세상을 바꾼 7분 38초

 

Extent of Ethiopia famine revealed (BBC, 1984. 10.23 )

Band Aid, USA for Afreica, Live Aid로 이어지는 일련의 일들의 중심에는 Ethiopia 대기근이 있다. 굶주린 이들을 돕자며 발벗고 나선 일은 지금도 진한 감동과 깊은 울림을 준다.
이 모든 일은 1984년 10월 23일 BBC 방송에서 출발한다. 단 7분 38초에 불과한 방송이었지만 세계인의 마음을 움직이게 만들기에 충분한 시간이었다.

오늘은 그날 방송을 영어 자막과 함께 게시한다.

 

Julia Somerville:
In Ethiopia seven million people are threatened by starvation. Thouands have already died. The famine caused by drought is the worst in living memory and now the rains have failed again for the third years in succession. The relief organizations are doing all the can but there just isn't enough food to go around. One of the worst hit areas is in the north of the country where the problem has been complicated by two secessionist wars in Eritrea and Tigre. 40,000 refugees have converged on the town of Korem in the hope of getting some food and medical aid. Our correspondent Michael Buerk has been back to quorum after four months and he found the situation far worse. 

Michael Buerk:
Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth.

Thousands of wasted people are coming here for help. Many find only death. They flood in every day from villages hundreds of miles away, dulled by hunger, driven beyond the point of desperation.

Fifteen thousand children here now; suffering, confused, lost. Death is all around; a child or an adult dies every twenty minutes. Korem, an insignificant town, has become a place of grief.

The relief agencies do what they can. Save the Children Fund are caring for more than seven thousand babies. Every day they weigh them on a sling then compare their weight with their height. By this rule of thumb, one in three is severely malnourished, starved to the point of death.

This morning another hundred and fourteen babies have arrived. The choice of who can helped and who can't among the constant stream of newcomers is heartbreaking.
  
There’s not enough food for half these people. Rumours of a shipment can set off panic. As on most days, the rumours were false; for many here there would be no food again today.

Two months ago, there were ten thousand people here; now the latest harvest has failed, there are forty thousand. There’s nothing like enough food in the country; not enough transport to move it if there was.

These people have waited all morning they want food; they're getting clothes those naked and most needy are marked by a pen stroke on their foreheads before the distribution begins.

An armed guard sits on the small bundles of cast-off clothing sent from countries in Europe. A few jackets, trousers and sweaters once worn in the wealthy West; now handed out to starving people who have to live in the open through nights when the temperature drops to a little over freezing point.

Today only a tiny amount of grain is being given out to those who have brought in firewood. People scrabble in the dirt as they go for each individual grain of wheat for some it may be the only food they've had for a fortnight or more. 

The Ethiopian government tries to persuade these people to go home but that would make death certain better to camp here. Some of the very worst are packed into big sheds, seven thousand now, most apparently dying of malnutrition, pneumonia and the diseases that prey on the starving. 

This three-year-old girl was beyond any help: unable to take food, attached to a drip but too late; the drip was taken away. Only minutes later, while we were filming, she died. Her mother had lost all her four children and her husband.

The situation is out of control. Hull groups are being ignored these people have been without foor for a month. A government truck arrived to pick up those most desperately ill and take them to the sheds that are already overcrowded. It was a quick and random affair. They took a handful but hundreds here needed the food and shelter the sheds provide. 

Those left behind seemed at least as bad as those that were taken clustering around us in a hopeless appealfor help.

Dr.Brigitte Vasset:
If nothing happened I don't know what we are doing; if there is no food as a medical treatment isn't nonsense giving drugs to the people giving a injection; giving tablets is a dota thing it's completely scattered refugees because we are here.

Michael Buerk:
How do you feel about the attitude of the rest of the world to this country?

Dr.Brigitte Vasset:
I am not a politician. I don't care at all about what's going on. Just I am a witness of Korem and I know that if nothing is done there will be thousand, one hundred thousand of people will die; Already we have thousands; only current and current is nothing in the world and who is not the only place in the choking. 

Michael Buerk:
Those who die in the night are brought at dawn to be laid out on the edge of the plain. Dozens of them; men, women and children, under blankets or bound in sack cloth for burial in the local custom.

Two hours the bodies kept coming from out of the encampment.

This mother and the baby she bore two months ago wrapped together in death.

As body after body was brought down, the grief became almost tangible. By Korem’s standards it wasn’t a bad night; thirty-seven dead. Tomorrow there would be more; the day after, more still.

Once the bureaucracy of death is over, the bodies are picked up to be carried back to the villages; they left in hope such a little time ago.

A tragedy, bigger than anybody seems to realise, getting worse every day. 

Julia Somerville:
Michael Buerk on the victims of the famine in Ethiopia and reaction to that report shown in earlier news programs has been enormous not least from the relief agencies who've been working in the area but much of their response has been anger that Moore has not been done by governments to help.