A new Book by Derege Demissie
“Abate Yachin Se’at”: Major General Demissie Bulto and the coup d’état of May 1989
In “Abate Yachin Se’at,” author Derege Demissie narrates the story of his late father, Major General Demissie Bulto. Derege’s story is about the private and public life of his father as well as a number of other high-ranking officers whose life run in tandem with the rise and fall of the post-WWII Ethiopian military history.
Derege’s book follows the arc of his father’s life and career from this period of Ethiopian history until his fateful death in 1989, by which time General Demissie had reached the pinnacle of his career as a Major general in command of the largest single military unit in Ethiopia. But Derege’s book is more than a son’s narrative of a beloved father’s public life. Throughout the book an intimate portrait of the private life of a father and a husband is threaded expertly on the large canvass of great historical moments that have shaped the attempt to establish and maintain a modern African nation-state. The promising ascent and catastrophic demise of the Ethiopian military under the otherwise inept leadership of the revolutionary Derg regime closely trace the triumphs and failures of the many campaigns of the country’s military, in all of which General Demissie participated.
General Demissie’s career began more or less with the very first attempt by the late Emperor Haileselassie to transform the Ethiopian military into a modern, thoroughly westernized fighting force. Demissie joined the emperor’s own Kibur Zebegna (honor guards) as an officer candidate of the third intake. It was a novel experiment in Ethiopia’s storied martial history, and Demissie’s time as a cadet was perhaps the most formative years of his life.
After a giddy, joy-filled three years as an officer candidate, Demissie and his fellow cadets were hastily shipped to the USS Radford, a United States Navy destroyer, and were unceremoniously commissioned as first lieutenants en route to the Korean peninsula. It was the Korean War, and the Ethiopian emperor, eager to impress western powers, had volunteered four successive reconnaissance battalions to be attached to the U.S. 7th Infantry Division as part of United Nations forces. The Korean War was to be the first of innumerable campaigns in which Demissie participated in his military service of more than three decades.
The story Derege narrates, is at once a story of personal courage and conviction as well as the moral dilemma inherent in war. Fade up with the dictatorial ruler that continually ignored their informed and professional counsel to institute crucial policy changes to end the war in the North and the government’s refusal to seek political solution to the internal problems the country faces, three high-ranking officers decided to design a daring plot to overthrow the government. These officers were: Maj. Gen. Merid Negussie, the Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. Fanta Belay, the Minister of Industry and former Commander of the Air force, and Maj. Gen. Demissie Bulto, the Commander of the more than 200, 000 strong Second Revolutionary Army (SRA). They convinced many others to join them and attempted the May 1989 coup d’état against Mengistu Halemariam.
When the attempt organized at the capital city failed in the first day of the coup, Gen. Demissie continued the effort in Asmara, then Ethiopia’s second largest city. For three days, Gen. Demissie continued his call for the end of dictatorship and for the formation of a representative government. The EPLF agreed to a 15-day cease-fire and preparations were underway to send troops to the Capital to crush the Palace Guard that was protecting the dictator. It was a daring plan, but one with increasingly diminishing chance of success. Yet, Gen. Demissie chose to fight to the end instead of boarding one the many planes under his control at the Asmara Air force base and saving his life. At that critical hour, Derege intimately examines the intense challenges his father faced and the personal courage he displayed.
The bloody massacre of the ablest generals and imprisonment of hundreds of officers, during the coup and its after math, became one of the major factors that contributed to the demise of the Ethiopian armed forces. Decapitated off its highly professional and brave leaders and officers, the Ethiopian army was now unable to withstand the continued push of the rebel forces. Engulfed with multifaceted contradictions, and ever alieniated from deeply dissatisfied populace, it took mere two years after the May 1989 aborted coup for Col Mengistu Hailemariam’s regime to finally succumb to the coordinated assault of the EPLF and TPLF. The collapse of the regime was to be followed by another era of tyranny under the dictatorial and ethnocentric TPLF/EPRDF that continues to date.
