A Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Analysis of the History of the revolutionary line of Berhane Meskal Reda and Getachew Maru in the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party
Introduction
Comrade Berhane Meskal Reda and Comrade Getachew Maru were the founders of the Algiers Group and the Abyot Group, which after growing both in exile and in Ethiopia proper amongst the Ethiopian Workers, Peasants, Soldiers and Revolutionary Intellectuals and unifying with all progressive anti-Imperialist groups in Ethiopia, formed the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), with Comrade Berhane Meskal as the first General Secretary.
Comrade General Secretary Berhane Meskel Reda principally, along with Comrade Getachew Maru, and a few others within the EPRP, represented the correct and revolutionary line of applying Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought to the objective and subjective conditions in Ethiopia, in both the EPRP and the progressive movement in Ethiopia as a whole and analysing both their successes and their mistakes can help both Marxist-Leninist-Maoist comrades in and outside of Ethiopia to learn from the Ethiopian Revolution and its defeat.
Ethiopia, the cradle of humanity, was in a unique state in terms of states, as it was one of the few countries to be:
1. Completely feudal until very recently in the early 1900s.
2. One of the most nationally diverse semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries on Earth.
3. One of the last countries in the world to abolish slavery, only in 1942.
4. Had a regime (the Selassie regime) who had at one point played a progressive role in resisting Italian fascism, who while developing towards something other than feudalism under Capitalist-Imperialist Exploitation had become one of the most slavish tools of US Imperialism.
5. Had an active progressive and then socialist students’ movement.
6. Occupied the complete separate and fully basically developed nation of Eritrea (as compared to, for example, Oromos, who were still in the process of basically developing until the later 1960s-early 1970s).
7. To have such a rapid transformation, especially under the heavy-handed Selassie regime, which supressed National Minorities and working class and student revolutionary movements.
Ethiopia was a semi-feudal, semi-colonial monarchical country under the leadership of the regime around Haile Selassie, which represented in terms of class interests some of the most reactionary members of the feudal landlord (and the relatively small emerging comprador capitalist) class who had not been completely negated by the transformation from a fully feudal semi-colonial nation into semi-feudal semi-colonial nation. It had a class system of overwhelmingly landlords and tenants, hangovers from the feudal system, a small but expanding and extant lumpen-proletariat, proletariat, petty, national and comprador bourgeoise. The classes with the most amount of power in this system were the comprador bourgeoise and the landlord class.
This has transformed after the Ethiopian Revolution, and Civil War, economic changes during and after the period of the so called ‘Revolutionary Democracy’ and Tigray War. Now Ethiopia is a bureaucrat semi-feudal semi-colonial state, and it is reasonable to say that the National Bourgeoise has greatly changed from it’s previous state. The proletariat and lumpen-proletariat have increased numerically, and the landlords and peasants have decreased. However, the peasant and feudal classes do remain as the majority of the population.
While the future guiding thought of a New Democratic and eventually Socialist and Communist Ethiopian revolution will be based on the Marxism-Leninism-Maoism synthesized by Chairman Gonzalo of the PCP, it is correct to analyse the application of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought to the Ethiopian Conditions to see what went well, what went wrong, why it was defeated and how both theories in and outside of Ethiopia can learn from and build upon the experiences in Ethiopia, in order to develop help Comrades in Ethiopia develop a Guiding Thought of the Ethiopian Revolution based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought and the Red Revolutionary Left Line of Comrade Berhane Meskal Reda and Getachew Maru.
While I am not an Ethiopian, I have been trying to study the experience of the Ethiopian Communist Movement for a very long time, as I believe that is one of the most relevant examples of how revisionism and social-imperialism can destroy a Communist Movement, and I hope that I can have provided the International Communist Movement with something useful to look at, critique and analyse.
