Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"When news of the disaster subsequently emerged, it was to inspire an extraordinary surge of compassion and generosity from peoples and governments around the world, prompting the greatest single peace-time mobilisation of the international community in the twentieth century. What was not realised at the time was the extent to which the disaster had been caused by Mengistu’s own counter-insurgency wars, wars that he was determined to prosecute even when the full scale of starvation became clear." [The Fate of Africa (p. 331-2] "In the United States the singer Harry Belafonte called up a galaxy of stars to record ‘We are the World’, a song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and arranged by Quincy Jones. A televised day-long rock concert – Live Aid – staged jointly in Britain and the United States and watched in 108 countries, raised more than $100 million. In just over a year, more than $1 billion was raised and allocated for relief assistance to Ethiopia by government and non-government agencies in the West. . . . Perhaps a million people died in the Ethiopian famine of 1984 – 5, no one knows how many." [The Fate of Africa, p. 341, 342]