Derg

Based on Wikipedia: Derg

In the summer of 1974, Ethiopian soldiers did something remarkable: they forced their commanding general to eat the same terrible food and drink the same contaminated water they had been surviving on for months. This small act of defiance—holding General Deresse Dubala hostage and making him taste the conditions of ordinary troops—signaled the beginning of one of Africa's bloodiest revolutions.

What followed would transform Ethiopia from one of the world's oldest monarchies into a Marxist dictatorship, unleash a campaign of political murder that killed hundreds of thousands, and create conditions for a famine that starved more than a million people to death.

The architects of this transformation called themselves the Derg.

The Committee That Ate an Empire

The word "Derg" comes from the Amharic language and simply means "committee" or "council." It's a remarkably bland name for a group that would commit such extraordinary violence. Officially, they called themselves the Provisional Military Administrative Council, but everyone just called them the Derg—a word that would become synonymous with state terror in Ethiopian history.

The Derg emerged from chaos. In early 1974, soldiers across Ethiopia were mutinying. The triggers were prosaic: bad food, no water, poor conditions. At the Fourth Brigade base in Nagelle, in southern Ethiopia, frustrated troops arrested their own officers. At the air force base in Bishoftu, more mutinies. At the Second Division headquarters in Asmara, the same story.

These weren't coordinated revolutionary actions. They were desperate acts by neglected men. But they cracked open the facade of Emperor Haile Selassie's ancient regime.

The civilian government, paralyzed by these military rebellions, proved utterly incapable of restoring order. Into this vacuum stepped a group of junior and mid-level officers who announced the formation of a coordinating committee on June 28, 1974. They claimed they just wanted to maintain law and order.

They were lying, of course. Or perhaps they didn't yet know what they would become.

An Unusual Revolutionary Body

The Derg had a peculiar structure. It drew representatives from forty different military units—the army, air force, navy, imperial guard, territorial forces, and police. Each unit sent three people: a private, a non-commissioned officer, and a junior officer up to the rank of major. Senior officers were explicitly excluded. As the Ethiopian historian Bahru Zewde noted, they were "deemed too compromised by close association to the regime."

This meant the Derg was composed of men who knew how to take orders, not give them. Men who had spent their careers watching corruption from below. Men with grievances but without the diplomatic instincts of those who had navigated the imperial court.

How many were there? The Derg deliberately cultivated secrecy, and for years the number "120" circulated. The actual figure was lower—probably around 109 members. No new members were ever admitted after the initial formation, which meant the Derg gradually shrank over time as members were expelled, executed, or killed in the factional violence that would consume the committee itself.

They elected a chairman: Major Mengistu Haile Mariam. This name would become infamous.

The Emperor Falls

Emperor Haile Selassie was no ordinary monarch. He claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—a lineage supposedly stretching back three thousand years. He had ruled Ethiopia since 1930, survived an Italian occupation during World War II, and positioned himself as a father figure of African independence. When the Organization of African Unity was founded in 1963, it placed its headquarters in his capital, Addis Ababa.

But by 1974, Haile Selassie was eighty-two years old and increasingly out of touch. A devastating famine in 1973 had killed perhaps 200,000 people in the northern provinces, and the imperial government had tried to hide it from the world. When footage of starving Ethiopians was broadcast internationally, the contrast with the emperor's lavish lifestyle became impossible to ignore.

The Derg moved methodically. In July, they extracted from the aging emperor the power to arrest not just military officers but government officials at any level. They used this authority immediately, imprisoning both former prime ministers, most of the cabinet, regional governors, military commanders, and courtiers. They were dismantling the imperial state piece by piece.

On September 12, 1974, the Derg deposed Haile Selassie. Three days later, they renamed themselves the Provisional Military Administrative Council and took full control.

The emperor who had ruled for forty-four years was driven away from his palace in a Volkswagen Beetle—a deliberately humiliating choice of vehicle.

