Curfew in Addis Ababa starts at midnight, but the shooting in Ethiopia's frightened capital (pop. 1 million) begins long before that. Shortly after sunset, armed members of the city's 291 kebeles (neighborhood associations) take to nearly deserted streets seeking "class enemies of the broad masses" —meaning opponents of the brutal Marxist regime of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam and his military administrative council, known as the Dergue. Scouring slum areas of the capital, kebele patrols kick open doors of mud huts in search of objects that would prove subversive intent. Among them: typewriters and field glasses. Justice is often administered on the spot—with a bullet. Foreign diplomats estimate that perhaps 3,000 people have been murdered since January by kebele cadres in Addis Ababa, and at least that many elsewhere in the country.
Exploding Grenades. TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief Lee Griggs, who was in Addis Ababa last week, reports: "Shooting broke out all over the capital late on Sunday afternoon and continued sporadically for twelve hours. Automatic weapons chattered incessantly, and the crump of exploding grenades punctuated the firing. Cars were banned from the streets, and roadblocks set up to restrict movement by foot. Next day the government-controlled papers announced that 'one anarchist' had been killed—although hundreds of weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition had been confiscated. Local hospitals had been forbidden to give out body counts, but an orderly at Menelik whispered to me in Amharic, 'Bizualee' (There are many). The best guess: 80 to 100 dead."
The massacres—another, in which more than 300 were killed, took place on April 29—reflect the jitters of a besieged regime. From the rebellious northern province of Eritrea to Ethiopia's southeastern frontier with Somalia, Mengistu and the Dergue face the gravest threat to their despotic rule since they overthrew U.S.-backed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. In and around the capital, the main opposition group is the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (E.P.R.P.), a Marxist organization, led primarily by students and young workers, that demands a return to civilian rule. E.P.R.P. has given the Dergue good reason to be nervous: it has assassinated more than 20 government officials, mounted at least one daring raid on
Dergue headquarters, and even wounded Mengistu in an ambush. One rebel sympathizer accosted Correspondent Griggs on a busy downtown street and boasted: "We have 700 marksmen, and some of them are Mengistu's own soldiers. It will take time, but we will clean out the pseudo-Marxist military leaders eventually."