Given a system in which responsibilities were shared, approaching senility would not have mattered so much–aides could have quietly taken over the running of the country while leaving the Emperor as figurehead to preside, Soviet-style, over official ceremonies. But Haile Selassie had made a point of centralizing power into his own, now incapable hands. Sensing his own weakness, he leant heavily on his eldest daughter. ‘In the day, I am the Prime Minister, in the night, it is the Emperor’s daughter,’ Aklilou complained, ‘and she undoes everything done during the day.’
It was not a propitious moment for a power vacuum to open up. By early 1974, famine in Tigray and Welo had claimed the lives of 100,000 peasants. Haile Selassie had always accepted the gulf between the desperate poverty of the countryside and his court’s gilded wealth with equanimity, regarding them as contrasting facets of a natural order decreed by God. But an Emperor in full command of his faculties would have known that articulating such fatalism was no longer acceptable in the age of radio and television. Instead, his floundering government labelled European reports of the disaster ‘wishful malice’ and one minister went so far as to comment: ‘If we can save the peasants only by confessing our failure to the world, it is better that they die’3–a remark that spoke volumes about the Ethiopian obsession with losing face. Public mutterings over an out-of-touch leadership–more interested in military spending than feeding the hungry–grew louder. Yet the government seemed incapable of action. Spencer saw his former employer for the last time in February 1974, emerging from the audience deeply shaken. ‘I had the sensation, still vivid today, that in leaving the private office, I was leaving the cockpit of a 747 after finding both the captain and the co-pilot unconscious. How was the craft to keep flying?’4 The lawyer flew to London, where he met the Ethiopian ambassador. ‘I told him: “Look, in six weeks I’m sure we are going to see the Emperor gone.”’5
It took a lot less time than that–the day after his prediction, the demoralized Ethiopian army in Asmara mutinied and garrisons around the country began following suit. Aklilou and his cabinet resigned, but they could not stop what had begun. The army, whose young leaders set up a coordinating committee, or ‘Derg’, to present its demands, seemed impossible to placate. They wanted higher pay, better food, but above all, they were sick of fighting what was beginning to feel like an unwinnable war in Eritrea. Haile Selassie’s pet project had turned into a hungry Frankenstein, ready to devour its creator. He had built the army up to deal with Eritrea, now it had turned on him.
Just as he had abandoned Addis to its fate in 1936, the Emperor now sold out his nearest and dearest, agreeing–in the face of furious protests from Aklilou and his incredulous colleagues–to have his cabinet ministers arrested in the hope that he, at least, might survive. The tactic bought him only a little time. On September 12, 1974, the Emperor’s 44-year-old reign came to an abrupt end. Army tanks rolled into position around the palace and a delegation of Derg officials informed Haile Selassie, who had donned full uniform for the event, that they were deposing him on the grounds of corruption and neglect. The Emperor put up no resistance. ‘We have tried to serve our country in peace and war. If we must serve it now by resigning, we are willing to do so,’ he replied. As the old man was walked towards the exit for the last time, he was watched in silence by his terrified retainers, peering around corners and peeping from behind heavy drapery. Once the doors closed behind him, a chorus of wailing broke out. The Derg had sent a Volkswagen Beetle police car to drive Haile Selassie to his place of detention, a choice that underlined the Emperor’s precipitous fall from grace. ‘What, into this?’ he stuttered, as the front seat was tipped forward to allow him to squeeze into the back. It was his last public appearance and came stripped of all dignity: confused, disorientated, he automatically waved at the youths who ran alongside as the tiny car puttered along. But this time the crowd was not singing his praises. It was shouting ‘Thief!’ and ‘Hang the Emperor!’
