(The New Yorker) — ANNALS OF POLITICAL TERROR about political prisoners in Ethiopia. Tells about the rise, in 1974, of a revolutionary party known as the Derg, led by Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, a 5’3″ ordnance officer known as the Black Stalin of Africa: he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands–perhaps millions–of his countrymen. The central part of Haile Selassie’s empire–the old kingdom of Abyssinia–is a high plateau, towering some ten thousand feet above sea level and marked by isolated valleys and deep volcanic rifts. A light-skinned, thin-lipped ethnic group known as the Amhara dominated the highlands–and the courts of the empire–for hundreds of years. They were in the minority, but they presided over a disparate collection of what were, in effect, principalities: desperately poor regions populated by some eighty ethnic and linguistic groups, all consisting mostly of peasants, living amid their goats and cattle in conical mud-and-thatch huts. The kingdom’s mountain fastness and its altitude had to a large extent guaranteed its isolation, and for centuries it remains an impregnable feudal realm. Tells how the problems of land tenure, reform, and famine, when coupled with the oil price shock of 1973, caused a revolution in Ethiopia. Power shifted to a complete unknown–Mengistu Haile Mariam. He was later known as the Black Stalin of Africa. He held power for 17 years, during which he organized innumerable massacres. [read the full text here]