"Another threat to the empire came from Eritrea. Through a mixture of
patronage, devious manoeuvres and intimidation, Haile Selassie managed to
incorporate Eritrea into the empire in 1962, treating it in the same
autocratic manner as the other thirteen provinces of the empire.
Various advantages that Eritreans had enjoyed in the post-war era —
political rights, trade unions, an independent press — were whittled away.
Amharic replaced Tigrinya and Arabic as the official language. Amhara
officials were awarded senior posts in the administration. The principle of
parity between Christians and Muslims, once carefully observed, was
abandoned. The result was a guerrilla war which eventually required a whole
division of Haile Selassie’s troops to contain. The brutal methods of
repression that the Ethiopians employed to hold on to Eritrea, burning and
bombing villages and inflicting reprisals on the civilian population,
served only to alienate increasing numbers of Eritreans, Christians as well
as Muslims, and fan the flames of Eritrean nationalism"
........
"What rescued Mengistu from military defeat was massive intervention by
Soviet and Cuban forces, dispatched to ensure his Marxist regime survived.
In November 1977 the Soviets mounted a huge airlift and sealift to
Ethiopia, ferrying tanks, fighter aircraft, artillery, armoured personnel
carriers and hundreds of military advisers. A Cuban combat force numbering
17,000 joined them. Led by Cuban armour, Ethiopian troops inflicted a
crushing defeat on the Somali forces in the Ogaden. The full might of the
Ethiopian army, backed by the Soviet Union, was then turned on Eritrea. For
the next twelve years, the Soviets continued to underpin Mengistu’s regime,
providing him with $12 billion worth of arms and military equipment"
http://www.rdm.co.za/politics/2014/11/10/a-brief-history-of-africa-s-coups-and-dictators
A brief history of Africa's coups and dictatorsThis is an extract from
Martin Meredith's new book, The Fortunes of Africa, published by Jonathan
Ball
Martin Meredith
10 November 2014
*OUPS AND DICTATORS*
The first upheavals of the independence era were seen as isolated events
rather than as harbingers of a more perilous future. In 1963, Togo’s
autocratic president, Sylvanus Olympio, was shot dead by a group of
ex-servicemen led by a 25-year-old sergeant, Étienne Eyadéma, after he
refused to employ them in the Togolese army.
Olympio’s assassination, marking as it did black Africa’s first coup
d’état, was denounced vociferously throughout Africa, though in Togo itself
there was little mourning.
A spate of coups followed in other francophone states: Dahomey (Benin);
Upper Volta (Burkina Faso); and the Central African Republic. None
attracted much attention. Dahomey was encumbered with every imaginable
difficulty: a small strip of territory jutting inland from the coast, it
was crowded, insolvent and beset by tribal divisions, huge debts,
unemployment, frequent strikes and an unending struggle for power between
three rival political leaders. When the army commander, Colonel Christophe
Soglo, a French army veteran, stepped in to take control in 1965, it seemed
to offer some sense of reprieve. Both Upper Volta and the Central African
Republic were impoverished, landlocked states run by corrupt governments.
In the case of Upper Volta, crowds of demonstrators implored the army
commander, Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana, another French army veteran, to
intervene. Coup leaders like Soglo and Lamizana saw themselves in the
tradition of de Gaulle and the Fifth French Republic, replacing ailing
regimes with a salutary spell of military rule. The coup in the Central
African Republic had more personal overtones.
On learning that his cousin, President David Dacko, intended to replace
him, the army commander, Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a former sergeant in
the French army, seized power instead, explaining: “I gave him valuable
advice which he did not heed.”
