Ethiopian Famine of 1983-1985

The Ethiopian famine of 1983-1985 affected an estimated 7.75 million of Ethiopia's roughly 38 to 40 million people, leaving between 300,000 and 1.2 million dead and displacing about 2.5 million within the country while roughly 400,000 more fled abroad as refugees. Although officially ascribed to drought, historians and human-rights researchers attribute much of the famine' s severity to the ongoing Ethiopian Civil War and to military and resettlement policies pursued by the Ethiopian government, with Human Rights Watch estimating that more than half its mortality resulted from human-rights abuses that caused the famine to arrive earlier, strike harder and extend further than drought alone would have produced; extensive international media coverage of the crisis, including the 1985 Live Aid concerts, made it one of the most widely publicized famines of the 20th century.