The letter above was made public today by the Ethiopian Reporter just ahead of the anniversary of the massacre of "the 60" on November 23, 1974. The letter is from the then "First Vice Chairman Mengistu Haile Mariam" of the Derg and is addressed to the "Campaign and Security Command" of the Derg, it is marked as "Very Urgent" and the subject is "Action required on the Political Decision in regard to the Officials of the Former Imperial Government". As a piece of historic documentation it is a stunning piece of evidence. Mengistu writes that since the Derg "demolished feudalism and swept away the crown" it has been closely studying the case of the former officials of the government of Haile Selassie I. It has now reached a decision on the fate of those officials who for over 40 years have been "oppressing and looting" the wide masses of the Ethiopian people. He states that following a meeting of it's full membership, the Derg has unnanimously decided that "Revolutionary action" should be taken on the 54 former civilian and military officials listed on the following page. It was therefore hereby ordered that
1) Lt. General Aman Andom (the then chairman of the Derg who had refused to sanction the executions and other Derg decisions engineered by Mengistu) should be immediately arrested at his home and made to join the prisoners.
2) That a bulldozer be taken to the central "Kerchele" prison and made to dig a pit and at exactly 8 pm the former civilian and military leaders numbered 1 to 54 on the attached list are to be separated from the other prisoners.
3) That at exactly 2 am in the morning, the 54 named prisoners are to be loaded onto military vehicles and taken to "Kerchele", and put to death together "by bullets".
The letter is signed by First Vice Chairman Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, and is on the letter head of the derg (then bearing the Lion of Judah stripped of it's crown and cross which briefly served as it's symbol until it was scrapped in favor of more communistic symbols).
The letter exposes as lies the various attempts by members of the Derg and Mengistu himself to blame a larger group known as the "neus derg" of rank and file soldiers of being to blame for this decision. Lt. General Aman Andom who had served briefly as interim head of state following the deposing of the Emperor had refused to sanction the executions without trial and refused to authorize a new offensive in his native Eritrea which was the reason for the order for his arrest. When the army came to seize him, he and 6 followers encamped at his house engaged in a blazing battle with them and were all killed (as a boy I lived a short distance from his home and remember the sounds of battle quite vividly). Their bodies ended up in the bulldozer pit at Kerchele along with the 54 officials who included several heroes of the Italian occupation, noblemen, educated and experienced officials of the government and the Imperial court. The full list of the executed follows in the next post.