Professor John Spencer wrote in his memoir that Haile Sellassie attempted three times to negotiate with Mussolini via the Vatican. The main reason the negotiation for abdication didn't succeed was because the British government didn't want to see Mussolini achieve legal occupation of Ethiopia.
(See "Ethiopia At Bay," page 84)
Throughout his carrier, he only cared about how to continue to hold on to power. Once he was kicked out from power by Mussolini's forces, and before he left for England, he was ready to hand over the Northern half of Ethiopia to Italy just as Menelik did about Eritrea. Here is how it went as Jasper Ridley points it out in Mussolini's Biography.
(Emphasis mine, see J. Ridley, page 270)In his desperate act to hold power, Haile Sellassie now made a secret peace overture to Mussolini, sending a former Ethiopian Minister in Rome to contact the Italian consul in Djibouti. HE OFFERED TO SELL A LARGE PART OF EHTIOPIA TO ITALY FOR ONE AND HALF MILLIARD LIRA AND TO APPOINT SIX ITALIAN ADVISORS TO DIRECT THE POLICY OF HIS GOVERNMENT. MUSSOLINI SENT A COURTEOUS REPLY TO THE INTERMIEDIARY, EXPRESSING HIS PLEASURE THAT THE NEGUS HAD AT LAST DECIDED TO NEGOTAIT DIRECTLY WITH HIM; but he said the offer was UNACCEPTABLE.
John Markakis & Nega Ayele recounted in their book about the Ethiopian revolution,
(See "Class and Revolution in Ethiopia," page 112 to 113)Haile Sellassie was not only the major owner of a public transport in the capital through the Anbassa Bus company, he was also the country's first beer baron through the ownership of two major breweries and a large share in a third one, as well as control of a wine factory. In the Haile Sellassie I Foundation, he owned the only holding company in Ethiopia, thinly disguised as a charitable institution, with shares in dozens of enterprises ranging from hotels to firearms production. The urban real estate holdings of himself and his family were countless, while their holdings in land throughout the empire were legion. Yet with undiminished greed, he and his brood never ceased accumulating possessions through methods that were seldom above board. Haile Sellassie even demanded and received regularly a share of the contraband goods confiscated by the customs service. Haile Sellassie, who never distinguished between his own money and the public treasury, regularly used public funds to acquire possessions that were classed as private imperial property. The most astounding revelation concerned the appropriation of the entire output from the country's sole gold mine, which he said to have deposited regularly in the bulging vaults of a Swiss bank. At the time that this corruption was revealed, the enormity of the allegation caused widespread incredulity. Indeed, the produce from the gold mine never appeared in any government revenue accounting, and the revenue of the Ministry of Mines never came close to matching its expenditure. To support the charge, the Dergue showed in television a letter from a Swiss bank manager, in which the Emperor was allegedly asked to delay new shipments because the storage capacity of the banks vaults had been exhausted.
Ryszard Kapuscinski extracted what is certainly a truthful stanza from one of Haile Sellasie's close palace intriguers, which he code named him as A.A... And speaking about those who were dying from uncontrolled hunger in the province of Wollo, A. A. said:
(Emphasis is mine, see "The Emperor," page 111)Death from hunger had existed in our Empire for hundreds of years, an everyday natural thing. Drought would come and the earth would dry up, the cattle would drop dead, the peasants would starve. Ordinary, in accordance with the laws of nature and the eternal order of things Since this was eternal and normal, none of the dignitaries would dare to bother His Most Exalted Highness (meaning Haile Sellassie) with the news that in such a province, a given person had died of hunger. Of course, His Most Exalted Highness visited the province himself, BUT IT WAS NOT HIS CUSTOM TO STOP IN THE POOR REGIONS WHERE THERE WAS HUNGER.
In creating bureaucracy, the Emperor was a class by himself. Witness what Ryszard Kapuscinski has to say about a man, whose job was to clean the urine of the Emperor dog:
(See "The Emperor," page 4; for the fleet of cars, refer page 12).It was a small dog, a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu. He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor's great bed. During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor's lap and pee on the dignitaries' shoes. The august gentleman were not allowed to flinch or make the slightest gesture when they felt their feet getting wet. I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth. This was my job for ten years.
The great, Marcus Garvey:
[See Italy's Conquest? The Blackman Magazine, August 1936. As quoted by Clarke, J. H. in "Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (1974) p. 363.]We can remember in 1920 inviting the government of Abyssinia to send representatives to the International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the world in common with other Negro governments, institutions and organizations. Whilst others replied, and most of them sent representatives to that greatest of all Negro conventions, the Abyssinian government returned the communication unopened. They ignored Negro relationships from without and throttled Negro aspirations from within. The result was that they dragged along without any racial policy, except that of the ruling classes, believing themselves white and better than the rest, with the right to suppress the darker elements which make up the tremendous population.
Professor Spencer (HS's personal advisor):
[John H. Spencer, Ethiopia at Bay (1984), p. 306.]Until 1955, Ethiopia had identified herself largely with the West. Ethiopians tended to regard with indifference the other peoples who, unlike those of Ethiopia and Liberia, had not succeeded in attaining independence against the tide of colonialism. ... The growing influence of the new states of the Middle East and Far East, the intervention of Egypt and Syria in Eritrea and the calling of the Bandung Conference alerted Ethiopia to the need for accommodation with the Third World and in particular, with the rest of Africa now approaching independence. Such an adjustment was difficult for Ethiopians who had always regarded themselves as non-African, looking to their cultural and linguistic origins in the Arabian Peninsula and the relationship between the Amharic and other Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. 'I am not a Negro at all; I am a Caucasian' the Emperor Menelik told the West Indian pan-Africanist Benito Sylvian who had come to Addis Ababa to solicit the Emperor's leadership in a society for the 'Amelioration of the Negro race.' Haile Sellassie confirmed that view in a declaration to Chief H. O. Davis, a well known Nigerian nationalist, stating that the Ethiopians did not regard themselves as Africans, but as 'a mixed Hamito-Semitic people'.
(Ibid, page 308)In essence Ethiopia's turn to the Third World was a reflection of the problems experienced over both Eritrea and the Ogaden.
Professor John Spencer, diagnosed Haile Sellassie as
Coward, scheming, devious, remorseless, egotistical, avaricious, ceremonious and like Hitler, the most kind to animals.
