# Ethiopian Revolution The collapse of the Ethiopian Empire across 1974 and the military seizure of power that followed. It is unusual among twentieth-century revolutions in having **no revolutionary party at the head of it**: the crowds, strikes and mutinies that brought the monarchy down were led by nobody, and the body that ended up in charge — the [[Derg]] — was assembled out of the army's junior ranks four months after the unrest began. ## How it happened The sequence is a cascade, not a plan: | Date | Event | |---|---| | **18 October 1973** | Jonathan Dimbleby's *The Unknown Famine* airs on Thames Television, documenting the Wollo famine the government had concealed | | **12 January 1974** | Soldiers of the **Negele Borana** garrison mutiny over bad food and lack of drinking water | | **18 February 1974** | Teachers strike over pay; Addis Ababa taxi drivers strike over fuel prices; nationwide protests by students, workers and white-collar employees | | **25 February 1974** | Second Division troops mutiny at **Asmara** and seize the radio station | | **February–April 1974** | Prime Minister Aklilu Habte-Wold falls (sources give both 28 February and 28 April); Muslim protests in Addis Ababa reportedly exceed 100,000 | | **21 June 1974** | The **Derg** is established as the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police and Territorial Army; publicly announced 28 June | | **12 September 1974** | [[Haile Selassie]] is deposed | | **15 September 1974** | The Derg renames itself the **Provisional Military Administrative Council** | | **23 November 1974** | The **Massacre of the Sixty** | | **21 March 1975** | The monarchy is formally abolished | ## The Derg's composition — the part that explains everything after The Derg was built from **three representatives of each of roughly forty military units**, with membership restricted to **privates, NCOs and junior officers no higher than major**. Senior officers were excluded on the grounds that they were compromised by association with the imperial regime. Total membership is contested at **roughly 109 to 120** — the exact figure is unknown because the body operated in secrecy. > [!important] ⭐ A committee designed so that no one in it outranked anyone else has no mechanism for settling a disagreement except violence > The exclusion of senior officers was a sound instinct about the old regime and a catastrophic institutional design. The Derg had no accepted hierarchy, no chairman with independent standing, and no procedure for resolving faction. It produced three chairmen in four months, and settled its final leadership question on **3 February 1977** with a shootout. **Where an organisation has no legitimate way to decide, the decision goes to whoever is most willing to kill.** ## The Massacre of the Sixty On **23 November 1974** the Derg executed sixty people without trial — fifty-four at Kerchele Prison in Addis Ababa and six at the home of chairman General Aman Andom during the shootout that killed him. The dead included two former prime ministers, **Aklilu Habte-Wold** and **Endalkachew Makonnen**, **Ras Asrate Kassa**, a rear admiral and several lieutenant generals. The names were read on Ethiopian Radio the following morning. Until that night the Derg's slogan had been ***Ityopya Tikdem*, "Ethiopia first" — without any bloodshed**. The massacre ended the possibility that this would be a negotiated transition, and it is the moment [[Mengistu Haile Mariam]] emerges as the decisive figure. ## Land to the tiller The revolution's substantive achievement, and the reason it had real support, is **Proclamation No. 31/1975 — Public Ownership of Rural Lands** (effective 4 March 1975, published 29 April). It declared all rural land "the collective property of the Ethiopian people," capped holdings at **10 hectares per farming family**, **abolished landlord-tenant relations outright** — freeing tenants from rent and accumulated debt — prohibited hired agricultural labour, made holdings non-transferable by sale, mortgage or lease, and created tiered **peasant associations** to allocate land and settle disputes. This dismantled in a single instrument the *gult*/*gabar* tenure that [[Menelik II]]'s conquests had imposed on the south and that [[Haile Selassie]] had spent forty years not reforming. **Proclamation No. 47/1975** did the same in the cities: one dwelling per family, all extra houses nationalised, all urban land transferred to the state without compensation, and the creation of the mandatory urban dwellers' associations — the **kebeles** — which two years later became the instrument of the [[Red Terror (Ethiopia)]]. ## The students and the national question The intellectual content of the revolution came from the Ethiopian Student Movement, which had been demanding "land to the tiller" since its first demonstration in **1965**. Its other legacy is a single essay: **Wallelign Mekonnen's "On the Question of Nationalities in Ethiopia,"** published in the student journal *Struggle* in **November 1969**, which argued that Ethiopia was not one nation but a state containing many, and that the movement should support their right to **self-determination**. Wallelign was killed in a failed hijacking in December 1972 at the age of about 24. That essay is the direct intellectual ancestor of the secession clause the [[Tigray People's Liberation Front]] wrote into the 1995 constitution. **The two organisations that would fight the Derg's urban war against each other — the EPRP, founded in West Berlin in April 1972, and MEISON, founded clandestinely in Europe in August 1968 — both came out of the same student milieu**, and disagreed only about whether to work with the military or destroy it. ## Why it matters here **A revolution can be genuinely popular, materially redistributive, and immediately murderous.** The same body that ended a feudal land system that had immiserated most Ethiopians for a century shot sixty officials without charge four months later and industrialised the practice within three years. Neither fact cancels the other, and accounts that keep only one are the ones to distrust. ## See also [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[Derg]] · [[Red Terror (Ethiopia)]] · [[Haile Selassie]] · [[Mengistu Haile Mariam]] · [[Ethiopian Famine of 1983-1985]] · [[Tigray People's Liberation Front]]