Red Tears, by Dawit Wolde Giorgis

...Although Ethiopia has never experienced long-term colonial rule, it was, by the 1970s, a society ripe for change...

...There would be no more convincing way to demonstrate his commitment to these lofty ideals than to pledge never to help impose Communism on another luckless people and, beyond that, to disengage from those regimes, such as the one that holds sway in Ethopia, which not only preside over, but actually take pride in a system that is inevitably leading their societies to economic and moral ruin...

...A young, educated, progressive-minded military officer, he was an early and avid supporter of the armed forces group that overthrew Haile Selassie in 1974...

...There was famine in Ethiopia for years before we took power—it was the way nature kept the balance...

...We countered this move by having cadres disguised as peasants at the resettlement sites...

...Opposition centered among younger military officers and students, many of them Western-educated and strongly influenced by anti-imperialist and Marxist ideologies...

...When foreigners arrived to ask questions, they could tape anything they liked...

...Eventually, the police were ordered to form a human chain around the capital to keep anyone from entering in search of food...

...What made Mengistu stand out in the early, chaotic, postmonarchy days was his calmness, lack of arrogance, and resoluteness...

...Even worse, Soviet military personnel and truck drivers routinely stole food and other material slated for famine relief—profoundly embarrassing for a regime that was constantly praising the good works of the USSR...

...Earlier, when foreigners would come and talk to peasants about conditions, government-smart journalists recorded the entire conversations and had them translated outside Ethiopia...

...Troops would arrive at a settlement, or, as was sometimes the case, a relief center, indiscriminately round up those peasants unable to escape, and place them in concentration camps...

...Like Stalin, Mengistu first encouraged the famine through state control of agriculture and then, after the hostile peasants had been beaten down byhunger, exploited the tragedy to advance collectivization...

...It goes without saying that this whole obscene enterprise was publicized as a great step forward for the Ethiopian nation...

...In the end, the tactic worked...

...As conditions in the countryside worsened, however, more extreme measures were needed to prevent starving peasants from ruining the spectacle...

...some could barely move their hands...

...As both government official and member of the revolutionary party's central committee, Dawit is the most highly placed member of the Ethiopian Communist government to have defected to the West...

...He has now written an astonishing account of one of the world's great tyrannies, a Stalinist-inspired regime that has sought a massive, overnight transformation of one of Africa's most backward societies...

...Mengistu's ardent embrace of the Soviet system was not motivated solely by ideological conviction...

...As the famine grew more acute by the day, Mengistu's attitude remained unchanged...

...Having invested considerable energy and money (much of it contributed by foreign governments) toward this event—he even imported a delegation of North Koreans to help plan the rallies and pageantry—Mengistu was determined that his country, or at least its capital city, present an image of order and neatness...

...Thus at the famine's height, Mengistu announced a massive resettlement program that would shift millions of peasants from the "overpopulated" northern regions to less crowded and relatively famine-free central and southern sections...

...Mengistu's greatest worry was that revelations of famine would spoil the gala celebration planned for the revolution's tenth anniversary in September 1984...

...he desperately needed Soviet bloc military assistance to prevent the Ethiopian nation's dismemberment by the various secessionist movements...

...We shall go where the government tells us to go...

...When Harry Belafonte and a delegation from USA for Africa visited a relief site: 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 They saw only what was programmed by party officials, who had carefully prepared places for foreign viewing and secretly assigned people they could talk to...

...When Dawit, as chief of famine relief, informed his leader that major problems were in the offing, Mengistu told him not to work too diligently to alleviate the mounting misery in the countryside: Your primary responsibility is to work toward our political objectives...

...In its execution, resettlement was a nightmare, ranking among the worst state-engineered atrocities of the recent past...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 55...

...To other members of the leadership, including Dawit, Mengistu candidly outlined the real motives: accelerating collectivization, splitting up potentially hostile tribal groups, providing a dumping ground for political dissidents and the urban lumpenproletariat, and thinning out the population of rebel areas...

...Moscow and its allies steadfastly declined to contribute more than a pittance to famine relief—going so far as to refuse to attend meetings at which Western donors were present—and only began supplying food and transport assistance when their argument that famine relief was the West's responsibility became the object of world scorn...

...Even then, the Soviets' reputation in Ethiopia suffered because of the behavior of their relief personnel...

...Legesse lectured these emaciated skeletons about Marxism and Leninism, about the establishment of the Party, and about the achievements of the Revolution...

...although Moscow sent twelve cargo planes and twenty-four helicopters, they were unable to move as much food as the Royal Air Force's two cargo craft...

...Dawit records a series of gruesome incidents in which Mengistu, flanked by loyal troops, massacred the rival of the moment and his supporters...

...Naive foreigners left wondering at the intelligence of the peasantry and their intense commitment to the revolution...

...Mengistu soon began comparing Ethiopia's revolution to the Bolshevik original: informed that the nascent Soviet state had been surrounded by fourteen hostile powers, he somehow discovered that embattled Ethiopia was threatened by precisely the same number...

...It was a scene all of us were used to in other contexts, but here in the shelters it was a horrible spectacle...

