This article is adapted from the November 4, 2024, Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture, “A Million Deaths Is a Statistic,” organized by the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium.
At the time of the Holodomor, Josef Stalin is infamously reported to have said that “if only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” The third element of this aphorism should be, “Famine is the murder of a way of life.” This, I submit, was something that Stalin well knew. In its first years, the Soviet Union experienced two back-to-back, even overlapping, famines that killed as many as nine million people between 1919 and 1922. Byproducts of revolution, these first famines unleashed problems the Communists had no strategy for managing. Soviet leaders were consigned to watching helplessly as it unfolded before them, even allowing Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration to launch enormous aid efforts.
Years later, analyzing that trauma—and drawing on his own personal experience—Russian sociologist Pitrim Sorokin observed how
hunger makes a norm of abnormality and the sacrilege becomes a tolerable and admissible act. Since this “sacrilege” would prevent satisfaction of hunger, starvation mercilessly rips off the “social” garments from man and shows him as a naked animal, on the naked earth.
Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership were no strangers to how acute mass hunger tore the social fabric, how it hardened the soul. Every one of these deaths was also a tragedy, and famine is far more than an aggregate of individual tragedies. Ten years later, Stalin knew that he could instrumentalize gargantuan social destruction in pursuit of totalitarian societal engineering and absolute power. It’s a bitter irony that the target of that terror by hunger was Ukraine, the richest agricultural lands of the Soviet Union, which had, over the previous century, become the granary of Russia’s cities, and indeed of Britain and other European countries too. Southern Russia and Kazakhstan, the other main food-producing regions, were also devastated by the famines—Kazakhstan, in fact, suffered the highest proportionate death rates of any of the Soviet socialist republics—but the sheer ferocity of starvation in Ukraine, prolonged and intensified even after hunger was lessened in Russian-speaking territories, speaks to the targeted use of famine to destroy a national community: in other words, genocide.
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” described the Holodomor as a paradigmatic case, in which the Soviet rulers resolved to eliminate the intelligentsia, clergy, and peasantry of Ukraine—the latter representing its national spirit. “The weapon used against this body,” Lemkin said in his famous 1953 lecture, “is perhaps the most terrible of all—starvation.” His identification of mass starvation as societal murder is important and enduring. Lemkin’s life’s work of campaigning had culminated in the adoption of the Genocide Convention in 1948, including Article 2(c), which prohibits “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Note the word “physical”: this signals a concern with bare life. But genocide is a crime committed against a group as such. One would say that a family group is destroyed if the bonds between parents and children, or among siblings, are irretrievably torn. Would that not also be the case for a national or ethnic group? There’s no case law that can help answer this question. It’s possible that judges at the international courts in The Hague may make some relevant rulings in the coming years. But as of now, the matter is, less definitively, in the hands of historians, social anthropologists and ethicists.
Some historians argue, even today, that Ukrainian officials were themselves responsible for the most egregious cases of forcible seizure of food during the Holodomor. They say that the complex patterns of local deprivation, with Ukrainian agency at those local levels, points to maladministration rather than extermination. But does this not show how effective the Soviet plan was at turning society against itself? How it was torturing society so that people betrayed their principles, betrayed their neighbors, even their family members, to be able to eat?
In the gray zone of collective starvation, people inflict unspeakable cruelties on their kith and kin to survive. It is societal torture, turning the biological survival instinct against the bonds of social solidarity. This is one of the enduring themes in histories of the Great Hunger in Ireland, and is increasingly surfacing in studies of how famines are remembered elsewhere. If we train the focus of our lens on the community, what we see are the harms that a society inflicts upon itself. We see the subaltern thieves, exploiters, and opportunists, the carpetbaggers and mealmongers, and those who target their deprivation on some in order to protect others, all while remaining part of a cruel apparatus of power. What the victims don’t see are the distant engineers of this calamity, guiding the self-immolation from a distance—with intent or with reckless, racist indifference to human life. And the engineers themselves deploy a range of techniques to conceal or mislead the world about their crimes: what we can call famine denialism.
Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow at the time of the Holodomor, was one of those who most enthusiastically joined the chorus of denial. In his memoir of that period, the American engineer Zara Witkin describes an occasion in which another journalist challenged Duranty, asking him what he was going to write about the famine:
“Nothing,” answered Duranty. “What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated. Anyhow, we cannot write authoritatively because we are not permitted to go and see. I’m not going to write anything about it.”
Duranty was combining simple denial (“it’s exaggerated”) and exculpation (“we don’t know for sure”), the binding element between the two being what we can call statistical denial: the suppression, manipulation, or misinterpretation of data. Because famine is partly defined by scale, statistics—for child malnutrition, families’ food consumption, a population’s elevated death rates—are important. Unlike for an atrocity such as a massacre or bombing, the statistician is needed as expert witness to diagnose the crime—and can be enlisted either for the prosecution or the defense.
This is because denial is not merely suppressing facts and narratives, but replacing them with something else. In the case of the denial of the Holodomor, the alternative story was a glowing story of societal modernization, a hopeful, idealized tale that enraptured many fellow travelers including foreign correspondents, Stalin’s “useful idiots.” Duranty was one of many who faithfully parroted the Soviet narrative, diverting attention from the here and now toward the questions of how we got here and where we are, purportedly, going. In effect, he was saying that there was something more important than a genocidal famine—in this case, the glorious Soviet project.
The history of famine denialism begins with the invention of the concept of famine itself. The English language is an anomaly in that it has a specific word for “famine.” Most languages have terms for “great hunger” or “hunger that kills.” Societies that experience famine also have vocabularies that evoke the social experience of mass hunger and its political significance. The food security expert Bruce Currey observed how in Bengal, communities described the gradations in famine with phrases ranging from “when alms are scarce” to “when the epoch changes.”
Bengal is significant at the beginning of this story because the British East India Company inflicted a particularly terrible famine there in 1770-72. The plunder and starvation of Bengal became a public controversy in Britain some fifteen years later, when the colony’s governor-general, Warren Hastings, was impeached in 1787. His trial was the first and only occasion on which the British authorities brought charges against a senior colonial officer for crimes committed in the line of imperial duty. Hastings was acquitted in 1795, partly because his personal record was relatively benign—corrupt company officials had conspired to frame him—but the question of famine, on a scale not experienced in England for perhaps half a millennium, had made a dramatic entry into public debate. Famine was news. The public sphere was something new at that time. So too were political science, demography, and statistics. Hastings, or his accusers, such as the political philosopher Edmund Burke, could have uttered the phrase, “A million deaths is a statistic,” in a manner that was both novel and meaningful, where just one generation earlier, it would have been incomprehensible.
And it was in 1798 that the Reverend Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population, which invented the concept of famine as a demographic event. He argued that human population increased geometrically—2, 4, 8, 16—while food production could increase only arithmetically—2, 3, 4, 5. Hence, if other measures to limit population failed, “gigantic inevitable famine”—the executioner of the laws of nature—would ultimately do the job.
Malthus’s concept of the limits of growth are valid. His identification of famines as a real, historical instrument for limiting growth, though, is simply wrong. No famine in any society, in causes or outcomes, has conformed to Malthus’s law. But his notion of ultimate famine remains a zombie concept, apparently impossible to kill, coming back time and again to haunt the living. It was especially attractive to Britain’s imperialists, who liked to attribute actual famines—commonly caused by their own actions—to the laws of nature and the irresponsible procreation of colonized native peoples in Ireland, India, and elsewhere.
The political realities of famines rudely intruded into Malthusian theory. To control discontent in India and dissent at home, the British introduced famine codes, administrative regulations to provide life-saving relief (principally food-for-work), to be adopted when certain measurable thresholds of distress were breached. A declaration of famine in a locality carried with it obligations on the colonial administration to act. But the overall narrative of seeing every famine, whatever the cause, as the working out of natural laws, casting blame on the victim, persisted.
Let us turn to the 1943 famine in Bengal. The 1943 famine was the product of a conjuncture of circumstances. It was at the zenith of World War Two. The Japanese had occupied neighboring Burma and were threatening to invade Bengal. In response, Britain instituted a policy of denying the necessary food and transport resources, in this case boats, to the invader, which thereby also meant depriving the local Bengali population of what was necessary to survive.
