The revolution had already devoured its own. Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam stood at the center of the storm he had helped create, a man who had clawed his way to the top of Ethiopia’s military junta through a series of arrests, counter-arrests, executions, and counter-executions. His rivals were dead or imprisoned, and the country now belonged to him. But in 1977, his grip on power was not yet absolute.
There were still students on university campuses who spoke too freely, priests in ancient churches who commanded too much loyalty, and professionals whose education made them dangerous. Mengistu would not debate them. He would destroy them. The violence did not emerge from nowhere.
It grew out of the collapse of one of Africa’s oldest states, a monarchy that had ruled Ethiopia for centuries and had been embodied for forty-five years in one man: Haile Selassie. To the outside world, he was a figure of respect, the emperor who had led Ethiopia’s valiant but doomed struggle against Mussolini’s Italy in 1936. To Rastafarians, he was revered as a divine figure, the earthly embodiment of God, a belief he matter-of-factly corrected when they visited him, though he treated them with respect for their Pan-African convictions. To his admirers in Ethiopia, he was the savior and modernizer who had brought the country to the world’s attention.
To his critics, he ruled through a rigid and unequal system that kept elites in power while most of the population lived in extreme poverty. By the early 1970s, dissatisfaction had spread across the country. Inflation, unemployment, corruption, and the government’s slow and inadequate response to a major famine eroded confidence in the aging monarch. More than eighty percent of Ethiopia’s population of 32.
5 million people was under thirty-five years old, and the students among them had become the system’s most vocal critics. By the 1960s and early 1970s, university campuses had turned highly political. Young activists debated socialism, land reform, revolution, and their own identity in a nation ruled by a monarch, his family, and his cronies. They debated both out of serious curiosity and because Soviet efforts had actively promoted communist theory among them.
By the mid-1970s, most young people believed the country’s institutions were incapable of dealing with the nation’s problems, and their demands for reform helped to create the environment that eventually brought the emperor down. In September 1974, a committee of military officers known as the Derg seized power and deposed Haile Selassie. Less than a year later, on August 27, 1975, the eighty-three-year-old former emperor died while under house arrest, officially from complications following prostate surgery. Many historians believe he was murdered on the orders of the new regime.
At first, many Ethiopians welcomed the change. The monarchy was stale, corruption was rife, the country was stagnant, and reforms seemed inevitable. The Derg promised modernization, equality, and an end to a feudal order that had long outlived its time. Instead, Ethiopia entered the most violent period in its history.
Following virtually every revolution, there is a split among the revolutionaries, a counter-revolution or civil war. The Derg was not unified. As a committee or junta, its sole purpose had been to overthrow the emperor. Once that was done, its members began to jockey for position.
During the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France in 1793, a revolutionary named Pierre Vergniaud had ended up on the wrong side of a power struggle and was beheaded by the guillotine. Shortly before his execution, he reportedly said, “The revolution devours its children. ” Historians have used that phrase ever since to describe what almost always happens after a violent revolution. After Haile Selassie was gone, the members of the Derg began fighting each other, both politically and violently.
The man who emerged at the top was Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, an ambitious and hard officer who achieved his position mainly through murder. He had become a Marxist before the coup that brought the Derg to power. Within a short time at the top, he began portraying any political opposition as a threat to be destroyed, not debated. Soon after, Soviet weapons and advisers, as well as Cuban troops, flooded into Ethiopia.
Armed with large amounts of Soviet weaponry and with Soviet and Cuban military personnel in the country, Mengistu felt free to act against his enemies, both real and perceived. In the West, news reports and governments worried more about the loss of Ethiopia to the Soviets than about what was actually happening inside the country. The Derg’s main urban opposition were independent parties, including socialist and communist ones. Their crime was being opposed to military rule, no matter how Marxist it proclaimed itself, and to Mengistu’s version of revolution.
Assassinations by rival groups during 1976 and 1977 further intensified the violent cycle of revenge. Then Mengistu publicly proclaimed the Red Terror at a mass rally in Addis Ababa, infamously smashing bottles filled with red liquid to symbolize the blood of the revolution’s enemies. To people seeking violence and radical change, the message was clear: violence on the part of the regime would not only be tolerated but encouraged and celebrated. A campaign of repression and terror swept across the country, especially in the cities and towns.
The military, the secret police, the police, and neighborhood organizations known as kebeles were all mobilized to identify and eliminate suspected enemies. The kebeles had originally been set up as a local administration, but they had quickly become instruments of surveillance and terror. Informants were everywhere. Some were eager to be good patriots.
Some took advantage of the times to denounce personal enemies before they themselves could be denounced. Students became the primary targets. Thousands of young men and women were hunted down by local militias across the country. Students had helped overthrow Haile Selassie’s government and remained politically active afterward.
University campuses and even secondary schools contained supporters of opposition movements. Not only were active members taken away, never to be seen again, but even people who were simply suspected, perhaps because of who they spent time with, disappeared from homes, classrooms, and dormitories. Their friends learned not to ask questions when someone was suddenly gone. Asking questions could lead to suspicion.
Parents often did not know what had happened to their children, whether they were alive, in jail, or already dead. Mengistu’s regime followed the playbook of almost every murderous dictator, dehumanizing their enemies, isolating them, and eliminating them. But they did one thing that most dictatorships did not do, because the killings were meant to be seen. Bodies sometimes were left where they fell.