Other writers have written about General Demissie Bulto in most flattering words extolling his farsighted and brilliant military mind and the decisive leadership he provided. In “The Ethiopian Revolution,” a newly published work of scholarship in English and focused on the modern military history of Ethiopia, Dr. Gebru Tareke, characterized General Demissie’s leadership during the war against Somalia as follows:
“…The operation was directed by Brig General Demissie Bulto, Commander of the First Revolutionary Army and an officer with a well merited reputation for strategic vision, integrity, discipline, and decisiveness. These qualities had earned him the admiration and dedication of his staff and troops, who in turn fought with high motivation and determination. Demisse allowed his field commanders sufficient freedom of action while demanding full accountability. This calibrated responses to a complicated situation proved to be extremely effective.”
General MacArthur, the American general who led the defeat of the Japanese in the pacific front during WW II and under whose command General Demissie served in Korea while still a Lieutenant of the then Royal Guard of Ethiopia, once said “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” In his book, Derege has brought back to life the legacy of General Demissie and the heroic officers who served Ethiopia with him in vivid detail. It is a testimonial about Ethiopian patriotism, heroism, and professionalism of a generation from whose life the current generation and posterity should draw strength and inspiration.
Like all good works of literature, the book has a quality of keeping one in suspense. It narrates the intricacies of the plot from many angles based on eyewitness accounts, interviews with key individuals who were involved in the coup attempt, and seventeen years of research from various published and unpublished sources, including information obtained from the United States Department of State through the Freedom of Information Act.
The book also contains a daily diary of Gen. Demissie Bulto taken during two of the most successful campaigns waged against the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) in then Northern Ethiopia. Zemecha Bahire Negash and Key Bahir Zemecha were often singled out for the sophistication of their planning and operation. Gen. Demissie, who was temporarily transferred from his position as head of the First Army in Harar, was assigned as a head of The Armed Forces Coordinating Committee that planned and executed the two campaigns. The daily notes the General took provide rich details of the coordination, planning, and execution of the campaign against EPLF forces that were entrenched in the town of Barentu and the mountains of Nakfa. Gen. Demissie’s notes give rare insight into how the ground forces, the Airborne, the Navy, and the Air Force collaborated in these campaigns as well as the many logistical and structural challenges they faced.
Derege Demissie, the author, is an attorney at law and a partner at the law firm of Demissie & Church. He graduated from George Mason University in Political Science in 1994 earned his Juris Doctor Degree from Suffolk University Law School in Boston. He is the fourth child of the late General Demissie Bulto. Married and with a son and daughter, Derege currently lives in Boston, MA.
(Publisher: Neamin Zeleke. “ABATE YACHIN SE’AT” IS AVAILABLE ON-LINE and Washington DC Ethiopian stores. To purchase a copy on-line, go to: www.demissiebulto.com)
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key administration posts:
* Daniel W. Yohannes, Chief Executive Officer, Millennium Challenge Corporation
* Arun Majumdar, Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, Department of Energy
* Gustavo Aranavat, United States Executive Director to the Inter-American Development Bank
President Obama said, “These individuals have proven that they will bring skill, dedication and expertise in these important areas to my administration, and I look forward to working with them in the coming months and years.”
Daniel W. Yohannes, Nominee for Chief Executive Officer, Millennium Challenge Corporation
Daniel W. Yohannes is President and CEO of M&R Investments, LLC, a privately-held investment firm specializing in real estate, financial institutions and the green energy sector. Previously, he served as Vice Chairman of U.S. Bank for the Commercial Banking Group, Consumer Banking Group and as Head of Integration for Community and Public Affairs. In this role, his responsibilities included leading the integration of U.S. Bank and Firstar, which resulted in the 6th largest bank in the country. From 1992 to 1999, Yohannes was President and CEO of U.S. Bank (formerly Colorado National Bank), where he grew the Colorado franchise from $2 billion to $9 billion in assets. From 1977 to 1992, he worked at Security Pacific Bank (now Bank of America), where he held a number of leadership roles. Yohannes is on the Board of the National Jewish Hospital and Research Center, the Denver Art Museum, the University of Colorado Medical School and Project C.U.R.E., which provides medical supplies to 110 countries. Yohannes holds a B.S. in Economics from Claremont McKenna College and a M.B.A. from Pepperdine University.
