Ethiopia’s history is in some respects the history of mankind. Bones discovered in eastern Ethiopia dated back 3.2 million years, making them some of the earliest ever found. Ethiopia is the oldest independent country in Africa and one of the oldest in the world. According to legend, Menelik I, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, founded the Ethiopian Empire.
The first Ethiopian kingdom, based on documentary evidence, is that of Aksum (Axum), which probably emerged in the 2nd Century. Aksum controlled much of the Red Sea coast and had links with the Mediterranean world. Under King Ezana, Aksum was converted in the 4th Century to Christianity by Frumentius of Tyre. In the 6th Century, Jewish influence penetrated Aksum, and some Ethiopians were converted to Judaism.
With the rise of Islam in the 7th Century, Aksum began to decline, mainly because its land contacts with the Byzantine Empire were severed and its control of the Red Sea trade routes ended. Largely cut off from the outside world, Aksum unraveled, and Ethiopia lapsed into a period of competition among competing groups.
In 1530–31, Ahmad Gran, a Muslim Somali leader, conquered much of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian emperor Lebna Dengel appealed to Portugal for help against the Somalis. The Somali war exhausted Ethiopia, ending a period of cultural revival and exposing the empire to incursions by the Oromo. For the next two centuries, the Ethiopian kingdom was torn apart by civil wars and attacks by the Oromo.
The reunification of Ethiopia in the 19th Century came about under Lij Kasa, who conquered Amhara, Gojjam, Tigray, and Shoa. In 1855 he was crowned emperor as Tewodros II and began to modernize and centralize the legal and administrative systems. Tensions developed with Great Britain, and Tewodros imprisoned several Britons, including the British consul. A British military expedition was sent out, and the emperor’s forces were easily defeated near Magdala (now Amba Mariam) in 1868. To avoid capture, Tewodros committed suicide.
A brief civil war followed, and in 1872 a chieftain of Tigray became emperor as John (Yohannes) IV. John’s attempts to further centralize the government led to revolts by local leaders. His regime was threatened during 1875–76 by Egyptian incursions and, after 1881, by raids by followers of the Mahdi in Sudan. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 increased the strategic importance of Ethiopia, and several European powers (particularly Italy, France, and Great Britain) sought influence in the area. In 1889, John was killed fighting the Mahdists, and, following a short succession crisis, the king of Shoa (who had Italian support) was crowned emperor as Menelik II.
Menelik signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Italy in 1889. Due to a dispute over the meaning of the treaty (Italy claimed it had been given a protectorate over Ethiopia, which Menelik denied), Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1895, but was defeated by Menelik’s forces at Adwa on March 1, 1896. Italy was forced to recognizing the independence of Ethiopia, while retaining its Eritrean colonial base.
During his reign, Menelik greatly expanded the size of Ethiopia, adding the provinces of Harar, Sidamo and Kaffa. In addition, he modernized the military and the government, made Addis Ababa the capital, developed the economy, and promoted the building of the country’s first railroad, with the help of financing from France.
Menelik died in 1913 and was succeeded by his grandson, Lij Iyasu, who alienated his fellow countrymen by favoring Muslims, and antagonized the British, French, and Italians through his support of Germany and Austria-Hungary during World War I. Lij Iyasu was deposed in 1916 and Judith (Zawditu), a daughter of Menelik, was made empress with Ras Tafari Makonnen as regent and heir apparent. During the 1920s, there was tension with Italy and Great Britain, as each tried to extend its influence in Ethiopia. Ras Tafari was given additional powers by the empress in 1928, and upon her death in 1930, he was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God.
Almost immediately, Haile Selassie faced threats from Italy’s ruler, Benito Mussolini, who was determined to establish an Italian empire and to avenge the defeat at Adwa. A border clash at Welwel, along the border with Italian Somaliland, on Dec. 5, 1934, increased tensions, and on Oct. 3, 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. The League of Nations (which Ethiopia had joined in 1923) called for mild economic sanctions against Italy, but they had little effect, and an attempt by the British and French governments to arrange a settlement by giving Italy much of Ethiopia failed. The Italians quickly defeated the Ethiopians, and in May, 1936, Addis Ababa was captured and Haile Selassie fled the country. On June 1, 1936, the king of Italy was also made emperor of Ethiopia. The country was combined with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland to form Italian East Africa.