The Early Political Life of Berhane Meskal Reda, the leader of the Revolutionary Left line in the Ethiopian Communist Movement
Berhane Meskal was born on September 1943, but, first appeared in politics in 1963 by denouncing American Imperialism in universities, but joined organised politics after entering the progressive semi-clandestine students’ org., the University Colleges Liberation Front, a.k.a. The Crocodile Society. He was a fiery orator, great theorist, and organiser, and was one of the main organisers (along with another Comrade, Zeru Kehishen) of the 2000-strong demonstration against the Haile Selassie regime, a slavish agent of American Imperialism, in 1965. They demanded the end of feudalism and land reform. He and Zeru, along with nine other organisers were arrested after this, which showed that there was great revolutionary potential in Ethiopia in the 60s. From then, he and the TCS developed by both theory and practice. From 1966–69, they called for the end of Concentration Camps, a right to demonstrations, to uproot Imperialist Culture, called for universal education, power to the students (influenced by the GPCR in the PRC) and expulsion of “Peace” Corps, a PR weapon of U.S. Imperialism.
They also began organising ‘Vietnam Days’ and ‘Cuba Days’ against Imperialism (at that time they held an incorrect and overly supportive line on Cuba, incorrectly upholding it as a Dictatorship of the Proleteriat, which would be proved incorrect in a very sadly ironic way later, which the Algeirs/Abyot Group/EPRP would later renounce). In April 1969, he, along with several other Comrades e.g. Comrade Walleign Makonnen and Martha Mebrahtu, who would later be killed by the Selassie regime in a later incident, was arrested, though the movement secured the release of some including Berhane Meskal.
One thing that was a consistent theme in the EPRP and the Ethiopian Communist/’Communist’ was the over-admiration of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. While Che was the head of the revolutionary and Communist faction of the Cuban Revolution, and was a great fighter for revolution, his petty-bourgeoise theory of Focoist revolution was proven to not to work for abandoning the mass base, and Che was murdered in Bolivia because of it.
While this was not as big a problem in the people and groups that went onto to join or become the EPRP as in other organisations in the Ethiopian Communist/’Communist’ Movement, this was still an issue and it even shows the petty bourgeoise class character of many the early members of the EPRP who were so attracted to Che and his theories.
In Exile
On August 12th, 1969, Berhane Meskal Reda and seven Comrades took control of a plane and fled from the regime of Haile Selassie and declared their allegiance to ML MZT, first fleeing to Khartoum in Sudan, and the Algiers, where they would become the Algiers Group. In Algiers they would learn from exiled Comrades from around the world, from the BPP and the liberation movements in the Iberian colonies. Comrades Benyam Adane and Iyasou Alemayehu, and Elaine Klein, a liaison between the Group and the PRC, met with GPCR-era PRC officials.
Berhane Meskal Reda would take the correct, revolutionary Marxist-Leninist (and, in the current era, correct Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) line held by Com. Walleign, Tilahun and others, that there were oppressed nations in Ethiopia, e.g. Oromos, Somalis, Eritreans, which had the right to national liberation up to independence, though it was best if these national liberation struggles had a socialist character. He supported the, at that time revolutionary, ELF, EPLF and later the TPLF (even if the party would abandon that line in regards to the EPLF and TPLF later), and opposed the opportunist lines of the original crocodiles-eating-faces-ist Haile Fide, the revisionist Sennay Likke, who denied the existence of nations in Ethiopia and rejected self-determination, and of Andreas Eshete. Around this time, the Algiers Group would build some of the first organisational links with the masses from the student movement with the help of the Abyot Group and Getachew Maru, who would represent and lead the revolutionary line in the EPRP along with Comrade Berhane Meskal.
A bit about the Abyot Group: the Abyot (Revolution in Amhara) Group were the first group that openly declared itself to be based in Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought in both among Ethiopians, and, strangely for the time, in Ethiopia itself. They had branches both foreign universities (in both the West, and strangely, more clandestine branches within the universities of the revisionist Soviet Union, somehow) as well as in Ethiopia proper (both in universities, high schools and the actual working and peasant class), being the most responsible for the organising of links between progressive and Maoist students in Ethiopia’s universities, to the workers (even taking over and transforming the AFL-CIO affiliated CELU into a revolutionary worker’s union, in the only instance where that has ever happened), peasants, students and some soldiers, especially in the air force. Much of the actual working class and peasant uprisings during the Ethiopian Revolution would be caused by the organising done by the Abyot Group.
They would be lead by Comrade Getachew Maru, called by some the first Maoist in Ethiopia, who would, along with Comrade Berhane Meskal, come to represent the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong Thought line in both Ethiopian politics in general, as the founding groups within the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party, and internally in the two line struggle in the EPRP, even though they were defeated.
