Word: mariam
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Months before his visit to Africa last week, Chief of Correspondents Henry Muller filed a request for an interview with Ethiopian Leader Mengistu Haile Mariam. Success seemed unlikely. Mengistu has been largely inaccessible to the Western press in the dozen years since he and fellow military officers overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. Muller had reason to hope he might be an exception. Eighteen years earlier, he and his wife Maggie McComas, now an associate editor at FORTUNE, had gone to Ethiopia to teach school as Peace Corps volunteers. Just as Muller was about to embark, word was passed along from Addis...
...capital, Addis Ababa. That slogan expresses the aspirations of those who lead one of the poorest nations on earth. Torn by famine and civil war, Ethiopia (pop. 40 million) has been stumbling from crisis to crisis for more than a decade. Now under Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, who seized power in 1977 after the military ousted Emperor Haile Selassie three years earlier, the ancient African nation is using a complex blend of doctrinaire Marxist-Leninism and old-fashioned nationalism to address its most intractable problems...
...bent on subduing what it calls the "Eritrean bandits." The U.S. backed the Ethiopian regime of the late Emperor Haile Selassie during the early years of the civil war. But U.S. ties with the country all but dissolved after 1977, when Ethiopia's leader, Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, allied his country with the Soviet Union...
...calling the stories "a shockingly big lie" that betrayed the tendency of "high-ranking officials of the Reagen (sic) Administration to go berserk once again on their usually familiar anti-Ethiopian campaign of denigration, disinformation and falsehood." Finally, last week, Ethiopia's Soviet-backed leader, Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, conceded that the mass exodus had indeed taken place--at the command of a misguided local official. The offender would be punished, he said, and the refugees welcomed back to Ibnet...
...full story of the forced move became clearer last week when foreign relief workers at Ibnet informed a visiting delegation of United Nations and Ethiopian officials. The government of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam denied - the accounts. The evacuation, it said, had actually begun a month earlier, with several thousand people leaving each week. The army had not been involved; as for the fire that consumed shelters, officials variously described it as an accident, a precaution against an outbreak of cholera, and the work of a demented arsonist. The authorities insisted that departing refugees were given rations to sustain them...