Ethiopia

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[This is from the 1985 second edition of "Afro-Communism" by Marina and
David Ottaway. I simply don't know enough about Ethiopian politics and
history to say whether it seems right or wrong, but I would expect that it
might prompt some interesting feedback from our Ethiopian comrades.]

Among the Marxist-Leninist countries in Africa we are discussing here,
Ethiopia stands out as a unique case. Socialism there did not follow in the
wake of a war of national liberation but was the outgrowth of an internal
social upheaval. Class conflict was omnipresent and real, an everyday
experience for most of the population rather than an abstract concept
propounded by intellectuals as it tended to be elsewhere. While a military
government suspicious of civilian involvement and reluctant to share power
tried to control the process of revolution closely, there was in the end a
great deal of unchecked and unauthorized popular participation, as various
groups sought to settle their grievances, the peasants tackled broadside
the problem of land reform and redistribution of wealth, and ethnic
minorities struggled for recognition and power. More than any other African
country, Ethiopia did not simply adopt Marxism-Leninism by a fiat of the
leadership but also experienced a real revolution.

At the time events eventually leading to revolution erupted in early 1974,
Ethiopia was a country ripe for change. It was ruled by an aging Emperor,
whose concept of political modernization amounted to moving from feudalism
to royal absolutism. It was wracked by old conflicts between peasants and
landlords, the center and the periphery, and the Emperor and the
aristocracy; it also faced a host of new problems spurred by incipient
economic growth and modern education. In short, Ethiopia was marked by
enough con- traditions for all political observers to agree that the
succession to Haile Selassie would be a painful one. But trouble set in
even before the death of the Emperor and triggered the type of social
revolution that occurs only rarely in history, a revolution that
drastically altered social, economic, and political relations. Why it took
on such dimensions is not an easily answered question. To be sure, it is
possible to trace the course of events, to describe the underlying
conditions and to point to the precipitating factors. But this does not
mean, in our opinion, that the revolution was inevitable. While the
underlying conditions existed, it also took a series of highly accidental
events to trigger the process. A famine, the barracks revolt of a garrison
over a broken water pump, a taxi drivers? strike over a stiff hike in
gasoline prices, all these were accidents of history which might or might
not have occurred at the same time. The fact that they did transformed
Ethiopia?s potential for revolution into an actual revolution. But even
after the old order was openly challenged by army and civilians, and even
after the Emperor?s overthrow,  there was still no certainty that the
transformation would be so radical or so quick. It did not follow an
overall plan and was not controlled by any one individual or group. It was
aimed initially at broadening somewhat the base of political power and
eliminating the monopoly over wealth by a small elite. It ended as an
attempt at reshaping the entire society and reweaving the pattern of social
relations. In the process, the revolution inevitably devoured a good many
of its own children.

The beginnings of the revolution have been narrated many times, and we will
only resketch them very briefly here. A barracks revolt in early January at
a small garrison in southern Ethiopia, sparked by lack of water and bad
food, led to a similar venting of grievances by enlisted men and NCOs in
other parts of the country. Their demands were highly specific and
corporate: pay, food, conditions of service, schools for their children.
But in all cases, the same pattern of soldiers and NCOs rising up against
their higher ranking officers was repeated. By mid-February, unrest had
spread to the civilian population. Students at Haile Selassie University
went on strike against an educational reform. Then, teachers struck for
higher pay and taxi drivers for higher fares. The country was suddenly in
turmoil. The Emperor tried a bit of everything, giving in to some demands,
ignoring others, replacing his prime minister, promising a new constitution
that would make the prime minister responsible to Parliament. Unrest
nevertheless persisted. The capital was paralyzed by a general strike, and
the soldiers continued to agitate, progressively adding political demands
to their specific corporate requests.

The next few months were marked by obscure behind-the-scenes maneuvering,
as many groups tried to take advantage of the crumbling of the old regime.
There never emerged in this period an organized, broadly based civilian
movement bringing together all the participants in the strikes and
demonstrations. Rather, the initiative passed on the one hand to the
military and on the other to civilian elites trying to assert their power
vis-a-vis the faltering Emperor. Within the armed forces, a series of
committees emerged, by and large representing junior officers. Among the
civilians, two groups vied with each other, one representing the old
aristocracy trying to regain its lost power, and the other a new
bourgeoisie seeking a political role for itself through liberal reforms.
Civilians and military ran a close race until the end of June, when the
military committees which had sprung up in the previous months managed to
join forces, organizing a Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces,
Police, and Territorial Army and seizing power. In the following weeks, the
Committee called upon the leading figures of the old regime to surrender
themselves; most complied willingly, believing their imprisonment was only
a temporary measure. The Committee then set aside the new constitution
which had been readied by August and represented basically a bid for power
by Ethiopia?s new bourgeoisie. Finally, it deposed the Emperor on September
12 without a shot being fired in his defense.