On June 30, 1936, Haile Selassie appeared at the General Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva and gave a
dramatic speech on behalf of the Ethiopian people in which he detailed the atrocities committed by the Italians, including the use of chemical weapons, and appealed to the world community to save his nation, concluding, “What reply shall I take back to my people?” Haile Selassie was instantly transformed into an international celebrity and a symbol of the war against Fascism. After British and Ethiopian troops drove out the Italians, he returned to Ethiopia in 1941 and, after World War II, Ethiopia became a charter member of the United Nations.
Unbeknownst to Haile Selassie, thousands of miles away on the island of Jamaica, four ministers, inspired by his list of titles, created the Rastafarian movement, a religion that worshipped Haile Selassie as God incarnate. In 1961 a delegation of Rastafarians traveled to Ethiopia for the first time and met with the archbishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, who told them that Haile Selassie considered himself a man just like them and that he would be upset if he learned that they considered him God. Far from being discouraged, the Rastafarians were convinced that this humility on Haile Selassie’s part was proof of his divinity. In 1966, he agreed to visit Jamaica. When Haile Selassie landed at the international airport in Kingston on April 21, more than 100,000 Rastafarians swarmed all over the airfield and the official government welcoming ceremony had to be canceled. Haile Selassie had to be convinced that his life was not in danger before he would deplane. He was unable to persuade the Rastas that he was not God, but as a gesture he donated land in Ethiopia for the Rastafarians to establish a community.
Great Britain had considerable influence in Ethiopian affairs until the end of WWII and administered the small Haud region in the southeast (adjacent to present-day Somalia) until 1955. Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia in 1952, giving Ethiopian access to the Red Sea.
Despite considerable aid from the United States and other countries, Ethiopia remained economically underdeveloped, with its wealth concentrated in the hands of a small number of large landlords and the Ethiopian church. A coup in 1960 lasted only a few days before Haile Selassie was returned to power. Between 1961 and 1967 there were border skirmishes between Ethiopia and Somalia, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was considerable fighting between the government and a guerrilla secessionist movement in Eritrea. In 1966, Haile Selassie instituted several reforms, including the granting of more power to the cabinet. But unrest continued among groups seeking more far-reaching reforms.
After a period of civil unrest, which began in February 1974, the aging Haile Selassie was deposed on September 12, 1974, and a provisional administrative council of soldiers, known as the Dergue (“committee”) seized power from the emperor and installed a government, which was socialist in name and military in style. The Dergue summarily executed 59 members of the royal family and ministers and generals of the emperor’s government; Emperor Haile Selassie was strangled in the basement of his palace on August 22, 1975.
Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam assumed power as head of state and Dergue chairman, after having his two predecessors killed. Mengistu’s years in office were marked by a totalitarian-style government and the country’s massive militarization, financed by the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and assisted by Cuba. From 1977 through early 1978 thousands of suspected enemies of the Dergue were tortured and/or killed in a purge called the “red terror.” Communism was officially adopted during the late 1970s and early 1980s with the promulgation of a Soviet-style constitution, Politburo, and the creation of the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia (WPE).
In December 1976, an Ethiopian delegation in Moscow signed a military assistance agreement with the Soviet Union. The following April, Ethiopia abrogated its military assistance agreement with the United States and expelled the American military missions. In July 1977, sensing the disarray in Ethiopia, Somalia attacked across the Ogaden Desert in pursuit of its claims to the ethnic Somali areas of Ethiopia. Ethiopian forces were driven back deep inside their own frontier but, with the assistance of a massive Soviet airlift of arms and Cuban combat forces, they stemmed the attack. The major Somali regular units were forced out of the Ogaden in March 1978.
The rule of the Dergue was weakened by droughts and famine that tormented Ethiopians during the 1980s. Insurrections cropped up, particularly in the northern regions of Tigray and Eritrea. In 1989, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) merged with other opposition movements to form the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). In May 1991, EPRDF forces advanced on Addis Ababa. Mengistu fled the country for asylum in Zimbabwe. As Addis Ababa descended into chaos, the US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen, encouraged the EPRDF to enter the capital “to stabilize the situation,” which they proceeded to do without hesitation.
The Ethiopians were glad to be rid of Mengistu, but the “situation” was not so simple. Traditionally, the capital, not to mention the central government itself, had been dominated by the Amhara people. But the new “interim” president, Meles Zenawi, was a Tigrayan, an ethnic group from the far north of Ethiopia that made up only 6% of the nation’s population. Protesters threw stones at the US embassy and called the change of government “Cohen’s coup.”
