In the autumn of 1973, as the emperor fretted about his army, Jonathan Dimbleby, a BBC journalist who had always seemed to be an admirer of the emperor, somehow got into Wollo province with a camera crew. His footage of the starving of the northern highlands was, in his ultimate documentary The Unknown Famine, intercut with footage of the emperor presiding at banquets. The documentary attracted the world’s attention. Pirated copies were smuggled into Ethiopia, and now Haile Selassie was forced to let relief agencies into the country to feed the people of Tigray, Wollo and Harar.
The first, often informal, relief camps that were set up were mainly a result of initiatives by provincial authorities in the north and north-west. Among those in sharpest need were professional beggars, labourers who hired themselves out by the day – generally in the towns – servants, water carriers, beer sellers and prostitutes. Weavers and craftsmen were also hit hard. Wives and children either stayed with relatives or came to town to beg for a living, or sought shelter in the relief camps. These first camps were primitive. Famine diarrhoea filled the laneways with human waste, which tainted the water supply.
In the US Senate, Senator Ted Kennedy criticised the Nixon administration’s tardiness in sending aid. ‘Is not the real reason for our slow response that we did not want to blow the whistle on the Ethiopian government?… As a result a lot of people starved to death.’ By the time foreign relief started arriving, many of the inhabitants were either dead or had gone elsewhere. Some migrant workers went off looking for work in the Setit Humera cash-cropping region near the border with Sudan, and in the cotton plantations of the Awash River in the southern part of the Tigray province.
Landowners were better off at first sight, since they did not have to pay rent. But many of those who owned small areas and few livestock had, by now, lost them. There were cases when government collectors were confiscating halfway-dead cattle for tax.
Like the Irish peasant producing potatoes for consumption rather than for sale, many Ethiopian farmers with small holdings ate the food grown by the family without buying any in the market. In Ethiopia, as in Ireland, what mattered for the poorer cultivators was the fall in what their family could grow, rather than any decline in the total food grown and harvested in their region as a whole. A number of farmers had run out of seed when a second planting became necessary after a false start to the kremt rains the year before. Some landowners finally sold their land. But there was a fall in the price of land because so many were trying to sell, and a similar fall in the market price of livestock. Neither those who owned or tenanted much land, nor even the very poor, moved from home easily, but now they did. Many of them had become indebted to the large landowners and thus were tied to them to the death, which for many came from starvation and its effects.
As the famine moved southwards, more camps needed to be set up in those regions as well.
During the emperor’s famine, among those most severely struck by want were the Afar nomads. Their cattle, camels and goats grazed, in particular, in the north-east of the country, between the highlands and the coast. There had been drought in 1972, but their chief troubles became very serious as soon as the belg rains failed in 1973 and their livestock began to die.
The Afar community were affected not only by the drought in north-eastern Ethiopia but also by the loss of grazing land owing to the expansion of commercial agriculture, particularly in the Awash Valley to their south. The land involved was the best of the grazing land ancestrally used by the Afar. When this smaller area close to the river was made unavailable for dry-season grazing, a much larger area away from the river was turned to desert because the Afar cattle overgrazed it. The nomads of the great southern triangular plateau, the Ogaden, and those of the Issa desert, were also under pressure. Their problems began to build in 1973, a year later than for the farmers of Wollo. The wet season had been late and short. Though the grain the Afar and Issa went to town to buy had risen by 15 per cent, the price of cattle had generally fallen to a third of the normal rate, which meant that in real terms grain had risen to three times the norm. The loss of grain in the family diet was significant, since the body takes in calories from grain far more quickly than it does from milk and meat.
During this southern famine of 1974, the death rate of nomad children increased threefold. Between November 1973 and December 1974, Ethiopia received foreign relief aid donations of 137,000 tonnes to see them to the next good harvest. Wollo and Tigray received 70 per cent of this, despite the fact that their problems were nearly over, and Harar and the Ogaden, where famine was at its height, received only 8 per cent.
