The fall of Addis Ababa

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2020

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In May 1991, the brutal Ethiopian dictator, Colonel Mengistu and his military regime were on the verge of collapse after years of civil war. The end came when a Tigrayan-led rebel movement advanced on the capital Addis Ababa and took power. We get a first-hand account from an American diplomat and hear how the events of 1991 contributed to the current crisis in Ethiopia. Plus, the controversy in France over banning headscarves and other religious symbols from schools, the Nazis' terrifying V1 bombing campaign in World War Two and the story of the Haitian slave leader, Toussaint Louverture.

Photo: EPRDF rebels in Addis Ababa, 28 May, 1991 (BBC)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,
0:10.3	the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:13.0	This week from 2004 the banning of the Islamic headscarf in French schools.
0:18.0	This law opened the flaggates to all the discrimination against Muslim. It's not nice really to say that you're
0:26.0	Muslim in France.
0:27.0	Also, the first woman to become a government minister in the Arab world fondly remembered
0:31.2	by those who knew her.
0:32.2	I consider her like a big sister and we looked to her.
0:38.4	She was a leader.
0:39.6	I miss her a lot.
0:41.2	Plus the former slave who founded Modern Haiti, and the V1 flying bomb that terrified
0:47.8	Londoners in the Second World War.
0:49.6	Something like a very loud motor bike overhead and then suddenly
0:56.1	suddenly silence and you knew it was about to drop. That's all coming up later in the podcast. But we begin this week with a look at the background
1:06.4	to the ongoing crisis in the Tigray region of Northern Ethiopia. Hundreds of people are reported
1:12.0	to have been killed in a month of fighting between the federal
1:14.7	government and the TPLF, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front. Many thousands more have been displaced
1:20.1	and are in urgent need of food assistance.
1:23.0	Much of the tension which has erupted in the current violence
1:26.0	can be traced back to 1991,
1:28.0	when rebel forces from Tigray led a guerrilla army into Addis Ababa
1:32.0	to end the rule of the dictator General Mengistu.
	...

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