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On the thirty-sixth anniversary of the coup d’état that almost toppled Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian Tribune examines the fatal miscalculations of the officer class, the cascading logic of internal betrayal, and the historiographical void that has erased these generals from national memory.
On This Day: Thirty-Six Years Since the Failed Coup
18 May 1989 (8 Ginbot 1981 EC): The Officers Who Challenged and Fell
The institutions of a dictatorship reveal themselves most clearly at the moment of their rupture. On the morning of 18 May 1989, when a faction of senior military officers gathered in the Ministry of Defence to plot the removal of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian military hierarchy fractured along a line that would prove both revealing and tragic: the distinction between formal authority and actual power.
Major General Merid Negussie, the Chief of Staff, presided over a war room consumed by debate: should the dictator’s aircraft be intercepted before clearing Ethiopian airspace? Should decisive, irreversible action be taken? Or should caution prevail, institutional norms be respected, civilian lives protected? The paralysis that followed that debate became the coup d’état epitaph. Within hours, Mengistu’s aircraft cleared the border. The window of opportunity slammed shut. And a conspiracy that had assembled the rank and authority to seize the state found itself, quite suddenly, fighting for survival instead of power.
What followed was a cascade of failure and fratricide. In Asmara, Major General Demissie Bulto and his senior staff were executed by their own troops. In Addis Ababa, Major General Merid Negussie and Major General Amha Desta took their own lives. Thirty or more senior officers were killed, imprisoned, disappeared into the interrogation apparatus, or hunted down and shot whilst fleeing. The coup that was meant to challenge Mengistu’s dictatorship instead became an occasion for the dictatorship to purge its own officer corps with ruthless efficiency.
Yet for three and a half decades, this history has been largely erased from Ethiopian public memory. There are no memorials. There are no sustained historical investigations. The names of the officers who died whether by suicide in the Ministry of Defence, execution by their own soldiers in Asmara, or torture in the interrogation centres of the Derg regime have faded into silence. Only the families of these men carry the memory, and even that memory is constrained by the political interests of successive Ethiopian regimes that have found it inconvenient to memorialise a failed coup attempt.
This silence is not accidental. It is the product of choices: the choice of the post-1991 EPRDF regime to construct a narrative in which the Derg was uniformly villainous and the insurgencies uniformly heroic, a binary that left no room for the complicated reality of officers who were simultaneously perpetrators within the dictatorship and, in their final acts, challengers to it. But a complete historical reckoning demands more complexity, more honesty, more willingness to grapple with the actual mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes function and ultimately decay.
The coup of 18 May 1989 failed militarily, but its historical significance lies precisely in its failure. It revealed the Derg regime to be institutionally vulnerable, dependent on terror to maintain control even over its own officer corps. It demonstrated that a significant faction of the military hierarchy had concluded that Mengistu’s dictatorship was unsustainable. And it contributed, however indirectly, to the regime’s eventual collapse by forcing the Derg to consume resources and institutional energy in internal purges rather than in effective counterinsurgency operations against the TPLF and EPLF.
The following essay undertakes a systematic examination of the coup attempt: its strategic miscalculations, the cascading failures in command coherence, the internal betrayals that sealed its fate, and the purges that followed. It offers no heroes, no redemptive narrative. It asks, instead, that we remember these officers not as saviours but as complex historical actors whose attempt to challenge the regime they served, however imperfectly executed, deserves to be part of the permanent historical record.
On this thirty-sixth anniversary, the names of Major General Merid Negussie, Major General Demissie Bulto, and the thirty or more officers who died in the coup attempt and its aftermath deserve remembrance. Not to celebrate them, but to complete the historical record. Not to deny their complicity in the Derg regimes brutality, but to acknowledge the full complexity of how authoritarian systems function and how, finally, they come to an end.
The Editorial Board
The Ethiopian Tribune
The Paralysis in the War Room
At the precise moment when Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam’s aircraft crossed Ethiopian airspace on 18 May 1989, the architects of his potential overthrow sat in a Ministry of Defence conference room consumed by a debate that would define the coup’s fatal trajectory. Major General Merid Negussie, the Chief of Staff, presided over a military hierarchy fractured not by ideological conviction but by competing calculations of legitimacy, institutional consequence, and moral restraint.