Arun Majumdar, Nominee for Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, Department of Energy
Arun Majumdar is currently the Associate Laboratory Director for Energy and Environment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He has had a highly distinguished research career in the science and engineering of energy conversion, transport, and storage ranging from molecular and nanoscale level to large energy systems. For his pioneering work, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2005. At Berkeley Labs and UC Berkeley, he helped shape several strategic initiatives in the areas of energy efficiency, renewable energy as well as energy storage, and testified before Congress on how to reduce energy consumption in buildings. He has served on the advisory committee of the National Science Foundation’s engineering directorate, was a member of the advisory council to the materials sciences and engineering division of DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences, and was an advisor on nanotechnology to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Dr. Majumdar has also been an entrepreneur, and has served as an advisor to startup companies and venture capital firms in the silicon valley. He received his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1985 and his PhD in 1989 from the University of California, Berkeley.
Gustavo Aranavat, Nominee for United States Executive Director to the Inter-American Development Bank
Gustavo Arnavat most recently served as Director and Senior Legal Counsel of the Citi Private Bank in New York, where he was Legal Co-Head of the Latin America market region. At Citi, he managed a wide range of legal, regulatory and policy issues in connection with banking, investment management and brokerage services. Arnavat also spent several years as an investment banker, focusing on the origination and execution of public offerings and private placements by Latin American issuers, and provided strategic advice relating to M&A transactions and joint ventures. Prior to attending law school, Arnavat served as a Presidential Management Fellow, working at the National Security Council as the Latin America regional analyst, the State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he worked on domestic and international law enforcement and anti-money laundering initiatives. He serves on the Boards of the DEA Museum Foundation, the Westchester Community Foundation, and TeatroStageFest. Arnavat received a B.A., cum laude, from Cornell University, an M.P.P. degree from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where he was an editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
By Jamie Shreeve | National Geographic
Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.
The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton—assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus—belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed “Ardi.” (See pictures of Ardipithecus ramidus.)
The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin’s time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today’s apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.
Ardi instead shows an unexpected mix of advanced characteristics and of primitive traits seen in much older apes that were unlike chimps or gorillas (interactive: Ardi’s key features). As such, the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.
Announced at joint press conferences in Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the analysis of the Ardipithecus ramidus bones will be published in a collection of papers tomorrow in a special edition of the journal Science, along with an avalanche of supporting materials published online.
“This find is far more important than Lucy,” said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. “It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn’t look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between.” (Related: “Oldest Homo Sapiens Fossils Found, Experts Say” [June 11, 2003].)
Ardi Surrounded by Family
The Ardipithecus ramidus fossils were discovered in Ethiopia’s harsh Afar desert at a site called Aramis in the Middle Awash region, just 46 miles (74 kilometers) from where Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, was found in 1974. Radiometric dating of two layers of volcanic ash that tightly sandwiched the fossil deposits revealed that Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago.
Older hominid fossils have been uncovered, including a skull from Chad at least six million years old and some more fragmentary, slightly younger remains from Kenya and nearby in the Middle Awash.
While important, however, none of those earlier fossils are nearly as revealing as the newly announced remains, which in addition to Ardi’s partial skeleton include bones representing at least 36 other individuals.
“All of a sudden you’ve got fingers and toes and arms and legs and heads and teeth,” said Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, who co-directed the work with Berhane Asfaw, a paleoanthropologist and former director of the National Museum of Ethiopia, and Giday WoldeGabriel, a geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
“That allows you to do something you can’t do with isolated specimens,” White said. “It allows you to do biology.”
Ardi’s Weird Way of Moving
The biggest surprise about Ardipithecus’s biology is its bizarre means of moving about.
All previously known hominids—members of our ancestral lineage—walked upright on two legs, like us. But Ardi’s feet, pelvis, legs, and hands suggest she was a biped on the ground but a quadruped when moving about in the trees.