Famine in the Ogaden region was not responded to well either by the Ethiopian authorities or international agencies. One might ask whether this was a result of operational difficulties or whether the Coptic Christian starving were more attractive to the world than the Muslims of Ogaden. The question does sometimes arise – are some destitute people in famines considered more entitled to food than others? That certainly was the case at the level of the emperor and his officials. The Ogadenians were troublesome citizens who seemed, at times, to have more kinship with the Somalis, whose ethnicity they shared. But was it true at an international level as well? There has always been the argument that it is very hard to get truckloads of emergency relief down the badly built roads to remoter provinces. For aid organisations this was certainly a test in the case of Ogaden, but also, and perhaps above all, a matter of the government’s lack of willingness and cooperation. For the emperor did not find it impossible to truck a considerable part of his army into the Ogaden.
The problem of roads cannot be an explanation for the famine, because one of the best roads in Ethiopia ran north from Addis Ababa through Wollo province to Asmara. Yet Wollo was an epicentre of the famine. Here at least, however, many travellers were flagged down and asked for food, thus giving greater visibility to the hunger in Wollo. The main foreign relief camps were set up near this highway because that is where most imperilled people in the area were now presenting themselves. And yet here, despite all the relief efforts, 30–40,000 people perished. The numbers who died in the less-observed and accounted-for regions is not known. And, as previously mentioned, there were a huge number of refugees – as many as 200,000 – who fled into Somalia and a lesser number into the Sudan. These, too, could be counted among Ethiopia’s losses.
Outraged by the famine and the emperor’s mismanagement, in September 1974, officers and soldiers took over the radio station in Addis and announced that a committee of the armed forces and the police would act on behalf of the emperor in leading a movement for a new Ethiopia. The Derg, the coordinating committee made up of army, navy, air force and police, and including lowly sergeant-majors and prison guards, was formed in the conviction that the emperor could no longer rule an Ethiopia where the army was in rebellion and the cities full of unrest. Generals were, by and large, not trusted enough to belong to the Derg. Most of its 120 members were ‘simple soldiers’ who brought no ideology to their task.
In its mistrust of most senior officers, the Ethiopian army had become very like the Russian army on the eve of the October Revolution, and city intellectuals did their best to press the glories of Marxism upon the Derg, just as the Bolsheviks did on the soldiers’ and sailors’ soviets of 1917. In late August, as a test, the Derg began to nationalise transport and breweries, as well as the emperor’s own corporation, the Haile Selassie trust.
One of the Derg’s leaders was a largely unknown, handsome young officer named Mengistu Haile Mariam, who now began to argue most strongly for the emperor’s total removal. Ruling Ethiopia under the emperor’s aegis was not working, said Mengistu, and violated the spirit of the revolution. Mengistu was characteristic of the Derg, in that he was not an intellectual and probably believed at the time of the revolution that his objective was mere reform. As an officer, he had secured a position in a foreign training program at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and he studied English in classes provided by the Universit
y of Maryland. He was in his mid thirties at the time the emperor was deposed, and had been serving as a major in the Third Division in Harar when the Ethiopian revolution began. Major Mengistu’s origins were mysterious – he was variously said to have been born of a princess and an NCO, or of a private soldier and a serving maid. Fantasists even depicted him as an illegitimate relative of the emperor, taking vengeance for his exclusion from the court.
Now, to focus the support of the people, Mengistu ran Jonathan Dimbleby’s documentary, with its scenes of the emperor living high, attending a profligate wedding and feeding his dogs from a silver platter with better meat than the peasants saw in a season. The emperor himself was forced to watch the documentary and, according to report, was overcome with tears by the shame of it. He was deposed on 12 September 1974. A sub-committee of the Derg, chaired by Mengistu, now began to argue for his total elimination. In late August 1975, he was strangled at the Menelik Palace and his body buried in a toilet floor, a punishment for the 200,000 people who had died in his famine. The rumour was that Mengistu himself applied the garotte to the old man’s neck, in which case the assassination was carried out by a man whose own famine record would ultimately make the emperor’s seem modest.