Meanwhile, Martha Mebrahtu would demarcate the Algeirs-Abyot Group’s line on the women’s movement and take a proto-proletarian feminist stand, which was miles ahead of, for example, the moderate faction of the student movement and the Haile Fide and Sennay Likke groups. She, as an Eritrean, would also help Comrade Walleign Makonnen develop his stand toward National Liberation. While she was not a direct member of either group, she was in contact or in support of the political line. She, Walleign Mekonnen and four others would be killed (one would be captured and imprisoned) in attempt to flee from the regime and go to Algiers.
In 1968, the opportunist Haile Fide clique would, form revisionist alliances and trick revolutionaries, to form the All-Ethiopian “Socialist” Movement. The A-A group would analyse conditions, saw they hadn’t developed enough to form a party, and continued the struggle. This was because they saw while the objective factors may have been said to have reached with increased contradictions sharpening, the subjective factors had not been reached, the revolutionary classes were yet mostly organised around the embryonic Three Weapons and the Algiers-Abyot Group could not have been said to have engaged in enough class struggle to have been able to form the party. Considering they had engaged In the most actual class struggle out of all ‘Communist’ groups, this means that MEISON had not engaged in anything close!
Likke’s Revisionism repudiated by the Algiers-Abyot Group
The Algiers-Abyot Group would help set the ESUE and ESUNA on the correct path of recognition of the right to self-determination, and in response, the Amhara chauvinist traitor revisionist Sennay Likke would steal all the funds of the ESUNA and set up his own chauvinist ESUNA. Sennay Likke would then leak plans of a member of the revolutionary line, Mesfin Habtu, to try to build a revolutionary base back home in Ethiopia, killing that plan, leading to Mesfin Habtu becoming depressed and ending his life on November 1st, 1971, at the young age of 23. While the plan had elements of adventurism, the response to adventurism is not to leak secrets to a dictatorial semi-feudal semi-colonial regime.
In 1972, two great events would occur. One: the ESUNA would create the “Handbook on Elementary Notes on Revolution and Organization”, a document “discussing class society, the necessity of building a Marxist-Leninist party, the differences between a party and a mass organization, and the strategies for building both. It covers methods of clandestinely, the strategic need for armed struggle, and standards for behaviour, even including a warning list of pitfalls for activists. Anyone who read this pamphlet would have had to do a double-take that this was a “student” publication. It was a major advance.”-Like Ho Chi Minh, Like Che Guevara, p. 92., in the words of a great book on this matter. Berhane Meskal Reda and others would meet with representatives of the ELF and EPLF, the three main groups that were leading the mass struggle in Eritrea and gain their support. Though the EPRP after Berhane Meskal’s death would fall out with the EPLF, at this time they were cordial.
Two: AA would form the Ethiopian People’s Liberation Organisation, which had a ‘Communist Core’ within it which would eventually produce the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party. Here we see a great triumph in the formation of a revolutionary front, and a central clandestine Communist Party but there was a very blurry distinction between two the groups, which was demonstrated with the disappearance of the EPLO and the transformation completely into the EPRP. While mass organisation continued, the United Front was unable to strategically hide EPRP involvement, which would have helped during the years of the ‘Red Terror’. This is something for us Maoists to analyse, as the United Front, though built concentrically around the other two, must, at its furthest rungs, especially under intense repression i.e. the Selassie, Derg regimes.
While no socialist country would give direct aid, the EPLO only receiving indirect aid from China via the ELF, the PFLP and DFLP would help the EPLO get started in constructing revolution, demonstrating the solidarity between the oppressed masses of the world. Selassie’s puppet regime in Ethiopia and occupied Eritrea was a strong supporter of ‘Israel’, with Ethiopian-American air bases in Ethiopian-occupied Eritrea helping save ‘Israel’ from it’s rightful fate during the Six-Day War. In this manner, it was only natural that the Ethiopian revolution would align itself with and get most of it’s support from the Palestinian National Liberation Movement.
