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The Ethiopian Revolution revisited

Why do the imperialists hate Mengistu?

By Deirdre Griswold

The revolution that swept Ethiopia in the 1970s got the most oblique of references from the imperialists this week. And then it was only to complain that South Africa had allowed the leader of Ethiopia's revolution, Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, to leave for his home in exile in Zimbabwe after having received medical treatment.

The U.S. and other imperialist countries had put strong pressure on South Africa to seize Mengistu for "war crimes." The Western media add the word "dictator" to his name as though that were his title.

Who is Mengistu and why do the imperialists hate him so much? Is it true he is a brutal war criminal?

Ethiopia is the second-largest country in sub-Saharan Africa. Its economic potential is enormous, but its people are still among the poorest in the world.

Mengistu became its leader in the 1970s at a time of great revolutionary ferment after the feudal monarchy of Emperor Haile Selassie was weakened by peasant rebellions, student demonstrations and strikes by the small working class following a terrible famine.

Ethiopia had never been subjected to the worst brutalities of colonial rule in the same way as the rest of Africa, having defeated an Italian expeditionary force in 1895 at the battle of Adawa. But it was invaded by Mussolini's army in the 1930s. Selassie survived the occupation in exile in Britain, and returned to the throne after Italy's defeat in World War II.

From then on, the emperor collaborated with U.S. and British imperialism. For many years, the largest U.S. monitoring post for the Middle East was at its Kagnew air base in Eritrea, then part of Ethiopia. However, Selassie retained a reputation in the world as the leader of a proud and independent African state.

A fierce class struggle

It was the class struggle within this feudal society that eventually produced the revolutionary military government led by Mengistu. The working class was too small to take the power directly. The aroused peasants were too dispersed, although they fought in the same way that peasants fought their wars in Europe hundreds of years ago--rising up against the landlords or their managers, seizing the land and then trying to survive off subsistence farming.

With the country in turmoil, a struggle erupted in the Ethiopian military, which was being called on to repress the masses. Junior officers broke with--and even shot--those of their officers who supported the old feudal system. They set up a 125-member Provisional Military Administrative Council to run the country.

In successive struggles, the leadership of this council kept moving to the left. Mengistu, a colonel who came not from the elite but from a people who had been serfs, emerged as the leader with a socialist orientation. The PMAC deposed Emperor Haile Selassie and his Crown Council.

The social transformation in Ethiopia combined elements of both a bourgeois and a socialist revolution. Its first sweeping act was to nationalize all land and extra houses in 1975, thus breaking the back of the landlord class. This was followed by the nationalization of the banks, insurance companies and what little industry existed.

All this was greeted with enormous popular support--except, of course, from the former rulers and their agents. Some of them formed a counter-revolutionary army-- called the "Ethiopian Democratic Union," interestingly enough--that mounted attacks on the revolution from neighboring Sudan.

The PMAC organized a huge peasant army in response. This writer visited Ethiopia twice in 1978, after the landlord army had been thrown back. In the countryside, peasants' associations had formed with the support of the government. They greeted visitors with signs that read: "We'll never let the landlords come back."

In Addis Ababa, the capital, barefoot militias guarded public buildings with Kalashnikov rifles. Women were also armed in the urban kebeles, or block associations.

The kebeles organized cooperative markets that sold basic goods at low prices, getting around the price-gouging merchants. One proud tender of a stall told me about her hard life as a serf before the revolution. She had escaped physical abuse by walking for days to get to the capital.

The growth of popular organizations paralleled a mass literacy campaign. In eight years, literacy was boosted from 10 percent to 63 percent throughout the country.

As hostility to the Ethiopian Revolution grew in the West, support came from the Soviet Union and countries in Eastern Europe. The German Democratic Republic in particular helped with technical training and items like clothing and toys for the small children attending kindergartens for the first time in Ethiopian history.

CIA tries to dismember Ethiopia

The U.S. could not be seen as overtly organizing the overthrow of an African government, but the media here were full of outrage at Ethiopia's orientation toward the socialist countries. And behind the scenes, the CIA was busy trying to dismember the country by assisting, or having its allies assist, separatist movements and outright invasions. With 90 different ethnic groupings that had been brought into a central state through the conquests of a feudal empire, Ethiopia was vulnerable.

One such invasion came from Somalia in 1977. It was depicted in the media here as a liberation movement by Somali people in the Ogaden plains of eastern Ethiopia. In fact, army troops with tanks and heavy weapons penetrated far into the Ethiopian highlands before being repulsed.

The editor of Newsweek, Arnaud de Borchgrave, revealed in the Sept. 26, 1977, issue of that magazine that the Somali president had received a secret message from President Jimmy Carter encouraging him to seize Ethiopian territory. The U.S. soon arranged $500 million in aid from Saudi Arabia--equal at that time to two years' gross national product for Somalia.

Although Ethiopia won the war, it was at a stiff cost for a poor country attempting to reorganize society.

War with Eritrea

The thorniest problem for Ethiopia was the Eritrean separatist movement. This pro vince on the Red Sea contained Ethiopia's only ports. Its struggle for independence had begun under Haile Selassie, and its leaders were originally anti-imperialist. But once the revolution happened in Ethiopia, a subtle shift began. The Eritreans began receiving more support from Arab regimes in the region.

The Eritrean leaders characterized the PMAC as fascist and collaborated with all its opponents, including even the army of landlords known as the Ethiopian Democratic Union.

The war between Ethiopia and the Eritrean movement was fierce. But the leader who replaced Mengistu with the blessings of the U.S. and Britain, Meles Zenawi, has also waged a bloody war with Eritrea over the past year. No one in the West is calling him a dictator.

There are no demands from the State Department or the White House to bring proven mass murderers like General Suharto of Indonesia to justice. Suharto killed a million Indonesians and hundreds of thousands of East Timorese. But he took power in a military coup with U.S. support, and was an anti-communist ally in Asia favored all along by Washington.

Mengistu, on the other hand, told the Organization of African Unity in 1977 that "We have cut the umbilical cord to imperialism." Could this be why the imperialists still want his head?

In a deal brokered in London, the umbilical cord was restored in 1991 when the PMAC was overthrown and Mengistu resigned. The USSR had been broken up and the prospect of building some form of socialism in Ethiopia, predicated on assistance from the socialist camp, had been scuttled.

Feudalism cannot return

In 1993, the new regime accepted a program of privatization laid down by the international imperialist banks. However, the travails of the revolution were not totally in vain. It produced lasting results that cannot be reversed.

The anti-feudal aspect of the revolution achieved its objective. Today, Ethiopia describes itself as a place where "land is public property." The peasants hold subsistence plots on lease from the government. Foreign investors also can lease land for modern agriculture. But the days when the peasants had to turn over 75 percent of their crops--and often their very bodies--to the landlords have passed into history.

In essence, every class society is a dictatorship of one class over another, whether the political form is that of a democracy or a totalitarian state. The huge prison population and the armies of police in the United States, the self-proclaimed most democratic of the imperialist countries, are evidence of the underlying class struggle and the brute force needed to contain it.

Nevertheless, the imperialists, wallowing in cash, find it suitable at this point in history to buy legislatures and presidents in their home countries rather than nurture military regimes--although they have engineered the most autocratic and openly brutal forms of rule in oppressed countries when the masses there challenged the status quo.

The imperialists hate Mengistu not because he was a dictator, but because the dictatorship in Ethiopia was one exercised by the oppressed classes over the bourgeoisified feudals and their imperialist allies. And for that very reason, Mengistu has earned his place in the history of the unfolding African revolution.

Copyright © 1999 workers.org