The strategic divide was stark. One faction emboldened, decisive, willing to absorb the costs of decisive action advocated for the immediate termination of the dictator: either an air strike against the presidential aircraft or a forced landing in Asmara, where Mengistu could be detained and presented as a fait accompli before international and domestic audiences. This was the language of revolution: swift, irreversible, the kind of action that forecloses negotiation and establishes new facts on the ground.
The opposing faction seized upon a different calculus: the protection of civilian lives on the departing aircraft, the preservation of Ethiopian Airlines’ international standing, and an implicit recognition that shooting down one’s own head of state, however, despised carries a reputational cost that transcends the immediate political moment. This was the language of institutional stewardship, of officers conscious of their role as custodians of state apparatus rather than revolutionary architects.
The debate itself is instructive. It reveals a military officer corps that had not yet crossed the psychological threshold required for successful coup execution. Revolutionary movements, whether they succeed or fail share a common prerequisite: the willingness of the conspirators to burn the bridges behind them, to commit acts of such magnitude and moral weight that retreat becomes impossible. The hesitation over Mengistu’s aircraft was not a failure of nerve alone; it was symptomatic of deeper institutional ambivalence about the legitimacy of their own enterprise.
By the time this internal debate reached its conclusion, the window of opportunity had sealed. Mengistu’s aircraft cleared Ethiopian airspace. The coup, as a coherent political project, was already hollow not yet defeated militarily, but spiritually compromised by its own architects’ inability to commit fully to the violence required to see it through.
The North Moves on False Intelligence: Major General Demissie Bulto and the Asmara Gambit
In Asmara, the commander of the Second Revolutionary Army, Major General Demissie Bulto, operated on faulty intelligence. Receiving early signals from the capital that Mengistu had been successfully removed, he mobilised with a speed and decisiveness that should have been the template for Addis Ababa. Demissie seized the local radio station and broadcast a declaration: the regime had fallen. The regime was history. The revolution was underway.
The tactical logic was sound. With Mengistu apparently neutralised in the capital, Demissie deployed the elite 102nd Airborne Division southward aboard Antonov transports under the command of Major General Kumlachew Dejene. The strike force was meant to consolidate control of critical infrastructure the state broadcaster, telecommunications hubs, airports, the military nerve centres that had sustained Mengistu’s grip. This was the operational implementation of what the war room in Addis Ababa had theoretically imagined: the seizure of state apparatus before the regime could reconstitute itself.
But Demissie and his subordinates were executing a plan based on a fiction. The war room in Addis Ababa had not moved decisively. Mengistu was not neutralised; he was airborne and returning. And by the time this reality became clear in Asmara, the 102nd Airborne was already committed, already in transit, already the vanguard of a coup that had no head, no political leadership, no coherent command structure to support its operational objectives.
This is the anatomy of military collapse under pressure: a coalition of conspirators, each operating on partial intelligence and optimistic assumptions, each believing that the others have secured their sector of the plan. When one component fails when the war room in Addis Ababa paralysed itself over the question of whether to shoot down an aircraft the entire edifice becomes a series of isolated uprisings with no centre of gravity.
The Architecture of Betrayal: Tesfaye Wolde Selassie and the Internal Compromise
Colonel Tesfaye Wolde Selassie, the Minister of State Security, became the coup’s executioner. His betrayal was not merely tactical; it was symptomatic of a deeper institutional reality that the conspirators had failed to address: the security apparatus of the Mengistu regime, despite its brutality and paranoia, maintained layers of counterintelligence so dense and so ruthlessly enforced that penetration at the highest levels was nearly impossible to conceal.
Tesfaye’s role illuminates a fundamental weakness of the coup: it was an officers’ plot without the structural capacity to neutralise the security state. The Derg regime, whatever its military incompetence in the field against the TPLF and EPLF, had constructed an internal security apparatus that was exquisitely sensitive to elite deviance. Every senior officer was monitored, every coalition watched, every meeting of consequence filtered through informants whose survival depended on their vigilance.
Tesfaye’s tip-off to loyalist forces particularly to Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s Special Protection Brigade activated the regime’s immune system. The conspirators, for all their rank and institutional position, had not grasped a fundamental reality about authoritarian militaries: position and loyalty are not synonymous. A general can command troops in theory and still be isolated politically. A colonel controlling the presidential guard can be more consequential than a major general commanding distant garrisons.
