News from Addis Ababa

From Ethiopia, almost forgotten since the British freed it from the Italians and restored Emperor Haile Selassie to his ancient throne, came a firsthand account last "week of life as the Lion of Judah and his people find it under British protection.

Restoration with Restrictions. Haile Selassie is the nominal sovereign of liberated Ethiopia. The actual chores of governing are handled (through agreement) by British civilian and military commissions.

British judges and assessors sit on the Ethiopian bench. Britons operate the railroad from Addis Ababa to Dire Dawa near the French Somaliland border. British officers control the Ethiopian police force, train Ethiopian soldiers. A British commission controls the Addis Ababa wireless. A British air commission rules the air over Ethiopia. Britain uses, rent free, an estimated $320 to $360 million worth of property left behind by the Italians. A British financial commission helped set up a new Ethiopian state bank. The United Kingdom Commercial Corp. expedites what trade there is.

Haile Selassie also carries on. He retains his great personal sense of dignity, his enormous palace, and a measure of authority over the once rambunctious tribal chieftains of the interior.

Italian Blessings. Brutal in conquest, the Italians were energetic imperialists. Their engineers, with sweating soldier-workmen and native labor, blasted, graded, bridged and finally smoothed 4,340 miles of asphalt and macadam highway over Ethiopia's desert areas, muddy lowlands, rolling valleys, deep ravines and high, broad plateaus. Some 10,000 miles of lesser roads were opened.

Italian architects, stonemasons and carpenters built office buildings, theaters and homes in Addis Ababa. Electrical engineers installed power plants. But Ethiopia is far from modernized. It lacks tractors, plows, harrows to till the rich valleys and lowlands. It lacks trucks to haul wheat, coffee, rubber, cotton into Addis Ababa, to be shipped thence by rail to Djibouti harbor on the Gulf of Aden.

Haile Selassie is looking forward to the arrival of a U.S. Lend-Lease observer, whose job will be to stimulate trade with Ethiopia, and to find out what Ethiopia can contribute to the Allied war effort. The U.S. representative will find the Emperor adamant on one point: he is determined not to allow foreign economic penetration or ownership that might further cloud Ethiopia's sovereignty.

Brigands & Beauties. The old Ethiopia goes its way. Along the new mountain highways, old-fashioned Ethiopian brigands lie in wait for British truck convoys instead of camel caravans, use hand grenades and rifles instead of spears and poisoned arrows. Ethiopians still farm with wooden, wife-drawn plows, still live in filth and squalor.

Addis Ababa is a mixture of the old and the new. British officialdom marches jauntily about the Italian-built offices. Masses of unemployed move aimlessly about the streets. Flea-bitten donkeys mourn past, laden with Ethiopian ladies under umbrellas. Occasionally a slicked-up Ethiopian sport in an appropriated, yellow Alfa-Romeo roadster splits the crowds.

The smart Olympia Cabaret overflows with society. In Addis Ababa British of-fleers and visiting Americans drink and dance with lush Ethiopian beauties, who bridle when they are called "Natives," consider themselves white. For the service of foreigners, an old Ethiopian institution remains intact: the practicing thief who can, on order and for a recompense, procure anything from a gas-tank cap to a tommy gun. Usual time required for delivery: about half an hour.

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