Product Description

Robert D. Kaplan is one of our leading international journalists, someone who can explain the most complicated and volatile regions and show why they’re relevant to our world. In Surrender or Starve, Kaplan illuminates the fault lines in the Horn of Africa, which is emerging as a crucial region for America’s ongoing war on terrorism.

Reporting from Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea, Kaplan examines the factors behind the famine that ravaged the region in the 1980s, exploring the ethnic, religious, and class conflicts that are crucial for understanding the region today. He offers a new foreword and afterword that show how the nations have developed since the famine, and why this region will only grow more important to the United States. Wielding his trademark ability to blend on-the-ground reporting and cogent analysis, Robert D. Kaplan introduces us to a fascinating part of the world, one that it would behoove all of us to know more about.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #301829 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-11
• Released on: 2003-11-11
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
“A writer of extraordinary intellect and passion . . .with a wonderfully lucid way of relating history as a living thing.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“This vivid account . . . tells very convincingly a story which the author claims was almost entirely ignored by Western media, diplomats, and relief officials. Kaplan paints a horrific picture of often fatal cruelty.” —Foreign Affairs

“Robert Kaplan is a scholarly and adventurous journalist. . . . He draws attention to long-term trends that other writers have little noted.” —The New York Times

“Kaplan is a gritty travel reporter and commentator on foreign affairs known for providing no-nonsense political-historical overviews of the dicey places he visits.” —The Washington Post Book World

From the Back Cover
“A writer of extraordinary intellect and passion . . .with a wonderfully lucid way of relating history as a living thing.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“This vivid account . . . tells very convincingly a story which the author claims was almost entirely ignored by Western media, diplomats, and relief officials. Kaplan paints a horrific picture of often fatal cruelty.” —Foreign Affairs

“Robert Kaplan is a scholarly and adventurous journalist. . . . He draws attention to long-term trends that other writers have little noted.” —The New York Times

“Kaplan is a gritty travel reporter and commentator on foreign affairs known for providing no-nonsense political-historical overviews of the dicey places he visits.” —The Washington Post Book World

About the Author
Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the bestselling author of eleven previous books on foreign affairs and travel, including Balkan Ghosts, The Ends of the Earth, The Coming Anarchy, and Eastward to Tartary and most recently Imperial Grunts. He is currently the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor at the United States Naval Academy. He lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Atypical for Kaplan
Surrender or Starve is a solid book that deserves reading, especially if you knew nothing of the Ethiopian/Eritrean conflict. When I was young, I distinctly recall images of the famine in Ethiopia, calls to action from within the United States but, like Kaplan emphasizes, the West did not appreciate the true root cause of these problems: ethnic conflict. At the very least, I was ignorant of these factors. Kaplan made me investigate deeper and in doing so, I found a lot of interesting material on the Internet. One mild example of the two countries animosity of one another was found when I was looking for a good Ethiopian or Eritrean restaurant in NYC. I found one, incidentally, and the food is different but good--first time for Ethiopian for me. At any rate, a listing of Eritrean restaurants on an Eritrean-American website showed several but apparently 2-3 were "bought by an Ethiopian" and were blocked out with those words bolded in red. I guess for the time being with the struggle still fresh in everyone's memory (and likely to ignite again), it's not appropriate to patronize your enemy.

more relevant than ever
I have enjoyed reading a half-dozen books by Robert Kaplan, a journalist who writes about foreign affairs for the Atlantic Monthly, and this one was no exception. Although some critics consider Kaplan's analyses as overly pessimistic, most give him high praise for his skill in combining first person travel narrative, history, geo-political analysis, and a street-level view of what is unfolding in the farthest corners of our world. Surrender or Starve was first published in 1988, right after the epic famines that devastated the Horn of Africa from 1984-1987; this new edition includes a new foreword and a postscript on Eritrea (which declared independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after a thirty-year war).

Kaplan is an unapologetically opinionated writer. Most of the media covered the famines that devastated eastern Africa as caused by horrible droughts, which is partly true. But Kaplan insists that Africans, and not only God, were also to blame, because the famines were greatly exacerbated by ethnic conflict and class warfare. In Sudan, the northern Muslim government in Khartoum ignored the plight of Christians in the south. In Ethiopia, the ruthless Marxist regime of Mengistu Hailie Mariam (1977-1991) turned the famine into a weapon of war against the ethnic Oromos, Tigreans and Eritreans. Massive "villagization" or forced collectivizations that displaced five million people were hailed by Mengistu as "famine relief." In 1986, for example, the World Human Rights Guide "gave Ethiopia the lowest rating of any country in the world" (p. 81). Today Ethiopia remains one of the poorest countries in the world. What makes Kaplan such an engaging writer is his stated intention to think and write about Africa in "a bold, unpopular, but more realistic way, judging Africa by the same standards of moral conduct that would apply to any other part of the globe" (p. xii). Characteristic of all his books, Kaplan thus places himself squarely in the tradition of realpolitik as opposed to all forms of political idealism.

The crimes of Mengistu and the Dergue.
This book is almost completely about how the Communist government of Ethiopia misled the West into thinking that a small harvest was the reason for the mass starvation of 1984. Most remember this as the time when the charitable West stepped in with huge donations of grain and musician celebrities formed to perfom Band Aid. It is bad because the main culprit was the dictator Mengistu and his Communist buddies doing forced resettlement, collectivization, and centralized villages. They wanted to win the civil war raging in Ethiopia and install a Marxist government. Millions died, the Hollywood establishment blamed bad weather, and leftists told the West they weren't doing enough. Well the Ethiopian government could have stopped the genocide by stopping its failed policies.

This is an eye awakening book about how the West was deceived by a Marxist Third World government. There is some material in the book about Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen but the main focus is Ethiopia. The fallen Ethiopian government failed the people it governed.