Farewell to American Arms

Routinely, the state-run TV network in Ethiopia puts on a prime-time horror show intended--quite literally--to terrify the nation's 28 million inhabitants. Shots of racked bodies of political prisoners tortured to death, corpses of dissidents shot down by mobs of armed vigilantes--they all flicker across the screen as evidence of the ruthless determination of what may be one of the most brutal and arbitrary regimes in power today.

It is led by a slim lieutenant colonel with a sharklike grin named Mengistu Haile Mariam. An avowed Marxist, he was one of a coterie of officers who finally deposed Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie in September 1974. Today, at 39, he has emerged as the top man in Ethiopia's 60-member junta, largely by pressing a campaign of arrests and killings that rivals even Ugandan Field Marshal Idi Amin's considerable efforts in this area. Mostly, Mengistu's efforts have been aimed at half a dozen rebel organizations, including a full-fledged guerrilla force fighting for independence in Eritrea, a desert province along the Red Sea coast. While cracking down at home, Mengistu--like other African leftist leaders--has attempted to consolidate his power by cozying up to the Soviet Union. He was especially anxious to court the Kremlin in view of the rapid cooling of the U.S.'s interest in Ethiopia following the junta's ouster of the Emperor, who had received $600 million in American aid between 1945 and 1975.

Last week Mengistu achieved realignment in a single stroke. Declaring that U.S. aid had only helped Selassie to "suppress the liberation struggle of the oppressed masses," the junta expelled all American military advisers, communications experts and information officials. By midweek some 300 Americans had departed within the four-day deadline set by the government. At the same time, the government expelled resident correspondents from the Washington Post, Reuters and Agence France-Presse for "distorting" their reports. All that was left of a U.S. presence that once had numbered some 4,000 advisers, diplomats, technicians and family members were 76 staffers and five Marine guards at the U.S. embassy and the Agency for International Development in Addis Ababa. The regime also closed down six foreign consulates in Asmara, the Eritrean provincial capital: those of Italy, France, Belgium, Britain and Sudan, as well as the U.S. Evidently Mengistu did not want nonsympathetic foreigners in a position to observe the latest phase of his drive against the rebels--an advance by thousands of civilian militiamen equipped with old-model rifles.

Human Rights. Washington professed no great surprise at the near break in Ethiopian-American relations. The break had been foreshadowed in December, when the Soviet Union by all accounts agreed to supply Mengistu's regime with some $100 million in arms. As one State Department official observed, "They couldn't be taking Soviet money and keep walking around in our G.I. fatigues." Although the U.S. has a major radio relay station outside Asmara, Washington had planned to shut down the facility in September and turn its functions over to satellites.

President Carter's emphasis on human rights clearly played a role in the Americans' expulsion. Only last February, after reviewing a State Department report excoriating the Mengistu regime for widespread abuses, the White House withdrew $6 million in military assistance to Ethiopia. Making the gesture a pretext for conclusively switching Ethiopia's allegiance from Washington to Moscow, Mengistu did not appear at all perturbed when the U.S. suspended shipment late last week of another $100 million in arms already pledged to his government.

While Mengistu's move may advance Soviet aims in Africa (see box), it also relieves the U.S. of the moral burden of backing yet another bloodthirsty dictatorship. During February and March alone. Mengistu's forces are said to have killed between 2,000 and 4,000 of their opponents. Getachew Mekasha, former Ethiopian Ambassador to Egypt, who defected in March, reckons that there are 25,000 political prisoners in Ethiopian jails. Says Mekasha, who is now teaching at California's Ambassador College in Pasadena: "The people in power in Addis Ababa today believe in the blind application of force. They use Marxist jargon because it is convenient and in keeping with the trends, but they rule through repression, indiscriminate murder and terror."

Mengistu does little to counteract that image. An erect figure in neatly pressed khakis, he is prone to waving red handkerchiefs, symbolic of blood, and leading crowds in shouting "Down with Yankee imperialism!" on public occasions. In a speech in Addis Ababa's Revolution Square last month, he engaged in one typically colorful bit of theater. First he raised his hand in a clenched-fist salute. Then he smashed to the ground six bottles filled with bloodlike dye--just to show how he would destroy all enemies of his rule.

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