At 11 a.m. last Tuesday, U.S. charge d'affaires Robert Houdek was called to the office of Ethiopian Prime Minister Tesfaye Dinka in Addis Ababa. With tears in his eyes, Tesfaye announced that President Mengistu Haile Mariam had resigned and left the country. The Prime Minister then asked Houdek to arrange a cease-fire between government troops and rebel forces that were at that moment rolling toward the capital.
The Prime Minister was one of the few people to weep for Mengistu, whose brutal 14-year dictatorship -- the last hard-line Marxist-Leninist regime in Africa -- had turned his nation of 51 million people...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
