Case Studies

Ethiopia: Post-communist transition & adjustment to Eritrean independence

05.05.2008

Narrates the post-communist transition of Ethiopia and the peaceful separation of Eritrea. Chronology of major events; Role of the Soviet Union; Resistance movements.

Article excerpt:
Section: AFRICA AFTER COMMUNISM
Communism in Ethiopia was defeated militarily by ethnic separatist movements. Today a good beginning has been made on establishing a federal system. And Eritrea, like Slovakia, has effected a peaceful separation.
The Ethiopian Revolution of 1974 had a strongly communist--almost Maoist--coloration from the start. Known by the Amharic word for committee, Derg the ruling military junta plunged the country into confusion with a radical nationalization program. Somali dictator Mohammad Siad Barre exploited the chaos by sending his Soviet-supplied army and air force to annex the Somali-populated Ogaden region. He was close to defeating Ethiopia when Moscow switched sides in late 1977 and airlifted in 20,000 Cubans, dozens of Soviet officers, and masses of equipment to defeat the Somalis. This decisive military aid cemented an Ethiopian-Soviet alliance as well as Major Mengistu Halle Madam's control of the Derg and the country.
During the next thirteen years, Moscow sent Mengistu over $12 billion in military aid to fight the Eritrean and Tigrayan insurgencies that challenged his hold on the northern heartland. In return for Soviet support, Mengistu denounced the West and attempted to turn the country into a model of Stalinism, although Ethiopia had only a meager social basis for a communist party. After five years of preparation, the Workers' Party of Ethiopia (WPE) was launched in September 1984, the tenth anniversary of the Ethiopian Revolution. Soviet hard-liners were elated to gain as a satellite an ancient country where Russia had aspired to gain a foothold since the nineteenth century. Arms flowed in in ever-larger quantities, but Soviet economic aid never amounted to more than a trickle.
The Last "People's Democracy"
A communist party was not enough. In September 1987, Mengistu proclaimed the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (PDRE) at a lavish ceremony attended by East German leader Erich Honecker, Bulgarian Communist Party Chief Todor Zhivkov, and a large Soviet delegation. It was the last example of this misnamed government system to come onto the world scene.
Mengistu's Stalinist system had begun to show signs of unraveling more than three years before. The great famine of 1984 exposed the incompetence and brutality of Derg rule to the world and forced Mengistu to grant Western relief agencies access to the countryside. Nevertheless he resisted any form of glasnost or perestroika; mention of these words was forbidden in the Ethiopian media. Like hard-liners in Moscow, Mengistu refused to recognize that the whole Soviet system was falling into crisis. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had more urgent problems than Ethiopia, but did nothing to halt the heavy flow of Soviet military aid until the Soviet-Ethiopian military aid agreement expired in 1990.
During the late 1980s, resistance to communism and rebellion against Mengistu spread throughout Ethiopia. Mengistu responded by redoubling his efforts to implement his most odious policies--massive resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people from the north, villagization of 15 million peasants, and the genocidal war in Eritrea. Nevertheless, more and more Ethiopians realized that a communist future was not inevitable. By the beginning of 1990, the question became not whether the system could survive, but how and when it would collapse. Agitation by exiles did little to hasten the fall of the Derg; crucial pressure came from inside Ethiopia itself.
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