War, famine, pestilence and doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist dictatorship; these are the four horsemen of modern Ethiopia's particular apocalypse. They have combined with one another into a brew more poisonous even than the sum of its parts.
Just how a people of such ancient culture and proud history, and of such intelligence and sophistication, could have come to this sad fate requires some words of explanation. That the name Ethiopia has, over the...