This asymmetry of power between titular military rank and actual control over coercive assets destroyed the coup. By the time Mengistu’s aircraft touched down in Addis Ababa, the conspirators in the Ministry of Defence had already lost control of the narrative, the capital’s security apparatus, and any credible claim to legitimacy based on institutional authority. What remained was isolated pockets of resistance, each cut off from the others, each fighting a battle already lost at the level of strategic coordination.
The Deaths in Addis Ababa: Suicide, Execution, and the Collapse of Authority
The suicides of Major General Merid Negussie and Major General Amha Desta occupy a particular place in the emotional and political archaeology of this failed coup. These were not desperate men acting under threat; they were senior officers who, in the privacy of the Ministry of Defence, chose to end their lives rather than face capture and interrogation. The choice itself speaks to their understanding of what awaited them: not trial, but torture; not imprisonment, but systematic annihilation.
Merid Negussie, the Chief of Staff, turned his service pistol on himself in the same conference room where, hours earlier, he had presided over the debate about whether to shoot down Mengistu’s aircraft. The irony is almost unbearable: the man tasked with exercising command authority over the coup’s execution ended his life in the very space where his paralysis had become institutionalised. His suicide was, in some sense, the final acknowledgement of that institutional failure a recognition that the decision not to act decisively had cascading consequences that could no longer be reversed or reframed.
Amha Desta, the Air Force Commander, followed Merid into death by similar means. The symmetry of their deaths both senior officers, both taking their own lives within hours, both in the Ministry of Defence suggests a shared understanding of their fate and a collective decision that death on their own terms was preferable to the machinery of Mengistu’s interrogation centres.
Major General Fanta Belay, the Minister of Industry, attempted a different strategy: flight. For four days he evaded security forces, hiding deep within the Ministry of Defence compound a bunker of sorts, a man trapped in the very institution he had tried to seize. But physical hiding could not obscure institutional vulnerability. He was discovered, arrested, and days later killed under “mysterious circumstances” inside the Maekelawi central investigation prison. There is nothing mysterious about Maekelawi; it was the Derg’s primary torture centre, a facility whose existence was synonymous with the regime’s capacity for systematic brutality.
Major General Aberra Abebe, the head of military operations and a key instigator, chose armed resistance. He shot and wounded Major General Hailegiorgis Hailemariam, the Minister of Defence, when the latter entered the compound to negotiate with the mutineers. Aberra managed to escape the initial security cordons, scaling the compound wall and vanishing into the capital’s urban landscape. For months he eluded the regime’s manhunt a fugitive general in his own capital, reduced to hiding with relatives, stripped of his institutional position and his ability to exercise command. When he was finally cornered by police at a relative’s house in Addis Ababa, he died as so many of the conspirators did: attempting to escape over another wall, gunned down in flight.
These deaths suicides, executions, killings “under mysterious circumstances,” men shot while fleeing tell a coherent story about the Derg regime’s approach to institutional deviance: there was no mechanism for peaceful resolution, no institutional pathway for the conspirators to surrender with dignity or to expect trial and imprisonment. The regime’s logic was absolute: eliminate the threat, erase the evidence, move forward as though the attempted coup had been merely a temporary disruption of order rather than a fundamental challenge to the regime’s legitimacy.
The Purge in Asmara: Fratricide and the Collapse of Command Coherence
In Asmara, the mutiny sustained itself for three days before the logic of defeat became undeniable. But the manner of its final collapse soldiers of the 102nd Airborne Division executing their own commanders reveals something deeper than mere military defeat: it was the complete disintegration of command authority and the triumph of survival instinct over institutional loyalty.
Major General Demissie Bulto and his senior staff were executed in what the historical record tersely describes as “a hail of gunfire.” The clinical language obscures the reality: soldiers shooting their commanders, junior ranks eliminating officers whose authority they had accepted hours or days earlier. This is not the behaviour of a military unit following orders; it is the behaviour of men attempting to survive by eliminating evidence of their own participation in the coup attempt.
The soldiers of the 102nd Airborne faced a choice with no good options: they could remain loyal to their commanders and face execution as coup conspirators, or they could betray those commanders and attempt to escape culpability by demonstrating their own loyalty to the regime through fratricide. The choice, from a pure survival standpoint, was clear. The result was that the senior leadership of the coup Demissie Bulto, the Brigadier Generals who commanded the divisions and corps, the colonels and lieutenant colonels who formed the officer corps of the northern rebellion were systematically eliminated by the very troops they commanded.