Former French colonies seemed especially prone to disorder and civil
strife. French army units stationed in Africa, in accordance with defence
cooperation agreements which France signed with almost all its former
colonies, were called upon time and again for help, often deciding the
outcome of local struggles. When Congo-Brazzaville’s first president, Abbé
Fulbert Youlou, a former priest, asked French troops to crush
demonstrations against his notoriously corrupt regime, de Gaulle turned him
down and told him to resign. When Gabon’s first president, Léon M’ba, was
deposed by a group of dissident officers in 1964, French troops were used
to rout the rebels and reinstate him. A French spokesman explained that it
was not possible “for a few men carrying machine guns to be left free to
seize a presidential palace at any time”.
East Africa had its own set of difficulties. In 1964, armed African gangs
in Zanzibar incited an uprising against the Arab ruling elite, forcing the
sultan to flee in his yacht. Some 5,000 Arabs were killed, thousands more
interned, their homes, property and possessions seized at will. A
revolutionary council, led by Abeid Karume, a former merchant seaman,
appealed for assistance from China, the Soviet Union and East Germany.
Hundreds of communist technicians duly arrived, prompting Western fears
that the island might become an African “Cuba”. On mainland Tanganyika,
Julius Nyerere, worried about the prospect of Zanzibar being drawn directly
into the Cold War and anxious to exert a moderating influence, proposed a
union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar. The union was subsequently named
Tanzania.
Once in power, Karume set out to crush the remaining Arab community.
Thousands were forcibly deported, packed into dhows, some old and
unseaworthy, and sent to the Arabian Gulf. The prosperous Asian community
also became victims. The population at large was subjected to dictatorial
control. Ruling by decree, Karume declared a one-party state and ordered
all adult Zanzibaris to sign up as members of the party. Anyone who
complained, even about food or consumer shortages, was liable to be
denounced as an “enemy of the revolution”.
The revolution in Zanzibar was followed swiftly by a series of mutinies in
Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya, precipitated by grievances over pay,
promotions and the continuing presence of senior British officers rather
than by political resentment of the three governments.
In each case, British troops were required to bring the mutinies to an end.
Whatever the cause, army coups and interventions in Africa became a
familiar occurrence. Within a few years of independence, they spread like a
contagion across the continent striking down not only regimes that were
inherently weak and unstable but afflicting even the giants of Africa.
Under Nkrumah’s leadership, Ghana sank rapidly into a spiral of economic
chaos and decline. His grand design for industrialisation and the
corruption that went with it burdened Ghana with a vast, unwieldy structure
of loss-making state enterprises — factories, steelworks, mining ventures,
shipyards — all weighed down by greedy and incompetent managers appointed
by Nkrumah’s hierarchy. His agricultural policies were equally disastrous.
He favoured mechanised state farms and diverted huge financial resources to
sustain them, neglecting the needs of peasant farmers. His state farms were
an overwhelming failure. Cocoa farmers, meanwhile, were forced to accept
successive cuts in crop prices and saw their incomes reduced by half over a
ten-year period. The mass of the population fared no better: beset by
rising prices, higher taxes and consumer shortages, they suffered
increasing hardship. Food queues became a common sight; hospitals ran short
of drugs. An official survey showed that by 1963 the standard of living of
unskilled urban workers had fallen in real terms to the level of 1939. The
overall result was calamitous. From being one of the most prosperous
tropical countries in the world at the time of independence in 1957, Ghana
by 1965 had become virtually bankrupt.
As public discontent with his regime grew, Nkrumah’s grip over Ghana became
ever tighter. When dock and railway workers went on strike in protest
against the sharp rise in the cost of living, he arrested strike leaders
and imprisoned them without trial. To deal with political dissidents and
critics, he set up special courts to handle political offences, with judges
appointed by himself, from which there was no right of appeal. For his
personal protection, he came increasingly to rely on security personnel
recruited largely from his home district.
Nkrumah’s downfall in the end came not as a result of Ghana’s desperate
economic plight, or high-level corruption, or government mismanagement, but
because of his fatal decision to interfere with the military. His attempt
to subordinate the military to his own purposes and to accord favourable
treatment to the President’s Own Guard Regiment, an elite unit regarded as
his private army, caused deep and dangerous resentments among the officer
corps. In February 1966, while Nkrumah was abroad, Ghana’s generals struck.
