Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam headed the junta which in 1974 overthrew the government of Emperor Haile Selassie in a bloody coup. Known as the "Derg" or "Dergue," the "committee," the junta consisted of about a hundred and twenty junior officers drawn from all regions of Ethiopia. Proclaiming a revolutionary agenda for the country, the Dergue inaugurated its rule by sending some sixty senior officials of the emperor's government to the firing squad.

The emperor and the Patriarch of the dominant Ethiopian Orthodox church were both secretly killed in the months that followed. The Dergue's early victims included members of the group itself. Col. Mengistu emerged as its undisputed leader after orchestrating the physical elimination of rivals from within.

In 1976 Col. Mengistu gave a dramatic send-off to a campaign of terror that he officially dubbed the "Red Terror." He threw to the ground before a huge crowd in the capital Addis Ababa bottles filled with a red substance representing the blood of enemies of the revolution: the "imperialists," and the "counter-revolutionaries," as members of rival leftist groups were labeled by the Dergue. In particular, the campaign targeted students and young people suspected of membership in the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP). Thousands of young men and women turned up dead in the streets of the capital and other cities in the following two years. They were systematically eliminated mainly by militia attached to the "Kebeles," the neighborhood watch committees which served during the Dergue period as the lowest level local government and security surveillance units.

The Kebeles required families to reimburse the administration for the price of bullets used to kill victims when they reclaimed their bodies for burial.

The process of eliminating the "counter-revolutionaries" was quite organized. Each neighborhood committee would meet to discuss how to eliminate individual suspects, and each member would sign on documents to confirm the decision reached at the meeting. Copies of the document would be sent to different levels of the administrations and the party apparatus. The centralized killing enterprise thus left mountains of documentary evidence of its crimes.

 

When famine in 1984 hit areas in northern Ethiopia partially held by rebels of the Tigre and Eritrean People's Liberation Fronts (TPLF and EPLF respectively), Mengistu's government for a while blacked out information about the famine. It later used the disaster as a pretext to forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of villagers from northern Ethiopia to areas in the south. The Dergue argued that its "villagization" campaign, as it came to be known, was meant to relocate people from food deficient areas to the fertile plains of the south. In reality, the move was meant to empty rebel-held areas from potential supporters. Again, victims of government action during the forced relocation were in the hundreds of thousands.

The Dergue was deposed in 1991 by the Ethiopian people's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of regional and ethnic rebel groups led by the TPLF. In the province of Eritrea the EPLF established a provisional government that steered the province to full independence by 1993, with the blessing and cooperation of its former ally the TPLF.