The BBC last night led its top news programme with warnings of a new famine in Ethiopia, "caused by two factors – drought, and rising food prices".

The main ‘deeper’ cause is in fact the long the reign of Marxist terror by dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, which killed a million people plus and seriously weakened the country:

Although the Red Terror affected thousands, it was Mengistu’s dismissive response to events in 1984 which arguably caused most deaths. An estimated one million people died in a desperate famine which grabbed the world’s attention. News footage, shot by the cameraman Mo Amin, spawned LiveAid and a global fundraising drive.

Yet through it all, Mengistu was consumed with preparations for the 10th anniversary of the revolution. Dawit Wolde Giorgis, the member of Mengistu’s central committee responsible for drought relief, claimed in his memoirs that Mengistu referred to the prospect of a serious famine as "petty human problems".

During his 17-year reign, tens of thousands of people were killed, tortured or detained and about 700,000 peasants were forcibly resettled in an effort to cut off support for rebels in the north. Those rebels, led by Meles Zenawi, took power in 1991…

My earlier post on the Cost of Mugabe and Milosevic and Castro was run by B92 in Serbia, prompting a series of mostly weird comments purporting to demonstrate that I am ‘anti-Serb’ or otherwise a crazy neocon.

My point is simple.

It may not be easy to show what exactly causes what, when it comes to the weather. But if you deliberately burn down your own house, it is fair to say (a) that you have ’caused’ your own rooflessness. And (b), that that rooflessness will persist until someone builds you a new one.

Massive sustained blunders at a national level have massive consequences, which echo on down the decades and bring about future disasters.

Run the figures. If Ethiopia had not had Mengistu and grown at a modest 3% per annum since the mid-1970s, there would be no mass famine now. ‘Drought’ is the cause of famine in poor societies primarily because they are poor – they lack the technology and productivity and flexibility to deal with it. And Mengistu’s terror made Ethiopia far poorer than it should have been.  

And yes, the Mengistu misery in Ethiopia and the Mugabe misery in Zimbabwe are indeed related.