I Didn't Do It for You by Michela Wrong

Author:Michela Wrong
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

In December 1960, two weeks after the Emperor had left Addis on an extended tour of South America, his Imperial Bodyguard took control of the airport, rounded up the royal family and key ministers in the Imperial Palace, and cut communications with the outside world.

The coup attempt was, ironically, the by-product of the very US-funded modernization drive Haile Selassie had launched. Returning from military academies and Western universities–where their courses were often generously paid for by the Emperor himself–a generation of young officers and bureaucrats looked at its own hidebound society, the nepotistic royal court, and judged it all stale and corrupt. Watching Africa’s newly-independent states kicking into life, promising their citizens rights and benefits unknown in Ethiopia–supposedly the freest of African nations–these young men felt the status quo had become intolerable. Disappointed and bitter, they blamed their frustration on their former sponsor, the very man who had opened their eyes to Ethiopia’s backwardness.

When, on the first day of the coup, the Crown Prince Asfa Wossen16 went on the radio to denounce the fact that life for the average Ethiopian had not changed for three millennia–that Queen of Sheba vision of history once again–and promised radical change, it seemed as if Haile Selassie was already history. US diplomats ordered the embassy’s classified files shipped up to Kagnew Station for safekeeping.

But, by the second day, the situation had grown murky. The main body of the army had not joined the Imperial Bodyguard. At a crisis meeting, US officials agreed that the time had come to meet the obligations spelled out in the Mutual Defence pact signed between the two countries. US advisers were sent to stiffen morale at army headquarters, where a handful of loyal Ethiopian generals, summoning reinforcements to the capital, were in danger of collapsing from exhaustion. Soon American pilots were roaring over the Imperial Palace, trying to frighten the rebels inside by breaking the sound barrier. ‘Up to that point, it could be said that we were neutral,’ commented the US embassy’s army attaché, ‘but afterwards there could be no question but that we were committed.’17

US help went a lot further than advice. Haile Selassie, in Brazil at the time, only heard his throne was in danger because the Americans allowed loyalist generals to transmit a warning from Kagnew Station. Rushing back to Ethiopia, the Emperor stopped off in Liberia, where he used US Air Force facilities to liaise with those preparing a counterattack. The Americans became so embroiled, shuttling between the two sides in a vain attempt to negotiate a ceasefire, that US ambassador Arthur Richards and two of his aides narrowly escaped being killed when the Imperial Palace was eventually stormed. Soon after, the despairing putschists shot their hostages, killing 15 ministers, secretaries of state and deputy ministers to ensure ‘Ethiopia should never be the same’. Arriving in Asmara, a jittery Haile Selassie used Kagnew Station’s facilities to communicate with his generals and it was only after Richards had personally assured him the situation was under control that he agreed to fly south.

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