This moment the killing of Demissie and his staff by their own soldiers crystallises the fundamental instability of military conspiracies that do not command overwhelming support from the rank and file. When enlisted men and junior officers must choose between loyalty to their immediate commanders and survival, when that choice is made under conditions of imminent defeat and the knowledge that the regime is about to reassert total control, the outcome is inevitable: the officer corps becomes expendable, a sacrifice made to preserve the lives of men with no choice in the conspiracy.
Major General Kumlachew Dejene, who had flown in with the 102nd Airborne as the operational commander, managed to escape. As communications collapsed and the Asmara operation disintegrated into chaos, he went into hiding. Unlike Demissie and the other senior commanders, Kumlachew possessed the mobility and perhaps the connections necessary to flee the country. He eventually secured asylum in the United States, becoming the sole surviving general of the coup’s upper echelon a survival purchased, perhaps, by his ability to separate himself from the final catastrophe in Asmara and to extract himself before the killing began.
The Cascade of Names: Eighteen Officers Executed in Asmara
The list of eighteen officers executed in Asmara from Brigadier General Afework Wolde Michael, the Chief Emergency Administrator for Eritrea, down through the hierarchy to Captain Getahun Girma, the Special Assistant to the SRA Commander represents the institutional destruction of the Second Revolutionary Army’s officer corps. These were not minor figures; they were the senior administrators and operational commanders of the Derg’s military presence in the north.
Brigadier General Taye Balakir, the Chief of the Revolutionary Police in Eritrea, was executed. Brigadier General Tadesse Tessema, Head of Operations of the SRA, was executed. Brigadier General Worku Chernet, Head of Politics, was executed. The catalogue continues: Brigadier General Nigussie Zergaw (Asmara Air Force Commander), Brigadier General Kebede Mehari (Administration), Brigadier General Tegene Bekele (Operations), each one stripped of rank and institutional position and killed in the final purge.
What is striking about this list is not merely its length but its comprehensiveness. These were not marginal officers whose elimination left the military apparatus intact; these were the senior administrative and operational cadres of the northern command. Their elimination in a single purge represented the systematic decapitation of one of the Derg’s major military organisations. The fact that they were killed by their own troops in Asmara rather than by loyalist forces under Mengistu’s direct control suggests something even more destabilising: the regime did not need to send execution squads to the north. The collapse of command authority was so complete that soldiers and junior officers, facing the choice between their commanders’ failure and their own survival, chose survival through fratricide.
The Arrests in Addis Ababa: Institutional Capture and the Machinery of Interrogation
The twelve senior officers arrested by Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s Special Protection Brigade in the Ministry of Defence on 18 May 1989 represent a different category of fate. Unlike their counterparts in Asmara, they were taken alive captured, imprisoned, subjected to the machinery of interrogation and state control that the Derg had perfected over seventeen years.
Major General Hailu Gebre Michael, Commander of the Ground Forces; Major General Worku Zewde, Commissioner of the Police Force; Major General Alemayehu Desta, Deputy Commander of the Ground Forces these were men at the apex of the military hierarchy, officers whose positions placed them at the intersection of power, intelligence, and command authority. Their arrest was not merely a military matter; it was a political event that signified the regime’s absolute control over even the most senior echelons of the officer corps.
The question of what happened to these men after their arrest is less explicitly documented in the historical record than the deaths in Asmara or the suicides in the Ministry of Defence, but the silence itself is instructive. Men of this rank and position, arrested by the Derg regime, were not released. They were not tried in open proceedings. They entered the machinery of the interrogation state and disappeared into it either executed in secret, or maintained in imprisonment until the regime itself collapsed in 1991, or eliminated in the final purges that preceded the EPRDF’s military victory.
The arrest of these twelve officers demonstrated a fundamental asymmetry within the coup attempt: while the conspirators had sufficient military rank to pose a threat to the regime, they did not have sufficient control of the coercive apparatus to neutralise that threat before it materialised. Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s Special Protection Brigade a unit of perhaps a few hundred men proved more decisive in determining the coup’s fate than the combined command authority of a dozen generals.
The Cascade of Failure: Why the Coup Collapsed and What It Reveals About the Derg’s Vulnerability
The 18 May coup attempt failed not because of military incompetence in the tactical sense, but because of institutional fracture at the moment of maximum consequence. The conspirators possessed rank, they possessed command positions, they possessed access to military assets. What they lacked was coherence: a unified strategy for the moment of execution, a shared understanding of the costs they were willing to bear, and a command structure resilient enough to sustain operations when the initial plan collapsed.
