Ethiopian Civil War

The Ethiopian Civil War (1974–1991) was a conflict in Ethiopia that followed the ousting of Emperor Haile Selassie, and the establishment of Mengistu Haile Mariam's Communist Derg regime.

Quotes

• The Emperor of Ethiopia has been deposed by a military coup … Poor Haile Selassie; over the past few years he'd lost control and the inevitable was bound to happen. I remember his attendance at the monarchy celebrations, how he snatched his hand away when I tried to help him from his car, telling me he could manage well enough on his own, thank you very much. Likewise during the recent drought when thousands of his people were dying he refused all HIM's offers of help, denying that anyone was suffering or even that there was a drought. He saw himself as a mighty ruler, but now the truth has caught up with him. At the Shavand Palace today I could think of nothing but Haile Selassie's fate. Inevitably one is inclined to draw parallels … They are not reassuring ...
  • Asadollah Alam (1991), The Shah and I: The Confidential Diary of Iran's Royal Court, 1968-77, p. 388

• Haile Selassie was not an evil man, but his priorities were misplaced. He was so concerned with establishing a strong central government and modernizing the country that he failed to meet the challenge of natural disaster... It was his false pride, this lack of courage to admit mistakes, that brought about his downfall.
  • Dawit Wolde Giorgis (1989), Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia, p. 257

• [Haile Selassie] wanted to avoid bloodshed, so he gave up power for the good of his people and without fighting.
  • Mamo Haile, Haile Selassie's servant, as quoted in Daniel Dickinson,"The last of the Ethiopian emperors", BBC News (12 May 2005)

• Haile Selassie wanted to develop his country, but social justice was not a concept that made a great impression on him. Opinions differ over the degree to which Ethiopia's backwardness in the early 1970s was to be attributed to his policies. Unquestionably, however, the flaunting of the wealth of the aristocracy and the business class, many of them foreigners, made the poverty of the masses seem all the more terrible.
  • David A. Korn (1986), Ethiopia, the United States, and the Soviet Union, p. 4

• The Derg was largely a mystery to the Americans, as it was to others. The officers of the US military mission in the Ethiopian capital knew few of its members, and those that could be identified and approached shied away from contact with the Americans.
  • David A. Korn (1986), Ethiopia, the United States, and the Soviet Union, p. 7

• There were two reasons why Mengistu and others in the Derg wanted Soviet arms. First, they came to power as revolutionaries with a radical program. They regularly denounced imperialism, yet they remained dependent on the bulwark of what they called imperialism, the United States, for the most critical of all commodities, weapons for their army. Could they be true revolutionaries and socialists and still have such a vital link to the United States? It was very embarassing. But it was more than that. For the second and equally powerful motive that pushed them toward the Soviets was that they wanted a much bigger army than Ethiopia had at the outbreak of the revolution.
  • David A. Korn (1986), Ethiopia, the United States, and the Soviet Union, p. 17-18

• The killing of General Aman and of the old regime notables was the turning-point for the Ethiopian revolution. To that moment events in Ethiopia had unfolded without bloodshed; thereafter blood flowed freely.
  • David A. Korn (1986), Ethiopia, the United States, and the Soviet Union, p. 10

• No sooner had Mengistu seized power than he unleashed an orgy of killing. Arms were given out to the Kebelles ('Urban Dwellers Associations') and a 'people's militia' was formed. Mengistu publicly urged it and the army to 'dispense revolutionary justice' and 'liquidate counter revolutionaries'. Revolutionary justice meant summary killing, without trial, of suspected enemies of the regime.
  • David A. Korn (1986), Ethiopia, the United States, and the Soviet Union, p. 26

• 1,000 children have been killed, and their bodies are left in the streets and are being eaten by wild hyenas . . . You can see the heaped-up bodies of murdered children, most of them aged eleven to thirteen, lying in the gutter, as you drive out of Addis Ababa.
  • Håkan Landelius, as quoted in Stephane Courtois, et al. (1999), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, p. 691

• Of all these offenses the one that is most widely, frequently, and vehemently denounced is undoubtedly imperialism—sometimes just Western, sometimes Eastern (that is, Soviet) and Western alike. But the way this term is used in the literature of Islamic fundamentalists often suggests that it may not carry quite the same meaning for them as for its Western critics. In many of these writings the term "imperialist" is given a distinctly religious significance, being used in association, and sometimes interchangeably, with "missionary," and denoting a form of attack that includes the Crusades as well as the modern colonial empires. One also sometimes gets the impression that the offense of imperialism is not—as for Western critics—the domination by one people over another but rather the allocation of roles in this relationship. What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law. This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kossovo, in all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim governments. It may also explain why spokesmen for the new Muslim minorities in Western Europe demand for Islam a degree of legal protection which those countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Judaism. Nor, of course, did the governments of the countries of origin of these Muslim spokesmen ever accord such protection to religions other than their own. In their perception, there is no contradiction in these attitudes. The true faith, based on God's final revelation, must be protected from insult and abuse; other faiths, being either false or incomplete, have no right to any such protection.
  • Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage". The Atlantic. September 1990. 