Meanwhile, the ESUE would be fully taken over by the revisionist clique of Haile Fide, who would go back on the previously revolutionary line taken by the organisation. Berhane Meskal and Fide would engage in intense two-line struggle over the fate of the movement. Berhane Meskal and the EPLO continued to uphold the right to self-determination of nations up to and including independence, while the revisionist Fide clique would denounce the right to self-determination up to and including independence and ally with Sennay Likke’s group, denouncing independence and only offering autonomy. Berhane Meskal Reda was able to see by 1973 that revolution was coming to Ethiopia very soon. Haile Fide, meanwhile, believed it was still decades off. The former would right, and the EPLO’s organising had managed to build a revolutionary movement with the chance of victory.
Revolution in Ethiopia
In 1974, the Ethiopian Revolution began. But why?
After the Wollo and Tigray famine, the contradictions between the broad revolutionary masses of Ethiopia and the reactionary feudal aristocracy had reached a boiling point. The contradiction between revolutionary students and the reactionary regime had also sharpened with this and would lead to widescale demands to end the Feudal regime. These are two Objective Factors leading to revolution in Ethiopia. The war in Vietnam was known to have been lost by the American Imperialists that defended the Selassie regime from collapse, and this helped mature the Subjective Factors towards revolution. Another objective factor, the Arab oil boycott to all countries that supported Israel had intensified the internal contradictions between the urban proletariat, petty bourgeoise and most of the national bourgeoise against the comprador bourgeoise. The oil boycott would act as a catalyst, but not the only reason, to the revolution.
What had initially been a strike by Taxi Drivers, then expanded to teachers (calling for the release of political prisoners and free organising for students), then rebellions rose in the Armed Forces.
Haile Selassie attempted to placate this uprising of the great masses of people by replacing his conservative puppet prime minister with a ‘moderate’ puppet The people raised the revolutionary slogan ‘A Popular Democratic Government — Yes! Ministerial Leap-Frogging — No!’ in response. The Army went home after a pay rise, but the people, in part led by the EPRP, which had taken over a AFL-CIO puppet Union, the CELU, and transformed it into an agent of revolution, continued the rebellion. Women began demanding equal rights as well, revolution was coming.
The majority of the decaying feudal landlord class attempted desperately to hold onto it’s power, while a large section of the national bourgeoise, proletariat and peasantry, as well as a class traitor pro-bourgeoise landlord section, rose up in favour of their own interests. Several towns were even taken over by the people, the peasants, the proletariat and the small petite-bourgeoise, for small periods of time. This would, because of the EPLO’s unpreparedness, and the revisionism of MEISON and Waz (Likke’s group) not lead to PPW. Also, around this time the EPLO would begin to give way to EPRP. The EPRP was one of the first parties to attempt to arm itself as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Army. They would start a newspaper and scout for a place in Tigray to start the Armed Struggle (Comrade Benyam Adane would die in this venture).
Cloaked Counter-Revolution in Ethiopia
Eventually, a group of Bonapartist military officers would take control of the country and establish some semblance of order (even if covered in holes and weak) in all areas except Ogaden, Tigray and Eritrea. This is the first Derg, which was a ‘left’ organisation whose only guiding principle was the vague slogan of “Ittiyopia Tikdem!” or Ethiopia First, a patriotic-sounding nothingburger slogan. The First Derg would depose Selassie in favour of his out-of-country son, and then depose and exile him, establishing military rule under Aman Andoum, an Eritrean-Ethiopian General.
The First Derg would form a triumvirate of Andoum (representative of landlords and some elements of the comprador bourgeoise), Tafari Benti (representative of some landlords, a chunk of the comprador bourgeoise and some reactionary aspects of the petty bourgeoise), Mengistu (representative of both the comprador bourgeoise and the lumpenproletariat, who would lead a fascistic wing of the Derg), would initially look to the MEISON and Waz for ‘political guidance’, as the EPRP was too principled, revolutionary and Maoist for them. They were both happy to oblige the revisionists.
However, the EPRP was still a threat to the regime, but too popular to get rid of immediately. In addition, a lot of the membership of MEISON and Waz were revolutionaries, even if under revisionist leadership, and so sent the Derg sent the students to the countryside. In the countryside, the EPRP especially would recruit en masse people into its United Front. This was a positive development, and they would use the opportunity to propagandize ML MZT to the masses. However, the EPRP made another great mistake. They did not start a PPW.
