Monday, May. 23, 1977

A Despot at War On All Fronts

Curfew in Addis Ababa starts at midnight, but the shooting in Ethiopia's frightened capital (pop. 1 million) begins long before that. Shortly after sunset, armed members of the city's 291 kebeles (neighborhood associations) take to nearly deserted streets seeking "class enemies of the broad masses" --meaning opponents of the brutal Marxist regime of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam and his military administrative council, known as the Dergue. Scouring slum areas of the capital, kebele patrols kick open doors of mud huts in search of objects that would prove subversive intent. Among them: typewriters and field glasses. Justice is often administered on the spot--with a bullet. Foreign diplomats estimate that perhaps 3,000 people have been murdered since January by kebele cadres in Addis Ababa, and at least that many elsewhere in the country.

Exploding Grenades. TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief Lee Griggs, who was in Addis Ababa last week, reports: "Shooting broke out all over the capital late on Sunday afternoon and continued sporadically for twelve hours. Automatic weapons chattered incessantly, and the crump of exploding grenades punctuated the firing. Cars were banned from the streets, and roadblocks set up to restrict movement by foot. Next day the government-controlled papers announced that 'one anarchist' had been killed--although hundreds of weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition had been confiscated. Local hospitals had been forbidden to give out body counts, but an orderly at Menelik whispered to me in Amharic, 'Bizualee' (There are many). The best guess: 80 to 100 dead."

The massacres--another, in which more than 300 were killed, took place on April 29--reflect the jitters of a besieged regime. From the rebellious northern province of Eritrea to Ethiopia's southeastern frontier with Somalia, Mengistu and the Dergue face the gravest threat to their despotic rule since they overthrew U.S.-backed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. In and around the capital, the main opposition group is the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (E.P.R.P.), a Marxist organization, led primarily by students and young workers, that demands a return to civilian rule. E.P.R.P. has given the Dergue good reason to be nervous: it has assassinated more than 20 government officials, mounted at least one daring raid on

Dergue headquarters, and even wounded Mengistu in an ambush. One rebel sympathizer accosted Correspondent Griggs on a busy downtown street and boasted: "We have 700 marksmen, and some of them are Mengistu's own soldiers. It will take time, but we will clean out the pseudo-Marxist military leaders eventually."

While trying to cope with rebellion in Addis Ababa, Mengistu has had to deploy nearly half his 50,000-man army in a losing struggle against three different forces in Eritrea. The 20,000-man Eritrean Liberation Front (E.L.F.) controls much of the land near the Red Sea coast, while the 15,000-man Eritrean People's Liberation Front (E.P.L.F.) rampages through western Eritrea. Five thousand guerrillas of the Eritrean Liberation Front-Popular Liberation Forces (E.L.F.-P.L.F.) are fighting in the province's north central region. Variously supported by such Arab states as Syria, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, the guerrillas would doubtless fall to fighting among themselves were they not determined first to defeat the Ethiopians. Mengistu's troops still hold the Eritrean capital of Asmara, but they can only resupply it by air or by twice-weekly convoys from the Red Sea, which are often ambushed or sniped at on the way from the port of Massawa to the city. The rebels have long since cut off all land routes between Asmara and the rest of the country.

Other Fronts. The Eritrean rebels are not the only ones who oppose Mengistu's rule. Just south of Eritrea, 1,500 guerrillas of the Tigre People's Liberation Front (T.P.L.F.) control about one-third of Tigre province. In the western provinces of Goijam and Gondar, 2,000 men of the right-wing Ethiopian Democratic Union (E.D.U.) are fighting for a non-Marxist civilian government and deny charges that they plan to restore a monarchy under Haile Selassie's sole surviving son, Crown Prince Asfa Wossen, 60, who is now in London. About 1,000 shiftas--armed nomads of the Western Somali Liberation Front--periodically mount hit-and-run attacks along the Somali frontier.

Mengistu also faces the possibility of war with Somalia for control of the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas, whose 215,000 citizens last week voted for independence.* Mengistu fears that Somalia will encourage the territory's Somali-speaking Issa majority to cut the railroad linking Addis Ababa with the port of Djibouti, through which moves more than half of Ethiopia's foreign trade. Unless he can work out a deal with Somalia's President, Muhamed Siad Barre, Ethiopia may have yet another combat zone on its frontiers when the territory becomes the Republic of Djibouti--Africa's 49th nation --on June 27.

Mission to Moscow. It was partly because of the possibility of a war over Djibouti that Mengistu visited Moscow this month to solidify his new alliance with the Soviet Union. Mengistu and Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny signed a declaration laying the "foundations for friendship and cooperation"--diplomatic sugar-coating on Moscow's agreement last December to supply Ethiopia with $100 million in arms. Moscow had good reason to show such benign feelings: Mengistu last month expelled all American military advisers, communications experts and information officials on the ground that the U.S. had helped the late Emperor "suppress the liberation struggle of the oppressed masses" (TIME, May 9).

The Russians face a delicate diplomatic problem in trying to gain a new client on the Horn of Africa. Too many gestures of friendship to Mengistu are bound to alienate Somalia, which Russia also supplies and which is being wooed out of the Russian orbit by promises of economic aid from Saudi Arabia. Apparently unbothered by such strategic complications, Mengistu is planning an all-out assault on Eritrea, led by a people's militia of 200,000 peasants equipped with cast-off American arms and trained--if that is the word --by a small cadre of Cuban advisers. They hope to whip enough "volunteers" into fighting trim to begin marching north in June before the onset of the rainy season. Griggs reports that long convoys are rolling through Addis Ababa carrying young recruits to a fetid training camp named Siga Meda, or "field of meat," west of the capital. It was formerly used for slaughtering goats, sheep and cattle for market.

* The territory is the last remnant of a huge French colonial empire in Africa that as recently as 1958 included 15 states. The others are all independent nations today. Troops of the fabled French Foreign Legion will stay on in Djibouti to help keep order. Reunion island and the Comoro island of Mayotte, both in the Indian Ocean, remain as overseas departments of France, with representatives in the National Assembly in Paris.

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