...others succumbed to diseases and the generally primitive conditions in the resettlement areas...

...Dawit describes a particularly nauseating incident in which Legesse Asfaw, one of Mengistu's more villainous henchmen, de-livered a pep talk to a group of peasants about to embark for their new homes: The weak, the aged, the dying, the children—all were forced to listen...

...Don't let these petty human problems that always exist in transition periods consume you...

...This last trait was crucial, as Mengistu eliminated methodically rivals within the military and among the once-worshipful students as well...

...His cadres scattered among the crowd would tell the people to applaud at certain points...

...The Soviets provided him with desperately needed military aid, and he was also impressed by their ideology, particularly its more infamous dimensions: its ruthlessness and inflexibility toward putative enemies, its time-proven techniques of internal control, and its cults of personality...

...They found the "peasants" cheerful, willing, and in excellent health...

...Long live Mengistu...

...uch cynicism aside, it soon dawned on Mengistu that the famine opened up unprecedented opportunities for the expansion of state power, hitherto largely limited to the major cities, by removing the chief obstacle to collectivization—a robust peasantry...

...As Mengistu's appetite for power grew, so did his pro-Soviet inclinations...

...The old emperor, once revered for his resistance to Mussolini's imperial designs, had grown oblivious to the grinding poverty of his people, who labored under a feudal system that deprived them of land ownership...

...Dawit reports that Soviet relief workers were "lazy and completely unmotivated...

...Initially, Mengistu underestimated the famine's larger usefulness to his collectivization drive and in fact treated it as a nuisance that threatened to detract from the regime's agenda...

...Although not prominent among the soldiers who engineered the coup, Mengistu quickly gained the loyalty of the more politicized soldiers and students, including Dawit, who saw Mengistu as the only military man with the "charisma, energy, or inclination to fight for the changes we thought were necessary...

...Dawit was uniquely positioned to assess Communism's impact on his own society, Ethiopia...

...As a first step, he ordered all undesirables—beggars, prostitutes, street people—removed from Addis Ababa and placed in concentration camps outside the city...

...Dignitaries from the Communist powers and the "nonaligned" movement were expected to be on hand, and Mengistu had chosen the occasion to officially establish a ruling Communist party...

...M engistu's admiration for Soviet achievements took a more sinister turn when he finally got around to dealing with the agricultural problem...

...A visit to North Korea made a powerful impression, and he subsequently borrowed heavily from the techniques of Kim Il Sung...

...From the camps they were packed into buses or huge Soviet Antonov cargo planes, which would transport them to the resettlement sites...

...The clapping was faint and sickly as the peasants tried to obey the cadres...

...While Westerners were now expressing remorse for not responding to Ethiopia's plight more expeditiously, Ethiopia's leader was devising ways to prevent the outside world from learning the full extent of the crisis...

...Mikhail Gorbachev has grown fond of issuing pronouncements about man's common destiny and the universality of humanitarian values...

...Dawit himself credits Soviet arms, advisers, and Cuban troops as crucial to Ethiopia's defeat of Somalia in their 1977 war, while noting that the Soviets allocated their military assistance to ensure longterm Ethiopian dependence...

...At the end of each speech Legesse would shout "Down with Imperialism...

...To foreign audiences, resettlement was presented as a humanitarian policy designed to minimize the impact of future drought...

...On one notable occasion, Mengistu and his followers walked out of a meeting of the military leadership, only to return with security guards who promptly executed the seven remaining anti-Mengistu men...

...Among these was a massive effort to deceive foreign notables lured to the Ethiopian countryside by televised images of dying children...

...We shall overcome nature...

...He subsequently rose to various high posts within the revolutionary government, ultimately serving as director of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC), the agency charged with organizing famine relief during the catastrophic drought of 1984-85...

...Arch Puddington works for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in New York His book, Failed Utopias: Methods of Coercion in Communist Regimes, was published by ICS Press earlier this year...

...foreign guests marveled at how clean and prosperous Addis Ababa appeared, especially in contrast to other Third World capitals, where public evidence of mass poverty was the norm...

...29.95 Arch Puddington In a book that deserves a much wider hearing than it so far has received, Dawit Wolde Giorgis reminds us that if totalitarianism has been the nightmare of the twentieth century, Third World totalitarianism, especially its Communist variants, has been the special curse of the past twenty years...

...More common was family separation, which Dawit estimates affected hundreds of thousands of peasants randomly taken by soldiers to fill resettlement quotas...

...Many died in transit...

...At every slogan, people were expected to raise their fists in the power salute...

...While the military men responsible for the initial coup were not committed to any particular political philosophy, under the insistent urgings of the students they were inevitably drawn to various socialist models—Chinese, Yugoslav, "African...

...Like Stalin in his dealings with the Ukrainian countryside, Mengistu understood that hunger was a potent weapon in the drive for socialism...

...Down with Capitalism...

...The lurch toward an overtly pro-Soviet stance followed the rise of Mengistu Haile Mariam as supreme revolutionary leader...

...As for the Soviet bloc's response to Ethiopia's domestic crises, Dawit describes an attitude of determined indifference...