Write a 5 pages paper on military rule in ethiopia. Emperor Haile Selassie ruled Ethiopia for nearly 40 years. In September of 1974, he was overthrown in a military coup. Famine and drought were sweeping through Ethiopia, but the emperor kept most of those details out of the press. When the people discovered the true extent of the terrible disaster, they welcomed the revolution and saw it as the first step to modernizing their country after four decades of autocratic rule. Unfortunately, the military junta (the Derg) could not deliver on its promises because of a series of wars, invasions, and skirmishes following on the heels of drought and famine.

Mengistu Haile Mariam executed General Teferi Benti in 1977 and took over the government, bringing the Red Terror into full swing (Beshah and Tupy, 2008). The military junta collapsed in 1987, and Mengistu became president (Gavish and Shabtai, 2009). Throughout their reign, the Derg looked toward Marxist-Leninist policies to structure the government. Nationalization, a founding tenet of Marxism (Donham, 1999) caused large businesses and vast tracts of land to be co-opted and put under the government’s control. Banks and factories were seized, and schools were shut down for two full years as students were conscripted into the nationalization efforts (Beshah and Tupy, 2008). The Dergue government was overthrown in 1991, but decades of wars and natural disasters have made it difficult for the nation to recover itself (Beshah and Tupy, 2008).

Stories of torture and death abound from the Red Terror days. One man was arrested in 1987 for being Jewish, held in solitary confinement in a 1 meter by 1-meter cell for a year, beaten with an iron rod, and otherwise tortured day and night (Gavish and Shabtai, 2009). Another man, a member of an opposition student movement, was arrested in 1978 by agents of the Ethiopian junta, tortured for 15 days and then shot.&nbsp.

Complete 5 pages APA formatted article: What Was the Overall Significance of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. These conventions were used to establish a set of barriers to prevent African Americans from being able to exercise their right to suffrage. The barriers created included literacy and property tests, poll taxes, understanding clauses, and grandfather clauses. The 1965 Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed these barriers to African American suffrage in the South.

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson put his approval on the legislation that brought into being the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 2 of the Act almost mirrored the Fifteenth amendment by applying a prohibition throughout the nation against any kind of denial or abridgment of the right to vote through the use of literacy tests. The Act also provided specific enforcement provisions against those regions of the nation, which demonstrated a high potential for discrimination against minorities.

Under the jurisdictions of Section Five of the Act special, these provisions were denied the ability to bring about any voting changes until the Attorney General, or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ascertained that the change had not been created for discriminatory purposes, and as such would not have any discriminatory effect. It also provided for the Attorney General to appoint a federal examiner in such counties, to review the qualifications of the individual attempting to register to vote. In addition, it allowed the Attorney General to appoint federal observers to monitor polling activities in those counties, where federal examiners were present. These provisions of Section Five of the Act due to top pressure from the majority community were made temporary and required renewal. The Bush administration in 2006 renewed all aspects of Section Five (1).

The primary significance of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is that it removed barriers to African Americans seeking to register as voters. Prior to Act in 1965 the African Americans found it very difficult to register themselves as voters. This meant that they could not taker part in elections, and even in African American-dominated areas, white community candidates were being elected to represent them, even though they had no interest in the welfare of the minority community.