Peasant revolution in Ethiopia

The TPLF entered the final period of the war against the Derg who were at this point weakened by the famine that disrupted the peasant economy and diverted energies away from mobilization and military campaigns, to relief and later, reconstruction.[9] At this juncture, the TPLF and peasants were united in struggle and with the passing of the famine many peasants were able to resume their normal livelihoods and continue their support of the opposition fighters in their midst.[9]

The TPLF was soon focused on the key elements of that stage of the struggle: confronting the Derg's plans to forcibly remove its peasant supporters, taking the revolution to the heterogeneous people of southern Tigray, and resolving political disagreements with the EPLF in preparation for the removal of the Derg from Tigray and the entire country.[9] The Derg's war against the liberation movements had many dimensions but were not limited to, military campaigns; reform programs to win the support of civilians; and efforts to isolate peasants from the appeal of dissidents, such as its resettlement program.[9] From 1950 to 1974, an estimated one million peasants voluntarily left the northern highlands and moved to the south and west of the country, and evidence suggests that Tigray had the largest net outflow of any of the provinces.[9]

In early 1978, the Derg launched a resettlement program with the alleged aim of combating drought, averting famine, and increasing agricultural productivity, although it was not until 1984–85 that the program assumed massive proportions.[9] Its objective was to move 1.5 million peasants from the northern provinces, and by the end of 1986, half a million had been moved, most of them forcibly.[9] Although by the mid-1980s the Derg had lost control of virtually all of rural Tigray and the army continued to attack population centers in the liberated territories until the final days of the war.[10]

There are no official statistics that could give an overall assessment of the human and material costs of the war since detailed figures have not been released of the number of fighters killed.[10] The TPLF revealed that approximately 50,000 people died as a direct result of combat, 99 percent of the fighters and militia members, and this number also includes those killed in the Red Terror.[10] Despite the military setback caused by the famine of 1984–85, the vast majority of the peasantry were irrevocably connected to the TPLF and it was clear that the Derg did not have the capacity to defeat its northern-based opposition.[11]

With the stabilization of the rural economy resulting from better harvests and the return of some refugees from Sudan, the TPLF was soon able to re-assert its control and influence in the rural areas and resume the siege of the towns.[11] By 1987 TPLF leadership had concluded that its forces and those of the Derg were roughly in balance and that a stalemate ensued.[11] As a consequence, the Front leadership began preparing plans to break the stalemate.[11] While the TPLF was able to mobilize growing human and material resources, the inability of the Derg to cause serious damage to its fighting forces led to declining morale among its officers.[11] Despite its ability to recruit and field a large number of troops to replace those lost in battle, the Derg was nonetheless singularly unsuccessful in inculcating faith in the regime, or a willingness on the part of its soldiers to keep the fight going.[11]

Meanwhile, growing TPLF inroads into the provinces of Wollo and Gondar led the Derg to plan another major campaign against the Front in the summer and autumn of 1987, a campaign that was aborted after the TPLF launched a three-pronged pre-emptive strike against the communications center of Mugulat outside Adigrat, and the eastern towns of Sinkata and Wukro.[11] The Derg's counterattack failed badly and the stage was set for the TPLF's biggest military victory up to that point in the war, which culminated in the 1988 capture of the towns. The battle for the towns began with an attack on the Derg's communication center of Mugulat in the northeast and after it was destroyed, the TPLF launched offensives against army bases at Axum and Adwa in central Tigray.[12]

So quick was the collapse of these towns that Derg forces sent from Endaselasie to relieve the garrisons found themselves attacked at Selekleka, and instead were forced to retreat before TPLF fighters moving west along the highway.[12] The fighting, which was the heaviest of the Tigrayan war, went on for two days before the army's positions were overrun.[12] The TPLF was also not prepared to hold the towns at this time when it did not have the resources to properly manage them.[13] Government employees and teachers who could not be paid from the TPLF's meager funds were encouraged to move to Derg-held towns.[12] Although it is clear that both the people and the fighters were unhappy at the impending turnover of the towns to the Derg, the TPLF was able to carry out its political work, establish underground cells and prepare for the next stage of the war.[12] As a consequence of its losses in Eritrea and Tigray, the Derg ended its state of belligerence with neighboring Somalia, thus freeing up troops and materials that could be transferred to the northern war zones.[13]

Another mobilization campaign was started and the Derg ordered, for security reasons, the expulsion of all foreign aid workers from Tigray and Eritrea on 6 April 1988, a move interpreted as ensuring that foreign observers would be unable to witness the events that were to unfold.[13] Some of the Derg's most heinous inflictions of atrocities throughout the war on the Tigrayan civilian population took place during the following months.[14] In particular, an all-day attack by helicopter gunships and MiGs resulted in 1,800 civilian deaths, the worst single atrocity of the entire war from the start of the ELF insurrection in 1961.[14] However, with the Derg largely restricted to the towns along the main roads and the TPLF in almost complete control of the countryside, the regime no longer had the capacity to cause the civilian dislocation that was needed if the TPLF was to be seriously weakened.[14]

The Derg's approach to the established church was ill-adapted to winning popular support, due to its victimization of students and teachers.[17] Distributing church lands was widely approved, but atheism and attacks on church dogma, practices, and priests were abhorred by the conservative Tigrayan peasants.[17] As church officials acknowledged, "the Derg knew that the Ethiopian people followed their religion and if it opposed the church directly, people would oppose the Derg, but at the same time he [the Derg] undermine the Church and religion indirectly'.[17] Unlike the Derg, the TPLF recognized that although the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was a major component of Ethiopian feudalism, it was not a monolithic institution.[18]

