Stars Above Africa

They looked to the sky, but God’s tears did not fall. The heavy rains of the meher season had failed in the highlands of northern Ethiopia. The hillsides were parched and leafless; a yellow dust blew across the heat-cracked plateaus. Some villagers left their farms to look for work in desert salt mines or town markets. Some stripped the thatch roofs off their homes to feed their livestock, but still their herds died.

A year passed, and they waited again for the meher rains. But above them, God’s eye remained a clear, hard blue. Everything that could be consumed was eaten. Thistles, sandals, everything. Soldiers hunted rebels in the hills, but the government sent no food to the villages. Faced with starvation, people began to walk. Those who reached Mekele, the provincial capital, were directed to a field outside town. Here, the migrants saw thousands of reflections of their own condition: limbs thin as acacia branches; children with swollen bellies, flies swarming at their eyes; and expressions of pain or resignation. They chased after false rumours of food during the day, and at night they huddled together against the aching cold, too weak to shiver. When dawn came, the newly dead were collected and buried in shallow trenches.

In Europe and North America, newspapers ran sporadic stories about a growing pan-African drought, but the Ethiopian government banned journalists from the northern highlands, where the famine was intensifying. The Dergue, the Communist “committee” that ruled Ethiopia, was preparing for a multi-million-dollar party that year. September would mark the tenth anniversary of the revolution that brought them to power, and comrades from around the world were dropping by to celebrate. Reports of mass starvation would have been embarrassing.

In late October, after the streamers had come down, the government relaxed its restrictions on journalists. Michael Buerk of the British Broadcasting Corporation talked his way onto a World Vision plane, which landed on a dirt airstrip near Mekele. On the drive into town, he saw crowds of hobbling migrants, caked in dust. A woman dashed in front of his truck, laid her baby down, and then ran away. Buerk’s driver, familiar with this ruse, calmly drove around the rag-swaddled infant.

When they reached the main camp, Buerk’s cameraman, Mohamed Amin, wandered through the crowds of starving and dying, his camera lens panning slowly across the scene. Buerk, a seasoned journalist, knew he needed a comment from a foreign aid worker. He found a feeding centre run by the International Committee of the Red Cross, a rickety shelter with corrugated iron walls and dirt floors. Claire Bertschinger was the nurse in charge. Petite and blond, wearing a loose sundress, her arms and legs covered in flea bites and scabies sores, she was, for Buerk’s purposes, perfect.

Bertschinger explained that there was enough dried milk, sugar, oil, bread, and rice to feed about 500 people. Then she confessed to Buerk — and the camera — her terrible responsibility. Every few days, several dozen children would graduate from the feeding regimen Bertschinger had helped to establish, and she could replace them with new patients. She would step outside, where more than a thousand people sat waiting in the sun. When she appeared, there would be murmurs and cries, but the migrants remained seated in orderly rows. Bertschinger would examine children sitting alone or held aloft by a pleading parent. She would grasp their biceps to feel bones wrapped in leathery skin. Most importantly, she would search the children’s eyes for a spark of life. If she didn’t see that glint she passed on by — there was no point wasting food on a child who would soon be dead.

When Bertschinger made a choice she took out her black marker and drew a cross on an arm or a forehead. The mark meant protection from the hunger that stalked the migrants. It meant life. If she left no mark, it often meant death.

Buerk’s journalistic training kicked in. With the camera fixed on Bertschinger’s face, he asked how that made her feel.

When I met Bertschinger recently, in her office at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, she described the guilt she’d felt after looking into the eyes of starving children and passing them by. “I felt like a Nazi condemning innocent people to the death camps,” she said. “I’ve lived with that ever since.”

But that morning in 1984, staring fiercely at Buerk, she said, “What do you expect? It breaks my heart.”