Ethiopia’s brutal Marxist dictator, known as the African Pol Pot, became the first fallen leader to be found guilty yesterday of genocide in his own country after a 12-year trial.

Mengistu Haile Mariam, the former President, who fled to Zimbabwe in 1991, was accused along with top members of his military Government of killing thousands during his 17-year rule. The period was marked by vicious crackdowns on opponents, disastrous wars with neighbouring countries and rebel groups and devastating famines in which starvation was used to force peasants into submission.

“Members of the Derg [Government] who are present in court today and those who are being tried in absentia have conspired to destroy a political group and kill people with impunity,” the presiding judge, Medhen Kiros, said.

The genocide verdict, which carries a death sentence, was passed two votes to one by the three-judge panel. Human rights groups welcomed the verdict, although President Mugabe of Zimbabwe has made it clear that he is not prepared to entertain any extradition requests.

“Verdicts such as this build up pressure and send the message that leaders who are bloodstained must not be allowed to retire in comfort,” Peter Takirambudde, Africa head of Human Rights Watch, told The Times. He stressed that Mengistu would find it impossible to travel to neighbouring countries, even for medical treatment, without facing the danger of arrest.

“This man and his followers committed monstrous crimes against humanity, and international justice demands he be brought to face justice. The cycle of impunity must and will be stopped,” he said. Charles Taylor, the former Liberian President, was in exile for many years in Nigeria, but was arrested this year and will go on trial next year in The Hague.

The Soviet-backed revolution that brought Mengistu and a group of other young army officers to power in 1974 ended the feudal rule of Emperor Haile Selassie, treated as a deity by millions of dirt-poor people in Africa’s second most-populous country.

The court was told how the ageing Emperor was suffocated to death with a pillow and his body buried under a lavatory in the royal palace, where he was under house arrest. Mengistu and other hardliners had decided that his presence was an obstacle to rural peasants making the leap from feudalism to Marxism without a process of industrialisation and creation of a proletariat.

Mengistu’s henchmen devised a “Red Terror”, modelled on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to bring the reluctant populace into line. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Others fled into exile or joined rebel movements. In the mid-1980s it was not uncommon to see students, suspected government critics or rebel sympathisers hanging from lampposts each morning. Ordinary people were too terrified to talk to Western reporters.

Other people were executed in the notorious state prison on the edge of the capital, Addis Ababa. Families had to pay a tax known as “the wasted bullet” to obtain the bodies of their loved ones. At the height of his power, Mengistu himself frequently garrotted or shot dead opponents, saying that he was leading by example.

The Soviet Union poured $18 billion in military support into Ethiopia as President Mengistu built up what was then black Africa’s largest standing army. With the collapse of communism, it was clear that the bankrupt regime would not last. It had already received worldwide condemnation for its role in creating and prolonging the 1984 Tigray famine, in which at least a million people died.

For months before the scale of the famine became known, President Mengistu denied its existence and flew in planeloads of whisky to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution. Eventually a coalition of Tigrayan and Eritrean rebel fighters crushed an army disillusioned by numerous purges of its best officers and marched on Addis Ababa.

In a deal brokered by the United States, President Mengistu fled ten days before the city fell — sparing it a much-feared bloodbath. Mr Mugabe, who was then lauded by the West, accepted Mengistu, who has since spent much of his time at home, where he is rumoured to drink vast amounts of whisky and beat his wife and members of his entourage.

He was found guilty along with 73 others, including Fikre Selassie Wogderesse, the former Prime Minister, and Fissiha Desta, the former Vice-President. About 40 officials are in jail, while 27 were tried in absentia. A few have died since proceedings began in 1992, and the trial formally started in 1994.

“Mengistu sought to right the wrongs made by his feudal predecessors but in the end he committed far greater wrongs than they did,” Ephraim Zwede, a businessman, said.

The dictator and other former officials face sentencing this month. They could be given the death penalty.

Fallen despots

Source: Times archive

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