Britain’s strategy for war finance also shifted a heavy burden to its colonies, especially India, which caused inflation. A cyclone struck that destroyed crops and flooded villages in parts of the Ganges Delta. As the food crisis deepened, all the indicators that should have triggered a declaration of famine, and with it enactment of the famine code measures, were present. But the war cabinet refused. Mention of starvation in newspapers, and even in soldiers’ letters home, was forbidden. In the midst of war and wartime censorship, famine was at minimum a cost and an inconvenience and at maximum a political liability. As Janam Mukherjee writes in Hungry Bengal, there was an alternative, implicit “famine code” in place among colonial officers—don’t use the word “famine” at all. (Today, senior aid administrators call it the “F-word,” just as in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere, they tiptoed around genocide, the “G-word.”) The British priority was fighting the war, allocating resources accordingly, and avoiding the public relations calamity of admitting famine. As they waited, about three million died.
In his remarkable book, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Stanley Cohen describes three kinds of denial: simple factual denial, “interpretative denial” (accepting the facts but claiming that they are not what they appear to be), and “implicatory denial” (giving a different meaning to atrocities and thereby justifying them). And, as I mentioned earlier, we need to fold “statistical denial” into each of these.
In the case of Bengal, there was factual denial. The word “famine” was censored. What was permitted, through a loophole, were pictures. Ian Stephens, the editor of the British-owned Indian newspaper The Statesman, published graphic photographs of corpses littering the streets of Calcutta. These spoke for themselves, telling the story of a starvation that had not been relieved, and played a key role in prompting a British response—too little, too late to save millions of lives and preserve Bengal’s social fabric, but something nonetheless.
There was interpretative denial. Evidence for the social distress that marked famine was suppressed. Statistics were only made public in a selective manner. The British argued that there was enough food; that it wasn’t bad enough to declare famine. There was implicatory denial. Winston Churchill blamed the starvation on what he considered the inferiority of Indians, using racist Malthusian slurs and arguing that Bengalis were less deserving than the “sturdy Greeks,” who were also starving at that time due in part to an Allied blockade of Nazi-occupied Greece.
And there was the story of something more important: in this case, the war. The British narrative was that winning the war was a priority that overrode all else. For Churchill, hunger deaths on the road to defeating the Axis powers and preserving the empire were a statistic. For Lord Wavell, viceroy of India, the famine “was one of the greatest disasters that [had] befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputation . . . is incalculable.” He was, reportedly, moved by human suffering. But the British authorities were moved to action by how that human suffering would be represented, something over which they were losing control. But, as with Ukraine a decade before, the question of the numbers obscured what was being done to society. In the case of Bengal, it was reckless, racist indifference rather than genocidal onslaught. But the societal traumas, and dynamics, are recognizable.
The inescapable depersonalization of population statistics in the era of total war can easily slip into bureaucratic dehumanization at scale. It also translates into dehumanization within society: normalizing the sight of dead bodies and reducing corpses to simple, if often arbitrary, identifiers, such as whether they are Hindu or Muslim. Confronted with so many corpses—so many unclaimed corpses—“indifference to the fate of the dead began to reign” among the residents of Calcutta and other cities, writes Mukherjee. And indifference rationalizes mercilessness, especially in those inflicting the quotidian cruelties of the survivor on those just below them in the fine gradients of desperation that decide dignity or destitution, living or dying. Famine hardens the discourse.
Of the violence that followed, Mukherjee writes: “These are not the signs of a society driven to madness by political rhetoric—these are the signs of a society dehumanized by abounding violence, death, and impunity. These are the signs of an already tortured society.” Mukherjee places his stress on “already.” Let me place it on “tortured.” The biological instinct for survival turned against sentiments such as solidarity, friendship, compassion, love—this is the purpose of torture. It is also the purpose of mass starvation. Individuals may manage to survive, but at the cost of societal trauma, even societal death.
