professor victor yazdovsky there talking to witness in moscow.n the autumn of 1984, ethiopia was hit by one of the worst famines in its history. dawit giorgis was the government officer in charge of the relief effort. famine was not new in ethiopia, for centuries people had been facing recurring problems of famine, but the 1984 famine was different because of the magnitude of the problem. it covered almost one third of the population and it was complicated by the politics of the times. the world in the 1970s and the 1980s was a world divided into two ideologies, the capitalist world and the world of the communists, headed by the soviet union. what we now know of the cold war, ethiopia at that time was in the communist camp. i was assigned to be the chief relief and rehabilitation commission. every day there was a funeral, every day hundreds of people were dying. these were my own people, i could have been one of them. i felt the pain, their pain. the government was celebrating the 10th anniversary of the ethiopian revolution and our own governmen