On the streets of Accra and Kumasi, large crowds gathered to welcome the
soldiers and celebrated by ripping down the framed photographs which
adorned offices, factories and homes. Outside parliament, Nkrumah’s statue
was battered to the ground and broken into bits.
The decline of Ghana did not stop there, however. Over the next two
decades, a succession of governments, both military and civilian,
engendered further collapse. Cocoa production fell by more than a half
between 1965 and 1983. Food supplies were unpredictable.
Hospitals and clinics lacked drugs and basic equipment. Thousands of
trained teachers and other professionals fled abroad. Encumbered by massive
debts, falling output, endemic corruption and incompetent management, Ghana
by the 1980s had been reduced to little more than a wasteland.
Civilian rule in Nigeria survived for less than six years after
independence.
>From the outset, rival political parties from the country’s three regions
engaged in a ferocious struggle for supremacy over the federal government
and the spoils of office. The North was determined to maintain its
hegemony; the two southern regions sought to break it.
Because each region produced its own political party dominated by the major
ethnic group based there, the struggle turned into ethnic combat.
Politicians on all sides whipped up ethnic fear, suspicion and jealousy for
their own advantage and to entrench themselves in power.
Public funds were regularly commandeered for both political and personal
gain. In return for political support, party and government bosses were
able to provide their followers and friends with jobs, contracts, loans,
scholarships, public amenities and development projects. At every level,
from the federal government to regional government down to local districts
and towns, politicians in office worked the system to ensure that their own
areas and members of their own ethnic group benefited, while opposition
areas suffered from neglect. Election campaigns were increasingly marred by
bribery, fraud and violence.
The end of civilian rule came with sudden and violent finality. In January
1966, spurred by disgust at the flagrantly corrupt and avaricious
manoeuvres of the country’s politicians, a group of young army majors
attempted to mount a revolution. Rebel officers in Lagos murdered the
federal prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, dumping his body in a ditch.
The premier of the Northern Region, the premier of the Western Region, and
several senior army officers were also killed. “Our enemies,” said one of
the leading conspirators in a radio broadcast, “are the political
profiteers, swindlers, the men in the high and low places who seek bribes
and demand ten per cent, those that seek to keep the country divided
permanently so that they can remain in office as ministers and VIPs of
waste, the tribalists, the nepotists.” But the revolution faltered and then
failed. Loyal army commanders took control. Instead of revolution came army
rule and a precipitous slide into civil war. While the January coup was
greeted by scenes of wild rejoicing in the South, it gave rise to deep
suspicions in the North. Northerners noted that all but one of the seven
principal conspirators were Igbos from the Eastern Region, and that many of
the principal victims were from the North while no prominent Easterner had
been touched. Moreover, the result of the coup had been to wrest power from
Northern politicians and to place Nigeria in the hands of a military
government led by an Igbo general. Brooding over the course of events,
Northerners became ever more convinced that the majors’ coup, far from
being an attempt to rid Nigeria of a corrupt regime, was in fact part of an
Igbo conspiracy to gain control.
In July, a group of Northern officers struck back in a counter-coup,
killing scores of Eastern officers and other ranks. In a savage onslaught,
disgruntled Northerners attacked minority Eastern communities living in
segregated quarters — *sabon garis* — in their midst, killing and maiming
thousands. As Easterners sought to escape the violence, a massive exodus to
the East began. Abandoning all their possessions, hundreds of thousands of
Easterners — traders, artisans, clerks and labourers — fled from Northern
homes. From other parts of Nigeria, too, as the climate of fear spread
among Igbos living there, thousands more, including civil servants and
academics, joined the exodus. By the end of the year, more than a million
refugees had sought safety in the East.
Led by the Eastern Region’s ambitious military governor, Colonel Emeka
Ojukwu, an inner circle of Igbo officials began preparing the way for
secession. Revenues from rich oilfields located in the Eastern Region had
made the idea of an independent state an eminently viable proposition.
