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Ethiopia: Few Tears for The Tyrant

2 minute read
TIME

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 into a wasteland of famine and internecine fighting. In the streets, hundreds celebrated the tyrant’s departure, cheering as workmen dismantled a huge bronze statue of Lenin in one of the capital’s main squares. The Israeli government took advantage of the confusion to launch a massive airlift of some 14,000 Ethiopian Jews who had fearfully gathered near the Israeli embassy (10,000 had been rescued during a famine in 1984). Using giant C-130 transport planes and 747 jumbo jets, the Israeli military removed the Jews, known as Falashas, in just 33 hours. Israeli and American officials had been attempting to negotiate with Mengistu for the emigration of the Falashas for months.

The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, an amalgam of four rebel groups, advanced to within eight miles of Addis Ababa, but then seemed to heed pleas from Western diplomats not to enter the city pending negotiations scheduled for this week in London on forming a new government. The situation might have been decidedly more tragic had Mengistu not agreed to leave. Though the civil war between his army and the rebels had turned decisively against him, for months the Ethiopian leader had resisted pressure to step down. Only after Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe sent a personal note offering asylum, and after the demoralized Ethiopian army began rapidly disintegrating, did Mengistu agree to depart. The unlamented dictator, whose ubiquitous portraits have already disappeared from most public places in Ethiopia, flew to Zimbabwe, where he had recently purchased a farm.

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