Live Aid controversies.

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/24/g8.debtrelief - This source is reliable as The Guardian is monitored by OFCOM and therefore cannot publish incorrect statistics. 

Foster, T. (2017). Remember Live Aid? Your Money Went to an Ethiopian Dictator, Not Famine Relief. [online] TVOvermind. Available at: https://tvovermind.com/remember-live-aid-money-went-ethiopian-dictator-not-famine-relief/#:~:text=Live%20Aid%20wasn.

https://www.spin.com/2015/07/live-aid-ethiopia-mengistu-haile-mariam-bob-geldof/

In 2005, the guardian published an article asking the question 'Cruel to be kind?' The article explains that this is in reference to Live Aid forcing the world to confront the Ethiopian famine in 1985. However, they raise the controversial idea that the more than £50 million raised may have helped fund a brutal resettlement programme that may have killed up to 100,00 people. While the article does explain the good which surrounded the concert and the influence it had on future efforts, it also highlights that it did harm as well as good. This is due to the fact that Ethiopia remains one of Africa's poorest countries and, if anything, they are worse off today than it was after Live Aid. Truly, nobody knows how many people died in the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s. However, estimates run from 300,00 to as many as a million due to the fact that Ethiopia remained a forgotten crisis until Michael Buerk's report and the Band Aid/Live Aid effort that followed. A strong case can be made for Live Aid's achievement. According to one Ethiopia expert, Alex de Waal, the relief effort may have cut the death toll by between a quarter and a half. The problem is that it may have contributed to as many deaths. Geldof remains unimpressed by the idea that the aid he helped to raise was used in ways that may have cost as many lives as were saved. As far as he is concerned, Live Aid raised a lot of money and used that money to feed people who would have starved. But where did the money actually go in order for this to happen? An article published on TVOvermind (2017) explained that Live Aid wasn't a scam but the money did manage to reach the hands of one of the last people on earth that should have had access to it. This was because instead of it going to help the poor and impoverished the money raised from Live Aid went instead to an Ethiopian dictator by the name of Mengitsu who had a reputation for killing innocents and relocating them from their homes. However, this idea has been discredited more tan once due to the fact that nobody would want to own up to the responsibility of the act. In 2015, Spin did an investigation into the relief aid abuse and explained the extent of Mengitsu's terror and the consequences of him being handed the relief money. They state that the toll of Chairman Mengistu's rise to power was 30,000 executed Ethiopians in three short years. Under his rule, security officers routinely shot and killed people in their homes, whether or not the contraband they looked for, such as illegal weapons or publications, was found. Children at and Addis school were gunned down as their parents demonstrated for the release of their offspring. Soldiers were granted a license to kill and handed a list of hundreds of names with photographs of "wanted people". When Bob Geldof came to Addis Ababa in November 1985, it was a tidier city than the one of seven years before. He lodged in one of the finest hotels with a pool, tennis courts, fine restaurants and a nightclub. Behind this façade, they seemed to ignore the fact that the Ethiopian government was killing its own people. Geldof returned to London and put on an extravaganza of a show in 1985 but the proceeds were about to go towards the genocide of Ethiopian citizens. The 1986 World Human Rights Guide lists violations by the Mengitsu government, ranging from censorship to extrajudicial killings by members of the military, from indefinite detention without charge to the death penalty for unauthorised travel outside the country - a policy that is a clear danger to the more than 2.5 million Ethiopian refugees who have fled across the borders into Somalia and Sudan.