For Eritrea, the Derg’s takeover briefly held out enormous hope. The new administration named General Aman Andom, the country’s most popular military leader, as chairman. A Sandhurst graduate with Eritrean blood running in his veins, Aman believed Addis must abandon its heavy-handed military tactics in Eritrea, opt for conciliation and consider reinstating the Federation. Had he lived, the future would undoubtedly have looked very different. But Eritrea was only one of the many issues on which he soon clashed with the Derg’s hot-headed officers. On November 23, fired up by an uncompromising speech delivered by Mengistu Haile Mariam, an ambitious young major who believed Eritrea’s separatist tendencies should be crushed rather than accommodated, the Derg voted Aman out of office. Later that day, an army tank drew up in front of the general’s house and soldiers opened fire. After holding off his attackers for two hours, Aman is said to have dressed in full military regalia, complete with medals and braid, and shot himself under the chin. That same night, the 59 detained ministers, generals and members of the royal family, including Spencer’s old boss Aklilou, were led out of their cells and executed under the floodlights, machine-gun fire ripping through their bodies as the movie cameras rolled. What had been cheerfully hailed up till then as ‘Ethiopia’s bloodless revolution’ had just turned nasty. The Derg declared Ethiopia a socialist state and announced its intention of instituting a one-party system and nationalizing land and key industries. The old order–including an entire social class of landed gentry and businessmen–was about to be swept away.
Haile Selassie himself was held prisoner for nearly a year, while the Derg attempted without success to persuade him to sign over his Swiss bank accounts. Rare film footage taken during this period shows the deposed Emperor staring, baffled, at the camera. His hair, as uncombed as any asylum inmate’s, curls in a frenzied corona around his head, his uncomprehending eyes have the milky glaze of a mad, caged eagle. Finally, in August 1975, the Derg announced that he had died of natural causes, supposedly of complications following a prostate operation. Few believed the official version. Exiled family members said the Emperor had been fed cyanide, rumours spread that he had been smothered with a cushion.
It would be another 20 years before the true account of Haile Selassie’s death emerged. At the 1996 trial of Derg leaders on charges of genocide and murder, the court was read the minutes in which the ruling military council–which demonstrated, like so many of the world’s most murderous administrations, a bizarre bureaucratic fastidiousness in recording every atrocity committed–agreed it was time to eliminate a man who might one day serve as a rallying point for a counter-coup. ‘It has been decided that the necessary means should be taken,’ read one entry. A personal attendant recalled how the 84-year-old Haile Selassie fell to his knees and prayed when soldiers appeared at his door one evening, crying: ‘Is it not true, Ethiopia, that I have strived for you?’ The next time the attendant saw Haile Selassie, he was lying dead on his bed, probably strangled while under anaesthetic. ‘There was a smell of ether in the air and His Majesty was not lying in his usual position…The shawl that he wrapped himself in when he went to sleep was lying in another part of the room. His face was ghastly and there was a bandage around his neck.’
Macbeth-like, king-killers tend to become obsessed with the question of whether their victims will lie quiet in their graves or issue forth as malevolent spirits to haunt them. There was a curious personal vindictiveness about the way Mengistu chose to dispose of his predecessor’s remains. Ordering several graves to be dug in order to spread confusion about Haile Selassie’s actual resting place, he told a gravedigger–another witness at the trial–to dig a hole below his office window at the Imperial Palace. While Mengistu watched, the Emperor’s small coffin was placed there–head down, some say–liquid concrete poured in and a latrine built on the site. Not only could Mengistu, responsible for a regicide which rivalled in boldness the murder of the Czars, verify at a glance that Haile Selassie remained dead and buried. Each day, when he felt the call of nature,
he could express his feelings for the Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Light of the World, in the crudest way known to man.
CHAPTER 12
Of Bicycles and Thieves
‘How can we fail, when we are so sincere?’
Sign in an Asmara public library
The Derg’s ruthless elimination of General Aman Andom served as a massive recruiting drive for the Eritrean rebel movement. Rightly concluding that an aggressively nationalistic regime which trumpeted Etiopia Tikdem (‘Ethiopia above all’) as its slogan would never be interested in a negotiated settlement, tens of thousands of Eritrean students and high-school pupils abandoned their studies and joined the resistance.