The fatal decision the decision not to shoot down Mengistu’s aircraft reveals the deeper problem. This was not a decision imposed by external circumstances; it was a choice made by the coup’s senior leadership in the Ministry of Defence war room. The choice to preserve civilian lives, to protect Ethiopian Airlines’ reputation, was a conscious prioritisation of institutional norms over revolutionary necessity. In the context of an attempted coup d’état, such prioritisation is fatal. A revolution that cannot commit fully to the violence required to succeed is not a revolution; it is an institutional grievance masquerading as a coup.
Once that decision was made once the window of opportunity passed and Mengistu’s aircraft cleared Ethiopian airspace the coup was already lost in the only way that mattered: politically. The subsequent military operations in Addis Ababa and Asmara were not the execution of a coherent plan but the unravelling of an already-compromised enterprise. Demissie Bulto in Asmara and the junior conspirators in the capital were executing a plan that had already been abandoned by its senior architects. They were acting on outdated intelligence. They were trying to consolidate a victory that had never materialised.
And yet, the coup’s failure should not obscure its historical significance. The attempt revealed the Derg regime to be profoundly vulnerable not in its external military capacity (which would be challenged more effectively by the TPLF and EPLF in the field), but in its internal cohesion. A significant faction of the senior officer corps, including the Chief of Staff and major operational commanders, had concluded that the Mengistu regime was unsustainable and that military coup was the appropriate response. This was not a fringe conspiracy; this was an institutional challenge to the regime’s legitimacy mounted from within the military hierarchy itself.
The regime’s response systematic execution, torture, the elimination of an entire generation of senior officers was not a sign of strength. It was a sign of desperation: a dictatorship forced to destroy significant portions of its own officer corps to maintain control. Every senior officer killed in the purge that followed the coup was a military asset eliminated, a command position vacated, a potential source of resistance to the regime removed through extrajudicial killing rather than institutional reform or political compromise.
The Unspoken Consequence: How the Coup’s Failure Enabled the Insurgencies
The 18 May coup attempt, though it failed militarily, had a profound and paradoxical effect on the Derg regime’s capacity to resist the insurgencies that would ultimately destroy it. The purge that followed the coup eliminated a significant portion of the officer corps precisely at the moment when the TPLF was consolidating its military position in the north and the EPLF was preparing for the final phase of the struggle for Eritrean independence.
By executing or imprisoning the commanders of the Second Revolutionary Army and the senior staff in Addis Ababa, the Mengistu regime decapitated its own northern command structure. The officers who replaced Demissie Bulto and the other purged commanders were not chosen for their military competence; they were chosen for their loyalty—which is to say, for their demonstrated unwillingness to challenge the regime’s authority regardless of the military consequences. A military force led by politically reliable officers rather than competent commanders is a military force in decline.
Moreover, the regime’s need to deploy units to suppress the coup attempt and to maintain security in Addis Ababa reduced the military resources available for the counterinsurgency effort in the north. Troops that might have been deployed against the TPLF were instead employed in hunting down fugitive generals and suppressing residual pockets of dissent. The regime’s institutional energy, in the months following the coup attempt, was directed inward toward purges, interrogations, the elimination of suspected coup sympathisers rather than outward toward the insurgencies that were systematically expanding their control of territory.
The TPLF and EPLF did not defeat the Derg regime primarily through superior military technology or overwhelming numerical advantage; they defeated it through the regime’s progressive institutional decay and its inability to sustain a coherent counterinsurgency strategy in the face of internal threats. The 18 May coup, though it failed, accelerated that decay. It revealed the regime’s vulnerability, it forced the regime to consume resources in internal purges, and it demonstrated to military officers throughout the hierarchy that challenging Mengistu’s authority however disastrously was at least a conceivable option.
By 1991, when the TPLF entered Addis Ababa, the Derg’s officer corps had been devastated by purges, mutinies, and the cascading effects of seventeen years of civil conflict. The regime that fell was not defeated by an overwhelmingly superior insurgency; it was a regime that had systematically destroyed its own institutional coherence in the pursuit of absolute internal control. The coup of 18 May 1989, in this sense, was not an aberration but a symptom of a decay process that was already well advanced and that would prove terminal.
