LIVE AID’S GRAVE LEGACY

Forty years ago, a well-intentioned, spontaneous group of musicians, led principally by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, produced Live Aid, the most ambitious and improbable concert since Woodstock, as two shows in London and Philadelphia, on July 13th, 1985. The objective was to raise money for the starving people of Ethiopia, victims of what was presumed to be a terrible famine. (They were victims alright, but of something far worse, a deliberate, systematic genocide wrought on them by the country’s Marxist ruler, Mengistu Haile Mariam.)

The concerts were spectacular, televised worldwide and giddyingly life affirming. Well, our lives anyway.

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But Live Aid’s legacy is, sadly, death rather than salvation.

We all bought the T-shirt, I used to say. We all wanted to believe that the awesome, planet-shaking power of millions of people galvanized could yield positive change — could, as the rallying cry went, feed the world.

Well, at least we could have fed Ethiopia, and probably for ten years, if the money hadn’t been funneled to perhaps the one person on Earth who should most not have been given hundreds of millions of dollars. Mengistu was slaughtering his citizens in a lopsided civil war no one in the West knew about, made more lopsided by the completely preventable missteps of Geldof, by then Live Aid’s fame-intoxicated and now sole figurehead. Indifferent to being told that the famine was man made, and dismissive of incessant warnings not to trust Mengistu, he channeled to him funds Live Aid, and other organizations drawn into their slipstream, raised. And he made sure he did it when the whole world was watching.

Ethiopian filmmaker Ermias Woldeamlak who lost three brothers to the mass murder committed by Mengistu’s Marxist dictatorship visits the Red Terror Martyrs Museum in Addis Ababa. (Credit: Michele Spatari / AFP via Getty Images)

I don’t think anyone believes Geldof meant to inadvertently fund the butchery that ensued. But he was told repeatedly and emphatically, by multiple relief agencies working in the country, such as Médecins Sans Frontières, that Mengistu was the aggressor and the humanitarian crisis was exacerbated by government jets napalming rebel fields and incinerating their crops. Geldof was begged to wait until an infrastructure was in place to get the aid to where it was needed. As it was, tons of food donated from around the world was left to rot on the docks, after Mengistu’s army took all they wanted.

Why didn’t Geldof pause for a moment and ask himself, well, what if all these experts, actual witnesses to the carnage, have a point? It apparently didn’t occur to him — or matter — what if they’re right?

But that didn’t happen. Bob Geldof brought to the then world’s biggest mass murderer more money than he could ever have imagined would fall out of the sky, and he promptly bought all the weapons he could from Russia. Newly fueled and better equipped, his army tore into rebel villages, divided tribes and families and made them walk on arduous and fatal “resettlement marches.” An estimated 100,000 people died on those.

Bob Geldof, whose boost for a genocidal dictatorship scored him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. (Credit: Fryderyk Gabowicz/picture alliance via Getty Images)

I remember the image of Geldof playfully punching and embracing Mengistu like they were BFFs, Geldof loving his moment in the spotlight, a moment immortalizing him rather than reprieve for a starving nation.

He famously said, “I’ll shake hands with the Devil on my left and on my right to get to the people we are meant to help.” Which, putting aside the unlikelihood of success from that strategy, sounds determined, heroic! — although faux heroic, souvenir shop heroic.

In reality it was a disaster that turned the tide of an awful civil war into a torrent of lost lives. SPIN broke the story exposing the fantastic naivety of Live Aid and Geldof’s inexcusable hubris, soaking up the public adoration while ignoring the realities of the situation, no matter how many times he was told. After our several stories and the rest of the world’s media eventually arriving at the same conclusion, Live Aid and other organizations withheld further money from Mengistu and his campaign eventually shrivelled up and failed and he lost the war.

Incredibly, in a tone deafness of an incalculable magnitude, and in possibly a desperate need to change fact back into fantasy, Bob Geldof and whatever’s left of Live Aid, if anything, is/are marking the 40th Anniversary with a 4 episode CNN series, hours of highlights from the ‘85 shows on BBC 2 in the UK, and a one night performance of a musical called Just For One Day, at a theater in London — followed by an after party.

What we won’t get is any kind of mea culpa, or acknowledgement of the massive, deadly mistakes made. That would just spoil the occasion.

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