by Guy Arnold
By this time it must have been clear that the Emperor’s days were numbered and on 12 September Haile Selassie was toppled from his throne. He had been Emperor since 1934 and before that had acted as Regent during much of the Empress Zawditu’s reign (1916–34). In 1923 he took Ethiopia into the League of Nations although membership of the League did not save Ethiopia from invasion by Mussolini’s Italy in 1935. During the anti-colonial struggle that followed World War II, despite his conservatism, Haile Selassie came to be regarded as a symbol of Black Africa’s ability to take control of its own affairs. The Emperor had seen himself as the Father of African nationalism and both the OAU and ECA were sited in his capital of Addis Ababa. He had proved more adaptable in dealing with international affairs than home affairs where he had to contend with a powerful and conservative aristocracy. During the three months that preceded 12 September his powers had been drastically reduced. On 23 July Endalkatchew Makonnen had resigned his post of prime minister to be replaced by Michael Imru Haile Selassie, a member of the royal family. On 1 August Makonnen had been detained in a wave of new arrests. On 16 August the Emperor’s Crown Council and Special Appeal Court were abolished. At that point the Armed Services Committee of the military began to move against the Emperor himself and crowds appeared to demonstrate outside the palace. A report in the Guardian recorded the steady loss of power and prestige that the Emperor suffered through August: ‘The traditional Establishment has collapsed and its leaders, numbering some 140 people, are now imprisoned at the barracks of the Fourth Division.’ Army factions had achieved solidarity and the ‘radical’ Air Force, guarded by the army, was allowed to fly. In Addis Ababa the Air Force planes flew overhead in precise formation and Army tanks and armoured cars rolled round the Piazza while the Imperial Bodyguard, whose loyalty had been suspect for some time, joined the anti-imperial demonstrators.14 On 25 August the Emperor’s Palace was ‘nationalized’ and the Emperor was placed under strict surveillance until 12 September when he was deposed and his wealth confiscated. On 26 August the Armed Forces Commission published charges against the Wold government and said ministers were collectively and personally responsible for the failure to combat the four-year drought that had resulted in 250,000 deaths in 1973. The new constitution provided for an Emperor to be titular head of state, a bicameral legislature to include 75 professional people elected by local authorities and municipalities and another 15 to be appointed by the cabinet. The judiciary was to be independent. Political associations were to be permitted provided they were not based on tribal or religious lines. A land law would limit personal holdings, which could not be given to anyone other than those using it to earn a living. All state lands were to become the property of the Ethiopian people.
On 13 September Lt-Gen. Aman Michael Andom was named Chairman of the Armed Forces Committee and Head of the Provisional Government. He was the country’s most distinguished soldier. He had served under Gen. Wingate to liberate Ethiopia from the Italians in 1941. In 1951 he served with the Ethiopian contingent in the Korean War and had then been appointed (as a full Colonel) Commandant of the Haile Selassie I Military Training Centre. However, he had fallen out with the Emperor over tactics in 1964 when he commanded the forces in the border dispute with Somalia with the result that he was retired. In the Senate thereafter he had conducted a vigorous campaign for reforms, thus incurring the further displeasure of the Emperor. When the Emperor was deposed on 12 September 1974 the Dergue – the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, the Police and the Land Forces – decided to establish a provisional military government. Over the following two and a half months two vital power struggles were fought out inside the Dergue. The first was between the Marxist radicals and the non-Marxists over the question of military rule, which the Marxists lost. The second concerned reforms: what reforms should be given priority and how to deal with the guilty men – those responsible for the famine disaster, government corruption and mismanagement, and finally, the question of what to do with the Emperor.
On 24 November the military government announced the execution of 60 high-ranking military and civilian officials, including Gen. Andom who had been appointed Chairman of the Armed Forces Committee only six weeks earlier. Andom had been ousted from power a few days before the executions; his house had been destroyed and he may have been killed resisting arrest. Those executed included two prime ministers – Habte–Wold (1961–74) and Endalkatchew Makonnen. A government statement said the 60 people had been executed after being found guilty of numerous crimes, including attempts to disrupt the country’s popular movement, perpetuating maladministration and injustice by employing divide-and-rule tactics on tribal and religious grounds, sowing division in the armed forces and trying to incite civil war. A further 140 people remained under arrest and faced similar charges. By this time Haile Selassie had been placed under close guard. No successor to Andom was named immediately, although his deputy-chairman, Maj. Haile Mengistu Mariam, was seen as the most powerful member of the Supreme Military Council. However, on 28 November Brig.-Gen. Teferi Bante was sworn in as Chairman of the Supreme Military Council. There were hostile reactions to the 24 November executions from two African states. The Tanzanian paper Uhuru said slaughter was no way to solve Ethiopia’s or Africa’s problems. President Nyerere had made representations to the rulers of Ethiopia to show restraint when Haile Selassie was deposed. In Zambia the government-owned Zambia Daily Mail said the executions were barbaric and should be condemned: ‘Unless there is a definite change to a civilized way of life Addis Ababa does not deserve to continue to be the headquarters of the Organisation of African Unity. It has become an embarrassment to Africa.’
