The Red Terror was a campaign of urban counter-insurgency that the Derg waged mainly in Addis Ababa between 1976 and 1978 against the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), which had begun assassinating regime officials, and later against the rival leftist group MEISON. After Mengistu Haile Mariam took sole power in February 1977, the regime armed kebele Defense Squads and declared the 'Red Terror' officially; Africa Watch records at least 2,500 killed in the first wave in spring 1977, an estimated 3,000-4,000 in a second wave in October, and perhaps 5,000 in Addis Ababa in a third wave from December 1977 to February 1978, with killings extending to provincial towns such as Asmara, Gonder, Bahir Dar, Jimma and towns in Tigray in 1978. Bodies were left in the streets, relatives were forbidden to mourn and in some cases charged for the 'wasted bullet', and detainees were tortured and many disappeared. Africa Watch called it one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa and judged that a generation of educated young people was lost. This entry covers only the Red Terror; the Derg's later resettlement and villagization programmes are in 'ethiopia-villagization-resettlement' and its war in Eritrea in 'eritrean-independence-war'. Ethiopian courts later convicted Mengistu and other officials of genocide, and a Dutch court convicted a former Derg official of war crimes in 2017.
Ethiopia's military government (the Derg) under Mengistu Haile Mariam, through kebele neighbourhood committees, armed Defense Squads and the army, killed, tortured and detained suspected members of the EPRP, MEISON and other opponents, mostly young urban people
The upper bound is deliberately left open. Africa Watch's 'Evil Days' (1991) states that the number killed 'is not known' but is 'certainly well in excess of 10,000', giving a minimum of 10,000 in Addis Ababa alone in 1977 and 'probably a comparable number in the provinces' in 1977-78, which implies roughly 20,000 as its own working figure. A JusticeInfo report records that Ethiopian trials between 1994 and 2008 identified more than 9,000 dead. Much higher figures circulate without a documented basis: Wikipedia attributes 150,000-200,000 to Amnesty International (not checked against an Amnesty document), JusticeInfo cites 'hundreds of thousands' for 1974-80, and Al Jazeera's 2008 report says 'more than a million' were tortured and killed. Africa Watch's separate figure of at least half a million civilian deaths caused by the Mengistu government covers war, famine and resettlement across 1974-91 and is not a Red Terror figure.
Africa Watch's 'Evil Days' documented nightly mass killings, executions of prisoners, torture of detainees, mass arbitrary detention and disappearances in custody, drawing on Amnesty International's 1978 report and other accounts; Human Rights Watch (1999) described the kebele killing system.
Ethiopia