Top Generals Reported Slain in Ethiopia

President Mengistu Haile Mariam appeared to regain control in Ethiopia on Friday as a four-day revolt by mutinous soldiers faded under the guns of loyalist troops.

Nearly the entire high command of this Marxist government has been killed, a Western diplomat said, in an attempted coup led by generals humiliated in a string of recent defeats against rebels in northern Ethiopia.

“If we move into a ‘night of the long knives,’ it (the high command) will be gutted even more,” the diplomat said, “There’ll be a certain amount of retribution.”

Despite reports of continued scattered fighting, the government confidently said it has thoroughly smashed the rebellion.

Briefing foreign ambassadors in the capital Friday, Foreign Minister Berhanu Bayeh said the revolt “was crushed at the center here in Addis Ababa” within hours Tuesday evening.

Lingering resistance was stamped out Thursday when loyal soldiers of the 2nd Army killed their “commander and his collaborators” in Asmara, Ethiopia’s second-largest city and capital of the northernmost province of Eritrea.

“It was a very self-confident briefing by the minister,” said a Western diplomat. “I think Mengistu has got back in the saddle. He has shown a degree of efficiency and ruthlessness that might have surprised some.”

But the envoy noted that the “military situation in the north is going to be substantially eroded.”

Mengistu’s troops have been fighting secessionist rebels in Eritrea and another rebel group seeking autonomy for the neighboring province of Tigre. But they have consistently lost ground to the rebels, despite massive military aid from the Soviet Union, which counts Ethiopia as its staunchest African ally.