don't know one's own feelings, it's very difficult. The job of a reporter is to be neutral but you can't be inhumane and somehow or other you have to communicate exactly the emotional temperature of the story as well as everything else but not tell people what to think about it, not tell people what to feel about it, people are perfectly capable of coming to their own conclusions about a story like this without me telling them what to feel. Philippa Thomas: The fact that you broke such a huge story - that your reports became such a catalyst, now Mark Lindsay from Swindon says: How were you affected by this, did you find it humbling? Michael Buerk: No I was terribly worried at the time in 1984, when I came back from Ethiopia, about how I could possibly communicate all that I'd seen to people who weren't going to be there themselves, they were going to watch it on this two dimensional set in the comfort of their own living room, how was I going to be able to try and show them what it was really like to be there and I could smell and be touched and touch and feeling it with all your senses? That was the challenge and responsibility I felt at the time. But actually the prevailing feeling I had was a terrible feeling of being utterly and completely useless because you're a "farangi", because you're white, they naturally think you're a doctor, you're an aid worker, you're somebody with food, they come to you, they try to give their babies to you and you suddenly realise you're that most useless of things - just a reporter, you're completely useless and incapable of actually helping these people and you just - the prevailing feeling I had then and still have to a great extent is a feeling of uselessness and lack of self-worth really. Philippa Thomas: And a lot of what we saw on screen just now will have moved so many viewers to tears but one question we had from Atif Kazi from London is whether anything has changed for the better do you think since 1984? Michael Buerk: Oh I think lots of things have changed for the better. I think the government has changed for the better - it's not, as I said, blameless, all sorts of criticisms could be levelled against it, it can be heavy-handed, it can be oppressive but it's nothing like as tyrannical as the last one. The wars have stopped, that's a huge thing, apart from this border dispute, terrible border dispute with Eritrea, but the wars have stopped and that's another big thing. And also after '84 we have an engagement with them, an embarrassment about them. I mean one of the heads of the aid agencies in Ethiopia said - I don't know why we're bothering with this early warning system, all we want to do is just pay to have three BBC crews here all the time because that's what the world responds to. We have a sensitivity to it but it's not a continuing responsibility that we seem to feel, it's just that we're sensitive to it when it's brought to our notice. Philippa Thomas: Now looking at dealing with the past we've had this question from Tadesse Yihdego and Tigist Dessalegn saying: Has any attempt been made to bring Colonel Menghistu to justice? Michael Buerk: I don't think they have. Colonel Menghistu fled to Zimbabwe when Addis fell. The last I heard about him he was living on a farm somewhere in the midlands of Zimbabwe. So I suppose attempts to bring Menghistu to justice will have to wait until arguably another African tyrant and dictator falls, what happens then I don't know. Philippa Thomas: We're going to look a lot more at causes Michael but just to say you can still send us your questions, we've had thousands so far, just to remind you, you can e-mail us, you can send messages via your satellite set top box or text us a question via your mobile phone, details are on the screen now. Of course in the programme Michael you say that Ethiopia receives the most relief aid of any country, yet the least development aid of any needy nation, hundreds of viewers have questions about that but first I want to ask you the most simple - what's the difference - relief and development aid? Michael Buerk: Well I mean broadly speaking relief aid is what you saw - it is the food, it is the sacks of American wheat, European wheat and some of the supplementary foods that go in there to keep people alive, it is the Band Aid, the stuff that just keeps people alive. Development aid is the money and support for projects which hopefully would reduce dependency long term, rather than cope with short term need. There's a distinction between the two and that interesting disparity in Ethiopia is one that I think a lot of people ought to ask questions about. Philippa Thomas: They are, the questions are coming in about that. One, for example, from Christopher McCullagh in Worcester, he wants to know why international organisations are reluctant to lend money, why not the commitment to putting in development aid? Michael Buerk: It's a big question and I'd be dishonest to say I know the full answer. The border war around the Millennium over this tract of land and this ramshackle town called Badme which soaked up a lot of money, did certainly stop an awful lot of aid coming in at that time, certainly a lot of foreign investment at that time. I think it's also true that although the government is a great deal more benign than the last one it has a very independent policy, they