The economist Amartya Sen, who was a child in Bengal at the time of the famine, was profoundly influenced by it, both personally and as a scholar. Among his seminal contributions to the theory of famine was the observation that a free press and democratic institutions are a powerful driver of famine prevention. This, he argues, was the key reason why great famines disappeared from postindependence India, drawing a contrast with the famine of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, which unfolded in secret. The largest famine of all time—it killed an estimated 36 million people from 1958 to 1962—was so effectively concealed from the world that it only became a subject of study when demographers started noting astonishing statistical anomalies in the population some twenty years later. While tens of millions perished, Mao told a story in which modernization was creating a land “dizzy with excess.”
Another case is the hunger years in Spain of 1939 to 1952. The historian Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco describes how the Franco regime in Spain in the 1940s used exactly the strategies Cohen identifies. Where simple denial was impossible, Franco deployed myths to blame a supposed persistent drought and the ravages of the civil war. He justified policies that drove hunger in historically Republican areas by blaming the Allied blockade during World War Two.
Hidden, too, was mass starvation in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, in Ethiopia under Emperor Haile Selassie and then the communist military regime, and in both Sudan and southern Sudan in the 1980s and 1990s. In all these cases, famines were concealed by suppressing news reports and by censoring print, radio, and television journalism. In all cases, there was an alternative official story of something more important than mass starvation—celebrating triumphs of imperial greatness, marking a revolution’s anniversary, attracting foreign investment in agriculture, or concealing an atrocious war.
In the last decade, the methods of concealment have been forced to change. We now have international standards for measuring and responding rapidly to food emergencies: mechanisms that are standardized, transparent, and based on complicated calculations. This means that those seeking to use famine as a weapon have to deny, subvert, or challenge these metrics and measurements. To do so, they need to deploy statistical denialism—sometimes crude, sometimes sophisticated—alongside other, more old-fashioned, forms of suppressing news.
Twenty years ago, in response to the need for a more standardized system for assessing acute food insecurity in countries such as Somalia, a group of aid agencies came together to establish what became known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, known as the IPC. The IPC uses three kinds of data to make an integrated assessment: household food consumption and livelihoods, malnutrition, and mortality. This led to a five-phase classification, ranging from Phase 1 (“Minimal/None”) through Phases 2 to 4 ( “Stressed,” “Crisis,” and “Emergency,” respectively) to Phase 5 (“Catastrophe/Famine”). “Catastrophe” refers to households that have absolutely no means of getting food, or populations that are in Phase 5 on one or two counts but not all three. “Famine” is designated when a certain proportion of the population in a certain area surpasses given thresholds on all three.
As the IPC experts emphasize in every report they issue, conditions short of “famine” are still truly terrible. Communities in Phase 4 are desperate, their mortality levels rising and their children suffering very high levels of malnutrition. In “Catastrophe” Phase 5, families are utterly destitute, violating taboos to find food, their social relations strained to—or beyond—the breaking point.
There are three dimensions for assessing famine: severity, magnitude and duration. The IPC uses severity, the intensity of deprivation in a particular area, which can be assessed in real time and published as a warning mechanism. The rationale is that we don’t want to wait to assess the overall numbers of who has died—the magnitude of starvation—or for how long the starvation has lasted—the duration—before declaring a famine.
The people who designed the IPC worked on the assumption of benevolence—that the public policy priority would be preventing humanitarian emergency and famine. In the sociology of public policy, it’s common to observe that when a particular indicator is adopted as a target, policy is distorted toward achieving that metric. It’s a longstanding problem in public health and education. But it is a special problem when the premise of benevolence doesn’t hold. What we see today is that too often the public policy priority is preventing a famine declaration, not preventing a famine. Policies are directed toward ensuring this particular indicator doesn’t flash red. That can be done by preventing humanitarian agencies from collecting information, casting doubt on information that has been collected, or doing just enough to make sure that the particular threshold isn’t crossed.
This is contemporary statistical denialism, and we have seen variants of it in South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and Ethiopia. Each has its own variant; each deserves its own chapter in the sad history of cover-up and manipulation. Let me focus on two: Ethiopia and Sudan.
