# Red Terror (Ethiopia) *Qey Shibir* — the [[Derg]]'s campaign of urban political killing, roughly **September 1976 to early 1978**, directed principally at the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party and then at MEISON, the Marxist organisation that had been the Derg's own ally. It is distinct from the Bolshevik Red Terror of 1918, which the Derg was consciously invoking. ## The two Marxist parties, and why one was destroyed after helping Both the EPRP and MEISON came out of the Ethiopian student movement, both were Marxist-Leninist, and both wanted the same end state. They split on a tactic: **MEISON cooperated with the military regime** as the available vehicle for reaching socialism and took government posts; **the EPRP refused, and fought an urban assassination campaign** — which the Derg labelled the "White Terror" — to bring it down. MEISON's reward arrived in **August 1977**. Having concluded that MEISON's membership "was more loyal to the party than it was to the Derg," the regime moved against it; the leadership including chairman **Haile Fida** went underground, was captured, and was executed. > [!important] ⭐ The regime destroyed its collaborators as soon as they stopped being useful, and it did so on a loyalty test no organisation could pass > MEISON's error was not backing the wrong horse. It was believing that a body with no internal rule for settling disagreements would tolerate an organised faction with its own discipline. **A junta cannot share power with a party, because a party is by definition a rival chain of command.** The EPRP's judgment about the Derg was vindicated at the cost of the EPRP's members. ## Chronology | Date | Event | |---|---| | **September 1976** | EPRP militants arrested and executed; EPRP assassination campaign begins; failed attempt on Mengistu, 23 September | | **3 February 1977** | Mengistu takes sole power in a shootout at a Standing Committee meeting; chairman Tafari Benti killed | | **22 March 1977** | House-by-house searches for EPRP members and weapons begin in Addis Ababa | | **26 March 1977** | Nine workers murdered at the Berhanena Selam Printing Press, including a woman in advanced pregnancy | | **17 April 1977** | Mengistu declares the campaign at a public rally, smashing three bottles of blood | | **29 April – 8 May 1977** | First massacre wave — Africa Watch records **732 to over 2,000** killed | | **October 1977** | Second wave, approximately **3,000–4,000** killed | | **December 1977 – February 1978** | Third wave, approximately **5,000** killed in Addis Ababa | **The bottles.** At the rally of 17 April 1977 Mengistu smashed three bottles filled with blood, or something resembling it, to signify the destruction of *imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism*, with the cry "Death to counterrevolutionaries! Death to the EPRP!" The venue is popularly given as Revolution Square; the act and the date are documented, the square is not. ## The machinery The instrument was the **kebele** — the urban dwellers' association created by Proclamation 47/1975 during the [[Ethiopian Revolution]] as a housing-administration body. The Derg armed loyal members as **"Defense of the Revolution Squads,"** which carried out arrests and killings alongside the regular security services. Control was never as total as the machinery implies. Africa Watch and subsequent accounts record squads that "followed their own whim and law," squads infiltrated by the EPRP, squads that prioritised MEISON's targets over the Derg's, and uncoordinated searches in which squads confiscated food, building materials and gasoline for themselves. > [!warning] The practice the campaign is remembered for > Bodies were left in the street, and **relatives had to pay one Ethiopian dollar for each "wasted bullet" in order to have the body returned.** The Save the Children Fund counted over **1,000 children killed, most aged 11 to 13**. ## The casualty figures, and what each one counts > [!warning] The published range spans two orders of magnitude and the numbers are not measuring the same thing > | Figure | Source | What it counts | > |---|---|---| > | **Minimum 10,000 in Addis Ababa in 1977, plus a comparable number in the provinces** | Africa Watch, *Evil Days* (1991) | Documented urban killings — a deliberate floor, wave by wave | > | **~100,000 killed 1977–78** | Britannica | Whole campaign | > | **10,000–150,000** | EBSCO research summary | Deaths attributed to the Derg during the campaign | > | **Up to 500,000** | Amnesty International, as commonly cited | Upper bound; the methodology behind it is not stated in accessible sources | > | **More than 700,000** | African Union human rights memorial | Commemorative figure, no methodology given | > | **10,000–980,000** | The full span of published figures | — | > > **The low figures are careful documentation; the high figures are political estimates.** Averaging them produces a number that describes nothing. Cite Africa Watch's floor and say it is a floor. For context, *Evil Days* separately concluded that the Mengistu government bore direct responsibility for **at least half a million** civilian deaths across 1974–91 as a whole, of which army killings of civilians "undoubtedly exceeds 150,000" — figures that include the [[Ethiopian Famine of 1983-1985]] and the counterinsurgency wars, not the Red Terror alone. ## The reckoning Ethiopia did something almost no post-atrocity state does: it prosecuted, at length, and in public. - The **Special Prosecutor's Office** was created by **Proclamation No. 22/1992 of 8 August 1992**, mandated to prosecute "any person having committed or responsible for the commission of an offense by abusing his position in the party, the government or mass organization under the Dergue-WPE regime." - Trials began **October 1994**. By 1997 the SPO had charged **5,198 officials — 2,246 in custody and 2,952 in absentia**. - Verdicts came **12 December 2006**; proceedings concluded **26 May 2008**. [[Mengistu Haile Mariam]] was convicted of genocide in absentia, sentenced to life in **January 2007**, and had the sentence raised to **death on 26 May 2008**. He has been in Zimbabwe since 1991 and has never served a day. - **Kelbessa Negewo** was convicted in absentia in May 2002 and later extradited from the United States to serve life — one of the few cases where a Red Terror sentence was actually executed on a person. The **Red Terror Martyrs' Memorial Museum** opened in Addis Ababa in **2010**, holding torture instruments, skulls, coffins and victim photographs. > [!important] ⭐ A fourteen-year trial that convicts five thousand people and cannot reach the one who ordered it > The Ethiopian trials are the most extensive domestic atrocity prosecution any African state has attempted, and they are also the clearest demonstration that **prosecution reaches the people who stayed**. Mengistu left, and a friendly government declined to send him back. Compare the Greek junta trials at [[Ethiopian History Hub]]'s sibling case, where the men who ran the dictatorship died in prison because the transition caught them before they could go anywhere. **The variable is not the quality of the court. It is whether the accused is inside the jurisdiction when the verdict lands.** ## See also [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[Derg]] · [[Ethiopian Revolution]] · [[Mengistu Haile Mariam]] · [[Ethiopian Famine of 1983-1985]] · [[Alex de Waal]] · [[Human Rights Watch]] · [[Genocide]]