are former Marxists who have difficulty in perhaps accommodating some of the capitalist ideas of how economies ought to be run and so on. But it's a complicated issue and one I don't have the answers to but I think the question is really worth asking. Philippa Thomas: It becomes very political doesn't it and in fact we've had a couple of questions at least about this issue. Tilahun Gizaw here in London says: I think the Ethiopian government is using food aid as a political tool to continue getting aid from foreign governments, what do you think? And Dibu Kelifo, an Ethiopian living here in London again, says: Firstly as an Ethiopian I want to thank you for bringing the world's attention to what was happening in 1984 but if things are worsening now, is this government using aid as a political tool just as the previous one did? Michael Buerk: I don't know, I didn't come across any particular evidence of that when I was there but I didn't get to every corner of the country this time and there are ethnic tensions within Ethiopia which are extraordinary complicated and extraordinary greatly felt within the country, so I don't particularly know. I get the impression that the government is a much more caring one than the last one, though that is not a very high standard to reach, but much more caring than the last one and anxious to improve the lot of the peasants, in particular, with whom they have this extraordinary emotional attachment, particularly the Tigrayan peasants, who are to a degree the most worst off of the particular regions within Ethiopia. So I don't know, it's a complicated internal argument. I don't see them using food aid in that sort of way. Philippa Thomas: We're going to go on of course to talk about government policy in more detail. Let me just bring you a question we've just had come in from Con O'Dwyer in Runcorn. He's talking about Clare, the young lady that you interviewed, he says: Has she received any sort of official recognition from our government in the honours list and if not why? He's trying to start a campaign here. Michael Buerk: I don't think she has though she's done the most extraordinary things and not just in Ethiopia. And has had to cope with all sorts of - as she explained in the programme - all sorts of secret demons afterwards. The idea that somebody who did that kind of work and went through all that should come away feeling guilty is I think quite a common phenomenon amongst aid workers but I just find it so sad that that should happen. And this kind of opportunity I think to revisit and see how it all panned out and what people thought of what she'd done there, she tells me that it's helped and I hope it has. Philippa Thomas: We're going to go on now back to the many reasons, I suppose, why Ethiopians continue to go hungry. We've had hundreds of e-mails about the government's land policy, about irrigation, about the fact the population has doubled since 1984. This from Neil Mitchell in London, for example, he says: Many fear the government's socialist policy on land tenure is key to the persistent famine - is that the case? This from Carell Laurent from Washington DC in the US who worked in Ethiopia for four years in the '90s: Isn't the best solution to move from this agriculture led land to a more industrialised nation, should Ethiopia change do you think? Michael Buerk: Well I'm just a reporter and it's not for me to make those kind of judgements but that is an argument that a lot of the outside agencies would advance. They would say that the peasants must be allowed to own their land, it must be more efficiently done, the country must be allowed to industrialise, that this is the only way out of this cycle of dependence - of increased dependency. The government themselves, still within their memory, 25 years ago, is the old emperor Haile Selassie and a feudal way of life where the peasants were very little more than serfs and they see the idea that if the land is given to the peasants the peasants will, in a bad year, will just sell it and then they won't have any land at all and millions of landless peasants will flock to the cities and the situation will get a lot worse. It's a hugely political question. All, as a reporter, I can say is that at the moment, although there are good years and bad years obviously, the trend is for increased dependency in a way that's going to be unsustainable very shortly - 14 million this last summer would have died if they hadn't been fed by the outside world. Well you look at that particular trend and you move it forwards 10, 15, 20 years and you're talking about 50 million people, now that is completely unsustainable. And you're talking about that increased dependency and that's just extrapolating this line but of course the more people the more the land is eroded and it isn't a straight line, it's a line that could go like that - you could easily foresee a scenario in which you have a completely unsustainable level of hunger in Ethiopia. Philippa Thomas: Then what about Ethiopia's own resources because of course we hear a lot about the irony of Ethiopia being the water tower of East Africa, it's got so much water yet it's suffering from drought. And we've had quite a few questions about how does this work, how do these two facts go together? For example, Samson Oguda, who's a Kenyan living here in the