BREAKFAST IN HELL: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account of the Politics of Hunger in Ethiopia

by ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1986

Harris, an Australian, and his nurse-wife served at Red Cross hospitals and relief stations in Ethiopia during the cresting famine and here testify to the bureaucratic idiocy and inhuman meretriciousness of the country's Marxist leaders--while casting a supportive but amazed eye upon the minds of the stricken peasantry. The Harrises were not novices at relief work when, in 1984, they were called to Red Cross headquarters in Geneva, shown films of the encroaching famine, and then dispatched with a small international team of nurses to one site of the disaster. The government had long denied the famine's existence, since it was happening in the usually indestructible agricultural heartland, an area that had survived many earlier famines; to admit the disaster meant that the country's rulers would lose face. Harris is scathing about the Marxists, the Ethiopian bourgeoisie, and the country's boss, Mengistu Halle Mariam. The opening chapters show the team overcoming or outlasting the sheer bureaucratic madness by which they are allowed to remove hospital stocks and provisions from their own warehouses, for trucking inland to the famine sites. The nation is celebrating a 10-day anniversary of the birth of socialism while peasants die by the thousands. Middle-class Ethiopians walk down the street without even seeing the dead and dying underfoot; meanwhile they are beautifully mannered to a point of utter unreality (""Ethiopians will weep if they are argued with. . .""). Among the dying, ""the very weak, the very sick, and the very ill would almost certainly surrender their [relief] cards to those their families felt had a far better chance of survival. Peasant life is unsentimental. . . To the peasants our attempts to feed the weak and to stop them from giving food to the strong were terrifying and evil."" A boldly written, at times searing book about ""an inverted world where murder was ignored, evil praised as enlightenment, and grotesque xenophobia billed as anti-racism.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Poseidon/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION