This vivid account of deliberate government design in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Ethiopia and the Sudan from 1984 to 1987 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 perpetrated by Ethiopian soldiers in their government's resettlement program (and related famine relief programs) and does a preliminary sketch of a similar picture in the Sudanese civil war. While indicting both the inhumanity of African elites and the human rights policies of the Carter Administration, he offers no ameliorative solutions, beyond a weak effort to enshrine the Reagan Doctrine as a moral precept.
