End of The Derg
Although the Derg government officially came to an end 22 February 1987, three weeks after a referendum approved the constitution for the PDRE, it was not until that September the new government was fully in place and the Derg formally abolished. The surviving members of the Derg, however, remained in power as the leaders of the new civilian regime.
The geopolitical situations turned unfavorable in the late 1980s, with the Soviet Union retreating from the expansion of Communism under Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, which marked a dramatic reduction in aid from Socialist bloc countries. This resulted in even more economic hardship, and more seriously, the collapse of the military in the face of determined onslaughts by guerrilla forces in the north. The Soviet Union stopped aiding the PDRE altogether in December 1990, and this along with the collapse of Communism in the Eastern Bloc in the Revolutions of 1989, proved to be serious blows to the PDRE.
Towards the end of January 1991, a coalition of rebel forces, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), launched Operation Tewodros, which led to their capture of Gondar, the ancient capital city, Bahar Dar and Dessie. Meanwhile, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front had gained control of all of Eritrea except for Asmara and Assab in the south. The Soviet Union, mired in its internal turmoil, could no longer prop up the Derg; it was clear that the end of the Derg was now a question of when, not if. In the words of the former US diplomat Paul B. Henze, "As his doom became imminent, Mengistu alternated between vowing resistance to the end and hinting that he might follow Emperor Tewodros's example and commit suicide." His actions were frantic: he convened the Shengo, the Ethiopian Parliament, for an emergency session and reorganized his cabinet, but as Henze concludes, "these shifts came too late to be effective." On 21 May, claiming that he was going to inspect troops at a base in southern Ethiopia, Mengistu slipped out of the country to Kenya, then flew with his immediate family to Zimbabwe, where he was granted asylum and as of 2010 still resides. Upon entering Addis Ababa, the EPRDF immediately disbanded the WPE and arrested almost all of the prominent Derg officials shortly after.
In December 2006, 73 officials of the Derg were found guilty of genocide. 34 people were in court, 14 others had died during the lengthy process, and 25, including Mengistu, were tried in absentia. The trial ended 26 May 2008, and many of the officials were sentenced to death. In December, 2010, the Ethiopian government has commuted the death sentence of 23 Derg officials. On October 4, 2011, 16 former Derg officials were freed, after twenty years of incarceration. The Ethiopian government paroled almost all of those Derg officials that have been jailed for 20 years.
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