Between September 1974 and the following March, the military?s Coordinating
Committee underwent enormous internal change. More moderate elements were
forced out, and a radical and ruthless faction consolidated its hold. The
Committee, renamed the Derg, or the Provisional Military Administrative
Council (PMAC), took a series of policy decisions truly revolutionary in
their impact, and much more far-reaching than even the most radical
civilians had dreamed possible. But it also established a pattern of
??revolution from the top?? and a tradition of uneasy relations with all
civilian groups.

For two months after the Emperor?s deposition, the chairmanship of the Derg
was in the hands of General Aman Michael Andom, Eritrean by origin,
moderate in outlook, and autocratic in style of rule. Drawing on his
Eritrean contacts, he devoted most of his attention to solving the conflict
which for over ten years had pitted two Eritrean nationalist groups, the
Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People?s Liberation Front
(EPLF) against the central government. But neither his policy of seeking a
political rather than military solution in Eritrea, nor his moderate
outlook, and even less his authoritarianism, proved acceptable to his
colleagues. At the end of November, a showdown took place. Aman first
resigned and then was killed after he refused to surrender and the military
attempted to capture him by force. This confrontation marked the triumph of
the hard-liners, whose first decision on the same night as Aman?s death was
the sudden execution of the 57 most important political prisoners, all top
officials of the old imperial regime who had surrendered peacefully during
the summer months. The new Derg chairman, Brigadier General Teferi Bante,
was a quiet, colorless man, chosen because it was assumed he would not try
to amass power in his own hands but would defer to the Derg as a whole.
Under him were two vice-chairmen, Major Mengistu Haile-Mariam and Major
Atnafu Abate. The former was to emerge in February 1977, after many bloody
conflicts, as the Derg?s strongman and the country?s ruler. The hard-liners
also chose military force as their solution to the Eritrean problem, and
shortly after the elimination of Aman a new offensive was launched in the
northern province to crush the ELF and the EPLF.

It was just a month after this showdown that the Derg?s first declaration
concerning socialism was issued. It was a hazy statement, in which
hebrettesebawinet, or Ethiopian socialism, was defined as "equality;
self-reliance; the dignity of labor, the supremacy of the common good; and
the indivisibility of Ethiopian unity."? Soon, however, socialism began to
acquire a much more concrete content. In January, the Derg nationalized the
major financial institutions, insurance companies, and 72 key industries.
In March, it proclaimed a sweeping land reform declaring all land state
property and organizing the entire rural population into "peasant
associations." These were empowered to redistribute land among their
members, set up cooperatives or collectives, organize their own defense
and, in general, become the basic units of local self-government. The
government called upon the 50,000 students already sent out to the
countryside in early January to take responsibility for overseeing the
implementation of the land reform. The final blow to the old economic order
came in July when the Derg nationalized all urban land and rental
properties and established elected neighborhood associations known as urban
kebeles to take over the administration of local affairs. With these
reforms, the revolution had entered its radical phase. There was no longer
any possibility of going back to the ancien régime, and within one more
year Marxism-Leninism was all but the official ideology of the military
government.

The society giving birth to such dramatic change could, in many ways, have
been used as a textbook illustration of Marx?s explanation of revolution.
Ethiopia was not only a feudal society marked by deep conflict between
landlords and peasants, it was also a country in which the power of the
landlords was beginning to be challenged by economic modernization, and
above all by the growth of "capitalist" commercial fanning, which altered
the old pattern of land use and social relations. In addition, there were
fissions not so neatly explained in Marxist terms, chief among them the
existence of intense ethnic rivalries and a separatist movement stemming
from Italian colonization in Eritrea. The Ethiopian empire was just that, a
conglomerate of different ethnic and language groups, or "nationalities" as
the Marxists would later call them, brought together by military conquest
and the personal fealty of local potentates to the Emperor. Like all
empires, Ethiopia had experienced changing boundaries over the centuries,
finally reaching its present ones at the end of the nineteenth century
through the conquest of large new territories to the south. These areas
were inhabited mostly by a Galla, or Oromo, population different in its
language, customs, and traditions from the Anihara and Tigreans of the
empire?s heartland. Western colonialism, too, had contributed to creating
conflict. Eritrea, which the Ethiopian government considered its northern
province, had been colonized by the Italians from the 1890s to World War
II, and only reannexed to Ethiopia in 1952 as the result of a very
controversial United Nations decision. The issue whether Eritrea was
historically part of Ethiopia is an extremely intricate one. What matters
most is that many Eritreans were convinced that their land should be a
separate entity and that they started a guerrilla movement to achieve this
in 1961. At the time of the revolution, Eritrea was in a state of war. To
the southeast, too, in the corner of Ethiopia wedging into Somalia known as
the Ogaden, Ethiopian sovereignty was openly contested. A movement known as
the Western Somalia Liberation Front had been organized and armed by the
Somali government, which lay claim to the region as part of a "Greater
Somalia." Elsewhere in Ethiopia, ethnic conflict was not so open, but
nonetheless existed as a potential threat, particularly in those areas of
the south where the land was owned by absentee Amhara landlords and tilled
by Oromo sharecroppers who had never derived any advantage from being
Ethiopian subjects.

