1977: Girma Kebede in the Ethiopian Red Terror
Add comment April 2nd, 2011 Headsman
There's a reason why "may you live in interesting times" is a curse.
The eras we call a "Terror" — Stalin's Russia, Robespierre's France, Pol Pot's Cambodia — are pretty interesting.
Ethiopia in the mid-1970's was one of the most interesting places in the world.
After the Derg, a shadowy committee of leftist officers, toppled the monarchy in 1974, factional violence between Ethiopia's two main Marxist parties soon came to the fore.
Long story short, All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON) backed the Derg — while its rival the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP) denounced it as fascistic.
And when Mengistu assumed dictatorial power in February 1977, it was Red Terror on.
It was as dirty as it sounds, "one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by the state ever witnessed in Africa" according to Human Rights Watch. This was the context of Mengistu's most notorious public appearance, at an Addis Ababa rally later this same month of April 1977 when he theatrically smashed bottles of (apparently) blood while inciting his supporters against "enemies."
Now that is red terror.
The Derg-MEISON alliance* built up Kebeles, small neighborhood militias — "essentially a matter of arming the lumpenproletariat against members of the urban intelligentsia," writes Christopher Clapham.
But even these MEISON-allied goon squads were liable to run afoul of revolutionary justice if their indiscriminate mayhem failed to discriminate at the most essential moment.
On two occasions, March and again in May 1977, house-to-house searches were carried out in Addis Ababa, and suspected EPRP members rounded up for execution. Attempts by the EPRP to launch a school strike were likewise countered by the execution of students who failed to attend classes. The press regularly reported the execution of 'anarchists' and 'paid assassins'. Along with the conflict between the rival political factions went the settling of personal scores, and gratuitous killings by psychotics on either side. The most notorious of these, Girma Kebede, was a Meison kebelle chairman in the Arat Kilo area of Addis Ababa, and the well-educated son of a former high official; he overreached himself by taking away for execution a group of 'reactionaries' from the Ministry of Education who included Mengistu's uncle, and was then shot on the charge of seeking 'to alienate the people from the Government and incite the broad masses against the revolution'.
On this date in 1977, Girma Kebede paid the forfeit. His, er, strategy of killing scores of humans to alienate the people from the government would take many more years and bodies to succeed.
* Later that year, the Derg-MEISON alliance also fell apart, Mengistu cemented his power, and MEISON got the same treatment it had once meted out to its EPRP enemies.
1759: Mary Edmondson - 2020
1942: Ewald Schlitt, performative cruelty - 2019
1590: George Schweiger, tough love - 2018
1828: William Dyon and John Dyon, all in the family - 2017
1954: Henry Frank Decaillet - 2016
1756: Veronika Zeritschin, the last witch executed in Germany - 2015
1880: James Madison Wyatt Stone, landing on his feet - 2014
1897: Ernest and Alexis Blanc, brothers in blood - 2013
1674: Benjamin Gourd, the last bestiality execution - 2012
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews - 2010
1781: John Donellan, Esq. - 2009
1582: John Payne, snitched out - 2008
1909: Leonard Groce and Lee Roy Cannon, American mercenaries in Nicaragua
1945: Friedrich Fromm, Claus von Stauffenberg's executioner
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Cycle of Violence,Death Penalty,Ethiopia,Execution,Executioners,History,Political Expedience,Power,Shot,Terrorists,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1970s, 1977, addis ababa, april 2, civil war, communism, derg, dergue, girma kebede, mengistu haile mariam, red terror, terrorism
Add comment December 21st, 2010 Headsman
On this date in 1936, Italian forces consolidating control of occupied Ethiopia mopped up a couple of royal relatives who had resisted a bit too long.
Brothers Aberra Kassa and Asfawossen Kassa had briefly become, with the flight to exile of their ally Haile Selassie, symbolic leaders of Ethiopia's domestic resistance to Mussolini's imperialism.
Along with another brother, these sons of Ras Kassa mounted an abortive July 1936 attack on Addis Ababa, precipitating a furious Italian response.
