In 1985, on this day Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Miriam was assassinated while reviewing a military parade in Addis Ababa.

Miriam AssassinatedAccording to a UPI reporter who was covering the parade at the time, Mengistu was shot six times by a gunman riding a Soviet-made motorcycle; the first two shots, however, were enough to kill him as the first bullet ripped through his brain just above the left eye and the second pierced the center of his heart. It would later be determined that the assassination had been carried out by three Eritrean separatists who bitterly resented the Mengistu regime's suppression of Eritrea's independence movement. The gunman himself managed to escape to neighboring Somalia(where he would later fight in that nation's civil war), but his two co-conspirators were seized by Ethiopian security forces within days and tortured to death less than two weeks after the assassination.


For the Marxist oligarchy that had ruled Ethiopia since Emperor Haile Selassie was ousted in 1974, the assassination was a fatal blow: even before Mengistu's death his government had been on shaky ground as the result of a famine which had been plaguing Ethiopia since mid-1984 and a steady decline in Soviet economic aid as the PLM's anti-Communist guerrilla war continued to rage on. Mengistu's assassination triggered a chain reaction which culminated in the violent overthrow of Ethiopia's ruling Marxist junta less than six weeks after Mengistu was killed. The end of the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia marked the beginning of a two-year span in which Communist regimes and political factions throughout Africa collapsed like a house of cards, stripping the Soviet Union of much of what little influence it still had left in the Third World. Only Libya, which boasted one of the world's largest oil industries and was capable of sustaining itself economically and militarily regardless of what happened to the U.S.S.R., managed to buck this trend.