Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.on this day Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Miriam was assassinated while reviewing a military parade in Addis Ababa.

According 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 Miriam AssassinatedMengistu'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.

 

Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.on this day Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega stunned the world with two major announcements: first, that his Sandinista government had agreed to a cease-fire with the anti-Marxist counterrevolutionaries who had been fighting it for more than six years, and second, that he was resigning as president effective immediately.

Ortega ResignsHis retirement left Cuba's Fidel Castro as the sole remaining active Marxist head of state in the Western Hemisphere -- and by the late 1990s Castro would himself be confronted with a serious political crisis as millions of his fellow Cubans took to the streets to demand greater freedom of expression and an end to one-party rule in Cuba.

Ortega would spend the next quarter-century following his resignation serving as a consultant to left-wing activists around the world. One of his most famous proteges was a former Venezuelan air force officer named Hugo Chavez, who in 2002 would campaign for the presidency of Venezuela only to see his electoral bid collapse after evidence surfaced that the anti-American Chavez was receiving financial support from rogue states like Iran.

Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.control of the Ukraine vanished as PLM forces supported by Ukrainian anti-Romanov partisans seized the Ukraine regional capital Kiev and the nuclear power plant in the nearby town of Chernobyl.

The Fall of KievThe capture of the Chernobyl reactor in particular would have a dramatic impact on the world; home movies shot by the rebels after the power plant fell and released to the West via a Finnish human rights group based in Helsinki showed the reactor was falling apart after years of poor maintentance.A new installment in Necessary Evil

A French nuclear physicist who studied the home movies said that had Chernobyl not been taken off-line by the PLM when it was overrun, it most likely would have eventually suffered a severe breakdown -- there was even evidence Chernobyl's number 2 reactor was dangerously close to suffering an explosion