Her big toe, for instance, splays out from her foot like an ape’s, the better to grasp tree limbs. Unlike a chimpanzee foot, however, Ardipithecus’s contains a special small bone inside a tendon, passed down from more primitive ancestors, that keeps the divergent toe more rigid. Combined with modifications to the other toes, the bone would have helped Ardi walk bipedally on the ground, though less efficiently than later hominids like Lucy. The bone was lost in the lineages of chimps and gorillas.
According to the researchers, the pelvis shows a similar mosaic of traits. The large flaring bones of the upper pelvis were positioned so that Ardi could walk on two legs without lurching from side to side like a chimp. But the lower pelvis was built like an ape’s, to accommodate huge hind limb muscles used in climbing.
Even in the trees, Ardi was nothing like a modern ape, the researchers say.
Modern chimps and gorillas have evolved limb anatomy specialized to climbing vertically up tree trunks, hanging and swinging from branches, and knuckle-walking on the ground.
While these behaviors require very rigid wrist bones, for instance, the wrists and finger joints of Ardipithecus were highly flexible. As a result Ardi would have walked on her palms as she moved about in the trees—more like some primitive fossil apes than like chimps and gorillas.
“What Ardi tells us is there was this vast intermediate stage in our evolution that nobody knew about,” said Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State University in Ohio, who analyzed Ardi’s bones below the neck. “It changes everything.”
Against All Odds, Ardi Emerges
The first, fragmentary specimens of Ardipithecus were found at Aramis in 1992 and published in 1994. The skeleton announced today was discovered that same year and excavated with the bones of the other individuals over the next three field seasons. But it took 15 years before the research team could fully analyze and publish the skeleton, because the fossils were in such bad shape.
After Ardi died, her remains apparently were trampled down into mud by hippos and other passing herbivores. Millions of years later, erosion brought the badly crushed and distorted bones back to the surface.
They were so fragile they would turn to dust at a touch. To save the precious fragments, White and colleagues removed the fossils along with their surrounding rock. Then, in a lab in Addis, the researchers carefully tweaked out the bones from the rocky matrix using a needle under a microscope, proceeding “millimeter by submillimeter,” as the team puts it in Science. This process alone took several years.
Pieces of the crushed skull were then CT-scanned and digitally fit back together by Gen Suwa, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tokyo.
In the end, the research team recovered more than 125 pieces of the skeleton, including much of the feet and virtually all of the hands—an extreme rarity among hominid fossils of any age, let alone one so very ancient.
“Finding this skeleton was more than luck,” said White. “It was against all odds.”
Ardi’s World
The team also found some 6,000 animal fossils and other specimens that offer a picture of the world Ardi inhabited: a moist woodland very different from the region’s current, parched landscape. In addition to antelope and monkey species associated with forests, the deposits contained forest-dwelling birds and seeds from fig and palm trees.
Wear patterns and isotopes in the hominid teeth suggest a diet that included fruits, nuts, and other forest foods.
If White and his team are right that Ardi walked upright as well as climbed trees, the environmental evidence would seem to strike the death knell for the “savanna hypothesis”—a long-standing notion that our ancestors first stood up in response to their move onto an open grassland environment.
Sex for Food
Some researchers, however, are unconvinced that Ardipithecus was quite so versatile.
“This is a fascinating skeleton, but based on what they present, the evidence for bipedality is limited at best,” said William Jungers, an anatomist at Stony Brook University in New York State.
“Divergent big toes are associated with grasping, and this has one of the most divergent big toes you can imagine,” Jungers said. “Why would an animal fully adapted to support its weight on its forelimbs in the trees elect to walk bipedally on the ground?”
One provocative answer to that question—originally proposed by Lovejoy in the early 1980s and refined now in light of the Ardipithecus discoveries—attributes the origin of bipedality to another trademark of humankind: monogamous sex.
Virtually all apes and monkeys, especially males, have long upper canine teeth—formidable weapons in fights for mating opportunities.
But Ardipithecus appears to have already embarked on a uniquely human evolutionary path, with canines reduced in size and dramatically “feminized” to a stubby, diamond shape, according to the researchers. Males and female specimens are also close to each other in body size.
