Word: mengistu
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Looking backward, life seems to shine with new promise. The civil war that ravaged Ethiopia for 30 years is over. In the five months since Mengistu Haile Mariam, the country's hard-line Marxist dictator for 14 years, was driven from power, the competing guerrilla bands have achieved a relative peace and joined in a transitional government. The death toll has fallen from 10,000 people a , month to a few hundred. Where torture and disappearances once silenced opposition voices, Ethiopians now feel free to voice their demands and even shout insults at President Meles Zenawi, a democratic exercise...
...trickle as potential Western donors wait to see if Ethiopia's much vaunted turn toward democracy is a genuine renunciation of years of Marxism or just a good sales pitch. The government careens from one crisis to the next -- banditry in the east, smuggling in the west, demobilization of Mengistu's army -- with no road map to guide it. Where most of black Africa has opted to quell tribal rivalry by imposing strict one-party rule, Meles has embarked on a daring multiparty experiment that acknowledges ethnic differences. But many of the country's 70- odd ethnic groups continue...
...something of a miracle, then, that the political center fashioned after Mengistu's flight is holding. Though the interim government is dominated by Meles' Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, its ruling council includes representatives from 35 different parties. Last July it adopted a charter ensuring each ethnic nationality the right to self- determination. Step One -- 12 regional elections to be held by the end of the year -- will pave the way for local autonomy or even secession. Already, the Red Sea province of Eritrea has set up its own provisional government and will hold a United Nations-sponsored referendum...
...points out, in Africa and South America. Ethiopia has suffered its tragic famines, Brown contends, partly because the country's population has outstripped the productive capacity of its fields. But World Bank analysts disagree, arguing that Ethiopia's agricultural failures stem more from the policies of the recently ousted Mengistu regime, which paid farmers rock-bottom prices and created no incentive to conserve resources...
...contracts are renegotiated; their employees are not permitted to travel or to communicate with the outside world. Two weeks ago, without explanation, the front threw out the team from the International Committee of the Red Cross. "There is the feeling," said one aid worker, "that anyone who worked with Mengistu's government is the enemy...