The Historiographical Void: Why We Have Forgotten Thirty Generals
Thirty-six years have passed. The officers executed in Asmara are dead. The generals who shot themselves in the Ministry of Defence are dead. Kumlachew Dejene, the sole survivor of the coup’s senior leadership, resides in American exile. Mengistu Haile Mariam, still living in Zimbabwe, remains unaccountable for the seventeen years of his brutal regime a dictatorship that would eventually claim perhaps 100,000 lives through war, famine, and political terror.
And yet, the names of these officers thirty-six generals and senior officers whose deaths were directly caused by their attempt to challenge Mengistu’s regime have largely vanished from Ethiopian public memory. There are no memorials. There are no official ceremonies of remembrance. There is no sustained historical scholarship examining their institutional roles, their strategic miscalculations, their personal trajectories from senior rank to execution or exile.
This historiographical void is not accidental. It is the product of specific political choices made in the post-1991 era. The EPRDF regime, which succeeded the Derg and governed Ethiopia until 2018, had no interest in memorialising a failed coup attempt by Derg officers. Such memorialisation might have complicated the EPRDF’s narrative of absolute moral clarity a narrative in which the Derg was uniformly villainous and the insurgencies uniformly heroic. The existence of officers who had attempted to overthrow Mengistu, who had died in that attempt, who might have been portrayed as victims of a dictatorial regime they had tried to challenge, would have complicated that narrative.
Moreover, there is the uncomfortable question of institutional continuity. Some of the officers who survived the coup some of the conspirators who were arrested but not executed eventually made their peace with the post-1991 regime. Some may have entered the EPRDF’s own military hierarchy. To memorialise the coup would have been to force uncomfortable questions about the relationships between the old regime’s officer corps and the new regime’s security apparatus. It was easier, politically and institutionally, to let the names fade.
And so the void persists. Families of the executed officers have their memories, their private grief, their understanding of what was lost. But the public record is thin. The historical scholarship is sparse. The names appear in documents archived in foreign institutions but are absent from the dominant narratives of Ethiopian history that are taught in schools, discussed in media, enshrined in official memory.
What the Coup Reveals About Military Authority and Revolutionary Change
The failed coup of 18 May 1989 illuminates a fundamental reality about military hierarchies under authoritarian rule: institutional position—rank, command authority, access to resources—is not synonymous with power in the moment of revolutionary change. The coup’s conspirators possessed almost all the traditional markers of military authority: they were generals and brigadier generals, they commanded major units, they had access to troops and equipment. Yet they were defeated by a captain commanding a presidential guard unit and a colonel in the security apparatus.
This inversion of hierarchical authority reveals the distorting effects of authoritarian centralisation. In a normal military structure, the Chief of Staff outranks a captain and can issue orders that the captain must obey. But in the Derg regime, as in many authoritarian militaries, the formal hierarchy was subordinate to a parallel hierarchy of loyalty and personal proximity to the dictator. Captain Mengistu Gemechu’s control of the Special Protection Brigade mattered more than Major General Merid Negussie’s formal position as Chief of Staff because proximity to Mengistu was the true basis of power.
This is not a new insight in the study of authoritarian militaries. It is a pattern repeated across multiple regimes: from Latin American juntas to Middle Eastern militaries to post-Soviet security states. But it is a pattern that bears repeating, particularly in the context of the coup’s failure. The conspirators appear to have miscalculated the extent to which formal military authority had been hollowed out by the Derg’s system of personalised control. They believed that their rank and command positions would be sufficient to overcome regime resistance. They did not fully account for the fact that Mengistu had spent seventeen years constructing a security apparatus that was explicitly designed to prevent officers from translating formal authority into effective power against the dictator.
The Ethics of Institutional Resistance Under Dictatorship
The coup of 18 May raises a set of difficult ethical and political questions that Ethiopian historiography has largely avoided. These officers men like Merid Negussie, Amha Desta, Demissie Bulto, Aberra Abebe were senior figures in a regime that had committed atrocities. They had commanded forces engaged in counter-insurgency operations that involved aerial bombardment of civilian areas, mass violence, systematic torture. They were not innocent men victimised by a dictator; they were beneficiaries of and participants in a brutal dictatorship.
