imlach

Watching the docu on Ethopia on BBC2 tonight.

Sir Bob Geldof - admiration for him. He cut through all the spin, politics, racism, boundaries, in the world in 1985, and made the WHOLE world see how bad that famine was. Arguments with the EEC & Margaret Thatcher were particularly strong.

Ironically, he stills finds it tragic that a 7" piece of plastic at £1.49 was the price for saving a life that Christmas.....

Who can look back at their lives and claim to have done as much good as he has....

He made the world see a humane side, and cut across all religions & races. No-one has done so before, and none since.

imlach

It was also interesting to note that popular music was the first method to get the globe to act together.

imlach

The clip of Robert Maxwell flying in aid on a BA plane plastered with Mirror ads was also sad. The aid on it would last 7 minutes....

stevem2k

I thought it was a fatastic programme. The red cross worker's plight of deciding who lived and died, and how it still affects her was very moving.


Steve

imlach

Agreed, it was a fab programme.

Still sad to see the problems persisting, and the needless war over a thin strip of land still costing the goverment $m's. Not to mention the shiny new airport in Addis, or the palatial Sheraton for the gravy train to descend on.

Another clip of note was the head of the Church of England at the time visting Ethopia and offering starving children a sweet from the bag of sweets he had in his pocket....FFS!

As they said in the programme, most of the VIPs visting Ethopia were there to be seen, rather than to see.

stevem2k

There was a footnote though, the population is now double what it was in 1984, and the country's growing potential is half.

So in it's harshest terms, is the west exacerbating the problem of these countries by providing relief, but not development aid and what culpability have the regimes since Mengistu (who was as mad as a bag of stoats) had in propagating the crisis.

Steve

thecirsch

I was watching this with the g/f tonight. We were of the same opinion that all that news footage passed us both by. We were both aware of Band Aid, Live Aid, etc. Although I was 17 at the time and she was a bit younger, we don't remember it being 'that' bad. Very strange I know.

Mind you 20 years on, Drive by The Cars, still sends a shiver up my spine. Good to see that little girl made it aganist everything that was thrown at her and her dad.

dr_ming

Imlach, Suggest you read Bob's autobiography. It's a good read, and the stuff about Liveaid is very intresting, especially re: how everyone involved in the UK concert worked for nothing, and everyone in the USA expected to be paid. It was only a last minute $3M sponsorship deal from ABC that saved the USA concert. How he persuaded a lot of the big names to appear for nowt was cheeky to say the least.

SiPie

Remember being at the Calais Palais in Edinburgh to see the Boomtown Rats and at the end of the show Bob passed a bucket around the crowd for cash to be collected for a forthcoming project to help famine victims. Bet none of us that evening (including Sir Bob) could of realised just how big it would become

The rats then played a song "Do they Know it's Christmas" and I couldn't work out whey he kept singing different lines in funny voices

It all became clear when I saw the finished track on TV about a week later...

Anyway... top guy IMHO

Dracoro

Interestingly at the end of the program, it was pointed out that Ethiopia has a large amount of water in lakes and suchlike but does not have the infastructure to distribute it around the country. The country NEEDS some infastructure so that it can become more stable and self-sufficient. If this is not done, I fear that the famine situtation will be here to stay, resurfacing every 20 years or so, getting worse each time as the population grows. Very sad and the people that can do things to really change it aren't doing so (i.e. Blair, Bush, Chirac, and most other leaders of the world).

Full credit to Michael Burke and especially Sir Bob Geldof.

TelBoy

I didn't see this unfortunately, but didn't it imply at one point that the short term success of the Live Aid thing might have been responsible for greater longer term hardship, ie temporarily defying nature and creating an unsustainable environment?

Tiggs

agree with telboy....is keeping more ppl alive with aid to have more children really the best primary objective?