Some priests rejected the church's prohibition against taking up arms and they became TPLF fighters, but most were too old to keep up with the teachers in Front-established schools.[18] With the TPLF's blessing many participated in local administration, although they were never permitted to dominate mass associations.[18] With its doctrinal fixation on the establishment of a Marxist state in Ethiopia, the Derg proved incapable of understanding the peasants' religious attachments and sentiments.[19] Like its attacks on the educated youth in the towns, the Derg's assault on the Church and the mosque and their rural representatives was a major cause of peasant estrangement.[19] The TPLF worked within and through the religiously overlaid society of Tigray; while this placed constraints on its reforms, it also served to preclude Church-based opposition and win the support of peasants.[19]

Overcoming the age-old fetters on the role of women was a major concern of the TPLF from its earliest days in the west, in part because attacking female oppression was consistent with its liberation philosophy, but also because the TPLF needed to use all the human resources of Tigray in the struggle against the Derg.[19] The first Women's Mass Associations were established in 1978 in Sheraro and Zana, which were among the earliest woredas to be liberated and were deemed to have a high level of political consciousness.[19] While the separation of women from men during mobilization drives might suggest that their problems were perceived as being unique, this was not the general philosophy subscribed to by the TPLF.[20]

Although women were not at first welcomed as fighters into the TPLF, by 1983 the Front claimed that one-third of the fighters were women, it was recognized that the term 'fighter' referred to a range of positions and not just those involved in military combat.[20] Despite these measures and the support they had among Tigrayan women, in the mid-1980s it was decided to restrict the number of women recruited as fighters.[20] The TPLF argued that the reasons for this change of policy were that domestic life was being disrupted because so many women became fighters; women could make a valuable contribution to the war effort through activities in their home and villages; the educational levels for becoming a fighter were raised to five years and many women did not meet these criteria; and lastly, the war was moving to a conventional form that placed more emphasis on physical strengths.[20] As TPLF Central Committee member Aregash acknowledged, for peasant women 'being a fighter is such a liberation for them', and as a result, the decision to reduce the number of women fighters 'created resentment among the women in the villages'.[20]

It seems likely that the TPLF's decision to restrict the numbers of women into their ranks was a response to unease in the villages and, more specifically, the appeals of Tigrayan fathers, and the influence of the Church and the Mosque.[21] Two years after it was started, the program was abruptly ended because, according to the TPLF, teaching women how to plow served to increase their already burdensome responsibilities; in addition, it was argued that plowing was too heavy a work for women.[22] As a result, in Zana, which was one of the first woredas where this program was introduced, no women were plowing in 1993.[22] If the official reasons for discontinuing the plowing program can be discounted then the assumption must be that the TPLF feared that encouraging women to plow was offending by challenging the core religious and social beliefs about women in rural Tigrayan society.[22]

In the ritsi-held lands of Ethiopia, which includes Tigray, peasants have always taken a close interest in government measures that could impact their access to land.[22] The extent to which the Derg's land reform was carried out in Tigray is difficult to ascertain. It is clear that land held by the nobility was confiscated, and gulti obligations terminated by the peasants on their own, very quickly after they heard of the Derg's 1975 proclamation. However, formal land redistributions were rarely initiated by peasants, and the Derg's weak presence in the province before 1977-8 meant that they were probably not carried out in most of the province.[22] Unlike some other areas of Ethiopia, highland Tigray had little commercial potential and therefore no state farms were established. A surplus of land in the southern kola lands led the Derg to organize many cooperative farms and move poor peasants from Agame and central Tigray to work on these lands.[23]

After the Derg retreated from the area, the TPLF organized a conference where various systems of land tenure were discussed and voted on, and cooperative farming was overwhelmingly rejected.[23] The Derg also failed to appreciate the different levels of interest in land reform across regions when land reform should have gained the Derg a basis of peasant support in Tigray.[23] Both Derg and TPLF land reforms were designed to restructure the rural political economy and win peasant support, but the regime's reforms proved to be a political failure, and the Front's reforms served as the basis around which they mobilized the peasants of the province.[23] While the Derg's land distribution involved violence and resulted in their friends getting superior shares, the TPLF ensures that their program provided an equitable distribution of land and was carried out by the peasants.[24]

While the demand for equitable and democratically implemented land reform was heard across Tigray, in the less populated and lower lands of the west, Tembien, and the south-east, the major issue for peasants was 'unfair' administration.[25] Peasants from these areas repeatedly expressed their concern over an inadequate and corrupt administration, poor infrastructure, land insecurity, and shiftas who emerged from the forests at night to prey on poor farmers.[25] The lack, or weakness, of imperial government institutions, or the steady decline in the effectiveness of the central state as distance increased from the core, explains the prevalence of shifta in these areas.[25] Shifta groups operated with little threat from established authority and this led many peasants to conclude that the nobility and shiftas worked in conjunction.[25]

To combat this, the establishment of mass associations and local administrations in the liberated territories and lowlands was a critical element in the TPLF's peasant mobilization.[26] Of particular importance in achieving legitimacy of local administration was the establishment of a system of courts.[26] The differences between courts under the imperial regime and those under the TPLF are that the TPLF established courts at all levels of their administration.[27]