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Ethiopia Human Rights
Despite much rhetoric on the part of the Mengistu
government to the contrary and an entire chapter of the 1987
constitution devoted to "basic freedoms and rights,"
Ethiopia under Mengistu had one of the worst human rights
records in the world. Haile Selassie's modernization of the
penal code and the introduction of legal guarantees in the
1955 constitution indicated at least a recognition of the
human rights problem. But Amnesty International described
subsequent improvements in human rights conditions as
"severely qualified." Human rights violations after 1974
increased dramatically, despite the regime's assurances to
the UN that political prisoners received "fair trials" and
obtained adequate food and clothing from their families.
According to reports issued by Amnesty International, the
International Committee of the Red Cross, and the testimony
of refugees, the human rights situation deteriorated still
further from 1976 to 1978. Although human rights
organizations often lacked verification of the exact extent
of violations, many observers made repeated charges that
Ethiopian troops had massacred civilians and committed
atrocities in Eritrea and that the Ethiopian government had
perpetrated human rights violations throughout the country,
including arbitrary arrests, imprisonment without due
process, torture, summary executions, and mass killings
during the Red Terror.
In a report based on the observations of a 1976 fact-
finding visit to Ethiopia, Amnesty International stated
that, since 1974, "there has developed a consistent pattern
of widespread gross human rights violations," and it singled
out the association tribunals for the most egregious
disregard of basic human values. Addis Ababa responded to
this charge by labeling the evidence presented by Amnesty
International as "imperialist propaganda [against] authentic
socialist revolution" and claimed that actions taken against
political dissidents during the Red Terror were "justified"
for the elimination of "counterrevolutionaries." Official
sources subsequently added that the human rights enjoyed by
the "broad masses" were greater than they had been before
the revolution and dismissed the "individual human rights"
concept that was the premise of Western criticism of the
regime as being irrelevant to a revolutionary government
building a Marxist society.
The enormity of government-sponsored operations against
suspected political opponents during the Red Terror has
defied accurate analysis and has made attempts at
quantification of casualties irrelevant. Amnesty
International, for example, concluded that "this campaign
resulted in several thousand to perhaps tens of thousands of
men, women, and children, killed, tortured, and imprisoned."
Other sources estimated that, during 1977-78, about 30,000
people had perished as a result of the Red Terror and harsh
conditions in prisons, kebele jails, and concentration
camps. Ethiopian sources opposed to the Marxist regime
claimed that the security forces had killed 2,000 teachers
and students in a pre-May Day 1978 massacre in Addis Ababa.
The authorities also executed hundreds of unarmed Eritrean
civilians in Asmera while the city was under siege by
secessionists in December 1977. In a single sweep in Addis
Ababa the same month, troops killed about 1,000 students for
distributing antigovernment leaflets.
During the Red Terror in Addis Ababa, security forces
frequently mutilated the bodies of political dissidents,
dumping them along roads or stacking them on street corners.
They also forced some victims to dig their own graves before
being executed. The government required families to pay a
"bullet fee" of about 125 birr to retrieve bodies of
relatives, when they could be found and identified. Sweden's
Save the Children Fund lodged a protest in early 1978
alleging the execution of about 1,000 children, many below
the age of thirteen, whom the government had labeled
"liaison agents of the counterrevolutionaries." Based on its
assessment of the human rights situation in Ethiopia in
1979, the United States Department of State reported to
congressional committees in February 1980 that "serious
violations of individual rights and civil and political
liberties take place in Ethiopia amidst a restructed
economic and social system that is aimed at improving the
basic living conditions of the great majority of the
country's poor."
During the 1984-85 famine in northern Ethiopia, the
Mengistu regime devised a scheme to resettle 1.5 million
people onto so-called virgin lands in southern Ethiopia. The
government forcibly moved people who resisted the plan, and
many of those who were resettled fled to Sudan and took
refuge in camps or tried to walk back to their northern
homelands (see
Resettlement and Villagization, ch. 2;
The
Politics of Resettlement, ch. 4). According to a report
issued by an international medical group, 100,000 people
died as a result of Mengistu's resettlement policy; Cultural
Survival, another humanitarian organization, estimated that
50,000 to 100,000 died. To make matters worse, Mengistu
refused to allow food to be distributed in areas where
inhabitants were sympathetic to the EPLF, TPLF, or other
antigovernment groups, a strategy that resulted in the
deaths of tens of thousands.
When a new famine emerged in late 1989, threatening the
lives of 2 million to 5 million people, Mengistu again used
food as a weapon by banning the movement of relief supplies
along the main road north from Addis Ababa to Tigray and
also along the road from Mitsiwa into Eritrea and south into
Tigray. As a result, food relief vehicles had to travel
overland from Port Sudan, the major Red Sea port of Sudan,
through guerrilla territory into northern Ethiopia. After an
international outcry against his policy, Mengistu reversed
his decision, but international relief agencies were unable
to move significant amounts of food aid into Eritrea and
Tigray via Ethiopian ports. By 1990 there also were many
reports that the Ethiopian air force had bombed relief
convoys and that the Ethiopian armed forces had used napalm
and cluster bombs against separatists in Eritrea and Tigray.
