Africa- Coup Attempts

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Ethiopia's left-talking milia popular revolution against the Emperor's autocracy in 1974.

Since then, the lack of any social. base of support in the country has torn apart the Derg in a series of internal struggles between 'left' and 'right'.

The original 120 members of the Derg have been reduced to half that number as a result of these struggles.

These conflicts reached a climax, though certainly not a conclusion, in a bizarre gun battle in the government palace on February 3rd.

Seven members of the Derg, including the head of state General Teferi Bante, were killed.

Reports do not make it clear if the dead belonged to distinct lactions or whether, as government statements later claimed, they had all been executed for crimes against the 'revolution' They were accused of being reactionary anarchists' and of sympathising with the left-wing Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Party, the Eritrean Liberation Movement and the ultra-right wing Ethiopian Democratic Union..

At least it seems that for the time being the battle has strengthened the positions of the rival Colonels Mengistu and Atnafu. They received messages of congratulation from Libya's Col. Gadatil But the permanent state of conflict within the Derg reflects the fact that in three years of power they have done little or nothing to resolve Ethiopia's monumental social and economic problems.

As a result, opposition from right, left and from the Eritrean liberation movement has been mounting and the Derg has been unable to control it.

The same day as the Derg gun battle a group of soldiers in the Sudan mutinied in the southern town of Juba.

This was the scene last year of a wave of arrests after President Numeiry had claimed that a military coup had been against his regime.

Last week's mutinters were reported to have expected to get help from the Ethiopian military regime (if so, they chose a bad day) and from Numeiry's arch rival Colonel Gadaffi.

On the West of the continent in the tiny republic of Benin (formerly Dahomey) another 'MarxistLeninist' military regime was threatened two weeks earlier by forces whose identity remains a mystery.

The government, in a series of contradictory statements, has said that a plane landed at Cotonou airport filled with white imperialist mercenaries.

They were routed by Benin forces and fled back to their plane which then crashed trying to take off. It still has not said where they came from.

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tary dictatorship, known as the Derg, seized power during