In Ethiopia’s Tigray region, we have seen a far-reaching combination of denial and the construction of an alternative story. The Ethiopian government and its Eritrean partner in crime waged a two-year war of starvation against Tigray beginning in November 2020. Its first stage, lasting nine months, was to destroy everything indispensable to survival, on a vast scale. The second stage, which followed for more than a year, was to subject the region to a starvation siege. The Ethiopian government was explicit that hunger was its principal weapon. In June 2021, at the height of the war, the IPC assessed that famine was very likely under a scenario in which the war continued and aid was not provided. Such a scenario did unfold. But the Ethiopian government suspended the IPC and prevented a follow-up mission, meaning that no data could be collected. The government and some officials in the World Food Programme (WFP)—along with a number of other foreign cheerleaders—took absence of evidence as evidence for absence. No famine was declared. International diplomats were reduced to haggling over numbers of trucks bringing in aid, trumpeting “success” whenever a single convoy was permitted.
The government’s story was that the war was a “law enforcement operation,” that there could be no famine (nor even hunger) because the country was harvesting bumper crops and becoming a food exporter, and that Ethiopia was being restored to its imperial greatness. It was the kind of inversion redolent of Stalin and Mao, but it was a triumphalist narrative that—through a combination of bribery, fake news narratives, and sheer bravado in telling a tale that international audiences wanted to hear—managed to resonate. In January this year Qu Dongyu, Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) awarded Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed the Agricola Prize for his supposed successes in food production, to the dismay of many FAO staff.
In November 2022, a ceasefire was signed in Tigray. But that only led to the unfolding of a bitter sequel to Ethiopia’s weaponized starvation, one that has been described as an “industrial scale” of food aid theft. In May 2023, a small element of the plot was exposed: the diversion of food aid in Tigray. As a result, the U.S. government, the main donor to the WFP, suspended their food aid funding. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. What took longer to uncover was the revelation that Ethiopia’s wheat exports included international food aid that had been stolen, rebagged, and rebranded—there are whispers that some of it was even sold back to the WFP for aid. The audacity of the corruption is astonishing. In a recent investigation by Reuters, aid officials are quoted blaming the victims for the theft, saying that they were selling their rations, a particularly distasteful example of implicatory denial. There’s solid evidence that thousands of people died of starvation as a result of that aid cut off. American diplomats deny this, while they and the UN also suppress evidence for the actual, nationwide scope of the food aid theft.
There are no good statistics for the numbers who died. The best guess is that from 2020 to 2022, more than 375,000 starved, along with scores of thousands more who died as a result of the collapse of health services. Tigrayan physicians have recorded another sharp peak in starvation deaths following the food aid cutoff. The IPC has yet to be reinstated in Ethiopia. At some point, demographers may be able to reconstruct better numbers for the human cost of Prime Minister Abiy’s hunger politics. When they do, it is quite possible they will find that as many as a million will have died, unnoticed by the world. And, once again, it’s not just numbers: it is the deliberate dismantling of a society, turning Tigrayans against one another in their struggle to survive.
Sudan has probably experienced more famines, and seen more forms of famine denialism, than any other country in modern history. It’s also seen many varied ways of breaking the silence. In 1992, at the zenith of the radical Islamist project in Sudan, when militant groups from al Qaeda to Hamas were congregating in Khartoum, the ruling Muslim Brothers launched what they called a jihad in the Nuba Mountains of south-central Sudan, declaring the entire population there—Muslims, Christians and traditional believers alike—as apostates worthy only of death or forcible conversion. Under a total media blackout, the mujahideen accompanied regular army units and began rounding up communities, trucking them to camps outside their home region, planning to turn them into forcibly Islamized subjects of the state. But ordinary Sudanese townspeople rushed to help these hungry, destitute, often naked people, and informal social networks broke through the wall of secrecy and denial, helping to break the regime’s will to mount a campaign of genocidal starvation. Today, we also see community mobilization to feed the hungry and break down the barriers of denial, under circumstances that are perhaps even more unpropitious. Local Emergency Response Rooms—groups of dedicated volunteers who provide essential aid—are one of the few points of light in the otherwise unremitting darkness that envelops Sudan.