These fresh recruits were no longer all heading in the same direction, for the rebel movement had splintered in the early 1970s, torn apart by disagreements over strategy and ideology. The civil war between the ELF–mainly Moslem, based in the Western lowlands, viewing Eritrea as part of the Arab world–and the breakaway EPLF (Eritrean People’s Liberation Front)–dominated by Christian highlanders, secular and socialist in outlook–would sap the insurgency’s strength and undermine its effectiveness for years to come. But in 1974, with their numbers soaring and Addis in a state of political uproar, the two movements managed to put their differences aside long enough to launch a staggeringly successful joint push on Ethiopian positions. By January 1975, the two rebel movements were nibbling at Asmara’s outskirts. Terrified Ethiopian army units sat in their rural garrisons, only daring to venture out in heavily-guarded convoys.
How could anyone have guessed that, far from representing the beginning of the end of Ethiopian rule, this was just the first round of a conflict destined to drag on for almost two more decades? With the frontline visible from the centre of town, shooting audible, and wounded Ethiopian soldiers being ferried through the city, victory seemed imminent. No wonder so many Eritreans too old or cautious to take up a gun chose this moment covertly to embrace the cause. The mid-1970s were the golden age for an underground resistance movement in which every member of society, from schoolchild to bar owner and bank manager, could play their part. Ask the classic question–‘What did you do in the Struggle?’–and you will discover that across Eritrea, ordinary people were doing extraordinary things.
The importance of tapping into that public support was first recognized by the ELF, which began setting up the fedayeen–mobile units of Fighters who would sneak into Asmara, take lodgings with sympathizers, work undercover for several months, then return to the front. Adopting a structure that the French Resistance or IRA would have recognized, the fedayeen were organized in small, interlinking cells, each with its own code name. In theory, each member knew only two other cell members. Should one member be captured by the Ethiopians and crack under torture, the theory ran, he would only be able to betray two other people. Protected from informers and the indiscreet alike, the network itself would live on.
The fedayeen were divided into three sections. The political branch was charged with spreading the word: each member was supposed to recruit five new supporters. The economic wing raised funds. The military wing was responsible for assassinations, sabotage operations and monitoring Ethiopian troop movements, information which was smuggled in handwritten notes across the checkpoints at the city’s limits and out to rebel lines.
One of the military wing’s most high-profile missions was staged at Sembel, a supposedly impregnable prison just off Asmara’s airport road. Sembel’s detainees included top political activists–several would become ministers in the post-independence government–and the ELF and EPLF wanted their best brains out. The fedayeen worked on both the prison governor and the Eritrean police force responsible for security. On February 13, 1975, as wild rumours circulated amongst the inmates, the governor summoned the prisoners together. He had already divided the policemen into two shifts: those who wanted to remain in Asmara had been assigned to the day shift, those ready to join the liberation movement would be on duty that night. ‘I’m an Eritrean like you, you are my brothers,’ the governor told inmates. ‘In a few hours’ time, we will leave this place together. You may belong to two organizations, ELF and EPLF, but this is a national operation, so we must all go together to an agreed place. Then it is each for himself.’
Under cover of darkness, the fedayeen opened the cells and led the inmates to the guard tower, where each jumped over the perimeter wall, landing on a pile of mattresses stacked on the other side. It must count as one of the least sophisticated prison breaks in history, but it went unnoticed by the Ethiopian guards outside, and that was all that mattered. ‘God knows how many people broke their legs and hands,’ recalls Tzadu Bahtu. Employed at the Finance Ministry today, he was then doing time for his role in the fedayeen assassination of an Ethiopian commander. ‘If one person had shouted out, the whole operation would have collapsed.’ Around 900 prisoners jumped to freedom that night and with them went 70 policemen.
The railway was a favourite target. The Ethiopians controlled the line only as far as the town of Ghinda, a paltry 45 km from Asmara–anything beyond was subject to the whims of the ELF, which relied on the Eritrean drivers to carry messages, relay military information from Asmara and stand meekly aside when they decided to hold up a train. On one occasion, when Haile Selassie was due to visit Massawa, the ELF stopped a train, loaded it with explosives and sent it trundling unmanned down to the coast. This rather symbolic assassination attempt failed, but another operation was more dramatic: stopping a train on Asmara’s outskirts, the ELF ordered the passengers off and put the locomotive on automatic pilot. As station chiefs telephoned in panic back to headquarters (‘There’s no one aboard!’), the rogue engine screamed through its usual stops, thundered across Asmara, smashed into an oncoming locomotive carrying Melotti beer, carried it piggy-back through another two stations–the Melotti driver applying the brakes to no avail–before finally coming to a halt on the line to Keren, 35 km from its starting point. Retired railwaymen find it impossible to recount the incident without giggling.