Starting production in 1958, the oilfields by 1967 provided Nigeria with
nearly a fifth of federal revenue, a figure expected to double within a few
years. To rally the Eastern population behind secession, Ojukwu
relentlessly pumped out radio and press propaganda to keep popular opinion
at fever pitch, stressing details of the atrocities that had taken place
and warning of the dangers of genocide. On 30 May 1967, he proclaimed the
independence of the new state of Biafra amid high jubilation.
The Nigerian civil war lasted for two and a half years and cost nearly a
million lives. As the federal noose tightened around Biafra, starving
refugees sought to survive in fetid camps. Foreign relief agencies, alarmed
by the spectacle of mass starvation, organised an airlift of food and
medical supplies, but their aid was used by Ojukwu to prolong the war.
Despite the appalling suffering of Biafra’s population, Ojukwu remained
intransigent, doggedly holding on to the notion of independence even when
there was nothing to be gained, spurning efforts at international
mediation, and presenting himself as a symbol of heroic resistance. Two
days before Biafra formally surrendered in January 1970, its people
exhausted, demoralised and desperate for peace, he fled into exile
declaring that “whilst I live, Biafra lives”.
In the aftermath of the war, Nigeria was divided into a federation of
nineteen states in an attempt to diffuse the rival power blocs that had led
it to disaster and to allow some minority groups their own representation.
But the same scramble for political control and thewealth that went with it
continued unabated, now fuelled by an ever rising tide of oil money.
In his old age, after ruling Ethiopia first as regent from 1916, then as
emperor from 1930, Haile Selassie found it increasingly difficult to
maintain personal control of his empire. The imperial structure he had
built depended on his decisions alone. Even small administrative matters or
items of petty expenditure required his approval. In his late seventies, he
showed no sign of willingness to loosen his grip on power. Nor would he
discuss the issue of his succession, distrusting the abilities of his son,
the crown prince. His authority remained absolute.
Yet the frailties of old age began to overtake him. He no longer possessed
the energy to master the business of empire. Moreover, the empire itself
was in trouble once more.
In the outer regions of Ethiopia, local rebellions broke out with
increasing frequency during the 1960s. An Oromo revolt in Bale province in
the south, where tribesmen had lost much of their land to armed Amharic
settlers and absentee landlords, lasted for seven years.
Somali insurgents in the Ogaden launched a campaign to drive out the
Ethiopians and link up with Somalia which had gained independence in 1960.
Periodic clashes between Ethiopia and Somali government forces erupted
along the border.
Another threat to the empire came from Eritrea. Through a mixture of
patronage, devious manoeuvres and intimidation, Haile Selassie managed to
incorporate Eritrea into the empire in 1962, treating it in the same
autocratic manner as the other thirteen provinces of the empire.
Various advantages that Eritreans had enjoyed in the post-war era —
political rights, trade unions, an independent press — were whittled away.
Amharic replaced Tigrinya and Arabic as the official language. Amhara
officials were awarded senior posts in the administration. The principle of
parity between Christians and Muslims, once carefully observed, was
abandoned. The result was a guerrilla war which eventually required a whole
division of Haile Selassie’s troops to contain. The brutal methods of
repression that the Ethiopians employed to hold on to Eritrea, burning and
bombing villages and inflicting reprisals on the civilian population,
served only to alienate increasing numbers of Eritreans, Christians as well
as Muslims, and fan the flames of Eritrean nationalism.
Encumbered by Haile Selassie’s growing infirmity, Ethiopia drifted along in
a state of paralysis. Government ministers and leading aristocrats
recognised that the system of government was far too archaic to suit the
modern needs of Ethiopia, but, afraid of displeasing the emperor, they took
no initiative. When drought and famine afflicted the province of Wollo in
1973, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of peasants, the government,
though aware of the disaster, made little attempt to alleviate it. Nor did
it seek help from international agencies, for fear of damaging the
country’s reputation.