While the EPRP never trusted the Army, and Central Committee members like Berhane Meskal, Getachew Maru and Kiflu Tadesse, and even earlier Getachew Maru before his Martyrdom, had pointed out the necessity of actual revolution that wouldn’t be hijacked, betrayed by the Army, the EPRP could not mobilize a People’s War in the countryside. But why?
Because a large section of the EPRP was hoping idealistically that the Army, a reactionary instrument of the ruling classes, would somehow turn out to be overall progressive and allow for some organisation that would allow them to actively make revolution when the conditions ‘improved’, while the Great Leadership within the Party, Berhane Meskal, Getachew and others, recognised the need for revolution, a large section of the party had resigned itself to ‘anti-reformist’ reformism, which was revolutionary in word but reformist in deed, a great error.
However, revolutionaries within the CELU began to protest the military rule that kept the ban on strikes, kept collaborating with America, and kept collaborating with Israel, and ‘delaying’ (really preventing) socialist revolution. The regime would brutally supress the CELU and begin attacks on the EPRP. While this was not the level of attacks that would begin under Tafari and Mengistu, they were still horrible and snapped the EPRP into awakening.
Open Counter-Revolution in Ethiopia
Meanwhile, the contradictions between the regime of Andoum, as well as the problem of Andoum’s desire to resolve the Eritrean Question peacefully, and the Tafari-Mengistu alliance, as well as the contradiction between the Peasantry and the Feudal Landlords, would lead to the fall and murder of Andoum in favour of Tafari, who would pursue a semi-land reform.
EPRP members in the Air Force, an area of the Armed Forces where the EPRP had a lot of power, were attacked first by the Derg, because of their blunt propagandizing. They openly denounced the Derg and military socialism, a great failure of the EPRP, who could not keep clandestinely amongst these branches.
After that, the MEISON and Waz, in tandem with Mengistu and his faction, and to a lesser extent Tafari’s faction, began to launch attacks of brutal nature against the EPRP. The EPRP responded in kind, defending itself from this onslaught. The EPRA and the Armed Bands of Meison, Waz, lumpenproletarian youth motivated by material incentives from the Mengistu faction of the Derg and eventually the Ethiopian Army began to get into firefights. This was used as an excuse to ban the EPRP, arrest members, people in United Front groups, and people affiliated members.
Later, Tafari Benti would be overthrown by Mengistu after he began to soften his stance on the EPRP. In the chaos of the coup, Mengistu supporter and revisionist Sennay Likke would be shot by a kamikaze Tafari-ist seeking to eliminate as many Mengistu-ists as possible. A truly ironic way to die for a rat who was obsessed with power.
Mengistu was a fascist. He fostered open collaboration between the comprador bourgeoise and Soviet Imperialism, inviting Soviet and other Eastern Bloc aligned companies and later Cuban and South Yemeni soldiers (at this point in time, the revolutionary faction of the Yemeni Socialist Party had been defeated and the revisionist pro-Soviet traitors had taken full power in Aden), servants of the Soviet revisionists, and used ‘Communism’ as a smokescreen to encourage class collaboration ‘between’ the ‘red’ comprador bourgeoise and the revolutionary toiling masses (really supressing the revolutionary masses and forcing them to work for his preferred ‘red’ faction comprador bourgeoise).
Later Cuban and South Yemeni soldiers would help him enforce his blockade of supplies reaching Tigray and other parts of Northern Ethiopia during the Ethiopian Civil War, which was being hit by a horrific famine, leading to thousands of deaths that were his responsibility, and could be considered genocide on the part of Mengistu Haile Mariam and his fascistic Derg regime.
At this time as well, the Ethiopian-Somali War would begin, which would see the Ethiopians gain the aid of the revisionist Social-Imperialist USSR and the revisionist Cuba, with Fidel Castro himself coming to oversee the state security apparatus of the Derg regime. This allowed the Derg regime to centralize power around itself, gain some support from the Lumpenproletariat and the backwards sections of the rest of society, and attack and persecute the EPRP with greater ease. This intensified with the Ethiopian Victory.
Violence against women in the EPRP also intensified. A pregnant female member of the EPRP, was tortured so viciously that even Mengistu himself had to execute her killer, even if the order came from him. Family members, mostly women, who had taken it upon themselves of warning EPRA fighters of coming attacks by the Derg, were brutally tortured.