• Henceforth we will tackle our enemies that come face to face with us and we will not be stabbed in from behind by internal foes... To this end, we will arm the allies and comrades of the broad masses without giving respite to reactionaries, and avenge the blood of our comrades double - and triple - fold.
  • Mengistu Haile Mariam, February 5 (1977), as quoted in Dawit Wolde Giorgis (1989) Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia, p. 31

• In this country, some aristocratic families automatically categorize persons with dark skin, thick lips, and kinky hair as "Barias" [Amharic for slave]... let it be clear to everybody that I shall soon make these ignoramuses stoop and grind corn!
  • Mengistu Haile Mariam, as quoted in Dr. Paulos Milkia's "Mengistu Haile Mariam: The Profile of a Dictator", reprinted from the February 1994 Ethiopian Review

• I'm a military man, I did what I did only because my country had to be saved from tribalism and feudalism. If I failed, it was only because I was betrayed. The so-called genocide was nothing more than just a war in defence of the revolution and a system from which all have benefited.
  • Mengistu Haile Mariam, as quoted in Riccardo Orizio, Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators, p. 150

• Bob Geldof has denied a new report claiming that millions of pounds were siphoned from the 1985 Live Aid concerts to purchase weapons for Ethiopian rebel groups. "It just didn't happen," Geldof insisted, despite accepting that "some money" may have been "mislaid".
  The allegations stem from an investigation by BBC Radio 4's Martin Plaut, who interviewed former rebels and NGO employees involved in aid work during the 1984-1985 famine. According to Aregawi Berhe, at one time a commander of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF), only 5% of the $100m (£65m) in aid money went to feed the starving. Of this $100m, a sizeable amount likely came from Bob Geldof's Band Aid campaign, including the Do They Know It's Christmas? single and the Live Aid concerts, which involved U2, Paul McCartney, Madonna and many more.
  Rebel soldiers allegedly disguised themselves as grain traders, exchanging camouflaged bags of sand for thousands of pounds at a time. "We showed them huge amounts of grains," Gebremedhin Araya, former head of finance for the TPLF, told the Australian. "But if you go there, half of the warehouse is stacked full of sand collected from the Tekeze River. We tricked them as well as possible."
  "The rebel leaders put [the money] in their accounts in western Europe, in so many different places," he said. "Some of it was used to buy weapons. The people did not get half a kilogram of maize." This claim is supported by a CIA assessment from 1985, in which the American intelligence agency claimed that "some funds [meant] for relief operations ... are almost certainly being diverted for military purposes".
  • Sean Michaels, “Bob Geldof: Live Aid money did not pay for weapons”, The Guardian, (5 Mar 2010)

"It's possible that in one of the worst, longest-running conflicts on the continent some money was mislaid. [But] if that percentage of money had been diverted, far more than a million people would have died. ~ Bob Geldof

• While Geldof rejected the report's principal allegation, he agreed that some funds may have been misused. "It's possible that in one of the worst, longest-running conflicts on the continent some money was mislaid," he told the Times. "[But] if that percentage of money had been diverted, far more than a million people would have died." (An estimated one million people died in the Ethiopian famine.) "The essence of the report also is not just about Live Aid. It's that all monies going into [the province of] Tigray – that would be Oxfam, Save the Children, UNICEF and Christian Aid – somehow, we were all duped and gulled. And that's simply not the case. It just didn't happen."
  • Sean Michaels, “Bob Geldof: Live Aid money did not pay for weapons”, The Guardian, (5 Mar 2010)

“On the trail of Ethiopia aid and guns” (Mar 4, 2010)

Martin Plaut, “On the trail of Ethiopia aid and guns”, BBC, (Mar 4, 2010)

For years the rains had failed and by 1984 millions were starving. But, kickstarted by Michael Buerk's reports for the BBC, people responded as never before.
Millions of dollars were raised. Food was brought in. Many died, but the worst was averted.
Then a year ago, I began hearing a different take. I was contacted by Ethiopians who said we had all missed the real story of how money given with such worthy objectives had ended up being used to buy weapons.

Although I was now finally following the trail of the money and the rebel guns, I am only too aware that I was making these enquiries 20 years too late.
The aid workers who did so much to help those suffering back then had not asked those questions either. But perhaps they would not have saved so many lives if they had.

• For years the rains had failed and by 1984 millions were starving. But, kickstarted by Michael Buerk's reports for the BBC, people responded as never before.
  Millions of dollars were raised. Food was brought in. Many died, but the worst was averted.
  Then a year ago, I began hearing a different take. I was contacted by Ethiopians who said we had all missed the real story of how money given with such worthy objectives had ended up being used to buy weapons.
• Aregawi Berhe is the former army commander of the rebel movement that operated in the Ethiopian province of Tigray.
  He now lives in a modest flat in the back streets of a Dutch town. He insisted on making me coffee.
  Then he told me his version of what took place all those years ago - how the lightly-armed rebels he led took on the mighty Ethiopian army which had all the latest Soviet weaponry.
  He told me that as the money began flowing in to feed the starving, a bitter debate had taken place inside the rebel movement.
  There were divisions over how the cash should be spent.
  He also explained how the aid money was diverted not just to buy weapons his troops needed, but also to build a hardline, Stalinist party - the Marxist Leninist League of Tigray.
  This initiative, he said, was led by a young ideologue, Meles Zenawi.
  In the bitter infighting, Aregawi and his allies lost out.
  Money that was being channelled through the rebel side went to the party and to buy guns.
  In 1985, Aregawi told me, just 5% of $100m (£65m) they received went to the starving.
  It was an extraordinary tale, but perhaps Aregawi and his associates were just embittered men, trying to blacken the names of their former comrades?
• I accumulated evidence from secret CIA reports. Former ambassadors supported the story Aregawi had told me.
  Facts were found in the dusty back issues of obscure newsletters.
  Even former Ethiopian government officials, who had been on the government side of the conflict said they believed it was true.
  Was it significant that so many people refused to speak about these events, including civil servants, academics and politicians like Meles Zenawi?
  It became clear that 25 years on, this was still a subject too sensitive to be discussed openly.
• Although I was now finally following the trail of the money and the rebel guns, I am only too aware that I was making these enquiries 20 years too late.
  The aid workers who did so much to help those suffering back then had not asked those questions either. But perhaps they would not have saved so many lives if they had.