This Friday, May 28, we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the overthrow of the terrorist regime led by Mengistu Hailé Mariam, now in exile. This national holiday truly greets the fall of a 17-year-old tyrannical system, but also the memory of a very special day.
The sun has not yet risen over Addis Ababa. In a week since dictator Mengistu Hailé Mariam quickly left the former imperial palace ahead of the rebels’ progress, residents of the Ethiopian capital have been waiting for the next battle in anxiety. Officially, everything is the same. But when “Red Negus” is out of the game, the status quo can not hold, they know it.
All week we saw incredible things. The day after Mengistu left, on May 22, in the heart of the city, for the first time in twenty years, euphoric protesters danced around the fallen statue of Lenin, unharmed by temporary authorities. That same afternoon, the radio announced that 200 political prisoners would be released, indicating that the new leaders wanted to turn the page to tyranny. The shops reopened, the taxis came out, the main roads were again filled with shoulders covered with the traditional white shawl: life seemed to resume an almost normal course, in a city still besieged and crossed by special forces.
But the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (FPRDE) troops still surrounded Addis Ababa, locked in its height basin. The city was deprived of its refueling routes, and rebel artillery threatened to shoot down any aircraft approaching the international airport. On May 24, in the northern provinces, their ally of the Popular Front led the liberation of the Eritrean Asmara garrison and took definite control of its capital after nearly thirty years of maquis. The so-called “Woyane” (“bandits”) therefore issued an ultimatum for surrender to the successor regime, which had remained in power despite the flight of their leaders. And in general, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen himself, went public and urged them to “enter Addis Ababa to restore order.”
Addis Ababa falls within a few hours
So on May 28, at dawn, a final battle took place between the armed coalition commanded by the Tigray guerrillas who were camped on the periphery and the last loyalist units that clung to official buildings. At half past two, just before dawn, cannon fire began to echo around the anchored camp “Old Guebi”, the former imperial domain occupied by Mengistu until his escape. Decisive battles are engaged. The day breaks when the elite guard in the presidential palace resists for two hours the waves of rebel commands, in uneven but very disciplined uniforms, infiltrated at night. Then the battles move to the airport. The police station, the revolution’s main square and several ministries are taken. The radio fell in turn, from where the rebels sent a message in a loop assuring that they were “with the people”. The rebels, dyed scarves around their heads, then deployed throughout the capital. The shooting stopped in the early afternoon. Addis Ababa falls like this in a few hours.
This crazy morning marks the end of a regime that hung by a thread. The one of “Derg”, first – an abbreviation for “Provisional Military Administrative Committee” in Amharic – a junta of Marxist-Leninist officers who overthrew the old emperor Haile Selassie I on September 12, 1974 and suffocated him under an ether-impregnated pillow a few months later. Then, more personally, more beautifully and cruelly, by Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Hailé Mariam, a cold and somewhat comedian, not yet in his forties, who took over the command of Derg on 3 February 1977 thanks to a coup d’etat internal force and a purge of former comrades .
Mengistu’s undisputed reign had lasted fourteen years when he was exiled by his own staff on May 21, according to a plan hatched by US diplomats, according to Herman Cohen. While he was in London, the conversations became nothing, they made him believe that he would meet the Tigrayan leader Meles Zenawi to resolve the issue from man to man. But after a simple stop in Nairobi, says historian Marc Fontrier, he left his four-engine plane to Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, where his friend Robert Mugabe reserved a villa for him, an income and an immunity. When his regime finally fell on May 28, Mengistu listened to everything on the radio.
The end of a relentless terrorist system
It is this date that is now celebrated in Ethiopia as a national day. And it is celebrated again as such on Friday, despite the current context, where the federal government is at war in Tigray against a TPLF that has officially become a “terrorist” again in the eyes of the federal authorities.
But on May 28, most Ethiopians do not celebrate the victory of one political-military movement over another, but rather celebrate the end of a relentless system of terror in which no difference was tolerated, by an over-militarized society, but economically, militarily and politically at the end of its rope. since the conflict with the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
Now in the 80’s, Mengistu Hailé Mariam still lives in her luxury villa in Harare, with her family and loved ones. For him, memories of May 1991 are now undoubtedly distant, even if he were officially sentenced to death of the country’s justice in 2008, at the end of a river trial of more than ten years for “genocide”. He does not speak in public, but according to those who visited him, the old man has no regrets.
