The Tests Awaiting Ethiopia

It’ll take some doing for the rebels who have taken control of Ethiopia’s government to do as much damage to the nation as ousted dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, who compiled an abysmal human-rights record and helped ruin the national economy with rigidly Marxist controls during his 14 years in power.

But for now most Ethiopians--and most of the rest of the world--can only watch warily to see how the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, also Marxists but believed to be a bit more flexible than Mengistu, comports itself in handling two very immediate problems.

They must first maintain some semblance of law and order in Addis Ababa, the capital city. Mengistu’s security forces collapsed once their leader flew to exile in Zimbabwe. Rebel forces took the capital earlier this week and, to date, have kept the peace with a minimum of bloodshed, although persistent anti-U.S. demonstrations have been a problem. The protests broke out because many residents of the capital city are of different ethnic backgrounds than the rebels. They blame the U.S. government, which has actually played a constructive role mediating a peaceful settlement, for letting the rebels seize the capital.

But even more important, the rebels must deal with the horrific tragedy that has kept Ethiopia on the world’s conscience for most of the last decade--a famine of nearly Biblical proportions. U.N. officials estimate that 7 million Ethiopians face immediate danger of starvation unless food and other relief supplies start getting through to them. That’s why it is encouraging that rebel leaders and relief officials began meeting Friday to discuss the logistics of getting the food aid flowing.

State Department spokesmen say U.S. diplomats intervened in the Ethiopian war, after virtually ignoring it for years as a backwater in the waning Cold War, because U.S.-Africa specialists think the rebels have learned a lesson from the worldwide collapse of Marxism and may be willing to try democracy as a viable alternative. “Whether they’ll be capable of doing it remains to be seen,” one diplomat said recently.

The first test of that is well under way.