New Left Review I/67, May-June 1971

Fred Halliday

The Fighting in Eritrea

One of the more anomalous heroes of the anti-fascist struggle was Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. Overrun by fascist Italy in 1935, Ethiopia and its leader became symbols of the fight for freedom, and when British troops put Selassie back on his throne in 1941 it was generally assumed that such a restoration was in accordance with the sentiments of his people. In fact the reinstatement of Selassie was a dry run for the more important and bloody restorations of France, Greece, Vietnam and Korea: under the Axis occupation a guerrilla movement had arisen which fought the fascist invader, but which also sought to replace the Emperor. This had to be, and was, put down by British troops and administrators. [1] The conflict between the Emperor’s international image and his domestic practice was illustrated in 1967, when his name was proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize; the normal investigations were undertaken to check the candidate’s suitability, and the project was dropped when he was discovered to have exposed the bodies of murdered political opponents in the streets in 1960.

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