Ethiopian revolution and the Derg power struggle

A crisis of famine, prices and military grievances

The 1974 revolution was not a single organization’s planned seizure of power from Emperor Haile Selassie. Government handling and concealment of famine, landed inequality, inflation, soldiers’ poor conditions and demands from students and workers converged. Military mutinies and urban protests could not be contained through cabinet changes or limited constitutional revision; they challenged both imperial legitimacy and governing capacity. Source 1 · Source 2

The Derg emerges and deposes the emperor

The coordinating committee formed by representatives of the armed forces, police and territorial army in June became known as the Derg. It was not initially controlled by one all-powerful leader; military participants differed in background, rank and political outlook. Arrests and intervention in appointments progressively disabled imperial institutions, culminating in the emperor’s deposition on September 12. Control over deployable troops gave the committee a decisive advantage over civilian reformers. Source 2

Aman, Tafari and Mengistu: the struggle within the regime

Early head of state Aman Mikael Andom clashed with the Derg majority over negotiating in Eritrea and the treatment of detained former leaders. After Aman’s death and mass executions of former officials in November 1974, Tafari Benti became chairman. Competition involving Mengistu Haile Mariam and Atnafu Abate continued. Tafari’s killing in February 1977 and Atnafu’s elimination in November established Mengistu’s predominance. Source 3

Land reform: ownership and cultivation rights

Rural land nationalization in March 1975 abolished tenancy and landlord rent, with peasant associations reorganizing cultivation. Peasants received access to land, not freely saleable private ownership of the soil. Existing tenure systems varied by region, producing different effects and resistance. Nationalization of land must be distinguished from the later expansion of collective and state farms. Source 4 · Source 5

Nationalization also encompassed banks, insurance, major enterprises, urban land and rental housing. Urban kebeles and rural peasant associations implemented reforms and organized services, but also enabled surveillance and political control. Sending students and teachers into rural development work aimed to spread education and reform, while compulsory mobilization and military discipline deepened conflict between former supporters of revolution and the military government. Source 4

Conflict with the civilian left and the Red Terror

The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) demanded civilian government, while the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement (MEISON) cooperated with the military for a time in hopes of directing the revolution from within. Both advocated socialism, so their conflict cannot be reduced to socialism against its opponents. Union independence, student political activity and the question of whether and to whom the military would transfer power were central issues. Source 3 · Source 4

As EPRP assassinations and government repression escalated, the Red Terror of 1977–1978 brought mass detention and killing of actual or suspected opponents. Students, young people and civilians suffered extensively, and MEISON, despite its earlier cooperation, also became a target. Violence by opponents did not remove state responsibility for indiscriminate punishment. The Derg closed the revolution’s competitive political space and moved toward directing parties and mass organizations from above. Source 6

How the decree was decided: who pushed it and why so fast

The Proclamation to Provide for the Public Ownership of Rural Lands (No. 31), dated 29 April 1975 in the Negarit Gazeta and effective from 4 March, was the most radical decision the Derg had yet taken, but its content was not devised by the officers themselves. It answered the demand 'land to the tiller', pressed since the emperor's deposition by university students and urban demonstrators. The Derg set up a committee of twelve ministers to study the land-tenure system and relations between landlords and tenants, and reached its conclusion within months. Two calculations lay behind this speed. One was that the military, still lacking a base of its own, wanted to pull the southern tenantry to its side by uprooting the largest source of grievance. The other was that in the leadership struggle inside the regime, whoever seized the initiative for the more radical reform also rose in the hierarchy. The edict was therefore proclaimed before its implementing rules were ready, with detailed provisions following after.

The proclamation made all rural land the collective property of the Ethiopian people, confiscated landlord property without compensation, abolished tenancy, and capped the land allotted to a farm family at ten hectares. Large-scale farms, defined as mechanised farms and modern animal-husbandry enterprises, passed to state control. The Orthodox Church, which for centuries had held 10–20 percent of the land, lost it all and lived on stipends paid by the Derg. But expropriation on paper could not by itself put land into cultivators' hands. To secure the means of implementation, Articles 8 and 10 directed that peasants be organized into associations covering at least 800 hectares, and for this the Derg dispatched more than 60,000 university students into the countryside under the name Development Through Cooperation Campaign (Zemecha). The students' task was to teach peasants the aims of the revolution and to carry out redistribution.

