MENGISTU HAILE MARIAM: THE WORST OF AFRICA'S BUTCHERS.
By Louis Rapoport
The Jerusalem Post
May 23, 1991
2626 words
THE TYRANT Mengistu Haile Mariam terrorized Ethiopia - economically one of
the world's most wretched countries - for over 15 years.
His doom has seemed certain over the past year. Moscow cut off military aid,
some $11 billion of which had propped up his war economy since 1978, and the
once-dependable Fidel Castro withdrew 10,000 Cuban combat troops from the
Eritrean front.
The "president for life" of the Ethiopian People's Democratic Republic fled
the country yesterday as rebel forces registered victory after victory and began
to converge on Addis Ababa. He will go down in history for such deeds as the
brutal resettlement of millions of peasants - a forced deracination over the
last six years that resulted directly in hundreds of thousands of deaths and
which recalled Stalin's genocidal collectivization some 60 years ago.
In the land where history slept for a thousand years, secretiveness has
always been a part of tradition. In this, nothing changed under the Marxist
officers who overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and set up a totalitarian
Communist regime.
Secrecy, aided by the Western world's general indifference to black Africa,
helped Mengistu conceal massive crimes against humanity, including the probable
deaths of 80,000 political prisoners. He used food relief as a political weapon
in the 1984 famine which cost nearly two million lives, withholding supplies
from rebellious areas of the vast country.
Mengistu once said drought and famine were "nature's way" of reducing
Ethiopia's main problem - too many people. Dawit Wolde Giorgis was formerly
Ethiopia's deputy foreign minister, and seven years ago headed the international
famine relief program. He fled to the West because of Mengistu's "natural
selection" politics.
UP TO the end, Mengistu killed foes, criminals, potential rivals and
innocents alike, and oppressed minorities in the country known as "the museum of
peoples."
More than two million people - from a population of 40 million - are believed
to have died because of resettlement, imprisonment, withheld famine relief,
military losses and straight execution.
Mengistu ordered mass executions of civilians in Eritrea and neighboring
Tigray province - the heartland of ancient Ethiopia - as well as in surrounding
regions. In one such massacre two years ago, hundreds of famine-weakened
peasants were forced into a shallow ditch and crushed by Soviet-built T-55
tanks.
Hundreds of thousands of peasants from the highlands of Gondar province were
transported to distant, malarial lowlands, where they died in droves.
Mengistu's death toll dwarfs even those of such deposed African monsters as
Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Masie Nguema Biyogo of Equatorial Guinea (who butchered
250,000 of his people), and the cannibal Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the
Central African Republic.
Mengistu long since rid himself of most of Ethiopia's educated classes.
During one week of Red Terror in the spring of 1978, his secret police and army
security squads murdered 5,000 high school and university students and
imprisoned 30,000 others.
Twelve-year-old children were among those immersed in scalding oil, sexually
tortured or flung out of windows and left to die in the road. Mengistu also
used the iron fist to keep his fellow army officers in line - he personally shot
one government minister who had dared to disagree with him, spilling his brains
on the cabinet table.
Just as Stalin killed almost every Bolshevik member of the first Central
Committee, Mengistu, within four years of Haile Selassie's overthrow, had
liquidated 80 of the 120 officers who led the revolution.
In the wake of the May 1989 coup attempt against him, which he crushed with
the aid of East German intelligence, the few top officers who survived the Red
Terror and the interminable wars were either murdered or imprisoned and horribly
tortured.
He decimated his general staff. His top generals and scores of other
high-ranking officers were beaten to death with wooden cudgels or cut in two by
high-calibre machine-guns. General Demissie, whose Second Army included
thousands of forcibly conscripted boys aged 12-14, was decapitated. His head
was stuck on a pole, and his body was dragged through the immaculate streets of
Asmara, Eritrea's capital and Ethiopia's second largest city.
Under Mengistu, tens of thousands of Ethiopians were permanently crippled by
torturers whose favorite weapon was the bastinado, used to beat the victim's
feet into bloody stumps.
MENGISTU FAITHFULLY followed the Leninist concept of revolution and the
Soviet model of 1917-1953.
The 48-year-old Mengistu, of mixed Amhara and Oromo heritage, was as
committed to Amhara hegemony over the 100 other Ethiopian nationalities as the
Caucasian Stalin was to Great Russian domination, or the Austrian Hitler was to
Germany's Thousand Year Reich. He once said: "Above all, the unity of Ethiopia
will be the sacred faith of our people."
Mengistu Haile Mariam was born in 1942 in the servant quarters of a
nobleman's villa in Addis Ababa. His registered father was an Amhara, a former
army sergeant-major who had become a servant in the house of the Amhara nobleman
Dadjazmach (Baron) Kbede Tasama.
But Mengistu was said to be the illegitimate son of Baron Kebede, who was a
court favorite of Haile Selassie. Mengistu mother was an Oromo slave - in
Ethiopia it was very rare for an Amhara to actually marry someone from the
blacker, nonsemitic tribes.
Baron Kebede helped pay for Mengistu's education but did not enroll the
teenager in the schools reserved for the aristocracy. The baron encouraged his
own son (now Mengistu's ambassador to the UN in Geneva) to befriend his
step-brother.
