The man who starved Ethiopia
EVERYONE knows about Live Aid, but few seem to know how Ethiopia ended up in such a starving, violent mess in the first place.
Ultimately it was down to one man and his followers, all them dedicated but deluded fans of the Soviet Union.
Haile Mariam Mengistu was a popular army officer installed as ruler of Ethiopia following the country’s 1974 revolution.
He remained in power for the next 17 years, but his attempt to mould the country into a Soviet-style socialist paradise plunged it into a brutal reign of terror instead.
Ethiopia’s government-sanctioned campaign of political repression resulted in an estimated 150,000 deaths, and Mengistu became known as the Butcher of Addis Ababa for it.
Starvation then killed hundreds of thousands and would lead to an infamous BBC documentary that itself sparked Bob Geldof to form Band Aid and, later, Live Aid.
Almost 15 years after his 1991 flight into exile, Menitsu was tried in absentia and found guilty of genocide.
To this day, though, he remains holed up in a walled compound in Zimbabwe, reportedly spending his days in a haze of alcohol.
But the legacy of his long and bloody rule was to destabilise the Horn of Africa and reshape the borders of its countries through the armed rebel groups that worked to unseat him...
SINCE 1916, Ethiopia had been under the control of Emperor Haile Selassie, who styled himself as a god on earth and doled out favours and resources to a select group of “nobles”.
For generations before him, however, the country had been plagued by periodic droughts, and its arable farming land was a lone, precious resource.
Haile Mariam Mengistu was born in 1937 and by the time of his childhood, nearly all the land in Ethiopia was owned by nobles.
Slavery
Peasants toiled thir lives away on the landowners’ estates in near-slavery conditions.
Then, in 1972, drought and famine struck and an estimated 150,000 people died.
The catastrophe was covered up by the Selassie government, which was also suspected of withholding emergency food supplies in efforts to quash anti-government rebels.
Outraged at this, many young Ethiopians began to take a dangerous shift to the left, and Mengistu was among them.
The subsequent overthrow of the Selassie government was a popular uprising until November of 1974, when 60 members of the imperial government were executed.
From that point on, Mengistu controlled Ethiopia with fear, with any anti-government sentiment deemed to be punishable by prison or death.
Newly allied with the Soviet Union, he began implementing a sweeping reform program carried out under MarxistLeninist principles.
The estates of the landowning class were seized, and the land was redistributed to peasants.
All major industries were nationalised, and the country’s college or foreign-educated management class were stripped of their perks and property.
In some cases, they were jailed or died in custody, while others fled the country for good.
Mengistu seized power more firmly in February of 1977, when he became commander in chief of the Ethiopian armed forces.
Two months later, he spoke at a rally and promised that all of the enemies of Ethiopia’s historic revolution would be brought to justice.
He smashed bottles that he claimed were filled with blood to emphasise his point.
The Ethiopian Red Terror of 1977-78 began with that speech, and hundreds of suspected enemies of the regime were arrested, detained without trial, tortured, and even killed.
Punish
The victims were university students and bureaucrats who had voiced dissatisfaction with Mengistu’s Sovietstyle revolution.
Some elements of the Red Terror were even borrowed from Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution in China that had begun a decade earlier, to find, punish, and reverse what was deemed “wrong” thought.
Estimates place the number of Red Terror deaths as high as half a million.
And yet the political killings continued.
“In the mid-1980s it was not uncommon to see students, suspected government critics or rebel sympathisers hanging from lampposts each morning,” wrote Jonathan Clayton in The Times.
“Ordinary people were too terrified to talk to Western reporters. Other people were executed in the notorious state prison on the edge of the capital, Addis Ababa.
“Families had to pay a tax known as ‘the wasted bullet’ to obtain the bodies of their loved ones.
“At the height of his power, Mengistu himself frequently garrotted or shot dead opponents, saying that he was leading by example.”
Starvation
Once again, though, mass famine would alter the political landscape of Ethiopia.
In 1983 the policy of agricultural collectivism had made worse the cycle of drought and starvation the 1974 revolution had
once promised to end.
This time the famine was well-publicised, thanks to journalist Michael Buerk’s BBC documentary, which resulted in a massive outpouring of media attention and sympathy in the West, and Mengistu was forced to accept relief aid from other nations.
In 1984 Bob Geldof formed Band Aid, and the world sang Do They Know It’s Christmas? while sending millions of pounds to the stricken nation.
Yet even despite the help, an estimated one million Ethiopians died between 1983 and 1985.
It was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that hastened the inevitable collapse of Mengistu’s regime.
Less than two years later, Soviet-backed regimes elsewhere had collapsed, and then the Soviet Union itself.
Most fatally, the flow of Soviet roubles that had kept the Mengistu government in power dried up.
Rebel militias began winning significant victories. Finally, in 1991, the United States brokered an agreement between Mengistu and the rebels.
The dictator was to resign from office and leave the country, and in exchange the capital city of Addis Ababa would not be targeted and widespread bloodshed would be averted.
Mengistu was to flee Ethiopia on May 21, 1991 and was given refuge by the then President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe.
The dictator and his family, which included five children, settled into a villa near Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital.
Power
The new Ethiopian government launched an inquiry into the Red Terror era soon after taking power.
Mengistu was tried in absentia for genocide, along with 73 other members of his evil government.
Only then were the actual details of the death of the man whom Mengistu had himself overthrown, Emperor Selassie, finally revealed.
He had ordered the emperor’s death, and the 83-year-old monarch was smothered by a pillow and then buried under a bathroom floor in one of his palaces.
Mengistu’s trial began in 1994 and included eight thousand pages of charges and evidence linking him to over two thousand specific deaths.
The Ethiopian High Court found him guilty on December 12, 2006, but that was where his “punishment” ended.
Because Zimbabwe refuses to comply with an extradition order, Mengistu, now 84, remains safely protected at his home in Harare, where he is fully fed, watered, and alive...
Unlike so many of his former countrymen.