The rebels were hunted to their retreat: the other brother was caught in a cave and summarily executed, which must have been at the back of Aberra and Asfawossen's mind when they surrendered under a pledge of safe conduct.
'Now I tell you to surrender', wrote Graziani, 'and I assure you nothing will happen to you. Why do you want to die uselessly?'
Only his cousins had remained with Dejaz Aberra: Mesfin Sileshi and the two younger men, Lij Merid Mangasha and Lij Abiye Abebe. They suspected Italian treachery. 'If you want to be killed', said Mesfin, 'shall I kill you?' …
The exact sequence of the events that followed is difficult to disentangle … Aberra and Asfawossen finally decided to submit. Aberra however sent his wife and baby son away with Mesfin and the two cousins, a last-minute concession to their pleas and threats.
A letter was sent up to General [Ruggero] Tracchia who had now occupied Fikke:
"To General Tracchia
"As you have assured me in your letter ot me that our lives will be spared, we shall assemble our armies and receive you by peaceful parade in a place called Bidigon.
"Aberra Kassa"
Ras Hailu in person led Aberra and Asfawossen to General Tracchia's camp. While they were in the tent drinking coffee with the General, the men of their escort were disarmed, apparently without difficulty, and taken away (they were released the next morning). A group or carabinieri entered the tent and arrested the two brothers. It was 21 December, three days after Ras Imru had surrendered. At 7 p.m. the men in the escort heard a volley of shots in the centre of the town.
Tracchia sent a laconic cable to Graziani: 'Dejaz Aberra and brother shot dusk in piazza of Fikke'. Graziani sent a cable to Lessona (Italian link) repeating Tracchia's message and adding 'Situation Salale liquidated'.
This reference to the Salale or Selale branch of the Ethiopian royal family was not entirely correct, however.
Not liquidated was the youngest brother, Asrate Kassa, who had escaped to exile and would return with Haile Selassie's post-Mussolini government. Asrate ultimately qualified for these dolorous pages himself, however, as one of the victims of the 1974 Derg purge.
Of more immediate concern for Graziani and his ilk: Abera Kassa's widow Kebedech Seyoum (French link) legendarily rose from childbirth after learning of her husband's execution to become one of the Ethiopian resistance's greatest military leaders. She's a national hero in Ethiopia … and there's also a Laboratorio Femminista Kebedech Seyoum in Rome, dedicated to the study of ant-fascist women.
1739: Elizabeth Harrard - 2019
1929: Peter Kudzinowski - 2018
1782: Patrick Dougherty, robber - 2017
2014: A day in aborted death penalty moratoriums around the world - 2016
1689: William Davis - 2015
1875: Henry Wainwright, Whitechapel murderer - 2014
1893: Frederick Wyndham, unrepentant patricide - 2013
1692: A batch at Tyburn, escorted by the Ordinary of Newgate - 2012
1838: The first hangings of the Lower Canada Rebellion - 2011
1624: Marco Antonio de Dominis, posthumously - 2009
1855: The slave Celia, who had no right to resist - 2008
1995: Kimura Shujish - 2007
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Ethiopia,Execution,History,Italy,No Formal Charge,Notably Survived By,Occupation and Colonialism,Power,Public Executions,Royalty,Shot,Soldiers,Summary Executions,Wartime Executions,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1930s, 1936, aberra kassa, abiye abebe, addis ababa, alessandro lessona, asfawossen kassa, asrate kassa, carabinieri, december 21, derg, fascism, fiche, haile selassie, hailu tekle haymanot, kebedech seyoum, merid mangasha, mesfin sileshi, nationalism, rodolfo graziani, ruggero tracchia
1977: Atnafu Abate, Mengistu's last rival
On this date in 1977,* Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam eliminated one of his last political rivals with the execution of Atnafu Abate.
The men's relationship had long been complex and unclear; Abate backed the Derg's "Black Saturday" mass executions in 1974, and sometimes lined up as Mengistu's ally over the succeeding years as part of the Derg military junta.
At the same time, there were rumors that things between Mengistu and Atnafu were so tense that they pulled guns at meetings.