UK says: Ethiopia is the main source of the Nile, why don't we supply irrigation equipment? And Desalegn Abera who now lives in Saskatoon in Canada says she's an orphan survivor of the 1984 famine, she was saved by donations, she says Ethiopia is still tied by a treaty - the 1959 Nile Water Treaty - that means more than 80% of the Nile's water flows straight to Egypt. Michael Buerk: There is a treaty with Egypt and the other countries of North East Africa that Ethiopia won't extract huge amounts of water, won't in fact stop the Nile flowing. I mean really if they used all the water that flows out of the Blue Nile out of the African highlands, I mean that's something like 70 or 80% of the Nile in most years. But even so I think most development aid workers would say there's a huge water resource in East Africa, in the highlands that's not being used. You go up and you see this absolutely enormous great lake that's about the size of Rutland. Philippa Thomas: Yes I think that outsiders wouldn't expect at all. Michael Buerk: But the amount of irrigation, even locally, around the lake seems to be so small. You can't help thinking that something more than is done at the moment could be done now. But an enormous amount of projects are being done in a way to try and terrace the hillsides and build little ponds and all that kind of thing but it's really too little and too late. Philippa Thomas: And you've referred of course to the fact that the population is increasing all the time. Let me put you this question which has come from many of our viewers, Barrie Mason, Paul Tyrell, J Johnson - all from London - they all say why has the population nearly doubled since '84? And are the West and is the Ethiopian government providing sex education and promoting the use of contraception? Michael Buerk: Well I think Ethiopia is a country where a lot of people live in Iron Age circumstances, far from roads and so on. It's not really a matter of education or providing contraception because we're actually talking about life and death situations here and we're talking about people - generations - who in their memory have seen times when all their children perhaps have died or their grandchildren have died and so on. And under those circumstances people have children as an insurance policy, they have children to keep them in their old age. And I think the pattern in other developing countries has been that a reduction in family size follows about two or three generations after the situation has been stabilised and some amount of security has come to people. And Ethiopia isn't in that situation now. Philippa Thomas: It's something of a catch 22. Michael Buerk: It is, it is. Philippa Thomas: And we've also been asked - a viewer in Belgium, Els De Temmerman saying: Ethiopia is a very religious country, do you feel there's any relationship between religious beliefs and the overpopulation? Michael Buerk: I don't think the Coptic church in Ethiopia takes a very constructive attitude towards limiting family size. But as I say we're talking about life and death situations in fairly primitive circumstances so making comparisons with the first world is very difficult under those circumstances. It is a very unforgiving church, there are difficult contradictions in Ethiopia, for instance, there are - I can't remember exactly how many - but something like 50 or 60 holy days in which the church forbids people to work. Well you've seen the seasonal pattern of the rainfall, it can quite often be the day when really if you've got to plant you've got to plant now, happens to coincide with a holy day, which is very easy to do, and the church forbids them to work. The church there is a very powerful force in people's lives and it's easy to criticise perhaps. Philippa Thomas: Now if it wasn't enough to look at all the difficulties you've canvassed and the famine facing people, quite a lot of our viewers and readers are concerned about HIV/AIDS and whether that could be the next catastrophe, if you like, for Ethiopia. Kinfe Gabriel in London, for example, saying he thinks it's killing more people than famine. Susan Ellis in Wadhurst in East Sussex saying: Is HIV/AIDS infection affecting the rural population's ability to farm, again stopping them from getting to the land? Michael Buerk: Yeah I think that's the case in many countries in Africa and Ethiopia's no exception. Except that Ethiopia, as you see, is a much more vulnerable society anyway. I think - the figures are terribly difficult to know or to trust but the estimates are that there's two or three million Ethiopians who are affected by HIV/AIDS. And people do talk about the way it is affecting people's ability to feed themselves and to operate, people who are already very, very vulnerable indeed. Actually one of the people we met, one of Clare's colleagues, an Ethiopian, who you actually saw on the old part of the film, we went to see while we were there, Clare and I, a lovely woman, her husband had died of AIDS, she had AIDS and she was dying when we saw her and she died, in fact, about three weeks after we met her. Philippa Thomas: If you think back about famine, about the causes of famine, trying to get to the roots here, one obvious question so many of you have asked and it's perhaps not fair to ask you this Michael, is who is to blame? For example, we've heard from