In the brief season of exhilaration at the fall of the emperor, the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC) was set up to deal with future want. In early 1975, the feudal land system was abolished for good. As in Russia, peasants seized the land of their masters, and this often led to local warfare between the landlords and farmers. Mengistu Haile Mariam was the strong presence behind all these changes.
By the end of 1974, Mengistu had become vice-chairman of the Derg, at a time when other parties were contributing to the committee’s ideas and competing for power. One such group was the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement, led by an intellectual named Haile Fida, who was in fact considered the architect of land reform. The young tyrant-in-training Mengistu hated intellectuals such as Fida, rather as Stalin had hated Marxist intellectuals and ultimately expunged them.
In 1975, the Derg initiated a movement named Zemecha, which involved sending 60,000 high-school and university students into the provinces to spread literacy among the peasants and to prepare them for land reform. Dawit Wolde Giorgis said that Mengistu and many of the Derg were pleased to get the troublesome students out of town and to place them at a distance in the countryside.
Only a short time after the emperor was deposed, Mengistu and another major competed for chairmanship of the council of the Derg. For once, the soldiers who made up the body asserted themselves and, ambiguous about both candidates, called on Mengistu’s superior, Aman Andom, a general they trusted, to take control. Andom was an Eritrean, and could see no sense in continuing the emperor’s wasteful and increasingly intense war against the northern province of Eritrea, formerly an Italian colony. The war had been initiated by the emperor’s abolition of Eritrea’s legislature, originally put in place to appease Eritrean desires for self-government. Eritrean hostility was also sparked by the savagery of the Ethiopian army in that province. The Eritrean Parliament should be reinstated, said Andom, and a policy of conciliating the Eritreans should be put in place. But Mengistu was even more determined than the emperor had been to crush the Eritrean revolt, and the result would be disastrous during the coming famine. It was an endeavour on which Mengistu would spend the substance of Ethiopia, making effective famine relief from the state – had he acknowledged the existence of famine when it came – even less likely.
Mengistu sent armoured cars and hundreds of troops to attack Andom’s house. It was a murderous and bloody affair. Andom and twenty-two other officers who wanted peace with Eritrea were killed. Mengistu took the opportunity to kill, as well, fifty-nine royal officials who had been imprisoned in cells beneath the gardens of the Palace of Menelik.
Though the confused and disoriented Derg were by now dominated by Mengistu’s personality, they found the courage to invite not Mengistu but another general, Teferi Banti, to become their chairman. Yet under Mengistu’s influence, a river of blood similar to that which flowed in Stalin’s purges became the accustomed reality of the Derg, no matter that it was headed by someone else. Nineteen others who were seen as soft on Eritrea were also assassinated in mid 1976. The governor of Eritrea was then executed. Hundreds of intellectuals were imprisoned. Within a week of the executions, two other young officers, frank opponents of Mengistu, tried to escape from Ethiopia, but were caught and shot down. Political rivals from outside the Derg were also put to the sword, but those within it were not safe either. In early 1977, in the Palace of Menelik, a regular meeting of the steering committee of the Derg was in progress. Suddenly Mengistu and his supporters got up and left the chamber. Mengistu’s bodyguards, led by his chief assassin, Legesse Asfaw, entered with machine guns and forced the seven leaders of the Derg, including Banti, down into the cellar. There, Mengistu appeared again and, with Asfaw, shot down the men.
In November 1977, Colonel Atnafu Abate, a Derg moderate, presented himself at the Palace of Menelik for a conference and he, his bodyguards, drivers and assistants were assassinated downstairs in the palace cellar, which one member of the Derg called ‘the revolution’s shooting gallery’.
A by-product of all this slaughter was that Mengistu was killing off a number of independent thinkers who might have helped their fellow countrymen when the famine struck.