The events of November 1974 saw the revolution take a decided turn towards violence and division and the possibility of achieving a national consensus for change correspondingly receded. At the same time the decision of the Dergue to embark upon an all-out military effort to defeat the Eritrean rebels was to have momentous consequences for the army and the long-term future of Ethiopia. Up to this point it had been apparent that the military had no clear-cut revolutionary plan; they had sparked off the revolution with a mutiny for better conditions rather than a blueprint for reforms and thereafter had responded to events. In the process they had sorted out their own leadership, brutally enough, with the result that, as in many revolutionary situations, the most ruthless eventually emerged at the top.
It was Haile Selassie’s tragedy that when the challenge to his rule was mounted he was too old and indecisive to know how to react. By clinging to power to the end he destroyed much of his life’s achievement and from April to September 1974 it was not clear who was running the country. The Emperor was on his throne but not in control, the Establishment was manoeuvring to obtain the support of the army, which, in its turn, was divided into more or less progressive factions. As things fell apart the ordinary soldiers hoped for a better deal while the officers wanted to modernize the army and had strong reasons for doing so: they feared the Emperor would employ his old tactics of divide and rule; they faced the by then daunting task of bringing the war against secessionist Eritrea to an end; Somalia was strengthening its armed forces with the assistance of Russia and a view to embarking upon an Ogaden adventure; and finally they wished to diversify from dependence upon the US for arms and equipment. There were other disgruntled groups; indeed, the Emperor and the old order had been sitting on a powder keg of developing discontents that now surfaced. Muslims wanted an end to their inferior status, priests wanted an end to the feudal structure of the Orthodox Church, Eritreans looked for liberation and non-Shoans to an end of Shoan dominance.15 As imperial power collapsed control of the army passed to junior officers, NCOs and privates who tried to create a democratic system of control, which led to the setting up of the Dergue. By September, when the Emperor was deposed, the dominant group in the Dergue were left-wing radicals, although these were divided over what to do with the guilty men and how to convert military rule into some form
of participatory democracy. The Dergue was cautious over what to do with Haile Selassie who was widely respected in Africa and the international community beyond the continent. The Dergue needed African goodwill and could not afford to liquidate the Emperor; instead, it isolated him from his throne and the old establishment that had surrounded him. By October a confrontation between the Marxists and the more pragmatic members of the military resulted in a temporary defeat of the Marxists: their leaders were purged from the army, their civilian allies in the trade unions and university were arrested and were lumped together with reactionaries as counter-revolutionaries. The following month the radicals on the Dergue seized the initiative. They were determined to deliver the promises that had been made, especially on land reform, and decided to eliminate the counter-revolutionary activities that had sprung up in the countryside and liquidate the leading members of the old establishment. The result of this decision was Bloody Saturday, 24 November, when some 60 generals, noblemen, ministers and courtiers were executed, including Gen. Andom who had been heading the interim government.
Between Bloody Saturday and the end of 1975 the course of the revolution was determined. Violent opposition to the Dergue followed the massacre of Bloody Saturday at the same time that the war in Eritrea escalated into bitter fighting. Further violence broke out in March 1975 following the nationalization of land. By that time the Dergue described all opposition as counter-revolutionary and dubbed both the Eritrean rebels and leaders of resistance on the land as ‘bandits’ while the radical students and Marxists were described as reactionaries, spreading ‘anti-revolutionary confusion’. On 4 March 1975, the Dergue published a Proclamation of the Nationalization of Rural Land. The measure met a mixed reception: feudal landlords, as was to be expected, opposed it but in many parts of the country, especially in the northern provinces where feudalism was practised less than in the southern lands, comparatively small landowners and tenants also opposed the measure. In addition, the nationalization of the land was opposed by private soldiers since, traditionally, ex-servicemen had received their pensions in the form of land. Now, all land had become the property of the Ethiopian people and generations of feudal injustices had been terminated.16
As it put its radical policies in place with single-minded ruthlessness the Dergue appeared to alienate all its earlier supporters. On 18 March a further six leading soldiers were executed on the orders of Teferi Bante, who overruled the court prison sentences. On 21 March a proclamation relieved Crown Prince Merid Azmatch Asfa Wossen, Haile Selassie’s successor, of his responsibilities (he had suffered a stroke), and amended Proclamation No. 2 of 12 September 1974 that had deposed the Emperor: ‘The sort of future government required by Ethiopia will be determined by the people. The status of the Crown powers given to Merid Azmatch Asfa Wossen and all titles of Prince, Princess and similar royal titles which were awarded to others by him as king have been cancelled.’ In April the Second and Third Divisions sent an ultimatum to the Dergue demanding a change to the land reform so as to allow private soldiers to own their own land and that it should initiate talks with the Eritreans. The ultimatum accused the Dergue of causing confusion and called on it to disband itself and send the army back to barracks. The Dergue rejected the ultimatum and arrested some 20 officers and civilians involved in the ‘plot’. By May student opposition to the Dergue had reached major proportions and a student boycott of classes was broken by a series of mass arrests while severe penalties were threatened against continued demonstrations. The trade union movement was similarly hostile to Dergue policies.