The trouble began precisely there. Southern tenants, in some areas paying half their harvest to landlords, did not rest easy even after receiving their plots. Former landlords tried to reclaim their property, and some newly enfranchised tenants sought to keep their foothold by secretly offering gifts to their old masters. In the northern highlands the situation was reversed. Where the ancient kinship tenure of rist prevailed, land reform did not mean ejecting great landlords; it was read instead as an attack on hereditary clan rights. Although Article 19 recognized the 'possessing rights' of those already tilling communal land, northern peasants remained suspicious, and resistance hardened once Zemecha teams began agitating for collectivization of land and oxen. The students, often more radical and politically sophisticated than government functionaries, clashed with state officials, and by 1976 the Derg tightened central control by law over peasant associations and urban kebeles. That land reform destroyed the landlord class is certain. What it could not settle was whether the regime trusted the forces that carried it out, the students and the peasant associations; and that distrust surfaced within months of the edict, which was the proclamation's most important political result.

3 February and 12 November 1977: what the two eliminations left

Mengistu's predominance was completed not by a single coup but by two eliminations ten months apart. On 29 December 1976 chairman Tafari Benti had announced a reorganization of the Derg that trimmed Mengistu's powers and posted his supporters out to the countryside, while placing the reform's architects, Captain Mogus and Captain Alemayehu Haile, in powerful posts. Those who thought they had clipped Mengistu's wings were disproved within a month. On 3 February 1977, during a routine meeting, soldiers under Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Asfaw seized Tafari and the officers suspected of conspiracy and shot them in a garage on the palace compound. Radio Ethiopia reported that Mengistu branded Tafari and his group secret supporters of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and claimed to have found in Tafari's possession a 47-page plan for installing an EPRP government in place of the Derg's 'scientific socialism'. The same broadcast's insistence that Mengistu and vice-chairman Atnafu Abate had survived 'safe and sound' betrays that this was not a coup against the council as a whole but a power struggle inside it. Time magazine counted roughly 120 officers on the council when it ousted Haile Selassie, reduced to about 60 by these executions. Atnafu had survived 3 February because he was out of the capital, presenting a flag to a militia unit finishing its training. He became the last independent figure in the Derg and, vowing 'for every revolutionary killed, a thousand counter-revolutionaries executed', the public face of the Red Terror. But on 12 November he too was shot by firing squad on Mengistu's orders, and the next day state radio announced the execution together with a six-page ideological indictment. Historian Bahru Zewde observes that the execution of Atnafu, who more than anyone embodied the Derg from its February 1974 origins, effectively marked the eclipse of the organization itself. A committee that had begun in 1974 as a collective leadership ended as one-man rule, and what the two eliminations left behind was a Mengistu answerable to no remaining peer, and a state violence about to turn at full force on the civilian left.

Three waves of the Red Terror: arming the street that would kill for the state

The Red Terror was not, despite its name, mere terror: it was an urban counter-insurgency campaign. The Derg itself used the name 'Red Terror' (Qey Shibir), modelled on the Russian Civil War's, as an official label. Its starting point was mid-1976. After the regime cracked down on student opposition, the EPRP began assassinating Derg officials and leaders of its client institutions, the kebeles (urban dwellers' associations); on 23 September came the first of nine officially listed attempts on Mengistu's life. On 2 October the EPRP killed Fikre Merid, a government cadre and MEISON member, and ten senior officials and fifteen secret-service men were killed over the next two months. Mengistu labelled the EPRP's sporadic assassination campaign the 'White Terror', and Atnafu Abate vowed to execute 'a thousand counter-revolutionaries for every revolutionary killed'.

The terror turned toward mass killing only in February 1977, once Mengistu had eliminated Derg chairman Tafari Benti and assumed supreme power. In a speech on 17 April, Mengistu smashed three bottles of what looked like blood on the square floor and cried 'Death to counter-revolutionaries! Death to the EPRP!'. The key instrument was arms: Atnafu organized 'Defense of the Revolution Squads', distributing weapons to kebele members deemed loyal, and within a month they were armed. But as Marina and David Ottaway recorded, these squads did not all side with the Derg. Each kebele answered to the political faction that controlled it, and many squads were in the hands of the EPRP or MEISON. Weapons handed out by the state became weapons of factional civil war.

The first wave ran from April to June 1977. Searches of the whole city on 23–27 March detained over a thousand people. From the night of 29 April, rural defense squads summoned to thwart the May Day rallies joined soldiers and kebele officials in massacring suspected EPRP supporters. The government counted 732 dead over a few days; others put the figure at 2,000 or more. On the night of 4–5 June some 400 students were killed. At least 2,500 died in this first phase. Bodies were left by the roadside to advertise the previous night's killings, and relatives who came to identify the corpses were themselves targeted for execution or detention.