Atnafu's absence (by accident or design) during an early 1977 purge within the Derg left the conservative and Orthodox Atnafu officially second-in-command, and unofficially the last real or potential rival to Mengistu.
His elimination was widely expected, though exactly why it went down, when it went down has never been transparent. Mengistu's grip on the country was already secure enough to have launched the Red Terror.
The New York Times' Nov. 15 report of this development captures a bit of the Alice-in-Wonderland political logic evidently at work.
The Ethiopian press agency, which made the announcement, also released what amounted to a six-page indictment listing "twelve specific antirevolutionary crimes," and "five specific arch-reactionary stands" attributed to Colonel Atnafu, who had served as vice chairman of the provisional military administrative council.
The statement charged Colonel Atnafu with opposing "proclamations intensifying the revolution," manifesting "a feudal arrogance while on visits to various provinces," and consorting after working hours with what the statement called riff-raff of the aristocracy and military bourgeois, as well as "extremely dangerous imperialist agents — especially CIA agents."
The statement also charged that "he had repeatedly confessed at meetings that he did not believe in the ideology of the working class."
But perhaps the section of the statement that most accurately reflects the bewildering tone of political rhetoric and chaos in Addis Ababa, was one that charged that the proof of Colonel Atnafu's "reactionary stands" was his placing of Ethiopian national interests before ideological considerations.
"At this time," said the document, "when workers, farmers, the men in uniform and all the toiling masses are intensifying the revolutionary struggle guided by the principles of Marxism-Leninism, Lieut. Col. Atnafu has been antagonistic to the idea and has instead by way of dilatory tactic, argued that the interest of Ethiopia should be put before ideology."
* As reported by the London Times gloss (articles Nov. 14 and Nov. 15) of a state radio report given in Ethiopia on Nov. 13. "A revolutionary measure" was the official euphemism for the action taken against Atnafu Abate.
1941: Ivan Sullivan - 2020
1863: Angel Vicente Peñaloza, "Chacho" - 2019
1717: The witch-children of Freising - 2018
1963: Four CIA saboteurs in Cuba - 2017
1886: William Wilson - 2016
1800: Thomas Chalfont, postboy - 2015
1964: Louis Drouin and Marcel Numa, Jeune Haiti - 2014
1969: Liu Shaoqi dies under torture - 2013
1858: James Rodgers, lamented - 2012
1793: Jean-Sylvain Bailly, moonstruck - 2011
1679: The hot-blooded Lady Christian Nimmo - 2009
1874: William Udderzook, because a picture is worth a thousand words - 2008
1755: Rowley Hanson - 2007
1974: Black Saturday in Ethiopia
1956: Juan Jose Valle, Peronist putschist
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Ethiopia,Execution,History,Politicians,Power,Revolutionaries,Shot,Soldiers,Treason
Tags: 1970s, 1977, atnafu abate, cia, cold war, communism, derg, dergue, mengistu haile mariam, november 12, purge, red terror
4 comments November 23rd, 2009 Headsman
November 23, 1974 was "Bloody Saturday" in Ethiopia for that day's* surprise purge of some threescore politicians and soldiers by the ruling Derg.
It was barely ten weeks since the Derg — an Amharic word meaning "committee", in this case a leftist military junta — had formally overthrown Emperor Haile Selassie, so ancient that he was already middle-aged back when he'd been leading Ethiopia's resistance against Mussolini.
It's strange to say in retrospect, but having spent the best part of a year systematically supplanting the political authority of the decrepit ancien regime with widespread public support, the Derg had engendered hope that its revolution would be accomplished without slaughter.
"Ityopiya tikdem/yala mimin dem" — "Let Ethiopia progress/Without any bloodshed" — became the popular slogan of that heady time. (pdf source)
Black Saturday turned the leaf on all that, and opened the sanguinary chapter of Ethiopian history today evoked by the name of the Derg.
"The prospect," concluded the analysis that appeared under this headline in the Nov. 29, 1974 London Times, "is that the mass executions will be followed by further drastic action aimed at consolidating the control of the new military rulers." The same author, Michael Knipe, had written on Nov. 16 that "the firmness of [the military's] control appears to be matched by an overall moderation of approach, which holds promise for Ethiopia's future."
