Red Terror begins
The Red Terror (Qey Shibr) began in February 1977, when Ethiopia's Derg military regime launched a systematic campaign of mass killings against political opponents, particularly supporters of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and other leftist groups. It was one of the defining violence escalations of revolutionary Ethiopia, because the Derg made large-scale repression against real and suspected opponents central to its strategy of political survival. The campaign was initiated by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, who had emerged as the Derg's dominant leader after eliminating rivals within the military council, and it was framed as a response to the urban guerrilla campaign known as the White Terror, waged by the EPRP and other opposition groups against Derg officials and supporters.
Executions, torture, imprisonment, and disappearances targeted students, intellectuals, teachers, and suspected dissidents across the country, particularly in urban areas such as Addis Ababa. Revolutionary neighbourhood committees, the kebeles, were empowered to identify and eliminate suspected enemies, which produced arbitrary killings and the settling of personal scores. Tactics included public hangings, mass graves, and the display of victims' bodies in the streets as warnings, while families were often required to pay for the bullets used to execute their relatives and were forbidden to mourn publicly. Estimates of the dead during the worst period, from 1977 to 1978, range from 100,000 to 500,000, with Ethiopia's educated class and urban youth hit hardest. International human rights organisations condemned the campaign, but the Cold War context limited outside intervention.
The Red Terror was not incidental excess; it became a governing technique that shaped the wider war-system around the Derg, establishing Mengistu's absolute control while deeply traumatising Ethiopian society and contributing to continued civil conflict. It remains a central case for the study of state terror, internal security as a method of civil war, and the transformation of urban political struggle into organised mass coercion.
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Its importance begins with the regime's decision to treat broad civilian opposition as a target for systematic violence.
The Red Terror mattered because it converted political struggle into organized mass repression under state authority. The Derg did not simply fight armed insurgents on battlefields. It also pursued suspected enemies inside cities and communities through arrest, torture, intimidation, and killing. This gave the regime a domestic war-making method that blurred politics, policing, and terror.
The Red Terror demonstrates that the civil war was fought through urban and social coercion as much as through front-line operations.
The event belongs inside a struggle in which the Derg faced both armed resistance and ideological competitors.
The Red Terror did not arise in a vacuum. The Derg faced opposition from groups that rejected military rule and demanded different revolutionary outcomes. Rather than resolving those rivalries politically, the regime turned toward exemplary violence. That decision reflected both insecurity and ambition: the Derg wanted not only to survive but to monopolize the revolution.
The campaign is best understood as part of a crisis of control, rather than as irrational cruelty alone.
Its wider meaning lies in the use of terror against society to reinforce state survival under multi-front pressure.
The Red Terror is strategically valuable because it demonstrates that some regimes fight civil war not only by pursuing insurgents in peripheral regions, but by terrorizing political life in the center. In such systems, repression is not separate from war. It is part of the state's survival toolkit. That distinction matters when comparing Ethiopia to other revolutionary or militarized regimes.
The event therefore helps explain why the Derg became more coercive even as its legitimacy deteriorated.
Its consequences were visible not only in immediate deaths but in the political culture of Derg rule thereafter.
The Red Terror's impact extended beyond its immediate victims. It reshaped how the regime was experienced and remembered, making state violence inseparable from the meaning of revolutionary government in Ethiopia. That matters historically because terror may suppress opposition temporarily while still hollowing out legitimacy in the long term.
The beginning of the Red Terror was a governing turning point in which the Derg fully embraced mass coercion as political method.
The Red Terror began in 1977 under Mengistu and marked the point at which revolutionary rule became structurally committed to large-scale terror as a method of political survival, linking urban repression to the broader civil-war system.
It defined the coercive character of the Derg state.
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