The EPLF, too, attacked food convoys, claiming that the
regime was using them to ship weapons to its troops.
Due process of law and legal guarantees prohibiting abuse
of power basically did not exist in revolutionary Ethiopia.
After revision of the penal code and the criminal procedures
code in 1976, judicial warrants were no longer required for
house searches or for the arbitrary off-the-street arrests
that became the norm in the late 1970s. Specific charges
were not necessarily brought against detainees after
politically motivated arrests, and those held had no right
to counsel. The bulk of noncriminal arrests involved
suspects seized at the discretion of authorities on charges
of nonparticipation in mandatory political activities,
curfew violations, and participation in unauthorized
meetings. In most cases, those arrested or summoned to
association tribunals for questioning would be released
after a scare or a roughing up, but many would disappear
without a trace. Whole families--including young children--
would be taken into custody and held for indefinite periods
in lieu of a missing relative who was a suspect.
In Addis Ababa, special security force squads, assisted by
kebele defense squads, would arrest political suspects, who
would then be taken to police headquarters for interrogation
by officials. After questioning, often accompanied by
torture, the authorities would assign suspects to a prison
to await trial or hold them in detention camps without
charges. Under these circumstances, many detainees welcomed
sentencing, even if it was for a long period. The government
confiscated a suspect's possessions after arrest and
required families to search prisons to locate their
relatives.
According to a variety of estimates, there were 6,000 to
10,000 political prisoners, including surviving officials of
the former imperial regime, in Ethiopian prisons in 1976.
During the Red Terror, as many as 100,000 persons may have
passed through Ethiopian jails. Appeals by Amnesty
International in support of approximately 3,000 known
political detainees in 1978 had no effect, and most of these
individuals were believed to have been killed while in
custody. Other sources put the number of political prisoners
at 8,000, of whom half eventually were released.
Categories of political prisoners still held in 1991
included former government officials; prominent civil
servants and businessmen; armed forces officers, including
those implicated in the May 1989 coup attempt against
Mengistu; students and teachers; members of ethnic,
regional, and separatist groups; leaders of professional and
women's groups and trade unionists who resisted government
takeover of their organizations; churchmen; suspected
members of the EPLF, TPLF, or other guerrilla movements; and
others arrested on various pretexts on orders from the
government or from kebeles or peasant associations.
Political prisoners generally included a large number of
young persons and educated professionals, a high proportion
of them Eritrean or Oromo.
Censorship, openly imposed under the old regime, became
even harsher after 1974. The press, radio, and television
were controlled by the state and were considered instruments
of government policy (see
Mass Media, ch. 4). Independent
media outlets, such as the Lutheran broadcasting station in
Addis Ababa, were seized by the Mengistu government.
Censorship guidelines for the press were vague, but many
Ethiopian journalists were imprisoned for less than
enthusiastic cooperation with the Mengistu regime. All
reports to the foreign press had to be transmitted through
the Ethiopian News Agency. After 1975 government authorities
expelled many Western journalists for "mischief and
distortion" in their reporting. The Mengistu government also
banned songs, books, and periodicals that were judged to be
contrary to the spirit of the revolution.
* * *
Because of the limited access to Ethiopia afforded Western
observers and the secrecy surrounding almost all of the
Mengistu government's activities, accurate and consistent
information and statistics pertaining to the Mengistu regime
are difficult to obtain. In 1991 there still were no
definitive studies describing in sufficient detail the
entire scope of national security problems in contemporary
Ethiopia. Those interested in Ethiopian national security
affairs therefore must rely on a variety of periodicals,
including Africa Research Bulletin, Keesing's Contemporary
Archives, Third World Reports, and Africa Confidential. The
International Institute for Strategic Studies' annuals, The
Military Balance and Strategic Survey, also are essential
for anyone who wishes to understand the evolution of
Ethiopia's security forces. The same is true of the annuals
Africa Contemporary Record and World Armaments and
Disarmament, the latter published by the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute.
Harold G. Marcus's Ethiopia, Great Britain, and the United
States, 1941-1974 provides an excellent analysis of the
historical evolution of the Ethiopian armed forces. Other
useful historical sources include Donald N. Levine's "The
Military in Ethiopian Politics"; Richard A. Caulk's "The
Army and Society in Ethiopia"; and Yohannis Abate's "Civil-
Military Relations in Ethiopia." Marina and David Ottaway's
Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution also is essential for an
understanding of the military's role in contemporary
Ethiopia.
Material on human rights practices in Ethiopia can be found
in the annual Amnesty International Report and in other
Amnesty International publications, such as Ethiopia: Human
Rights Violations, Ethiopia: Political Imprisonment and
Torture, and Ethiopia: Political Imprisonment. Although
dated (1979), Bekele Mesfin's "Prison Conditions in
Ethiopia" remains a valuable first-hand account of the life
of a political prisoner in Mengistu's Ethiopia. For an
analysis of the human costs of Mengistu's resettlement
policy, Jason W. Clay and Bonnie K. Holcomb's Politics and
the Ethiopian Famine, 1984-1985 is fundamental.
(For further information and complete citations, see
Bibliography.)
Data as of 1991
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