An Ideology Found, Not Chosen

Here is something crucial to understand about the Derg: they didn't start as Marxists. In their early months, their only clear ideology was Ethiopian nationalism. They knew they were against the old feudal system, against the corruption of the imperial court, against the vast inequalities of Ethiopian society. But they didn't have a coherent vision of what should replace it.

That vision came from outside—from Ethiopian leftists who had been studying abroad, from student radicals who had been organizing underground, from intellectuals who returned to Ethiopia in the summer of 1974 sensing that history was being made. These activists brought with them the language and framework of Marxism-Leninism, and the Derg adopted it wholesale.

In March 1975, the Derg formally abolished the monarchy and declared Ethiopia a socialist state. They announced a sweeping land reform program under the slogan "Land to the Tiller." All rural land was nationalized. Tenancy was abolished. Peasants were put in charge of redistributing property.

On paper, it was one of the most radical land reforms in history—more extreme, in some ways, than what the Soviet Union or China had attempted. Students and urban activists were sent to the countryside to help implement it, in campaigns that consciously echoed Mao's Cultural Revolution.

But reality proved more complicated than slogans. By 1980, state farms and cooperatives accounted for only six percent of agricultural output. The grand transformation of Ethiopian agriculture never materialized. What did materialize was violence.

The Massacre of the Sixty

The Derg's first chairman wasn't Mengistu. It was Lieutenant General Aman Andom, a popular military leader who had trained at Sandhurst, the prestigious British military academy. The Derg chose him partly for his credibility, partly because they initially planned to restore the monarchy as a constitutional system under Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen, who was receiving medical treatment in Europe.

That plan died quickly. General Aman clashed with the Derg's radical faction over two issues: he opposed a major new military offensive against Eritrean separatists, and he resisted proposals to execute high officials from Haile Selassie's government.

The radicals won.

On November 23, 1974, after neutralizing military units loyal to Aman, the Derg removed him from power and killed him. The circumstances remain disputed—some accounts say he died in a shootout at his home, others that he was executed. What is not disputed is what happened next: the Derg executed sixty former officials of the imperial government in a single night.

This event, known as the Massacre of the Sixty, sent an unmistakable message. The Derg would not negotiate with the old order. It would eliminate it.

Death of an Emperor

Haile Selassie was held prisoner in his own capital. On August 27, 1975, he died under what official accounts called "natural circumstances"—specifically, complications from a prostate operation. His personal physician, notably, was absent at the time.

Almost no one believes the official story. The widespread assumption is that Mengistu ordered his murder, though whether the execution was delegated or personal remains unknown. The emperor's body was reportedly buried beneath a toilet in the palace grounds—a final degradation of the man who had claimed to be the Lion of Judah.

Years later, after the Derg fell, his remains were exhumed and eventually given a proper burial in 2000, a quarter century after his death.

The Red Terror

The Derg did not have a monopoly on revolutionary violence. Several other Marxist-Leninist groups also sought to lead Ethiopia's transformation, and they were not content to let a military junta claim that role. The most significant was the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party, known by its acronym EPRP.

The EPRP wanted democratic elections and a people's republic—not military rule masquerading as socialism. They began assassinating Derg members and supporters. Mengistu himself survived an assassination attempt on September 23, 1976.

The Derg's response was the Red Terror, or in Amharic, Qey Shibir. This was not a metaphor. It was an explicit policy of revolutionary violence modeled on the terror campaigns of the Russian and French revolutions—the intentional use of mass killing to eliminate opposition and instill fear.

The numbers are staggering. Over roughly two years, from 1976 to 1978, the Red Terror killed somewhere between 30,000 and 500,000 people. Some estimates run as high as 980,000. The variation in these figures reflects the chaos of the period and the Derg's deliberate destruction of records, but even the lowest estimates describe one of the worst political massacres in African history.