This element of sheer cheek characterised many of the fedayeen’s interventions. Cocking a snook at Addis, they demonstrated, with humiliating clarity, the shakiness of Ethiopia’s hold on Eritrea. ‘The people are with us. Our sympathizers are inside every organization. There is no one you can trust,’ ran the relentless message. But there was also a large dollop of pragmatism. Given the world’s indifference to Eritrea’s thwarted aspirations, the separatists quickly realized the Struggle would have to be largely self-financed. The fedayeen’s task was to raise the capital that would allow the rebel movement to stay in business.
One-off stings yielded fantastically rich pickings. The most ingenious of these involved Asmara’s main state-owned bank, where the fedayeen kidnapped the Ethiopian employee in charge of money transfers. The ELF sympathizer who took his place arranged a massive transfer of funds from Addis into a smattering of local accounts. Over the next few days, the account holders filed into the bank to write out generous cheques to themselves. ‘We were collecting 60,000 birr a day. The whole thing lasted a week and we were using fake IDs and swapping cards around to get out as much money as possible. If we were dealing with someone who was well-dressed, we’d say: “Write out a large cheque”, if they looked like a farmer they had to keep it small to avoid arousing suspicion,’ recalls Zemhret Yohannes, an active fedayeen organizer at the time. ‘There were a lot of people involved and at the end they all had to leave for the front, as their names were known. Mind you, we could probably have continued for another week as the Ethiopians didn’t seem suspicious at all about the amount of money leaving the bank.’
But for the most part, the fedayeen looked inwards. Members would quietly investigate the activities of prosperous Eritrean businessmen, drawing up income estimates. Finally, the entrepreneur would be discreetly contacted and a levy in line with his financial circumstances agreed between the two side
s. While the middle class was reaching into its pockets, lowly workers in Asmara’s factories were just as important. They were perfectly placed to fiddle the books, pilfering raw materials and manufactured goods of use to men at the front. One day a load of spare engine parts would disappear from a warehouse. Another day 10,000 cardigans would be mislaid from the textile plant, or a delivery of Kongo sandals would go missing from the shoe factory. It was known as ‘liberating’ supplies, and sometimes the level of planning that went to freeing up these vital goods reached astonishing levels.
If Melles Seyoum, director of the Central Health Laboratory in Asmara, puts his paperwork to one side and walks to the window of his second-floor office, he can see the low outline of a white building across the road.
That view holds a certain personal irony. Melles, a sober, softly-spoken man with a corona of grey-white hair, once worked there, in what used to be the Central Medical Store. The subsidiary of a state-owned pharmaceuticals company in Addis Ababa, it provided all of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia with drugs and medical equipment, supplying in the process Ethiopian army forces stationed in the province.
The couple of hundred yards of dusty tarmac between the two establishments–filled with the soothing cooing of ring-necked doves–represents a massive symbolic distance. It is the journey Melles, in his own mind, travelled from white-collared vassal of an oppressive state to free man. For it was in the building opposite that this trusted employee and respected colleague, a man widely regarded as more ‘Ethiopian’ than most Ethiopians, turned fifth-columnist, traitor and sneak–or inside-operator, patriot and hero, depending on your point of view.
The decision he made–to exploit his position of trust to burgle his own business on the EPLF’s behalf–exposed him to extraordinary danger. Throughout the whole gut-churning episode he had a home-made cyanide pill taped to his groin, ready to die rather than face discovery and interrogation. But while Melles talks about it with a quiet intensity that makes clear those fraught days in 1976 were the most vivid of his life, he regards the decision itself as unremarkable. His experience, in truth, stands out not because of the risks taken but because of the meticulous preparation, a sample of the tenacity that would enable a small rebel movement to bring down an army.
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