Exclusive: How Bill Casey’s CIA Ripped Off the 1985 Live Aid Concert to Arm Right-Wing Ethiopian Rebels and Left Thousands to Starve to Death

By Alex Constantine

“Live Aid Money Aids in Killing, Relief Workers Charge”
The UPI headline on June 11, 1986 was jarring, the story grotesque. A panel of African relief workers maintained that the Ethiopian government under Mengistu Hailemariam – once idealistic in its Marxist aims but increasingly given to authoritarian distortions of socialism — was diverting Live Aid proceeds and other western relief funds to underwrite “a massive resettlement program leading to the deaths of thousands of people.”1

“These institutions make themselves accomplices of a genocide,” said Dr. Rony Brauman, president of the French medical relief group Medicins San Frontiers. “The magnitude of the famine and human rights violations in Ethiopia can only be compared to the Khmer Rouge,” recalling a similar resettlement program in 1976 that killed an estimated 1.5 million Cambodians.

“This for us would be an act of complicity in mass murder if we kept silent.”

UPI: “Brauman and two anthropologists who specialize in the problems of Africa charged that the relief stations set up by relief groups, such as Unicef and Save the Children” — both charities were recipients of Live Aid largesse — “are used as ‘bait’ to draw Ethiopians away from their homes,” a tactical maneuver in the government’s counter-insurgency program. Instead of feeding them, Derg (“Committee”) troops uprooted the starving Ethiopians, who were forced at gunpoint to board trucks for resettlement to concentration camps, then to makeshift villages in unpopulated zones where they could not be recruited by murderous, far-right, CIA-supported Tigray rebels, constituting, in Reagan-speak, “democratic resistance” to the Derg in accord with the administration’s destabilizing third world Contra strategy laid out in National Security Directive 75, January 1983.2

On March 3, 2010 — after a year-long investigation – the BBC reported that tens of millions of dollars raised by Live Aid had been diverted by the Tigrays to buy guns, possibly 95 percent of the net proceeds. Robert Houdek, Washington chargé d’affaires in Addis, confirmed to the BBC that the US government was aware of the genocidal diversion of famine aid funds.

But the report was retracted a full eight months after an obscenity-laced denial from Bob Geldof. The BBC apologized for “errors” in the report. Scores of reporters throughout the media have excoriated the retraction, not the story itself.3 On November 4, the day the BBC rescinded the story and issued an apology, the Solidarity Committee for Ethiopian Political Prisoners — a group opposed to the dictatorship that arose from the ashes of Derg rule — released this statement:

http://www.constantinereport.com/exclusive-bill-caseys-cia-ripped-1984-live-aid-concert-arm-right-wing-ethiopian-rebels-left-thousands-starve-death/