Ethiopia receives Soviet backing

The Soviet Union provoked the present crisis when it moved to shore up the tottering fascist military junta (the Dergue) which runs Ethiopia. In February Mengistu Haile Mariam seized power in the Dergue by murdering a number of its members, including the chief of state Brigadier-General Teferi Bente.

The junta was under attack from all sides. Almost all of Ethiopia's provinces were in violent revolt against it. In Eritrea (a former Italian colony annexed by Ethiopia) the national liberation movement controlled over 90% of the territory.—only a few towns remained in Ethiopian hands. In Addis Ababa the Ethiopian People's Revoltionary Party, a left-wing coalition of workers, students and military personnel, was leading the mass struggle. Mengistu massacred hundreds of students, sympathetic to the EPRP in May of this year in Addis Ababa in mass executions. Parents of the murdered students had to pay $100 to retrieve their bodies.

This massacre produced an incident of self exposure by the Russian aligned Socialist Unity Party at this year's FOL Conference. A move by Mr A. T. Neary (North Island Electrical Workers' Union) to have the conference condemn the massacres was countered by the Socialist Unity Party. Taking in some people. Bill Andersen used the old argument that "you can't trust the bourgeois press" to send the motion onto a higher committee (in this case J. Knox) for investigation in the hope that it would disappear forever without trace. Andersen's real motives were revealed by the SUP's paper "Tribune" which spoke of Neary engaging in "anti-Sovietism in his allegations against the Ethiopian regime".