The second and third waves matter because the target shifted. After the EPRP was largely crushed in the capital and retreated to a rural base in Tigray, the killing did not stop. In August 1977 Haile Fida, Mengistu's confidant and the leader of MEISON, was detained, and scores of MEISON cadres were arrested in the following months. Some 3,000–4,000 died in the October second wave, much of it not at the hands of the state but in a factional war between MEISON and the EPRP remnants; both organizations were so infiltrated by security agents that cadres of one could be assassinated while the regime disclaimed responsibility. Three hundred died on the night of 16 December, and on 21 December defense squads machine-gunned worshippers in a mosque. By the end of 1977 Amnesty International estimated 30,000 political detainees in the capital's central prisons and the 291 kebele detention centres, itself a deliberately cautious figure. Total deaths are estimated at a minimum in the tens of thousands, and as high as several hundred thousand, with executions continuing into 1980. What the Red Terror revealed was not the depoliticisation of power but the regime devouring the civilian left as a whole: first the EPRP, then MEISON, which had cooperated with it.

What ended and what remained: three verdicts still contested fifty years on

By the end of 1977, what had definitively ended Ethiopia? First, the empire. The proclamation of a republic in March 1975 legally extinguished a monarchy of millennia, and the rural land nationalization of 4 March dissolved southern tenancy. Second, the material base of the landlord class: in the Oromo south, tenant peasants drove out the neftegna owners and took possession of the land themselves. By 1978, official figures counted 28,583 peasant associations covering 7.3 million households, backed by 500,000 armed villagers in peasant defence units. Third, urban property relations. On 1 January 1975 all banks and 13 insurance companies were nationalized; on 26 July urban land and rentable housing followed. By late 1976 two thirds of manufacturing lay under the Ministry of Industry. None of these three was reversed.

Far more was left unsettled. Political participation ended as a military monopoly. On May Day 1975 soldiers fired on demonstrators demanding a return to civilian government, and the April 1976 National Democratic Revolution programme absorbed most of the EPRP's social demands while omitting the one that mattered to it: a commitment to civilian rule. The autonomy of labour also ended. Strikes, illegal since 1974, were prohibited by the 1975 labour code; at the end of 1976 the CELU was dissolved and the state-created All-Ethiopian Trade Union took its place. Decisively, the national question was left untouched. The Eritrean war continued, and in Tigray, Gojjam and Begemdir land reform was cast as an Oromo-Muslim threat to the Amharic-Tigrean Christian order, producing resistance that by 1977 had subtracted much of those provinces from government control. Class domination was reorganized; the relation between the state and the nations within it was not.

Historians still divide on the verdict. The first dispute is whether this was a revolution or a coup. In their 1982 article "Ethiopia's Revolution from Above," Maxine Molyneux and Fred Halliday described the process as radicalization and post-revolutionary consolidation. On their account the officer corps after September 1974 belonged to no secret party and no left-wing military conspiracy: pressure from the peasantry and the urban poor, pressure from the political parties, factional conflict inside the Derg, and the sheer need to destroy the old order's socioeconomic foundations combined to radicalize a malleable group. Conditions made them, not intentions. Other scholars reject the standard starting point of 12 January 1974 at Negele Borana altogether, reading the sequence not as popular insurrection but as the military's gradual seizure of power.

The second dispute concerns the left's responsibility. Molyneux and Halliday call the EPRP's turn to urban assassination from September 1976 a serious error. Killing AETU leaders, political instructors at the Yekatit 66 ideological school and elected kebele officials attacked people who, whatever their positions, were trying to advance the Ethiopian revolution, and it fatally underestimated the regime's capacity to survive and counterattack. In the same article, however, they insist that the EPRP's mistake does not justify the conduct of the Derg and its civilian allies: the November 1974 executions were intended at least partly to instil fear in the population, and from late 1976 that became central government policy.

The third dispute is whether this was socialism. Writing in 2019, Ian Scott Horst calls reading Derg-era Ethiopia as actually socialist "completely shameful," and argues the international left embraced yet another left-talking military strongman while turning its back on the EPRP, one of the largest mass civilian communist movements in African history. That verdict should not be adopted wholesale here, but it establishes two things: the reforms were carried out by command and coercion rather than by an autonomous social movement, and those who first raised the problem from inside the left were among the victims.

The three disputes converge on one point. The revolution of 1974 to 1977 succeeded in transforming property and class relations, but on the question of who would control that transformation the military won. That expanding social reform did not broaden political freedom was a matter of process, not merely of outcome, and that is why the record still has to be argued over, document by document, fifty years on.