Victims were shot in the streets. Bodies were left on roadsides as warnings. Families were sometimes required to pay for the bullets used to execute their relatives before they could retrieve the corpses. In some cases, entire families were killed together.

The Derg established a secret police force called the Central Revolutionary Investigation Department to identify enemies. Neighborhood committees called kebeles, originally created to implement land reform and distribute rations, became instruments of surveillance and denunciation.

Mengistu Takes Full Control

Mengistu Haile Mariam did not become the undisputed leader of the Derg until February 3, 1977. On that day, a factional dispute within the committee turned into a gunfight. Chairman Tafari Benti was killed. The vice chairman, Atnafu Abate, survived—but not for long.

Atnafu disagreed with Mengistu about how to handle the war in Eritrea. This disagreement proved fatal. In November 1977, Mengistu had Atnafu and forty other officers executed. The justification was that Atnafu had "placed the interests of Ethiopia above the interests of socialism"—a remarkable formulation that reveals how thoroughly ideology had displaced any other consideration.

After eliminating his rivals, Mengistu intensified the Red Terror. According to Amnesty International, about 500,000 people were killed after he consolidated power—more than in the earlier phase of the campaign.

Observers who met Mengistu during this period often remarked on his calm demeanor. He projected what one account called "a cool realism." He had grown up in poverty, served in the military since his teens, and traveled extensively within Ethiopia. He understood the country's regional diversity. He was also, by any reasonable definition, a mass murderer.

The Transformation of Ethiopian Society

The Derg's revolution extended far beyond political violence. They attempted to fundamentally restructure Ethiopian society.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which had been the official state religion for some 1,600 years, was disestablished. The Derg declared a policy of state atheism, following standard Marxist-Leninist doctrine. This put them at odds with the vast majority of Ethiopians, who remained deeply religious.

Education was expanded dramatically. Literacy campaigns reached rural areas that had never had schools. The Derg genuinely believed that an educated population would embrace socialism.

Industries were nationalized. Urban real estate was seized. The housing law led to an odd result: because landlords could no longer profit from rental properties, construction of new housing essentially stopped, creating shortages that the government's redistribution programs could not address.

Workers in factories initially hoped the revolution would give them control over production—a key promise of socialist ideology. The Derg crushed these hopes. Strikes had been illegal since the junta took power, and the 1975 Labor Code formalized the prohibition. The workers' revolution would be managed by the state, not by workers.

Wars on Every Front

The Derg inherited an empire, and empires have restive peripheries. Eritrea, a former Italian colony that had been federated with Ethiopia in 1952 and then annexed outright in 1962, had been fighting for independence since the 1960s. The Tigray region in the north had its own grievances and its own guerrilla movement. Ethnic Somalis in the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia looked toward neighboring Somalia.

In 1977, Somalia invaded the Ogaden, seeking to unite ethnic Somalis under one flag. The timing seemed perfect: Ethiopia was consumed by internal chaos, and the Derg had alienated its American military suppliers by embracing Soviet-style socialism. But the Cold War had its own logic. The Soviet Union, seeing an opportunity to gain a more strategically valuable ally, switched sides from Somalia to Ethiopia. Cuban troops arrived to support the Derg. By 1978, Somalia was defeated.

The victory in the Ogaden did not bring peace. The wars in Eritrea and Tigray ground on. By 1976, insurgencies existed in all fourteen of Ethiopia's administrative regions. The Derg could never pacify the country it claimed to rule.

Famine

Ethiopia's geography makes it vulnerable to drought. The highlands where most of the population lives depend on seasonal rains that sometimes fail. But the famine of 1983-1985 was not simply a natural disaster. It was a catastrophe shaped by policy.

The Derg's agricultural collectivization had disrupted traditional farming. The constant warfare consumed resources that might have gone to development. When drought struck, the government's response was slow and inadequate. Worse, the Derg used food as a weapon, restricting supplies to rebellious regions.