In early 1974, discontent within the army over pay and conditions led to a
series of minor mutinies. Simultaneously, a chaotic profusion of strikes
and demonstrations broke out in Addis Ababa and other towns; civil
servants, teachers, students, journalists, even priests and prostitutes,
took to the streets, protesting over pay, rising prices and a multitude of
other grievances.
The old order soon collapsed. A group of radical junior officers formed a
military “committee” or “Derg” and stage by stage began to dismantle the
whole imperial structure, imprisoning ministers, officials and members of
Haile Selassie’s family. In September, three officers arrived at the
emperor’s Grand Palace with a proclamation dethroning him. He was taken
prisoner, confined to rooms in the palace for the rest of his life and
murdered there in August 1975.
Hospitals and clinics lacked drugs and basic equipment. Thousands of
trained teachers and other professionals fled abroad. Encumbered by massive
debts, falling output, endemic corruption and incompetent management, Ghana
by the 1980s had been reduced to little more than a wasteland.
Ethiopia’s revolution, initially accomplished without bloodshed, turned
increasingly violent. An ambitious ordnance officer, Major Mengistu Haile
Mariam, emerged in control and embarked on what he referred to as a
campaign of “red terror” to root out all resistance.
The succession of coups in Africa swept on so rapidly that many episodes
passed by in little more than a blur. In the first two decades of
independence, there were some forty successful coups and countless
attempted coups. Dahomey (Benin), over a period of ten years, went through
six coups, five different constitutions and ten heads of state. Not once
was there an occasion when an African governmentwas peacefully voted out of
office. In justifying their actions, coup leaders invariably referred to
the morass of corruption, mismanagement, tribalism, nepotism and other
malpractices into which previous regimes had sunk. Only the military, it
was said, with their background of discipline and dedication, were in a
position to restore national integrity and bring about a return to honest
and efficient government. On seizing power, coup leaders also emphasised
the strictly temporary nature of military rule. All they required, they
said, was sufficient time to clear up the mess which had prompted them to
intervene in the first place.
A few military regimes were noted for ruling effectively and for their
efforts to root out corruption. But Africa’s military rulers generally
turned out to be no more competent, no more immune to the temptations of
corruption, and no more willing to give up power than the regimes they had
overthrown. The results, in most cases, were disastrous.
In the aftermath of his coup in 1965, General Joseph Mobutu set out to
create a “new Congo” from the shambles it had become after five years of
civil war and political strife. Acting ruthlessly to suppress disorder and
dissent, he managed to impose some form of central control over most parts
of the Congo within a few years. His economic strategy was equally
effective. Inflation was halted, the currency was stabilised, and the giant
copper mining industry was nationalised. In a bid to create a new national
identity, he ordered the country to be known as “Zaire”, a name derived by
the Portuguese from a Kikongo word, *Nzadi*, meaning “vast river”.
But Mobutu then began to turn Zaire into his personal fiefdom.
He established a single national political party, set himself up as its
sole guide and mentor, assumed grand titles and laid down an ideology to
which everyone was instructed to adhere. Year by year, he accumulated vast
personal power, ruling by decree, controlling all appointments and
promotions and deciding on the allocation of government revenues.
He next turned to self-enrichment on a scale hitherto unknown in
independent Africa. In 1973, citing the need to give Zaire greater economic
independence, he ordered the seizure of some 2,000 foreign-owned
enterprises — farms, plantations, ranches, factories, wholesale firms and
retail shops — handing them out without compensation to favoured
individuals. The main beneficiaries were Mobutu and members of his family.
He used the central bank for his own purposes, commandeering whatever funds
he required, funnelling huge sums abroad to buy luxury houses, office
blocks and grand estates in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal,
Italy and other countries. He built himself a huge palace complex costing
$100 million in the depths of the equatorial forest at Gbadolite, a small
village 700 miles north-east of Kinshasa (Leopoldville) that he regarded as
his ancestral home. The airport there was capable of handling supersonic
Concordes which Mobutu often chartered for his trips abroad.
