"WATCHING ETHIOPIA is like watching a case of creeping paralysis," said one diplomat in Addis Ababa in May 1972.
And an Ethiopian civil servant added: "The Emperor has lost interest in the government."
Economically, Ethiopia had been hit hard by the closing of the Suez Canal, which had sharply increased costs of imports and exports. A stubborn and puzzling refusal to devalue the Ethiopian currency against the American dollar was costing the country another 8 to 10 per cent of its major export earnings.
An enormous army and police establishment that the Emperor apparently believed he must placate, continued to eat more than one-third of the government's budget.
Politically, the Emperor had disillusioned some of his best officials by failing to give important support for even a mild land-reform move that would regulate relationships between Ethiopia's peasants and the wealthy landowners, who controlled the parliament and much of the Ethiopian countryside.
Haile Selassie had been increasingly absent from the country on what many saw as a quest for the Nobel Peace Prize, which would be a crowning accomplishment for his career.
"Mundane matters of running the country no longer interest the Emperor," said one senior American diplomat.
There was even mutterings that senility had set in, of course, never openly.
John Spencer, an American adviser to the Emperor for some 40 years, would remember leaving a meeting with the thoughts: "It was like flying in an aircraft with both the pilot and co-pilot asleep and you kept wondering who was flying it."
Although the Emperor had developed many government departments along modern lines, critics charged that anachronisms remained. "You are not promoted for your work here, but for your family connections to the throne and the feudal nobility of this country," said an Ethiopian civil servant, adding: "No government in Africa is so archaic, so irrevelant."
While the internal changes were noticeable, the Emperor was still Ethiopia to the rest of the world.
His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I yesterday afternoon visited the scene where an East African Airways VC-10 (jetliner) crashed and completely burns.
These words informed Ethiopian readers of an air disaster that killed 38 persons in Addis Ababa, for the Ethiopian Herald was under orders to begin any news story by mentioning the Emperor, who was to be given more prominence to his visit than to the event which caused it.
Such tribute wasn't unexpected by the tiny and spry man. In the eyes of the proud and clanish Amharas, who ruled Ethiopia, any action of their monarch, no matter how small, was vastly more important than anything else could be.
Modern Ethiopia, in 1972, was both a creation and a captive of this unyielding Amharic culture and the man who embodied it; this remarkable 79-year-old, 5-foot-2 autocrat, who had been seen by his admirers, including at least five American presidents, as the bulwark of stability and pro-western sentiment in Africa.
His critics, on the other hand, accused Haile Selassie of increasingly stifling internal reform and throwing dissidents to the lions - literally. The Emperor kept lions as pets on the grounds of his half-dozen palaces and mansions scattered among the squalid and deadingly poor neighborhoods of Addis Ababa, which had pretensions of being the capital of Africa.
The vast majority of Ethiopia's illiterate and poor peasants appeared to continue to hold the Emperor in reverence and awe. But, significantly, the frustration level among the younger businessmen, intellectuals and army officers, who formed the educated elite of Ethiopia seemed to mounting rapidly, and the number of the Emperor's critics seemed to be growing.
Competent observers reported that in the latter part of 1972 and early in 1973, more and more Ethiopians appeared to have decided that the lengthy and extraordinary rule of Haile Selassie was in its twilight, and that the country might soon face a difficult trial in selecting a successor.
