"Haile Selassie wanted to develop his country, but social justice was not a concept that made a great impression on him. Opinions differ over the degree to which Ethiopia's backwardness in the early 1970s was to be attributed to his policies. Unquestionably, however, the flaunting of the wealth of the aristocracy and the business class, many of them foreigners, made the poverty of the masses seem all the more terrible."