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Ethiopia: Deforestation: Difference between revisions
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Ethiopia: Deforestation (view source)
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Selassie’s advancing age, his increasing distance from the daily life of his subjects, and the sense among a growing number of Marxist-oriented Ethiopians during the climate of the Cold War that the conflict with Eritrea was imperialist in nature. Inflation, corruption and famine added to the growing unrest in the country and eventually military coup was staged by Marxist officers in the army under Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1974. The last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, was murdered in 1975. | Selassie’s advancing age, his increasing distance from the daily life of his subjects, and the sense among a growing number of Marxist-oriented Ethiopians during the climate of the Cold War that the conflict with Eritrea was imperialist in nature. Inflation, corruption and famine added to the growing unrest in the country and eventually military coup was staged by Marxist officers in the army under Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1974. The last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, was murdered in 1975. | ||
Power was assumed in 1974 by a provisional administrative council of soldiers known as the Derg, with Mengistu as head of the newly Marxist state and Derg chairman. This triggered the Ethiopian Civil War that was to last until 1991, with the Derg imprisoning or exterminating many thousands of its political opponents, and continuing to prosecute the Emperor’s war against the rebel province of Eritrea, as was as the province of Tigray. Under the Derg, Ethiopia became a client state of the Soviet Union, and as a result also became the most militarised state in the region. It was thanks to military aid from the Soviet Union, Libya, GDR and North Korea, and 17,000 professional soldiers from Cuba that Ethiopia was able to fight off an invasion by Somali forces in 1977. | |||
At the same time, the Derg attempted to follow through on its Marxist philosophy by redistributing land to the peasants. However, mismanagement, corruption, and wholesale hostility to the Derg's violent rule combined with the debilitating effects of constant warfare resulted in a precipitous fall in agricultural production, and it is during this period that deforestation in Ethiopia began to rapidly escalate. Although Ethiopia has generally long been prone to drought, few were prepared for the scale of drought and famine that hit the country in the mid-1980s, in which up to seven million may have died. | |||
Mengistu was finally overthrown in 1991 when the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front captured Addis Ababa. | |||
== Resources == | == Resources == | ||