To get to absolute power, by 1978 Mengistu had taken an extraordinary toll of prominent figures: three heads of state – that is, the emperor and two chairmen of the Derg – and eight members of the original 120-strong Derg. Having acceded to the chairmanship and to total power, Mengistu expressed a particular admiration for Stalin – for his surgical ruthlessness towards counter-revolutionaries. He had emulated him and continued to do so. Stalin’s criminality in permitting up to 10 million Ukrainians and Russians to die of famine in the early 1930s must also have been, implicitly, admirable to Mengistu, given that it had swept counter-revolutionaries off the map.
By the late 1970s, Mengistu’s behaviour had predictably grown psychotic. He lived in the splendid palace the emperor had occupied, surrounded by servants in livery. The torture chambers and prison beneath the palace and its garden remained in operation, while Mengistu played tennis at ground level and afterwards ordered the assassination in the street of imprudent opponents.
He now began to distribute weapons to the Urban Dwellers’ Associations, known as the kebeles. They were made up of Derg supporters, local bullies and sometimes former criminals. His cry to the kebeles was, ‘We shall beat back white terror with red terror!’ or ‘Death to counter-revolutionaries!’ At a public rally, he suddenly produced two bottles of what appeared to be blood and smashed them to the ground either side of him, to reinforce his proposition, borrowed from Lenin, that the revolution needed to be fed with the blood of traitors.
The period from 1977–8 would be known as the Red Terror. Members of the Derg, and Mengistu himself, presented to the kebeles lists of suspect people for execution or imprisonment. Operatives of the East German Stasi gave the kebeles advice on tracking down the enemies of the regime. On the most remote suspicion, young men and women were shot dead in the street, and the kebeles, sometimes delivering the dead to the door of the family home, demanded payment for the lethal bullet. Other citizens were summarily executed and their bodies left where they lay. University students and professors were particularly vulnerable. In 1978, high-school students became the target, and 5000 of them were said to have been executed in one week. A Swedish observer saw some thousands of bodies of the young lying on the roads leading from the capital, which, like those felled by the Evil Days, were eaten by hyenas.
In prisons run by the secret police of Legesse Asfaw, guards augmented the torment of prisoners by using a nylon rope called ‘Mengistu’s necktie’ to kill or torment. The bastinado, an excruciating caning of the soles of the feet, was also a common implement of torture and crippled thousands of E
thiopians.
Again, through his sundry assassinations, Mengistu was eliminating men and women who could have reacted with some efficacy to the coming famine.
Taking advantage of the disorder, Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre invaded Ethiopia in July 1977. The Somalis had been supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, which Mengistu and the Derg now began to court, Mengistu abandoning for good the emperor’s old alliance with the United States. The Soviet and Cuban military abandoned the Somalis, began to equip the Ethiopian army heavily with Soviet arms, and took part in driving the Somalis out of Ethiopia. It was Mengistu’s intention to deploy the tremendous amount of Russian matériel he had acquired into the subduing of rebel Eritrea and Tigray. Mengistu’s military association with Russia would have a fatal impact on the Ethiopian people. The falling-out with the West was acrimonious and accompanied by much vituperation on Mengistu’s part.
In the meantime, ‘land reforms’ were reducing the peasantry to a level of grain vulnerability they had not previously felt. Soon after the revolution, the Derg transferred all land to regional Peasant Associations, which would decide how much land a peasant would get for his own use. Though seven million peasant families in Ethiopia were granted land by their associations, the average grant was one-and-a-half hectares. A large amount of a farmer’s time was devoted to communal labour on the food, which the association sold at a low rate to the state’s Agricultural Marketing Corporation (AMC). This communal, compulsory labour frequently did not leave farmers enough time to produce adequate food for their own survival. Their food production was also intruded upon by compulsory political classes, in which for some hours a day cadres instructed them on Marxist thinking.