On September 12, 1974, military officers belonging to the Derg organization overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia in a bloodless coup, leading away the frail, 82-year old ex-monarch to imprisonment.
The Derg gained control of Ethiopia but did not abolish the monarchy outright, and announced that Crown Prince Asfa Wossen, Haile Selassie’s son who was currently abroad for medical treatment, was to succeed to the throne as the new “king” on his return to the country. However, Prince Wossen rejected the offer and remained abroad. The Derg then withdrew its offer and in March 1975, abolished the monarchy altogether, thus ending the 3,000 year-old Ethiopian Empire. (On August 27, 1975, or nearly one year after his arrest, Haile Selassie passed away under mysterious circumstances, with Derg stating that complications from a medical procedure had caused his death, while critics alleging that the ex-monarch was murdered.)
(Taken from Ethiopian Civil War – Wars of the 20th Century – Volume 4)
The surreptitious means by which Derg, in a period of six months, gained power by progressively dismantling the Ethiopian Empire and ultimately deposing Haile Selassie, sometimes is referred to as the “creeping coup” in contrast with most coups, which are sudden and swift. On September 15, 1974, Derg formally took control of the government and renamed itself as the Provisional Military Administrative Council (although it would continue to be commonly known as Derg), a ruling military junta under General Aman Andom, a non-member Derg whom the Derg appointed as its Chairman; General Aman thereby also assumed the role of Ethiopia’s head of state.
At the outset, Derg had its political leanings embodied in its slogans “Ethiopia First” (i.e. nationalism) and “Democracy and Equality to all”. Soon, however, it abolished the Ethiopian parliament, suspended the constitution, and ruled by decree. In early 1975, Derg launched a series of broad reforms that swept away the old conservative order and began the country’s transition to socialism. In January-February 1975, nearly all industries were nationalized. In March, an agrarian reform program nationalized all farmlands (including those owned by the country’s largest landowner, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church), reduced farm sizes, and abolished tenancy farming. Collectivized agriculture was introduced and farmers were organized into peasant organizations. (Land reform was fiercely resisted in such provinces as Gojjam, Wollo, and Tigray, where most farmers owned their lands and tenant farming was not widely practiced.) In July 1975, all urban lands, houses, and buildings were nationalized and city residents were organized into urban dwellers’ associations, known as “kebeles”, which would play a major role in the coming civil war. Despite the extensive nationalization, a few private sector industries that were considered vital to the economy were left untouched, e.g. the retail and wholesale trade, and import and export industries.
In April 1976, Derg published the “Program for the National Democratic Revolution”, which outlined the regime’s objectives of transforming Ethiopia into a socialist state, with powers vested in the peasants, workers, petite bourgeoisie, and anti-feudal and anti-monarchic sectors. An agency called the “Provisional Office for Mass Organization Affairs” was established to work out the transformative process toward socialism.
Ethiopian Civil War The political instability and power struggles that followed the Derg’s coming to power, the escalation of pre-existing separatist and Marxist insurgencies (as well as the formation of new rebel movements), and the intervention of foreign players, notably Somalia as well as Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union and United States, all contributed to the multi-party, multi-faceted conflict known as the Ethiopian Civil War.
The Derg government underwent power struggles during its first years in office. General Aman, the non-Derg who had been named to head the government, immediately came into conflict with Derg on three major policy issues: First, he wanted to reduce the size of the 120-member Derg; Second, as an ethnic Eritrean, he was opposed to the Derg’s use of force against the Eritrean insurgency; and Third, he opposed Derg’s plan to execute the imprisoned civilian and military officials associated with the former regime. In November 1974, Derg leveled charges against General Aman and issued a warrant for his arrest. On November 23, 1974, General Aman was killed in a gunfight with government security personnel who had been sent to arrest him.
