The Derg's 1974 Overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie

By early 1974, Emperor Haile Selassie’s 44-year reign over Ethiopia was collapsing under the weight of mutinies, a widely publicized famine in Wollo and Tigray that had killed an estimated 100,000 people, and growing anger at the stagnation of his absolute monarchy. In June 1974, a group of junior military officers formed the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army, known as the Derg (Amharic for “committee”). Over the following months the Derg steadily stripped Selassie’s government of power in what historians have called a “creeping coup,” arresting ministers and officials one by one while the aging emperor remained nominally in place.

On September 11, 1974, Selassie was removed from his palace and driven away, notably in an ordinary cream-colored Volkswagen Beetle rather than one of his official cars, a choice reportedly made so the vehicle would draw less attention on the streets of Addis Ababa. The following day, September 12, the Derg formally deposed him, reading a declaration on state radio and television announcing the end of his rule. He was placed under house arrest, and in March 1975 the Derg abolished the monarchy entirely, ending a dynastic line that traced its founding legend back centuries.

Haile Selassie died on August 27, 1975, while confined at the National Palace. The Derg initially reported natural causes, but that account was widely disbelieved at the time and directly contradicted decades later. At a 2006 genocide trial of former Derg officials, testimony described a meeting on August 23, 1975, at which Selassie’s opponents allegedly agreed he should be strangled, with witnesses dating the killing to the night of August 26 into the early hours of August 27. No independent forensic confirmation of strangulation has been published, so the exact circumstances of his death remain a matter of historical dispute rather than settled fact, though the strangulation account is now the version most widely accepted by historians.

His remains were not seen again for nearly seventeen years. On February 17, 1992, almost a year after the Derg regime itself had fallen, workmen discovered his remains buried beneath what had been an office floor in the National Palace grounds. They were kept temporarily at Ba’ata Mariam Church before a formal funeral was finally held on November 5, 2000, when Haile Selassie was reburied at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, alongside other members of the imperial family.

The Derg that replaced him would go on to rule Ethiopia as a Marxist-Leninist military government until 1991, a period marked by further internal purges among its own leadership and the violent political crackdown remembered as the Red Terror.