The current war began in April 2023, pitting two components of the armed forces against one another: the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) versus the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The war has created famine, both because of the level of destruction attendant on the fighting, and also because each side uses starvation as a weapon, albeit in different ways. The RSF is like a swarm of human locusts, a pillage machine stripping everything bare as it moves and vandalizing what it cannot carry away. That includes destroying hospitals and medical centers, universities, agricultural infrastructure, and even food stores. The SAF, for its part, uses its aircraft to bomb essential infrastructure. It either blocks international aid or slows it to a trickle, using its status as the UN-recognized government to insist that it has the sovereign authority to decide whether aid is permitted or not. The UN has surrendered to this. There are no SAF troops within hundreds of miles of the border between Sudan and Chad, and that border is crossed daily by smugglers and arms traffickers. But it is all but closed to the WFP because the UN’s legal counsel insists that every truck must have permission from the authorities in Port Sudan 1,500 miles away.
In June, responding to an IPC report that was about to trigger a famine review committee, Sudan’s ambassador to the UN, Al-Harith Mohamed, began by dismissing the evidence. He faced up to the challenge that the numbers facing starvation were high and set to grow. But, he argued, the 750,000 people in IPC Phase 5—the largest number registered by the IPC since it began—were an “insignificant” 2 percent of the population. The numbers would come down in due course after a good harvest. And besides, he concluded, it was the depredations of the RSF that were really to blame for the hunger (a narrative that is correct but one-sided).
All famines have their own particular kind of implicatory denial. The Sudanese version is the notion that declaring “famine” is the pretext for an international takeover of the country. At the end of his press conference, Mohamed set aside his speaking notes, becoming agitated and accusing the RSF of working “maliciously . . . with specific international circles . . . to develop a narrative whereby famine could be dictated from above . . . [to] give a recipe for those ill-wishers to intervene in Sudan.” He ended with a warning of “biblical Armageddon war,” leaving it unclear whether this would be in response to a determination of famine by the IPC or foreign humanitarian intervention. The famine review committee was not intimidated. At the end of July, it issued a report finding “famine with reasonable evidence.” But the Sudanese diplomat’s message had been intended more for the ears of Russia, China, and some of their allies and clients, all of which want sovereign governments to have the power to control all aid crossing their borders. For fear of a Russian veto at the Security Council, the UN hasn’t pushed for a peace mission nor any robust mechanism for ensuring that aid can reach the starving regardless of the warmakers’ objections.
The thresholds for “famine” under the IPC definition have almost certainly been crossed in two camps for displaced people near the city of al-Fashir in Darfur, where some tens of thousands will most likely starve to death. But the entire country is in food crisis as well; fully one-fifth of its people are suffering protracted IPC 4 food emergency. All told, that could very well imply one million deaths from hunger and related causes—a calamitous famine that can only be lamented after the fact. Meanwhile, famine serves the military and political purposes of the belligerents by severing the social bonds that constitute a functioning society.
We need statistics to understand famine. But statistics cannot describe everything that famine is. Famine is a societal catastrophe. Those who inflict it do so with knowledge, sometimes with genocidal intent. Famine is a memory that endures among survivors, a shame that lives on among the perpetrators. In every one of the cases I have mentioned, inflicting starvation causes moral decay among those perpetrating the act. Over the decades in Sudan, the country’s far peripheries where famine reigned were “ethics-free zones” in which army officers and militiamen were encouraged to pillage, rape, kill and even take slaves—until the capital city itself became an ethics-free zone. In Ethiopia, those who inflicted starvation crimes on Tigray subsequently became entangled in other depravities, waging a vicious counterinsurgency in the Amhara region and bulldozing urban neighborhoods in the capital city to build Dubai-style skyscrapers, theme parks, and shopping malls. The international aid officials who were silent witnesses to famine crimes there now find themselves compromised. They cannot now speak out, exposing the corruption within their own ranks, for fear that too-big-to-fail institutions will have their reputations irredeemably damaged.