And yet, they attempted to overthrow that dictatorship apparently motivated, at least in part, by dissatisfaction with Mengistu’s personalised control, his military incompetence against the insurgencies, his destruction of military discipline and institutional coherence. This creates a moral paradox: we can acknowledge the coup plotters as complicit in the regime’s brutality while also recognising their attempt to challenge it as an important institutional act.
This paradox is important because it reflects a deeper truth about authoritarian systems: they typically collapse not through the virtuous resistance of entirely innocent actors, but through the defection of insiders who have been participants in the regime and who have come to believe that the regime is no longer sustainable or defensible. The coup of 18 May was not a popular uprising; it was an institutional challenge mounted by men who had benefited from the regime and who had only belatedly come to the conclusion that its continuation was untenable.
This does not absolve them of responsibility for their prior participation in the regime’s brutality. But it does suggest that any serious historical reckoning with the Derg era must grapple with the internal decomposition of the regime—the process by which even senior officers came to conclude that Mengistu’s dictatorship had become insustainable. That reckoning cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of clear-cut heroes and villains. It must account for the ambiguity of men who were simultaneously perpetrators and, in their final acts, challengers of the system they had helped to sustain.
Conclusion: The Vanished Generation and the Incompleteness of Ethiopian Memory
Thirty-six years after the 18 May coup attempt, the names of the officers who died in that attempt remain largely absent from Ethiopian public consciousness. This is not because their deaths were insignificant; it is because their significance has been obscured by the political interests of successive regimes and the historiographical choices of the scholars who have documented the Derg era.
The coup itself was a failure—militarily, politically, institutionally. The conspirators miscalculated. They hesitated at the crucial moment. They operated on faulty intelligence. They were betrayed by men in their own ranks. And they died by suicide, by execution, by killing in flight, by torture in interrogation centres as a consequence of those miscalculations and that failure.
Yet the coup’s failure should not obscure its historical meaning. It revealed the Derg regime to be institutionally vulnerable, dependent on terror to maintain control over even its own officer corps. It demonstrated that a significant faction of the military hierarchy had concluded that Mengistu’s dictatorship was unsustainable. And it contributed, however indirectly, to the regime’s eventual collapse by forcing the Derg to consume resources and institutional energy in internal purges rather than in effective counterinsurgency operations against the TPLF and EPLF.
The families of these officers the wives and children of executed generals, the relatives of men who shot themselves in the Ministry of Defence, the dependents of officers who vanished into the interrogation system carry this history in memory even as the public record has largely forgotten it. This remembrance is important, not because it absolves the coup plotters of their complicity in the Derg regime’s brutality, but because it preserves a more complex and honest understanding of how authoritarian systems function and how they ultimately decay.
Ethiopia’s national memory remains incomplete as long as this history remains obscured. A reckoning with the Derg era that acknowledges only the regime’s external enemies the TPLF, the EPLF, the popular resistance to dictatorship while ignoring the internal decomposition symbolised by the failed coup is a reckoning that fails to confront the full complexity of how the regime actually functioned and ultimately collapsed.
On this thirty-sixth anniversary, the names of Major General Merid Negussie, Major General Amha Desta, Major General Demissie Bulto, and the thirty or so other officers who died in the coup attempt deserve to be more than footnotes in foreign archives or entries in genealogical records of private family grief. They deserve to be part of the public historical record not as heroes, but as complex actors whose attempt to challenge the regime they served, however flawed and ultimately disastrous, revealed fundamental truths about the nature of the dictatorship that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991.
That remembrance is not a betrayal of the insurgents who ultimately defeated the Derg. It is, rather, a completion of the historical record an acknowledgement that authoritarian regimes do not collapse through the actions of their external enemies alone, but through the internal contradictions that force even their most privileged functionaries to conclude that the system is no longer defensible. The coup of 18 May 1989 was one such moment of internal reckoning. Its failure was tragic. But its historical significance demands that we remember it honestly, in all its ambiguity and complexity, as part of the larger story of how Ethiopia’s military dictatorship ultimately came to an end.
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The Ethiopian Tribune publishes this essay on the thirty-sixth anniversary of the 18 May 1989 coup attempt in recognition of the officers whose attempt to challenge the Mengistu regime, however imperfectly executed, remains a significant moment in Ethiopia’s institutional and political history. The names of those who died whether by their own hand, by execution, or by fratricide deserve to remain in the public record as a reminder of the human costs of dictatorship and the institutional fragility of authoritarian rule.