Kathleen Young in Glasgow and Solomon Negussie in London, they both say - what has the current Ethiopian government done to help the situation, is it responsible and they say should it be prosecuted for allowing millions to starve? Michael Buerk: Well responsibility - is it their responsibility or is it our responsibility? Well of course it's their responsibility, it's the Ethiopian government's responsibility and one I think the Prime Minister, as you saw in the programme, it's a responsibility he feels extremely strongly. Whether the sort of policies they're adopting are likely to reduce the dependence or not is a very open question. And the evidence of the last 10 years is no. So there is a high level of responsibility there. I don't think it's criminal or culpable responsibility in that particular case. But then you have to ask yourself what is our responsibility? There are really complex arguments about the role of food aid in countries like Ethiopia and you can make a very interesting argument about how food aid creates dependency, until you come to the point of saying well what's the answer then, we don't send food and 14 million people starve? Which would have been what happened if we hadn't done this last year. Philippa Thomas: It's a question of priorities for the outside world of course and for the government in Ethiopia and Nuur Hassan in Orpington says: Did the Ethiopian prime minister justify spending money on guns and fighting border wars rather than spending it on food? Michael Buerk: He did, we didn't include it in the programme. His argument, and I suppose it's a reasonably powerful one, if you take the view that Eritrea is the aggressor - and I'm not making any judgements between the two but that's his view - if the French invaded Southampton then you would expect to spend money on armaments to push them out of Southampton - that's what you'd do, this isn't exactly a parallel situation, it's our view that this town is part of our territory, our territory was invaded, our army has to repel the invaders, you'd do it, we do it, what's the difference? Well again you can make some case along those lines, the Eritreans can make some case along those lines. But here are two of the poorest countries on Earth fighting over a piece of land that you wouldn't bother to spit on, I mean it is really a barren - we're not talking about Welwyn Garden City or anything here, we're talking about a strip of barren land and a ramshackle town. Philippa Thomas: Of course you interviewed the Prime Minister, how would you describe his attitude, his approach to the situation his state is in? Michael Buerk: Meles Zenawi is an extremely intelligent man and an extremely cogent man and an extremely rational man. The critics say he's got it wrong, that he hasn't been able to move away from his attachment to a rather Marxist world view, that his attachment to the peasants is not in the long run going to really work but he's actually got to bring in industries, change the whole nature of Ethiopian society in order that people can get away from this perpetual hunger. But he's not the tyrant that Menghistu was, I mean Menghistu was an absolute monster. Meles Zenawi is not a monster. He is criticised I'm sure and oppressive things happen under his regime and he has critics who have strong arguments against him but he's in a very different league. Philippa Thomas: I want to find out how optimistic you are now Michael because of course the question everybody's been asking as well is what the future holds for Ethiopia. This from Jonathan Cowie in Milton Keynes, he says: Can you envisage an Ethiopia that could ever provide for itself? Michael Buerk: I sometimes get very depressed because there were times on some of the trips this last year making the programme when I got very depressed, when you see the level of dependency and yet on other occasions I went around with an old rebel that I went with during the wars who is building all these terraces and building all these ponds, is mobilising people in a particular area and you're just thinking yes, fantastic, this amount of energy, this amount of selfless impulse behind all this you think great. But the numbers don't stack up at the moment, something has got to shift, something has got to happen and I'm not sure what it is, I'm not sure whether it's them or whether it's us but something has got to break this cycle. But having done that then you look at ordinary people and see their stoicism, their dignity, their ability to survive. If you looked at Bahal [phon.] and her father, just that little family unit, and think all the things that have been thrown at them over the last 20 or 30 years and yet they're still there and they're still the most admirable people on Earth. Philippa Thomas: No easy answers but thank you very much for your insights, Michael, for joining us here in the studio and responding to all these questions we've had. And I'm sorry we've just run out of time but thank you for all your messages. If we haven't been able to answer your question tonight do visit our website at www.bbc.co.uk/thisworld, you can continue debating the issues there. Also on the website you can watch both Michael's programme and this discussion again and find out more about charities that work in Ethiopia. So from me Philippa Thomas and on behalf of us all goodnight.