International attention came through a BBC report in October 1984 that showed images of starving Ethiopians. The footage prompted the Live Aid concert in 1985, which raised tens of millions of dollars for famine relief. But much of that aid was manipulated by the Derg, which used food distribution to control populations and force resettlement from rebel-held areas.

The Derg itself estimated that more than a million people died during the famine. Other estimates run higher. Whatever the true number, it represented a failure of governance on a massive scale—made worse by a government that prioritized military spending and ideological programs over feeding its people.

The People's Democratic Republic

In 1987, Mengistu formally dissolved the Derg and proclaimed a new state: the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. A new constitution was promulgated. The Workers' Party of Ethiopia, modeled on communist parties in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, became the sole legal political organization.

This was supposed to represent a transition from military to civilian rule. It was largely cosmetic. Mengistu became both Secretary-General of the party and President of the republic. Former Derg members filled key posts in the government, the party's central committee, and its politburo. The same people remained in charge, wearing different hats.

Mengistu also retained his position as Commander in Chief of the armed forces. He remained, as one observer put it, "the undisputed totalitarian dictator of Ethiopia."

The Fall

The Derg's end came from multiple directions at once. The Eritrean and Tigrayan rebel movements grew stronger through the 1980s. The economy continued to deteriorate. And in 1989, the Cold War ended.

This last factor was decisive. The Soviet Union had been propping up the Derg with military aid worth billions of dollars. When that support evaporated, Mengistu's military position became untenable. The rebel Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, a coalition dominated by Tigrayan forces, advanced on Addis Ababa.

On May 21, 1991, Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe, where the government of Robert Mugabe granted him asylum. He remains there today, having been convicted in absentia of genocide by an Ethiopian court in 2006.

A week after Mengistu's flight, rebel forces entered the capital. The Derg regime, which had ruled for seventeen years and killed hundreds of thousands, was finished.

The Reckoning

The new government established a special prosecutor's office to investigate crimes committed during the Derg period. The resulting trials took more than a decade. In 2006, Mengistu and dozens of former officials were found guilty of genocide and other crimes. Mengistu received a death sentence, later confirmed, though Zimbabwe has consistently refused to extradite him.

Ethiopia has struggled with the Derg's legacy ever since. The ethnic federalism adopted after 1991 was partly a reaction against the Derg's centralization. The emphasis on regional autonomy reflected lessons learned from decades of civil war. Yet those same structures have created new tensions, as Ethiopia experienced in the Tigray War that began in 2020.

The Derg left behind a traumatized society. A generation of educated Ethiopians had been killed or driven into exile. Institutions had been hollowed out. Trust in government had been shattered. The physical and psychological scars remained long after the regime itself was gone.

Understanding the Derg

How should we understand the Derg? They were not uniquely evil—the twentieth century produced many regimes that killed on similar scales. They were not uniquely incompetent—other revolutionary governments have created famines and economic disasters. They were, in many ways, typical of what happens when military officers with grievances but without governing experience seize power and adopt a totalitarian ideology.

The Derg believed they were building a better society. They genuinely thought that land reform would liberate peasants, that literacy campaigns would enlighten the masses, that socialism would create prosperity and equality. They were wrong, and their certainty that they were right made them unwilling to change course even as evidence of failure accumulated.

They also faced real enemies—the imperial system they overthrew had been genuinely corrupt and oppressive, and the various armed groups fighting them were not always paragons of virtue. But the Derg's response to these challenges was wildly disproportionate. They reached for violence first and always, until violence became not just a tool but a way of governing.

The word "Derg" still carries weight in Ethiopia. It evokes fear and anger, loss and trauma. It serves as a warning about what happens when armed men convinced of their own righteousness take power and refuse to let it go.

A committee of soldiers who made a general eat their food ended up killing a million of their own people. That trajectory—from legitimate grievance to revolutionary idealism to mass murder—is worth remembering. It has happened before. It will happen again.