They appeared in marketplaces, public squares, and on roadsides, almost always accompanied by a sign identifying them as enemies of the revolution. Most dictatorships want the population to be afraid, and the unknown is part of that fear, as in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, and the dictatorships of Latin America, where not knowing a person’s fate, relying instead on rumor and threats, can be terrifying. But leaving bodies on sidewalks, in piles, in alleyways, and on college campuses sent a message with every execution. Sometimes the message was, “This is what happens to you if you oppose the regime.
” Other times it was, “Here are your family members lying dead in the street. If you had turned yourself in, this wouldn’t have happened. ” Terror became government strategy. One practice in particular became infamous: the wasted bullet fee.
When relatives tried to recover the bodies of their loved ones, they were charged a payment before they could claim a body for burial. The fee was to repay the regime for the cost of the ammunition used in the killing. In years to come, survivors would often remember this part of the Red Terror most vividly. The regime had not only taken their loved ones; it had made grief worse by mixing it with humiliation.
The capital, Addis Ababa, experienced the worst violence throughout the country. Local officials competed with each other over who had the highest body count, everyone trying to ingratiate themselves with the regime and stay out of its crosshairs. Another group suspected by Mengistu and his government was the clergy. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is one of the oldest Christian organizations in the world, and for centuries church and state had been intertwined.
Mengistu and the regime suspected the church for exactly that reason. Priests were seen as both symbols and agents of the old regime. They were imprisoned and in many cases executed. A church that had survived centuries of invasion and dynastic warfare was almost completely neutralized by a government that did not allow for power sharing.
Like what was happening in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge had driven nearly two million people out of Phnom Penh and turned doctors, lawyers, teachers, writers, and white-collar professionals into enemies of the people overnight, the Ethiopian regime went after the very people who could have helped build a new society. Teachers, professors, engineers, white-collar professionals, and civil servants all became targets. Anyone with a professional title or degree was immediately suspect. An education, which had once garnered respect, was now a mark of danger.
Everywhere in Ethiopia, people played dumb to avoid drawing attention to their backgrounds. Across the country, survival often depended on appearing harmless. The longer the terror went on, the more paranoid the people became. Ordinary conversation and offhand comments carried risks.
Families lowered their voices when speaking to one another, and sometimes avoided speaking about anything even remotely political. As in revolutionary France in the 1790s, a denunciation from a co-worker, a neighbor, or simply someone who did not like you could lead to imprisonment, and often death in the street. Sometimes political persecution became more about settling scores than anything concrete. The violence reached its peak in mid-1977 and 1978.
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and later historical investigations describe thousands of young people’s bodies turning up in the streets of the capital. Much of the killing was carried out by the kebele militias, not all of whom had guns. Many of the bodies were found mutilated and in pieces, killed by hysterically violent mobs made up mostly of uneducated working-class people taking out their difficulties on the more fortunate. The victims were overwhelmingly young, and many had no ties at all to opposition parties, underground militias, or even student campus politics.
Others had merely been suspected. During the Red Terror, suspicion often meant death. Determining the exact death toll remains difficult. Years of civil war, war, and famine left many unaccounted for and many deaths unrecorded.
Estimates vary widely. Most historians put the total in the tens of thousands, while some estimates reach one hundred thousand or more. What is undeniable is that the Red Terror became one of the largest campaigns of political violence in modern African history. Tens of thousands were killed, imprisoned, and tortured.
Many of those who survived physically unharmed remained emotionally and psychologically scarred for life. Some of the survivors retained no physical wounds, but the trauma stayed with them. By the end of the 1970s, organized opposition in the cities had been crushed. Mengistu’s government survived, but the methods used by the regime to stay in power and the deaths of many of the country’s best and brightest left deep wounds throughout Ethiopian society and made recovery even more difficult.
Families searched for years for missing relatives. Many carried visible and invisible scars from trauma, torture, and the loss of trust in their own people. Entire communities struggled with the legacy of fear and mistrust that had accumulated during the years of terror. As the Red Terror subsided, the little attention it had received in the rest of the world’s news broadcasts and papers began to stop.
Africa, for more reasons than there is room to list, was and still is underreported by the world’s journalists and news organizations. Then came the catastrophic famines of the 1980s. For most of the world, Ethiopia was a country experiencing mass starvation, not one that had just finished killing tens of thousands of its own young people. Despite starting the terror and being at least partly responsible for the famine’s death toll, Mengistu remained in power until 1991, when his government collapsed.
He fled the country and eventually settled in Zimbabwe, where he still lives at age eighty-nine, never having faced justice for his crimes. He was tried in absentia by an Ethiopian court and found guilty, but he remains in Zimbabwe, leading a life of comparative luxury. Investigations into the Red Terror since the fall of Mengistu’s regime have uncovered mass graves, gathered testimony from survivors, and documented the scale of the slaughter. Museums and memorials for the victims dot the country today.
The killing fields of Cambodia remain one of the most recognized examples of revolutionary extremism. Ethiopia’s Red Terror is less well known, but it followed a similar pattern. A government and a man came to power that believed they held a monopoly on truth and on right and wrong. Political opponents became deadly enemies.
Students became targets, and independent institutions became threats. Ethiopia lost thousands of people who could have helped educate, build, and modernize the nation. The Red Terror was not the killing fields, but both were driven by a belief that anyone with a different point of view, background, or political belief could be eliminated if the goal was a perfect society.
Once that idea takes hold, revolutionaries begin to consume each other and the societies they claim to save.
