In the 1980s, Robert Kaplan traveled to Ethiopia to cover a horrifying internal armed conflict that was being inaccurately reported by foreign media as a famine. Images of starving Ethiopian peasants were starting to fill the TV screens of Westerners, to whom it was incorrectly being implied that the culprit was drought. In reality the starvation was being deliberately engineered by a ruthless Ethiopian military junta known as the Dergue, which, along with Soviet advisors, was implementing an African version of the Red Terror against its own citizens. Peasants were being denied food and forcibly collectivized onto villages and farms, almost always with brutal violence. Particularly targeted were minorities such as Tigrayans and Oromos who were historically disadvantaged by the Amhara-dominated central government. For well over a decade Ethiopia was plunged into a full blown civil war that included a separatist movement to create the independent state of Eritrea.
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