- Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray
The Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray (MLLT) was a semi-clandestine
Communist party that held a leading role in theTigrayan Peoples' Liberation Front (TPLF) in the 1980s. The majority of the TPLF leadership held dual membership in the MLLT, including the current Prime Minister of theFederal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia ,Meles Zenawi .According to a 1986 article in the League’s publication, "The People’s Voice", the MLLT was first established in
1983 as “pre-party organization” called the Organization of the Vanguard Elements. This grouping would become the MLLT in 1985 to serve as a “vanguard party for the TPLF”.Posing as orthodox defenders of
Marxism-Leninism and allying itself with the communist current associated with the hard-lineEnver Hoxha regime inAlbania , the MLLT saw its goals as spreading Marxism-Leninism throughout the world and “engaging in a bitter struggle against all brands of revisionism,” which they defined using the parlance of the Albanian ruling Communist Party of Labor, as including “Krucshevism,Titoism ,Trotskyism , Euro-Communism andMaoism .”The emergence of the MLLT created some rifts with the
Eritrean People's Liberation Front with which the TPLF was allied against the ruling Soviet-backed EthiopianDerg . The MLLT took a much harder line on the role of theSoviet Union in the world, which they along with Albania viewed as social-imperialist and an enemy of the oppressed of the world. The EPLF held a more flexible line viewing the Soviet support for the Derg as a tactical mistake on their part and avoided any public denunciations of the Soviet Union.With the coming to power of the TPLF in
1991 and the collapse of communist regime in Albania, the TPLF dropped all references to Marxism-Leninism. The leadership of the TPLF claims that the MLLT dissolved when the TPLF-backedEthiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front took power after the collapse of the Derg in 1991.While many current TPLF leaders downplay or minimize the influence of MLLT on the TPLF, it is clear that it played a major leadership role in the TPLF for most of its existence, and is believed to have played a role in the removal of TPLF founder
Ghidey Zera Tsion in 1984.References
* Young, John. "Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia: The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, 1975-1991" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
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