A Grain of Salt

Ethiopian students in West Berlin, Germany, demonstrate in solidarity with the EPRP, 1977.

This is a widely held view about the generation of young Ethiopian student revolutionaries of the 1970s-era:

“Because of their singular preoccupation with immediate seizure of state power, both [factions of the student movement] mistook the trees for the forest. One side [EPRP] thought violent opposition to the Dergue would secure them state power, while the other [MEISON], which did not have much of a following inside Ethiopia, thought that tactical alliance with the Dergue would bring them to power, after using and then disposing of the soldiers. Both failed in their respective adventures.

“What needs to be underlined is that between 1970 and 1974, the vast majority of rank and file students at home or abroad were not aware, at least for a good while, that they were being used as puppets of two underground communist parties that were struggling for hegemony of the student movement, and through it, of the revolutionary process in Ethiopia. After coming out of the closet in 1974–75, both parties continued to use the student movement as their social base. No revolution has ever succeeded with students as its social base. As such, it was inevitable that the student-based communist parties would fail in their quixotic efforts to seize state power. The tragedy is that they used students as cannon fodder for their blind ambitions. As I used to say at the time, the leaderships of these parties have criminal responsibility for the thousands of students who died needlessly.” —Professor Alem Habtu, 2015. (Alem was a leader in the expatriate Ethiopian Student Movement in the very early 1970s in the United States, and the brother of Mesfin Habtu)