As David Rieff makes clear in this article (via Butterflies and Wheels), the famine that led to Live Aid in 1985 was caused to a significant extent by the brutal collectivisation policy pursued by the Marxist Dergue regime in Ethiopia, “every bit the equal in its radicalism to the policies Stalin pursued in the Ukraine in the 1930s, where, as in Ethiopia, the result was inevitable: famine.”
To this day, Oxfam has not officially retracted the policy of working with the Dergue that it pursued. The most it has ever been willing to do has been to speak out against the “haste, scale and the timing” of the resettlement. Some aid officials went much further in accommodating the regime’s policies. Jack Finucane of the Irish relief NGO Concern hosted a dinner in Addis Ababa in late 1985 for foreign relief workers, attended by Bob Geldof, at which he defended the resettlements. Finucane reportedly demanded that western donor governments stop being so squeamish and put money into the project. […]
With the exception of MSF [Medecins Sans Frontieres], what neither the relief world in general, nor the UN, nor Geldof and his Live Aid team have ever come to terms with is that the Mengistu regime—finally ousted in 1991—also committed mass murder in the resettlement programme in which Live Aid monies were used and in which NGOs that benefited from Live Aid funding were active. The Dergue was in control, and it did with the UN and the NGOs what the Nazis did with the International Committee of the Red Cross: it made them unwilling collaborators
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