Africa Notes: Can Ethiopia Survive Both Communism and the Drought? - March 1985

More U.S. newspaper space and television hours have been devoted to Ethiopia in the past half-year than this ancient land has attracted from the media since Emperor Haile Selassie's 1936 appeal to the League of Nations for action against the invasion by Mussolini's Italy. Two events sparked this phenomenon: (1) the announcement from Addis Ababa in September 1984 that Ethiopia had become "Africa's first structured Communist state" with the reorganizing of the government under a Soviet-modeled Workers' Party of Ethiopia (WPE), and (2) the series of riveting BBC television segments which NBC brought into U.S. living rooms during prime time evening news in October, thereby launching the American discovery of the Ethiopian drought some two years after its discovery by millions of hapless Ethiopians.