Word: mengistu
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...slim lieutenant colonel with a sharklike grin named Mengistu Haile Mariam. An avowed Marxist, he was one of a coterie of officers who finally deposed Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie in September 1974. Today, at 39, he has emerged as the top man in Ethiopia's 60-member junta, largely by pressing a campaign of arrests and killings that rivals even Ugandan Field Marshal Idi Amin's considerable efforts in this area. Mostly, Mengistu's efforts have been aimed at half a dozen rebel organizations, including a full-fledged guerrilla force fighting for independence in Eritrea...
Last week Mengistu achieved realignment in a single stroke. Declaring that U.S. aid had only helped Selassie to "suppress the liberation struggle of the oppressed masses," the junta expelled all American military advisers, communications experts and information officials. By midweek some 300 Americans had departed within the four-day deadline set by the government. At the same time, the government expelled resident correspondents from the Washington Post, Reuters and Agence France-Presse for "distorting" their reports. All that was left of a U.S. presence that once had numbered some 4,000 advisers, diplomats, technicians and family members were 76 staffers...
Human Rights. Washington professed no great surprise at the near break in Ethiopian-American relations. The break had been foreshadowed in December, when the Soviet Union by all accounts agreed to supply Mengistu's regime with some $100 million in arms. As one State Department official observed, "They couldn't be taking Soviet money and keep walking around in our G.I. fatigues." Although the U.S. has a major radio relay station outside Asmara, Washington had planned to shut down the facility in September and turn its functions over to satellites...
President Carter's emphasis on human rights clearly played a role in the Americans' expulsion. Only last February, after reviewing a State Department report excoriating the Mengistu regime for widespread abuses, the White House withdrew $6 million in military assistance to Ethiopia. Making the gesture a pretext for conclusively switching Ethiopia's allegiance from Washington to Moscow, Mengistu did not appear at all perturbed when the U.S. suspended shipment late last week of another $100 million in arms already pledged to his government...
...Ababa last week, Castro had already stopped in Algeria, Libya, South Yemen and Somalia, a desert land where Soviet influence is particularly strong. From there, he proceeded to Ethiopia, Somalia's neighbor and archenemy. His presence in Addis Ababa must have pleased the current military boss, Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, since Castro is the first head of state to visit Ethiopia since the country's squabbling junta (known as the Dergue) dumped the late Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. Mengistu was believed to have asked Castro for military aid, but there were no indications of how Castro...