At this time, the EPRP, in exile and at home, would continue to oppose both US and Soviet Imperialism, pointing to the (shrinking) US remnants of support to the Derg. I am unaware of their position on China, and to be honest I do not think they even had one on account of being massacred, but if they had the time, I believe the EPRP under the revolutionary leadership of Berhane Meskal Reda and Getachew Maru wouldn’t have supported the counter-revolutionary coup in China.
At this moment in time, the EPRP had mostly been engaged in urban guerilla warfare, as this is where most of the membership of the party and the EPRA existed in, instead of taking the correct line, which was taken by Mao Zedong in the CPC after the Shanghai Massacre and the White Terror, of retreat from the cities. Instead of studying Mao Zedong’s line within the CPC when faced with a very similar situation, the EPRP instead took a vulgar pragmatist line which was unsupported by the actual reality of Ethoipian Society.
They also engaged in a line similar to the “Class Annihilation” line incorrectly taken by the MCCI under great Comrade Kanai Chaterjee and factions of the CPI(ML), including the original and correct under great Comrade Charu Mazumdar.
Berhane Meskal Reda (in both but especially the former line) and Getachew Maru (in both but especially the later line) realised the incorrectness of this line. Berhane Meskal recognised class antagonism was the worst in the countryside, which was still semi-feudal even despite the botched land reform and so the revolution should fight from the countryside, while Getachew Maru saw that the ‘class annihilaition’-like line was an infantile ultra-leftist line that isolated the party from the masses.
A petty-bourgeoise infiltration hysteria also swept over the EPRP as well. This came partly from real and reasonable fears of infiltration, as well as the petty-bourgeoise class stand of a lot of the earliest revolutionaries of the EPRP. This would lead to the EPRP-EPRA arresting, torturing, and killing many of its own members. This was like the line that arose in the Communist Party of the Phillipines which was rectifyed by Comrade Jose Maria Sison through the Second Great Rectification Movement.
In a way, the EPRP had to deal with the revisionist infections that grew on both the Indian and Filipino Marxist-Leninist (an in future Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) Communist movements, of Class Annihilation and of Infiltration Hysteria. Only the EPRP failed to implement the correct Berhanemeskal-Getachew Line, embraced revisionism rooted in over-admiration of Focoism, and was defeated as a result.
Berhane Meskal Reda and Getachew Maru developed an understanding of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought tailored to the Ethiopian reality which rejected the rightist tactics that appeared left in form but were right in essence in the EPRP-EPRA. It understood that the rural peasantry would be the base of revolution in the semi-feudal semi-colonial Ethiopian state, and that the enemy was a paper tiger but that revolutionaries should not underestimate its strength. It understood that the revolutionaries would have to fight in the countryside first in areas of weakest control of the reactionary old state (the Northern Ethiopian, Tigrayan, Eritrean mountains, where both objective factors and subjective factors were best for revolution and the government lacked control), establish Principled Unity with the progressive national liberation movement, work through their United Front to liberate Ethiopia to by building the Army and strengthening the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party.
However, by this point, a lot of the key membership of the leadership of the EPRP that had agreed with them had been killed or captured, and those who remained were still stuck in their petty-bourgeoise mindsets of urban insurrectionism and class annihilation, highlighting a failure of the party to remould the petty-bourgeoise members of the party into proletarian revolutionaries, which was intensified by the seemingly accidental semi-unification of party and front that had occurred earlier.
The EPRP would eventually be forced to flee to the Assimba area in Tigray in the late 70s (almost adopting the Berhanemeskal-Getachew Maoist line of revolution in the countryside, but not building a sufficent mass base), which after they broke from Marxism-Leninism almost completely except in words, and began to attack the TPLF and EPLF, they lost and were driven from Assimba. The remnants of the revisionists who usurped the EPRP fled to the West, where they gave up Marxism-Leninism completely, and became a reformist Liberal-Social Fascist organisation. They exist as a group of sad old men in Washington D.C. to this day, and remain banned by the Ethiopian Government, even after the overthrow of both the Derg and EPRDF/TPLF governments, as the legacy of the once revolutionary EPRP still haunts the government of Ethiopia.
