Time for Apologies

Arriving somewhat belatedly on the scene last week, 50 foreign newsmen trooped past a pair of gazelles and a frolicsome antelope on the gracious lawns of bullet-pocked Jubilee Palace in Addis Ababa. Inside, they learned from Emperor Haile Selassie (the Elect of God, the Lion of Judah, etc.) the official story on the army revolt that had bloodied the capital city just a few days before. The attempted coup, said the Emperor, had been the work of a "small, isolated group of officers." According to Haile Selassie, the rebels' own proclamations demanding an end to oppression and poverty amounted to "approval of the program of progress in education, health and social welfare that we have been implementing all the time." His son Crown Prince Asfa Wassan had broadcast for the rebels "at the point of a gun," according to an official communique. To emphasize that he was back in charge, the Emperor ordejred the bullet-riddled corpse of a rebel chieftain hanged in a public square.

Massacre. The revolt, timed to coincide with Haile Selassie's state visit to Brazil, had indeed been crushed--but at a far higher cost than the outside world had guessed. At least 325 persons were dead. The gates at the Palace of the Prince of Paradise, the Emperor's main residence, were a mass of twisted iron. Downtown hotels and office buildings were agape with shell holes where, at the height of the rebellion, the loyal 1st Division had fought a pitched battle with 4,500 rebel palace guardsmen. The loyalists won the battle and followed up by storming Prince of Paradise Palace. As the assault began, the panicky rebels brutally machine-gunned 15 top government officials whom they had been holding as hostages in a palace anteroom.

One near casualty was U.S. Ambassador Arthur L. Richards, 53, who had taken on the dangerous task of serving as messenger between the two sides. Just before the assault, Richards had arrived at the palace bearing a letter from a loyalist general. While Rebel "Premier" Ras Imru (who was forgiven for his role in the revolt last week by the Emperor on the grounds that he had acted "under duress") was scribbling his reply, loyalist tanks came charging through the palace gates. Richards scampered out a window in the nick of time--"it was the nearest available exit." Another U.S. official in a tight spot was Mrs. Oswald B. Lord of Minneapolis, who happened to be in Addis Ababa as the U.S. observer at a U.N.-sponsored seminar on "women in public life." As bullets whistled through the Ghion Hotel, Mrs. Lord recalls, "I sat on the floor of my room drinking bourbon, wrapping Christmas gifts and writing feverishly in my diary."

Man Hunt. Would the revolt, and fear of worse to come, lead to any changes in Haile Selassie's feudal monarchy? "None at all," said the durable Emperor. But he seemed suddenly old, tired, and sad. Grimly his troops hunted through the nearby hills for the two chief leaders of the revolt--a Columbia University-educated provincial governor named Germame Newaye and his brother Brigadier General Mengistu Newaye, Commander of the Imperial Guard.

Other captured rebel officers, some of them barefoot, stood in line at the palace to plead with the Emperor for their lives. Students at the University College of Addis Ababa, who had come out in support of the rebels, learned that they could not go back to classes until they had written their individual apologies to the Emperor. That left Ethiopia where it had always been, or perhaps a step or two backward. One Ethiopian diplomat noted bitterly that the fighting had wiped out an inordinate number of the country's scarcest commodity--well-educated men.

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