This large and conflict-ridden country, with its more than thirty million
people, was only very loosely administered. The Emperor had sought to build
a more bureaucratic and centralized administration, but Ethiopia was still
far from having the apparatus of a modern nation-state. The provincial
administration was understaffed, and local authorities?very often
landlords? tended to have the last word. The road system of Ethiopia
reflected the country?s political reality: a star-shaped configuration of
all-weather roads connected Addis Ababa to the provincial capitals. Further
than that, roads were practically nonexistent, and so was modern
administration.

The economy of Ethiopia, the world?s fifth poorest country, revolved almost
exclusively around the land. It was land that provided the livelihood of
over 90 percent of the population and the wealth and power of the elite.
Rents were high and a system of tenancy affecting millions of peasants was
highly exploitative. Per capita income, stagnated around $110 annually.
Little innovation had taken place in agriculture until the 1960s, when
modem farms began to spring up around the capital. These provided food for
the urban market and some exports but also increased social conflict by
displacing sharecroppers through mechanization. Altogether, by the time of
the revolution there were some 5,000 commercial farms in Ethiopia covering
about three quarters of a million hectares. But the dominant picture of
Ethiopia was one of grinding poverty, ignorance, and disease.

The industrial sector was even less developed than in other African
countries we have considered. It consisted chiefly of about 100 consumer
goods manufacturers employing only 50,000 to 60,000 workers?in a country of
thirty million.4 Internal trade was mostly in the hands of small merchants,
and transport outside the few roads relied on donkeys. The country exported
coffee, small amounts of gold, hides, and skins, and, in recent years,
pulses, worth altogether $200 million to $300 million annually.
Paradoxically, before the revolution, Ethiopia had enjoyed a very healthy
balance of payments, despite the paltry amount of exports, because imports
were limited largely to consumer goods for the small upper class and to
agricultural machinery for the commercial farms.

Given the subsistence character of the Ethiopian economy, agriculture had
to be the key to growth, but its development was impeded, as had been
pointed out by many economic advisory missions, by the rigid land tenure
system which actively discouraged peasants from introducing innovations to
increase production. Land reform was advocated not only by Ethiopian
radicals but by virtually all international organizations and foreign aid
agencies in the country. Such a measure was a highly explosive issue,
howevet it would undermine the power of the ruling landed elite, call into
question Amhara domination, and bring into the open a host of latent social
and ethnic conflicts. For these reasons, the Derg?s decision to nationalize
all land in March 1975 was a truly revolutionary move which in fact set
loose a process nobody could control.

While the divisions in Ethiopian society were deep, and the potential for
conflict enormous, there were no political organizations to represent the
interests and aspirations of various groups and classes. The Emperor had
actively discouraged such associations. While he finally allowed the
formation of a labor union, this was closely controlled and under a very
tame, conservative leadership. The only group which openly expressed
dissent was the students, who for many years had demonstrated, struck, and
agitated for reform. But the student movement never spawned an organized
political force, as its members dispersed after graduation or were coopted
into the system. The absence of any political organizations helps to
explain why in the early months of the revolution the civilians were unable
to coalesce into a coherent opposition movement. The most articulate and
organized center of political activity and opposition to the Emperor was
not inside the country, but outside. The Ethiopian students abroad, mostly
in the United States and Western Europe, were free to organize, had more
access to books, and therefore were better read and more articulate than
their counterparts inside the country. They were also very far removed from
Ethiopia and thus precluded from any concrete possibility of action, a
situation which tended to encourage interminable and very abstract
ideological debate. Virtually all of the politically active students
abroad, and most of those inside, were Marxists, though this did not
prevent them from being deeply divided into factions based on their
respective admiration for the Soviet Union or China, their attitude toward
the Eritrean question, and, more simply, personal rivalries. Many of these
students came back to Ethiopia after the Emperor?s overthrow to make their
long-dreamt-of socialist revolution. Given the weakness of all
organizations and the limitations of the political debate within Ethiopia,
it is probably not surprising that most of the radical civilians who played
an important role in the revolution, for or against the Derg, came from the
ranks of these returnees. They participated in the formulation of policy,
helped to organize a political party, wrote the clandestine antimilitary
pamphlets, led the opposition groups and shared with the Derg
responsibility for the violence and bloodshed which led in 1977 and 1978 to
a period of revolutionary ??red terror."



Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)