Mixed messages

Sometimes it's the messenger rather than the message that's the problem. Bob Geldof probably missed this paragraph from a Sunday Times report by Jon Swain in November last year.

In the mid-1980s, during one of those terrible famines that have gripped Ethiopia in the past 30 years, millions of dollars flowed from western donors into Rest, the so-called Relief Society of Tigray, which was purportedly the humanitarian wing of the TPLF.

Aregawi (Behre) told me that, instead of using the money to save lives, Rest gave it to the TPLF. He remembers sitting with central committee members preparing a budget; they agreed that 95% of the Rest money should be used for the cause.

“It bought weapons, ammunition and clothes for the fighters and paid for TPLF propaganda work,” he said. “It was very depressing. It made me very angry. The leadership literally had no sympathy for the people."

Ironically, Swain was put in touch with Aregawi Behre (who had kidnapped Swain in 1976) by Martin Plaut, whose BBC Assignment on Ethiopian aid has attracted the heated wrath of Sir Bob Geldof. The difficulty for the World Service is that Plaut's account was a headline story, and made waves in a way that The Sunday Tines did not. The fundamental challenge is whether or not what was said to both Plaut and Swain was evidence, and then presented as evidence - or an assertion or a claim that needed more challenge.

Note: I found the Sunday Times piece thanks to a post on the BBC's College of Journalism website.