The Derg long remained a shadowy body, its members largely unknown and its internecine factional politics only guessed-at. The executions this date are generally read as the consolidation of the coup's "radical" elements as against its "moderates" and the first signal event in Derg member Mengistu Haile Mariam's eventual conquest of supreme authority.
The crucial issue that separated radicals from moderates at the revolution's early stage appears to be their approach to the ongoing struggle of coastal Eritrea — then still a province of Ethiopia.
Ethnically Eritrean officer Aman Michael Andom, the first titular head of the Derg who had been deposed from his position only a week ago, was a noteworthy advocate of negotiating a peacable settlement with Eritrean agitators. He was among the casualties of Black Saturday. (Aman was later reported to have been killed resisting arrest, rather than actually executed; many of the available accounts of this massacre have slightly varying numbers and particulars.) Henceforth, military force would be Addis Ababa's only approach to the Eritrean problem.
A few other Aman supporters in the Derg shared his fate in a political wipeout. But more numerous among the 29 civilian and 31 military men announced as casualties the next morning — and there had been no prior warning that executions were imminent — were aristocrats and officials of the Haile Selassie government, including:
Two former Prime Ministers, Endelkachew Makonnen and Aklilu Habte-Wold (or Aklilou Wold), both of whom had been slated for trial for the recent famine in Wollo (London Times, Nov. 14, 1974);**
Solomon Abrahami, the former governor of Wollo;
Selassie's own grandsom, Rear Adm. Iskender (Alexander) Desta;
16 generals, including Selassie's son-in-law (and former Defense Minister) Abiye Abebe.
(This Nov. 25, 1974 New York Times article — behind the paper's pay wall — lists all 60 vicitms.)
These were a selection of some 200 political prisoners held by the Derg; how hard to come down on these officials was another point of contention between radicals and moderates. It emerged later that the Derg had met earlier on the 23rd to vote, name by name, which among its prisoners deserved execution.
So if you look at it right, summarily machine-gunning only 30% of your political prisoners is a moderate policy. Alas: these would hardly be the last.
After the Derg government was itself finally overthrown in 1991 — and the troubled province of Eritrea finally won its independence from Ethiopia — some of the perpetrators of its genocidal atrocities were themselves put on trial.
* It's obscure — perhaps permanently so — whether the nighttime killings transpired before or after the end of the day, and both the 23rd and 24th are variously cited as the date of death. "Reliable sources said the executions were by machine gun at midnight," the unhelpfully breezy New York Times reported on Nov. 25. This account (pdf) has the shootings occupying several batches with midnight passing during the process. We give precedence to Saturday the 23rd here because that's the day that earned the "Bloody" appellation.
** According to Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution, Mengistu was rumored to have disposed of Aklilu personally.
1789: Ann Davis, the first woman hanged at Sydney Cove - 2019
1763: Charles Brown, security consultant - 2018
1901: Willie Louw, Boer commando - 2017
1910: Johan Alfred Ander, the last executed in Sweden - 2016
1825: Angelo Targhini and Leonidas Montanari, carbonari - 2015
Feast of St. Clement - 2014
1955: Elli Barczatis and Karl Laurenz, East Berlin spies - 2013
1739: Seven of nine Williamsburg malefactors - 2012
1867: The Manchester Martyrs - 2011
1499: Perkin Warbeck, Princes in the Tower pretender - 2010
1927: Father Miguel Pro, "Viva Cristo Rey!" - 2008
1910: Hawley Harvey Crippen - 2007
1915: 167 Haitian political prisoners
1979: Two former dictators of Ghana with four of their aides
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Ethiopia,Execution,Famous,Heads of State,History,Mass Executions,Notable Participants,Politicians,Power,Shot,Soldiers,Summary Executions,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1970s, 1974, addis ababa, aklilou wold, aklilu habte-wold, alexander desta, aman andom, bloody saturday, derg, dergue, endelkachew makonnen, eritrean war of independence, haile selassie, iskender desta, iskinder desta, mengistu haile mariam, november 23, solomon abrahami