On September 12, 1974, Emperor Selassie was deposed by the Armed Forces Coordinating Committee known as the
Dergue, which soon established Provisional Administrative Military Council.
But London provides Yusuf with the freedom to practice the religion that was denied him by the Marxist
Dergue, and as Lilly contends, "To read the Qu'ran with your family around you is to be home" (235).
In the late 1970s, the revolutionary
Dergue regime instituted land reform and attempted to radically reorganize farming, which disrupted traditional agricultural systems and productive capacity.
The military junta known as the
Dergue left the country in total ruin when it was toppled in 1991 through an armed struggle led by a coalition of democratic forces of the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the current ruling party.
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has ruled Ethiopia since 1991, when his minority ethnic guerrilla group, the Tigray People's Liberation Front, overthrew the country's post-imperial Communist regime, the
Dergue, which had murdered, tortured and imprisoned tens of thousands during its brutal seventeen years in power.
He argues that the Khmer Rouge's genocide in Cambodia was much broader in scope, which he attributes to the Khmer Rouge's messianic ideology of racial purity versus the Ethiopian
Dergue's pursuit of inter- racial unity through the suppression of ethnic chauvinism.
In 1974, the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie was over-thrown by the
Dergue, a leftist populist movement led by the military.
Most Eritreans--Muslim, Christian and animist--rejected absorption into Haile Selassie's Amharic empire and, later, the Marxist terror state of the
Dergue, which overthrew him.
(3) In addition, the Land Commission, a relic of
Dergue rule, has recently attempted to grant usufructuary rights to housing and farming land to Eritreans equally, regardless of sex, belief, race, or clan.
The
Dergue, the military government, never admitted that they murdered him.
One of the main issues that the military regime or
Dergue (in Amharic) which ousted Haile Selassie promised to tackle was the grievance of the various nationalities with regard to the suppression of their cultures and languages.