Many Ethiopians were also infuriated when Meles Zenawi gave his blessing to Eritrean independence, which turned Ethiopia into a landlocked nation. Meles, who might have been satisfied to have secured independence for his Tigrayan people, now found himself the leader of the entire nation of Ethiopia (minus Eritrea). Although he pledged to turn Ethiopia into a multi-party democracy, staying in power was too hard to resist. Still, he knew that to keep the financial and military support of Europe and the United States, he needed to create an appearance of a multi-ethnic democracy. In regional elections in 1992, he outlawed the Oromo Liberation Front, which represented Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, the Oromos. By 1994, he was ready to put on a better show. Meles proudly bragged that 39 different political organizations, representing all the major ethnic groups, took part in the June 5 election. In fact, what he had done was to create for each ethnic group a puppet party that supported his government. All of the real opposition parties boycotted the election. In the Ogaden region, where ethnic Somalis continued to wage a war of secession, the elections were not held at all.
In 1998 one of the most useless wars in recent history broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea. When Eritrea gained its independence, there were three small areas where the border was left undefined. On May 6, 1998, a few soldiers from Eritrea crossed into the Badme region, one of the disputed zones, and engaged in a brief firefight with local militia in the Tigray Province of Ethiopia. Considering that the leaders of the two countries were once close allies, the incident should have been resolved peacefully and easily. But both Ethiopia’s Meles and Eritrea’s Isaias Afewerki were facing major political problems at home, and both could use a war for their own benefit, even it would prove ruinous for their people. Meles, who was still viewed with resentment by many Ethiopians for giving away Eritrea, saw a chance to prove that he was a true Ethiopian patriot. Isaias whipped up similar patriotic sentiment to distract attention from the miserable state of the Eritrean economy. The fighting quickly escalated into a full-scale war, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and leaving tens of thousands of soldiers dead. In May 2000, Ethiopian troops cut one of the Eritrean army’s main supply lines and occupied a quarter of Eritrea. The Eritreans retreated from the disputed zones and Ethiopia declared victory, ending the war.
However, although the killing ended, the conflict was not over. On December 12, 2000, the two sides, as part of the
Algiers Agreement, agreed to binding arbitration in which an Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission would study the claims of both sides and decide the final borders. In April 2002 the Boundary Commission gave each country some of the disputed territory, but it awarded the Badme region to Eritrea. Meles, despite his earlier agreement to binding arbitration, refused to accept the decision and refused to return the territory to Eritrea.
In April 2001, student demonstrations demanding greater academic freedom and the removal of armed police from campuses ignited simmering discontent in Addis Ababa with rising unemployment and deteriorating economic conditions. Soon there was widespread rioting, and security forces killed 130 people and imprisoned hundreds more.
On May 15, 2005, Ethiopia held parliamentary elections. The day of the voting passed peacefully, but when the results were announced, trouble started. Meles’ EPRDF claimed they had won more than 300 of the 527 seats contested, while the leading opposition parties announced that they were leading in most constituencies. The next evening, Meles declared a state of emergency and took control of all security forces. Demonstrations against election fraud grew until June 8, the day that the official results were originally supposed to be announced. That day, police in Addis Ababa shot to death at least 37 protestors and an estimated 4,000 people were arrested. When the final results were finally released on July 8, they showed the EPRDF with 327 seats. Protests continued until November, when police killed another 48 people and again made thousands of arrests. Among the 730 protesters and opposition leaders sent to jail was the mayor-elect of Addis Ababa, Berhanu Nega, who was not released until July 20, 2007.
A drought in 2000–2001 affected some 10 million Ethiopians, with as many as 50,000 dying from starvation. Another famine threatened the country in 2003. Things improved somewhat by 2004, but several million people were still dependent on food aid. In 2003–2004 ethnic violence erupted in the Gambela region, including accusations that the army was involved in some of the attacks.
In April 2006, Ethiopian soldiers fought with Kenyan forces when the soldiers pursued Oromo rebels across the border into Kenya. Somali Islamists accused Ethiopia of invading Somalia in June after the Islamists secured control of much of South Somalia. Although Ethiopia denied the charge, Meles denounced Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, leader of the Somali Islamists, as a threat to Ethiopia. The sheikh accused Ethiopia of “occupying” the Ogaden.
In July 2006, there were more reports of Ethiopian troops entering Somalia, but the Ethiopian government did not acknowledge this until October, when it claimed that the Ethiopian forces in Somalia were military trainers. In December the Somali Islamists demanded that Ethiopian troops leave or face attack. When fighting erupted, Somali government forces supported by Ethiopian forces drove the Islamists from their Somalia strongholds. Warfare ended in early 2007, but insurgent attacks continued in the subsequent months. Flooding in August–September and again in October damaged several Ethiopian regions, affecting several hundred thousand people.
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