In the late 70s, Berhane Meskal Reda and Getachew Maru, for daring to rebel against the rightist line (left in form, right in essence, which would give birth to revisionist line that would abandon Marxism-Leninism and the Armed Struggle) that had sunk into the party, even though they had led the party into the greatest and most high victories it had ever seen, were purged. The EPRP arrested both.
Comrade Getachew Maru would die, executed by his own former Comrades-turned-revisionists when the Derg raided the safehouse they were keeping him captive. He may have died on July 26th 1977, but he lives forever in our hearts, and in the hearts of all revolutionaries and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communists!
Comrade Berhane Meskal Reda would eventually escape only to be captured, tortured (though giving up nothing to the fascistic Derg regime’s henchmen), and executed by the Derg (around the same time as the revisionist Haile Fide, as the leopard he had supported came to eat his face).
Comrade Berhane Meskal Reda was executed a hero of the revolution and people of Ethiopia on July 12th, 1979. Long Live the Memory of Him and the Ethiopian Revolution!
What can we learn from this?
In terms of successes, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party were able to develop a vanguard party with mass organisations in a United Front structure, as well as a form of a People’s Army. They were also able to propagate and spread Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought to the broad masses and generate, at least for a time, genuine popular support for the revolution. The EPRP were also able to generate a Great Leadership of the struggle. The EPRP also (until the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism in favour of Liberalism and ‘non-ethnic federalism’) supported the rights of the oppressed nations of Ethiopia. All throughout the struggle until the expulsion of Comrade Berhane Meskal Reda and Comrade Getachew Maru from the Central Committee, while the EPRP were a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong Thought party.
In terms of things that were mixed in successes and failures, the EPRP seem to have somewhat applied a basic pre-Gonzalo accidental semi-Concentric Construction, of the Party around the Front, however the party was not militarized, nor was the People’s Army around the party. This was better than a lot of other defeated revolutionary movement, and actually led to a lot of benefits in the early stages of the revolution due to this structure, however, this left the United Front and Party exposed to attack, and the Army isolated from the masses, and was a factor in the growth of revisionism and the defeat of the movement.
In terms of things that were bad, there was not enough distinction and plausible deniability of allegiance to the United Front. As there was no militarization of the party, leading to a lack of discipline, infiltration hysteria, class annihilation line, and the defeat of the revolutionary left Berhanemeskal-Getachew Line in favour of the ‘left’ opportunist and purely militaristic line (like the line of Artemio in Peru) that led to a rightist liquidation of the Armed Struggle and the abandonment Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought through the victory of that counter-revolutionary line (like what happened Artemio’s fraction of the PCP). The failure to remould some of the petty-bourgeoise students into proleterian revolutionaries was both another factor, as well as a cause for many of these problems.
What conclusion can we therefore get from this?
To at last wrap things up, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party participated in and produced many martyrs for the struggle and was the vanguard party of the Ethiopian Revolution. But it was betrayed by Bonapartism by the Derg, social-imperialism and revisionism (manifesting as urban guerrilla warfare, class annihilation and infiltration hysteria). The Bonapartism and Social Imperialism were outside factors which could not have been prevented by the EPRP (without time travel), but they could have defeated the enemy by both getting rid of the conditions that created revisionism by dealing with the class background of the initial EPRP through significant ideological remoulding, refusing any peace with the Derg unless temporary absolutely necessary and by being more active in engaging in struggle, which would have defeated revisionism and brought about a People’s Republic of Ethiopia.
Long Live the Revolutionaries of modern Ethiopia!
Long Live the Memories of Berhane Meskal Reda, Getachew Maru, and all other martyred Comrades!
Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism!
Reconstitute the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party as a Maoist Communist Party of Ethiopia!
Long Live a future People’s Republic of Ethiopia!
SOURCES, INSPIRATION AND FURTHER INFORMATION
Note after Publishing: I have recently found out that there was a feudal lord/Dejazmach confusingly named “Berhane Meskel” who led an uprising in 1975 in Wollo (modern Amhara Region), around the time our Berhane MESKAL REDA was in nearby Tigray. While he does not seem that important historically, just remember not to confuse him with Comrade Berhane Meskal Reda.