While Mobutu was busy accumulating riches, Zaire plunged ever deeper into
decline and decay. Corruption and embezzlement spread to every level of
society. Civil servants and army officers routinely siphoned off state
funds. Teachers and hospital staff went unpaid for months. Hospitals closed
for lack of medicine and equipment. Most of the rural road network was
unusable for motor traffic. The river transport system disintegrated.
Agricultural production plummeted. Large imports of food were required to
keep the urban population alive. The level of employment fell below that at
independence. Relief agencies estimated that two-fifths of Kinshasa’s
inhabitants suffered from severe malnutrition. The state existed only to
serve the interests of the ruling elite. The mass of the population were
left to fend for themselves.
In the Central African Republic, Jean-Bédel Bokassa’s regime became
renowned not just for its brutality but for extravagance and folly
unsurpassed in Africa at the time. Soon after seizing power in Bangui in
1965, Bokassa promoted himself to the rank of general and began to think in
grandiose terms. He liked to describe himself as an “absolute monarch” and
forbade mention of the words democracy and elections. As well as making
fortunes from diamond and ivory deals, he used government funds to acquire
a string of valuable properties in Europe.
He became obsessed with the career of Napoleon, a general who had become an
emperor, calling him his “guide and inspiration”. In an attempt to emulate
Napoleon, in 1976 he declared the Central African Republic an empire and
himself emperor of its two million people and made elaborate arrangements
for his coronation, using as a model the ceremony in which Napoleon had
crowned himself emperor of France in 1804. No expense was spared. Bokassa
ordered from France all the trappings of a monarchy: a crown of diamonds,
rubies and emeralds; an imperial throne; carriages and thoroughbred horses.
To the strains of Beethoven and Mozart, mixed with the throb of tribal
drums, Bokassa crowned himself emperor at the Palais des Sports Jean-Bédel
Bokassa, on Bokassa Avenue, in December 1977.
The French government, keen to keep Bokassa within the French orbit, picked
up most of the bill.
But Bokassa’s *folie de grandeur*, taking place in a country with few
government services, high infant mortality, widespread illiteracy, only 260
miles of paved roads and in serious economic difficulty, added to a
groundswell of grievances among Bangui’s population. In January 1979,
students demonstrated in protest against an imperial order instructing them
to buy and wear new school uniforms bearing Bokassa’s name and portrait
manufactured by a textile company owned by the Bokassa family and sold
exclusively in their retail stores. The demonstrations were brutally
suppressed by troops, but strikes by teachers and civil servants continued.
When Bokassa’s own car was stoned, he ordered the Imperial Guard to round
up schoolchildren. More than one hundred died in prison in a massacre in
which Bokassa himself participated. In France, the media dubbed Bokassa the
“Butcher of Bangui”.
No longer able to stand the embarrassment of propping up Bokassa’s regime,
the French government decided to remove him and install his cousin, David
Dacko, as president in his place.
Uganda’s fate was to fall victim to two megalomaniac dictators: Milton
Obote and Idi Amin. Like so many other African states, its initial
prospects were promising. Uganda began independence in 1962 with a booming
economy and a carefully constructed federal constitution that allowed the
kingdom of Buganda to exercise a measure of internal autonomy, to retain
its own parliament, the Lukiiko, and monarchic traditions, while the
central government in Kampala remained in effective control nationally. In
a spirit of compromise, the Baganda king, the Kabaka, Sir Edward Mutesa,
was appointed head of state, while Milton Obote, a Langi from the north,
headed a coalition government which included the Baganda royalist party,
the Kabaka Yekka.
>From the outset, however, Obote strove to gain absolute control.
