INSHALLAH: The Famine in Ethiopia

Inshallah THE FAMINE IN ETHIOPIA

Doug Menuez

Inshallah  The Famine in Ethiopia

Text & photographs by

Doug Menuez

I

n the Spring of 1985 I was sent by Newsweek to cover the Ethiopian famine and conflict with Eritrea which had just burst onto world headlines. I crossed 1000 miles of the Sahara to the Sudan/Ethiopia border and found a human disaster on a scale not seen since the Biafran war.

I was on my first overseas assignment and wholly unprepared for the scale of suffering I saw - a spectacle of hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in ill-prepared camps, most dying quickly from starvation, disease and exhaustion.

Forced out of their villages by drought and war with Eritrea, masses of villagers were coming down from the hills in search of safety, food and water. Upon my return, the famine was bumped from the news by other dramatic stories. These photographs were never published and wound up in storage for the last fifteen years. The recent tragic reprise of war and drought in the region has led to another massive famine which in turn led me to dig out these photographs and finally finish the assingment.

Inshallah roughly translated means “God Willing” in Arabic and was often the reply to any question I might ask a local about the famine. How else, I thought, to explain a catastrophe of this magnitude other than God’s will?  - Doug Menuez

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