The revolutionary endgame of political power: the genealogy of ‘red terror’ in Ethiopia

Abstract

This article critically examines the historical genesis and distinctive features of the political violence known as the ‘red terror’ in Ethiopia in the late 1970s. The tragic process and outcome of the political violence of that period in 1977–1979 have differentia specifica features that need a closer and critical investigation. Despite the casual and general comparative references, as well as one-dimensional description with a catch-all universal concept as ‘genocide’, the political violence in Ethiopia has unique and distinguishable features. The Ethiopian ‘red terror’ is differentiable in many aspects from the Rwandan, Kampuchean, Argentinean, Chilean and Indonesian genocides. First, even though the ‘red terror’ was primarily an institutionalised violence wangled by the military derg regime, it was also a complex and intertwined process in which opposition forces had actively engaged in and contributed for; second, the antagonists and protagonists that were interlocked in power struggles were primarily Marxist-oriented forces, including the military derg regime, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party, and the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement; third, the political violence was ideologically justified and legitimised by all parties involved in the struggle as a raison d'être for successful revolutionary transformation to socialism; fourth, the intense political struggle among the groups was uncompromising and puritan in advancing the ‘correct mass line’, in accordance with their respective sectarian political programmes; fifth, anarchic revolutionary justice had prevailed during that period as the judicial system was viewed irrelevant and extraneous in the revolutionary process; sixth, the dead, the injured and the imprisoned were not regarded as victims by their comrades, but as ‘martyrs’ who sacrificed for the revolutionary cause; seventh, the political violence was also complex due to the intra- and inter-party struggle, and as the ‘red terror’ was in some cases indistinguishable from the ‘white terror’; and finally, the formal ‘red terror’ or genocide trials of former high-ranking military derg members somehow brought the acrimonious memory of this period to a historical closure with the conviction, imprisonment, imposition of the death penalty and the controversial pardon for their release from prison in October 2011.