Word: marxist
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...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...
Behind the facade of Marxist rhetoric and trappings lies a host of formidable social and economic woes. Last year's famine took hundreds of thousands of lives and left 4.5 million Ethiopians on the edge of starvation; most are now receiving food aid, thanks largely to Western relief programs. While rains finally broke the drought last summer, much of the population remains undernourished. In the parched northern provinces of Eritrea and Tigre, a simmering civil war is making already harsh conditions even worse. The government's conflict with rebels in those regions has driven out relief workers and blocked food...
...welcomes private foreign investment. At present, most of the country's crops are privately grown and some industry is in private hands. Associates say that from the moment Mengistu became chief of state nine years ago, the Chairman, as he is known, has been a nationalist first and a Marxist second. Now Mengistu is reaching the zenith of his influence at home and abroad. "Ethiopia is the key to the Horn of Africa," says a Western expert, "and Mengistu is the keeper...
Ethiopia's deepest fears center on the U.S. The African nation's leaders are worried that the Reagan Administration may back rebel forces against Addis Ababa, just as it supports contra efforts to oust the Marxist-Leninist Nicaraguan regime. Yet officials in Washington, which provided $282 million in emergency aid to Ethiopia last year, say they have no wish to topple Mengistu. Notes a senior diplomat: "We've told the Ethiopians that we would like to engage in a serious dialogue with them. Every time we propose a place and a time, we are rebuffed...
...meaning. Berger, who was born and educated in Britain, was originally a painter. He became an art critic for the New Statesman, then turned to the full-time writing of poetry, novels (G.), social criticism (Art and Revolution), films (La Salamandre), TV documentaries (Ways of Seeing). An unorthodox Marxist, he now lives in a village in the French Alps (about which he wrote Pig Earth), but he roams far. This collection of essays, his 17th book in a productive quarter- century, includes Berger's impressions of Moscow, New York City, Strasbourg and Istanbul...