The intentions of the revolutionary Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC) or Dergue became much clearer during 1975: in January it nationalized financial institutions and these were followed later in the year by other business enterprises; the land proclamation of March, which nationalized all rural land, was followed in August by the nationalization of urban land so that the regime had gone a long way towards implementing the political demands of the younger, more radical elements in the country who had contributed substantially to converting the army mutiny of February 1974 into a full-scale revolution. By June 1975 the Dergue had 120 members and a corporate identity had become the norm; however, a triumvirate emerged at the top consisting of the Chairman and Head of State, Gen. Teferi Bante, and two Vice-Chairmen, Maj. Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Col. Atnafu Abate who began to act as a separate cabinet. On 27 August the Dergue announced that Haile Selassie had died in his sleep but since no doctor had been in attendance and there was no post-mortem suspicions arose that he had been poisoned or otherwise put to death. By the end of 1975 the revolution that had been welcomed because it would destroy the old feudal system had fallen into the hands of a military autocracy that by then was leading the revolution from the top. The Dergue became increasingly harsh in maintaining discipline and arrests and the absence of trials shocked many Ethiopians who otherwise were in favour of the changes taking place.
THE ERITREAN WAR
When the Dergue assumed full power in September 1974 it faced Eritrean demands for secession that had been pressed during 12 years of intermittent fighting between government forces and the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). Ethiopia’s only ports, Massawa and Assab, were both on the Red Sea coast of Eritrea and their retention was seen as a vital strategic necessity. ELF had been formed in 1961, the year before Haile Selassie integrated Eritrea into the unified Ethiopian state; its armed wing, the Eritrean Liberation Army (ELA), was then led by Mohamed Idris Awote and it fired the first shots in what came to be called Africa’s longest war in September 1961. The Ethiopian revolution of 1974 provided Eritrea with its chance to gain independence, for up to that time there had seemed no possibility of defeating the Ethiopian army. In 1971, for example, Fred Halliday had written: ‘Above all, it is impossible to see how the Eritreans could ever inflict a definitive defeat on the Ethiopian army without a parallel anti-monarchic revolution inside Ethiopia itself. In that sense, the victory of the opposition inside Ethiopia appears to be a strategic precondition for the liberation of Eritrea.’17 By the 1970s the situation in Eritrea was complicated by the bitter rivalry between the ELF and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) as the two movements struggled for mastery that eventually would be won by the EPLF. Over the years 1975–77, at the height of the fighting against superior Ethiopian forces, the EPLF kidnapped many of ELF’s revolutionary cadres, ambushed and otherwise terrorized and killed its leading members. Eritrean hopes that a revolutionary government in Addis Ababa would be sympathetic to its independence were soon dashed when the Dergue decided to intensify the war against Eritrean secession.
In the meantime, the United States began to reassess its relations with Ethiopia. To begin with it was not greatly worried by the socialist measures introduced in the early days of the revolution for almost all political observers had assumed that any successor to Haile Selassie would have to move to the left. However, as the proposed reforms were announced and put in place and most especially the nationalization of land, banks, insurance companies and certain basic industries, Washington began to realize that Ethiopia was about to abandon the capitalist path. The Dergue, facing war on two fronts – Eritrea and an increasingly belligerent Somalia – was militarily dependent upon the US, its army being entirely equipped with American weapons, which were the only ones they knew. In March 1975 the US government decided to continue arms sales to Ethiopia, which it regarded ‘just not as part of Africa’ but as part of ‘a greater region that would include the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean’. This decision was very much a Cold War strategic one.18 However, the continuing move to the left of the Ethiopian revolution led US policy-makers to undertake a comprehensive reappraisal of the US-Ethiopian relationship and over 4–6 August 1976 the Senate Sub-Committee on African Affairs, chaired by Senator Dick Clark (D-Iowa), held hearings on Ethiopia and the Horn. Most experts also saw Ethiopia and the Horn as part of a wider region that comprised the
Middle East and Persian Gulf as well as Africa. A majority on the committee agreed that Ethiopia had not totally slipped away from the US sphere of influence (though this might occur) and Secretary Schaufele said the PMAC was not yet ‘systematically or instinctively anti-United States’.19 At the same time most US experts continued to oppose Eritrean independence, although they recognized that Haile Selassie had been at fault in ending the federation, and favoured a reinstatement of the federation between Ethiopia and Eritrea. At the same time, the hope was expressed that Somalia could be weaned away from its Soviet alliance to become a surrogate for Washington.