Surrender or Starve

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Before moving to Greece in 1982, I bought several books about modern Greek politics, all but one of which were balanced, objective, and devoid of any emotion. They left me unmoved, and now are useful only as reference books to check a date or the spelling of a name. One of the books, however, was passionate, opinionated, and far more subjective than the others. The book, Greece Without Columns by the late British journalist David Holden, was a debunking of modern Greece as the birthplace of Western civilization. Although the book was pilloried by philhellenes, in a strange way I found it pro-Greek. It did something that none of the other, dull, predictable tomes did: it fired my imagination and made me want to know more, not less, about Greece. The following pages attempt to do the same for the Horn of Africa.

I had no intention of writing a dispassionate rehash of yesterday’s headlines. Famine in the Horn is both a tool and an aspect of ethnic conflict, with the Ethiopian Amharas of the central highlands pitted against the Eritreans and Tigreans of the north. The overwhelming majority of U.S. journalists have reported on Ethiopia from one side only—that of the Amharas in Addis Ababa. I wanted to show the story from the other side, in order to redress a grievous imbalance in news coverage. If the reader finds this book polemical, be advised that I meant it that way. To get people excited, you sometimes have to light a fire, and that was my intention.

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