I didn't know Ethiopia had any!
Sounds like the "Derg" has never been out of power.
Rita Marley made the Rastafarian equivalent of aliyah in the 80s and hundreds, maybe a couple of thousand, Rastafarians followed her there.
They squat on land in Shashamane which their deity willed to them, and which the government considers to be state property.
Sounds like the "Derg" has never been out of power.
Actually, the EPRDF killed most of the Derg - different ethnic group from the Tigrayans who are the mainstay of the EPRDF.
The Rastafarians are, contrary to the media portrayal of them, a criminal enterprise which exploits religious freedom as a cover for drug running. At the time, Ethiopia was the only independent African state (i.e., independent from colonists as well as Arabs, who are white and who dominated Egypt.) Given that Ethiopia had a serious claim to holding the Holy Grail, the “Lost” Ark of the Covenant, an African emperor (Haile Salessi (sp?)), was at the time held to be the birthplace of Man, and was home to a black tribe which had held for 2500 years the claim that they were the lost tribe of Israel (and which even Israel would eventually grant status to), it was a natural choice for invented religious mysticism. So the Rastas declared that the Ethiopian emperor was the 2nd coming of Christ and built their religion around him.
The Ethiopian emperor, however, was a very devout Christian, and was greatly offended. Of course, such foolish claims were also a political embarrassment. So, he treated the Rastas like the criminal enterprise they were. Naturally, the American communists and academics who loved the pan-Africanism (and excuse for pot-smoking) represented by the Rastas, deeply hated the Ethiopian government for this. But they and the Rastas portrayed this as corruption that the emperor would eventually rout. (The commies expressed love for the governor while hating his policies.) When their god-king died, the Rastas simply invented a conspiracy that he was simply in exile until peace was established on earth, while the commies blamed the decline of Ethiopia on the big, bad Capitalist West.
And the Rasta way to establish this peace? Buy copious quantities of drugs from the Rastas, of course.
So there was a legitimate law-enforcement purpose to suppressing the Rastas that had nothing to do with religious oppression. Without meaning to concede that there may have been abuses, I don’t mean to suggest that the ACLU or the John Birch society would have approved of the emperor’s crime-fighting techniques; I just don’t know. It certainly is plain that the communists loved the opportunity to rally guerrilla forces around an African emperor: once chaos is created, they can establish control. I don’t believe the emperor desired such chaos, though.