In some of Russia’s sieges in its current war on Ukraine, such as the 2022 siege of Mariupol, we saw the war crime of starvation. So too do we see the penal starvation of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Fortunately, hunger in Ukraine has not matched the scale of other contemporary cases, though that’s not for lack of trying on Russia’s part. I submit that the Russian forces that routinely vandalize and destroy memorials to the Holodomor in the areas of Ukraine they have invaded do so in part from the rage that comes from shame. Vladimir Putin knows what the Soviet leadership did then, and seeks to write a different version of history. And he and his forces know precisely what they are doing as they destroy the farms, the farmers, the very soils, of Ukraine. There is a general lesson here. Just as torture will, in the end, destroy the humanity of the torturer, so too will starvation corrode the moral fabric of the society inflicting, condoning, or denying it. Perpetrators become victims of their own crimes. Famine zones are ethics-free zones, and those who lord over them lose their own humanity in a deathly cycle.
Let us finish by turning to Gaza. There, we are seeing mass starvation. We see it in the pictures and stories sent by local journalists and aid workers. We also see it in the data gathered by the IPC. Its famine review committee is extremely cautious in interpreting data, but the numbers show an extreme humanitarian catastrophe, with massive numbers in IPC Phase 4 (“Emergency”) and Phase 5 (“Catastrophe”)—just short, so far, of full-blown famine. The closest the IPC came in its declarations was “famine projected” in March. In October it was “risk of famine.” But last week, it issued an unprecedented alert that “famine thresholds may have already been crossed [in northern Gaza] or else will be in in the near future”—within days.
If the IPC data for Sudan points to the largest famine by magnitude in forty years, the data for Gaza reveals the most severe humanitarian catastrophe since the IPC began. It is possibly the most concentrated, intense, reduction of a population to starvation since World War Two. The IPC assessments put the proportion of Gaza’s total population in IPC Phases 4 and 5 combined at between 37 and 69 percent. This compares with the worst recorded data from the hardest-hit locations in South Sudan, Yemen, Tigray and Somalia, which peaked at between 34 and 61 percent. Northern Gaza, taken on its own, peaked at 80 percent in IPC Phases 4 and 5. Northern Gaza is a data black hole today, but we have every reason to fear the worst. In my book, it’s mass starvation, it’s a famine that kills, and it’s a famine crime.
The Gaza figures are particularly shocking because before October last year, acute malnutrition levels were about 1 percent, and general mortality was just a quarter of the background rates for African countries. Gaza was food insecure in the sense that most people relied on UN food assistance, which was allowed at Israel’s discretion. Many children suffered micronutrient deficiencies, but few were underweight. After October 7, acute food crisis indicators went off a cliff, at a speed without parallel.
Israel and its foreign allies have some tough questions to answer. Is Israel pursuing a strategy of starving Gaza, but just short of the level that would prompt a famine declaration? Is Israel limiting humanitarian data gathering to ensure that the indicators don’t meet the critical threshold? Are Israel and its allies aware that, even though they may keep the IPC indicators below the official threshold for famine, the current levels of mortality could, by magnitude, easily add up to famine levels? That there could, quite plausibly, be 100,000 deaths—a statistic—without any official declaration of famine? And are they aware of how this catastrophe is a societal trauma, the destruction of a group? And just as we should assess what is happening in Gaza by the same metrics as other humanitarian emergencies around the world, so too should we diagnose and challenge the strategies for denial. We can acknowledge that the story of how we got to where we are today is complicated, and that there are alternative futures, perhaps better ones, to be plotted. But we shouldn’t deny what is actually happening today by invoking something purportedly more important.
Justice Aharon Barak is a former president of Israel’s supreme court. In 1999, in a well-known decision, he ruled against the use of torture by Israel’s security services, even against known terrorists. “Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back,” he wrote, “it nonetheless has the upper hand.” When South Africa brought its case against Israel to the International Court of Justice eleven months ago, Barak was nominated by Israel to sit on the bench. In March, South Africa demanded a provisional measure that Israel facilitate immediate, widespread, and effective humanitarian assistance. Barak voted for this order, making the decision unanimous. His vote, consistent with his conscience and his belief that a democracy cannot use unlimited force, poses a question: Which will prevail, Israel’s claim to being a democracy with the rule of law, or famine in Gaza?
History tells us of the undying shame of those who denied famine in Ukraine, in Bengal, in Ethiopia, and in Sudan: the moral decay of those who inflicted it, those who covered it up, and those who preferred not to ask. We must learn this lesson.
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