In 1957, aged 15, Mengistu was placed in the military non-combat services,
and admitted to full rank three years later. He attended the Genet military
training center and was commissioned a second lieutenant.
Mengistu was later sent to the military academy at Olatta, 60 miles north of
Addis, which was run by Israelis, who also trained the emperor's secret police.
This was the officer-training school for the NCOs and low-born, whiel the
aristocratic Amhara and Tigrean cadets were trained by British and Italian
instructors at the Harar Military Academy, patterned after Sandhurst. This
division between Olatta and Harar took on great significance in 1974, when the
princes, dukes, barons and counts of the feudal empire were overthrown.
Throughout the 1960s, there was tension in the armed forces between graduates
of these two academies. Olatta graduates, who were battle-hardned in Eritrea
and other trouble spots, were consistently overlooked for promotion, while the
sons of the upper class got all of the plum assignments. Olatta men comprised
most of the 120-member Dergue which ruled until Mengistu became absolute
dictator.
By 1967 Mengistu had acquired a reputation for phenomenal memory, for showing
remarkable calm in battle, and for holding his own in barroom brawls. He was
sent for advanced training to the United States. He spent 18 months at the
Aberdeen Training Grounds outside Washington and took courses at the University
of Maryland during one of the most tumultuous periods in the U.S. history. He
spoke English haltingly, and kept very much to himself at first.
He became virulently anti-American, sympathizing with the American black
nationalist movement and the radical Marxist Ethiopian emigres who could be
found on campuses in turmoil from Berkeley to Colombia.
ETHIOPIAN STUDENTS and dropouts were deeply offended by Americans who
considered them blacks no different from any others. Mengistu was the object of
racial slights on several occasions. His experience was exteremely important in
shaping Mengistu's Stalinist philosophy, which he would get a chance to enact
just six years after leaving the U.S.
Like Stalin, Mengistu came to despise intellectuals and had an obsessive need
to dominate and feel superior to those around him.
A sign of his animosity toward the Western world was his failure to visit any
Western country after his stay in Maryland - even when he was expected to
address the UN in New York as head of the Organization of African Unity.
In 1971, Major Mengistu returned to the military academy at Olatta as the
chief Ethiopian ordinance instructor.
His work was supervised by an Israeli officer, Moshe Segev, now retired and
living in Haifa. He recalls Mengistu as "very professional, very strong, and
very quiet." Mengistu seemed "closed and skeptical. He spoke English well, did
not appear to be overly conscious of his Galla background, and seemed to know
exactly what he wanted to know, and where he wanted to go."
Mengistu's last assignment under the old regime was with the Third Infantry
Division at the fort in Harar near the aristocarts' Military Academy. Harar,
the town Rimbaud haunted in his last days, is on the edge of the Ogaden desert,
near the frontier with the hostile Somalis.
Although Mengistu was an ordnance man - in charge of weapons and military
supplies - he also went out to do battle with the roaming bandit bands known
throughout Ethiopia as shiftas, and against rebellious Somali tribesmen.
Despite a reputation for insubordination, he rose to a prominent position in
the Third Army, gaining the respect of his fellow officers with his quiet
self-confidence and take-charge personality.
MENGISTU WAS in the capital in early 1974 when strikes and riots led to the
downfall of the feudal regime, and he was immediately elevated to the front rank
of young officers who arrested the Emperor and his officials, and later shot
them.
He was eloquent and ambitious and adept at plotting - on one occasion in the
early days of the revolution, he sent a squad to arrest 22 officers who opposed
him, and had them all shot. He expressed his great admiration for the Russian
Revolution, for Lenin and Stalin, and believed that the bloodbaths nurtured the
revolution.
Lenin's Terror of 1918 to consolidate his power became Mengistu's model and
rationale. He killed his only friend other than his step-brother, Kebede -
Dergue deputy chairman Atnafu Abate, a provincial moderate who could not
understand the theory of mass blood-letting and had urged a balanced policy
between East and West.
General Atnafu was dragged to a basement of the palace and killed like a dog,
along with all of his bodyguards, drivers, assistants and friends.
As Mengistu's former comrade, Dawit Wolde Giorgis would put it, the young
tyrant was "swift and vicious when his power was threatened." An interminable
list of executions and "suicides" followed Mengistu's consolidation of power
from 1974-77.
He killed everyone from the Dergue's Governor of Eritrea, General Getachew
Nadew, to Addis Ababa high school students who looked the wrong way when
crossing the street from the emperor's imperial palace - now Mengistu Haile
Mariam's imperial palace.
Mengistu declared in a speech on February 5, 1977: "We will not be stabbed
from behind by internal foes ... 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."
Like Stalin, who also had a remarkable memory, Mengistu never forgave or
forgot anyone who slighted him. The grounds of the imperial palace, now a mass
graveyard, attest to that fact.
At mass rallies, Mengistu was hailed like Hitler. Secret police gauged the
responses of the crowd, and no one dared to be anything less than fervent in
their approval of "Our Beloved Revolutionary Leader." His fellow ministers never
dared defeat him at his weekly day of tennis. He was served in the palace by
liveried butlers.
He was never condemned by his fellow African heads of state. But millions of
African people who were under his cruel fist are now celebrating his overthrow.
Copyright 1991 The Jerusalem Post