Later that same day, in the event known alternatively as the “Massacre of the Sixty” or “Black Saturday”, Derg security units gathered a group of imprisoned high-ranking ex-government and ex-military officials and executed them at the Kerchele Prison in Addis Ababa. The Derg’s stated reasons for the executions were that these officials had made “repeated plots … that might engulf the country into a bloodbath”, as well as “maladministration, hindering fair administration of justice, selling secret documents of the country to foreign agents and attempting to disrupt the present Ethiopian popular movement”. Among those executed included Haile Selassie’s grandson, other members of the Ethiopian nobility, two ex-Prime Ministers, and seventeen army generals.
In late November 1974, Derg appointed General Tarafi Benti, also a non-Derg, to succeed as Derg Chairman and thus also became Ethiopia’s head of state. At this time, Major Mengistu, Derg’s first vice-chairman, made attempts to expand his power base, which were countered by rival Derg factions allied with General Benti. For a time, the Benti faction appeared to have gained the upper hand, relegating Mengistu’s supporters outside key government posts. However, in a decisive armed confrontation that took place between the two factions in early February 1977, General Benti was killed, along with some of his supporters, and Major Mengistu emerged as the undisputed leader of Derg. Mengistu became Derg Chairman and the head of government; thereafter, his authority would not be challenged and he would rule with dictatorial powers. In November 1977, the last remaining threat to Mengistu’s authority was eliminated when Major Atnafu, Derg’s vice-chairman, was executed.
Early on after Derg come to power, a number of Marxist-Leninist groups, the two most prominent being the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement (MEISON), competed for influence in Derg for the role of “vanguard party” which would provide direction for the country’s transition to socialism. EPRP opposed Derg’s military control and soon railed at the government for not carrying out a genuine “people’s revolution” along traditional Marxist lines; this criticism infuriated the Derg government. MEISON, however, was agreeable to a gradual transitional period under a military regime, a position that found favor with Derg. Thereafter, Derg established a working relationship with MEISON and appointed a number of MEISON party members to government positions.
Armed conflict soon broke out between Derg and MEISON on the one hand, and EPRP on the other hand. Starting in February 1977, in what the Derg regime called “White Terror”, EPRP militants assassinated Derg officials and MEISON members, and sabotaged government infrastructures. The Derg government responded with its own, and much more brutal, campaign of violence against the EPRP called “Red Terror”. Local “kebeles” (urban residential associations) served as the government’s eyes and ears; suspected state enemies were arrested, tortured, and executed by government-sanctioned local “kebeles” death squads.
By December 1978, the government’s sustained repression had killed or imprisoned thousands of EPRP militants and supporters and had forced the EPRP to leave the cities and transfer to Agama Province in northern Ethiopia where it reorganized as a rural guerilla militia. The Derg regime soon also came to distrust MEISON, its political mentor, as it saw the latter’s increasing autonomy as a potential threat. In mid-1977, the government launched a campaign to eliminate MEISON, arresting and executing the group’s members and purging MEISON officials from government positions. In total, the Red Terror may have caused up to 250,000 – 500,000 deaths.
With the EPRP and MEISON eliminated by 1978, Derg merged a number of smaller socialist groups into the “Union of Ethiopian Marxist-Leninist Organization”, which became the new “vanguard party” to succeed MEISON under strict government oversight. Thereafter, Derg’s transitional process to socialism met little internal opposition.
The country’s militarization alienated many of the revolution’s early supporters, including teachers, students, and workers, while many officials of the previous regime who had not yet been arrested fled into exile abroad. Meanwhile, the regional ethnic insurgencies increased in magnitude under the Derg government. In Eritrea, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) had succeeded the ELF has the leading separatist movement, while in Tigray province, many armed groups also had organized, foremost of which was the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), whose (initial) goal was secession of Tigray from Ethiopia. Both the Eritrean and Tigrayan insurgencies achieved considerable success, ultimately seizing control of some 90% of Eritrea and Tigray, respectively, mainly in rural and hinterland areas (government troops retained control of the major urban centers), and turning back repeated Ethiopian Army offensives.