When his plans for a one-party state met resistance, he staged what was in
effect his own coup d’état. In 1966, he ordered the arrest of leading
cabinet ministers, announced he was assuming all powers, abrogated the
constitution, suspended the National Assembly and dismissed the Kabaka as
president. He also appointed a new army commander, Idi Amin, a former
sergeant in the colonial army who had risen to the rank of
lieutenant-colonel with command of his own battalion. When the Lukiiko
tried to oppose Obote’s coup and rallied supporters, Obote ordered Amin to
attack the Kabaka’s palace on Mengo Hill. Several hundred Baganda died in
the assault. The Kabaka managed to escape after climbing a high perimeter
wall and hailing a passing taxi. He spent the rest of his life in exile in
London. His palace, meanwhile, was turned into a base for Amin’s troops. In
1967, Obote completed the rout by abolishing the kingdom of Buganda
altogether.
Obote assumed that Amin would continue to serve him as a loyal and simple
soldier. A man of huge physique, a Kakwa from the West Nile region, he was
virtually illiterate, with no schooling and limited intelligence, but he
possessed a peasant’s cunning and shrewdness.
When Obote began to build up a personal following in the officer corps and
to look for support among the large contingents of Langi and Acholi troops,
Amin matched his manoeuvres by enlisting groups from the West Nile. Amin
struck first, ousting Obote in 1971 while he was on an overseas visit.
Under Amin’s rule, Uganda descended into a nightmare of massacres, murders
and lawlessness. In constant fear of a counter-attack by Obote’s
supporters, he ordered the mass killing of Langi and Acholi police and
troops and let loose special squads to hunt down suspected opponents. No
one was immune. The chief justice was dragged away from the High Court,
never to be seen again. The vice-chancellor of Makerere University
disappeared. The bullet-riddled body of the Anglican archbishop, still in
ecclesiastical robes, was dumped at the mortuary of a Kampala hospital
shortly after he spoke out against Amin’s tyranny. The civil service, once
the most advanced in east Africa, was reduced to a mere shell, its senior
members either purged or escaping to safety abroad. All notion of orderly
government ceased to exist. Amin used the state and its resources simply to
keep himself in power and his army satisfied.
As Uganda sank deeper into disarray, with soaring prices and consumer
shortages, Amin turned vindictively on Uganda’s Asian community. A wealthy
immigrant minority, Asians controlled much of the country’s trade and
industry and were widely disliked. In 1972, Amin ordered the expulsion of
all Asian families with British nationality, handing out their shops,
businesses and properties to his cronies in the army. In the general exodus
of Asians that followed — some 50,000 left in all — Uganda lost a large
proportion of its doctors, dentists, veterinarians, professors and
technicians.
The end of Amin’s regime came in 1979. After falling out with his closest
collaborators, Amin desperately sought a diversion and ordered the army to
invade the Kagera Salient in northern Tanzania, allowing his troops to loot
and plunder at will. Tanzanian forces struck back across the border and
then decided to oust Amin altogether. After brief resistance, Amin
abandoned Kampala and headed for exile, finding refuge in Saudi Arabia.
Amin’s rule had left Uganda ravaged, lawless and bankrupt, with a death
toll put at 250,000. But its ordeal was not yet over. In 1980, Obote
regained power in disputed elections, plunging Uganda into an anarchic
civil war. Obote’s repression was as bad as Amin’s had been.
By the time Obote was overthrown in 1985, Uganda was a wreck.
The discovery of huge oil resources in Libya in 1965 transformed it from an
impoverished backwater into potentially one of the richest states in
Africa. But just when oil revenues began to flow, an army
coup in 1969 brought to power a 27-year-old captain, Muammar Gaddafi, a
Bedouin officer driven by grand ambitions, fierce hatreds and a
pathological penchant for meddling in the affairs of other countries, who
squandered Libya’s fortunes on military hardware and foreign adventures.
His spending spree on military equipment was gargantuan: between 1970 and
1985, the bill amounted to an estimated $29 billion. Among his purchases
were 700 aircraft, submarines and helicopters. He also used Libya’s oil
revenues to support a host of dissident and insurgent groups fighting to
overthrow foreign governments and sent out death squads to murder opponents
living in exile.