Lovejoy sees these changes as part of an epochal shift in social behavior: Instead of fighting for access to females, a male Ardipithecus would supply a “targeted female” and her offspring with gathered foods and gain her sexual loyalty in return.
To keep up his end of the deal, a male needed to have his hands free to carry home the food. Bipedalism may have been a poor way for Ardipithecus to get around, but through its contribution to the “sex for food” contract, it would have been an excellent way to bear more offspring. And in evolution, of course, more offspring is the name of the game (more: “Did Early Humans Start Walking for Sex?”).
Two hundred thousand years after Ardipithecus, another species called Australopithecus anamensis appeared in the region. By most accounts, that species soon evolved into Australopithecus afarensis, with a slightly larger brain and a full commitment to a bipedal way of life. Then came early Homo, with its even bigger brain and budding tool use.
Did primitive Ardipithecus undergo some accelerated change in the 200,000 years between it and Australopithecus—and emerge as the ancestor of all later hominids? Or was Ardipithecus a relict species, carrying its quaint mosaic of primitive and advanced traits with it into extinction?
Study co-leader White sees nothing about the skeleton “that would exclude it from ancestral status.” But he said more fossils would be needed to fully resolve the issue.
Stony Brook’s Jungers added, “These finds are incredibly important, and given the state of preservation of the bones, what they did was nothing short of heroic.
But this is just the beginning of the story.”
Alabama A&M University’s work to improve basic education in Ethiopia has received a $13 million boost from the federal government.
The grant from the U.S. International Development Agency was one of three federal contracts announced Thursday by the university.
A&M also received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation for research in advanced materials and nanophotonics and a $2.2 million foundation grant to strengthen science, technology, engineering and mathematics education.
The three-year Ethiopia grant is part of a larger $600 million initiative to pair historically black colleges with African nations. A&M’s grant funds its Textbooks and Learning Materials Program, which puts books and other materials in Ethiopian schools.
“Day to day, African nations confront horrendous obstacles in their quest to properly educate their children,” said A&M President Dr. Andrew Hugine Jr. “The textbook program offers (A&M) an opportunity to appreciatively give back to Ethiopia, a country with an ancient and rich heritage, while furthering our mission on an international scale.”
“The textbooks are used by 100 percent of the children of the country,” said Lamin Drammeh, manager of a similar program for Tanzania based at South Carolina State University. “The learning materials reflect what’s needed for the country’s work force, are culturally relevant, and are published in Africa by local African publishers using African distribution centers.”
A&M has developed English-as-a-second language textbooks for children in grades 1, 6, 7 and 8. The university has also trained teachers.
The science grants will help upgrade A&M research facilities and equipment and develop programs in nanoscience, nanotechnology and other areas of engineering.
Ethiopia’s regime continues to monopolize telecom services including fixed, mobile, Internet and data communications. This monopolistic control has stifled innovation and retarded expansion.
The
Ethiopia has the second lowest telephone penetration rate in Africa, but it recently surpassed Egypt to become the second most populous nation on the continent after Nigeria. [This is done on purpose by the U.S.-backed regime to keep the people of Ethiopian in the dark age]. However, it is also one of the poorest countries in the world with approximately 80% of the population supporting themselves through subsistence agriculture, which accounts for more than half of the country’s GDP.
Despite the monopoly situation, subscriber growth in the mobile sector has been excellent at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of almost 90% since its inception in 1999 and more than 100% in the past six years. However, demand has been even stronger, and ETC has been unable to satisfy it. Ethiopia’s mobile market penetration is still one of the lowest in the world at little more than 3%. Fixed-line penetration is even lower, and this has also impacted on the development of the Internet sector. Prices of broadband connections are excessive.
Improvements are beginning to develop following massive investments into fixed-wireless and mobile network infrastructure, including third generation mobile technology, as well as a national fibre optic backbone. Ethiopia is investing an unusually large amount, around 10% of its GDP, into information & communication technology (ICT). However, telecommunications revenue has grown only moderately in comparison, at around 16% per annum. It has remained under 2% of GDP, a low figure in regional comparison.