His readiness to use proxy violence, assassination and bribery in foreign
lands made him widely feared and detested there.
In Africa, Gaddafi backed Eritrean guerrillas against Haile Selassie’s
regime; Polisario guerrillas fighting to oust Morocco from the Western
Sahara; opposition factions in Niger and Mali; and southern African
liberation movements. When Amin’s army faced defeat in 1979, Gaddafi
dispatched an expeditionary force to Uganda to try to prop him up. He sent
troops to invade the Aozou Strip, a stretch of desert on the border with
Chad, and then used it as a forward base from which to intervene in a civil
war in Chad, hoping to make it part of a new empire. In Libya, meanwhile,
the population endured decades of stifling dictatorship.
>From the outset of Ethiopia’s revolution in 1974, Mengistu Haile Mariam
relentlessly pursued his goal of achieving sole control, eliminating
whatever opposition stood in the way. A dour, secretive man, coming from a
poor background, with little formal education, he was impatient for
revolutionary action. When Derg members met in November 1974 to decide the
fate of some sixty prisoners, mostly officials associated with Haile
Selassie’s regime, it was Mengistu who insisted on ordering their
execution. The following month he proclaimed the advent of Ethiopian
socialism and followed through by nationalising banks, insurance companies,
all large industrial and commercial enterprises, rural land, urban land and
rentable houses and apartments. In a radio and television broadcast in
1976, he announced Marxism-Leninism as Ethiopia’s guiding ideology. He
finally achieved undisputed control of the Derg in 1977 by organising the
killing of seven of his opponents on the committee.
As the revolution rolled on, Ethiopia was engulfed in strife and turmoil.
Landowners, landlords, royalists and aristocrats all raised the banner of
revolt. In one province after another, rebellions against the central
government flared up anew, aggravated by long-held grievances.
Eritrean guerrillas launched a huge offensive in their campaign for
independence, gaining control of much of the countryside. In Addis Ababa,
radical political groups wanting civilian control of the revolution sought
to resist the Derg, assassinating scores of officials and supporters.
Mengistu’s answer to all opposition was brutal repression. In Addis Ababa,
he sent out murder squads to crush civilian activists defying his rule.
Thousands died in his campaign of “red terror”; thousands more were
imprisoned and tortured. In Eritrea, shunning the possibility of a
negotiated settlement, he sent peasant armies to the north, hoping that
sheer numbers would overwhelm the rebels. But he lost further ground there,
including control of major towns, and his position became increasingly
beleaguered. In July 1977, Somalia, taking advantage of Ethiopia’s internal
upheavals, launched a full-scale invasion of the Ogaden.
What rescued Mengistu from military defeat was massive intervention by
Soviet and Cuban forces, dispatched to ensure his Marxist regime survived.
In November 1977 the Soviets mounted a huge airlift and sealift to
Ethiopia, ferrying tanks, fighter aircraft, artillery, armoured personnel
carriers and hundreds of military advisers. A Cuban combat force numbering
17,000 joined them. Led by Cuban armour, Ethiopian troops inflicted a
crushing defeat on the Somali forces in the Ogaden. The full might of the
Ethiopian army, backed by the Soviet Union, was then turned on Eritrea. For
the next twelve years, the Soviets continued to underpin Mengistu’s regime,
providing him with $12 billion worth of arms and military equipment.
Assured of Soviet support, Mengistu adopted an increasingly imperious
manner. At the fourth anniversary celebrations marking the overthrow of
Haile Selassie in 1978, Mengistu sat alone in a gilded armchair covered
with red velvet on a platform in Revolution Square watching a procession of
army units and civilian groups pass before him. “We were supposed to have a
revolution of equality,” recalled one of his ministers. “Now he had become
the new Emperor.”
Received on Mon Nov 10 2014 - 15:38:25 EST