Rights groups applaud Ethiopian genocide conviction

Human rights advocates are cheering the genocide conviction of former Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mengistu and dozens of his military government officials were convicted on Dec. 12 of killing thousands of political opponents during a particularly brutal period of the dictator's 17-year rule. "This is a man whose regime was marked by some of the worst atrocities of our time."said Reed Brody, legal counsel for New York-based Human Rights Watch. "Thousands of political killings [were carried out and] over 100,000 people died as a result of forced relocations." Known by some as "the Butcher of Addis," Mengistu's reign began with the toppling of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and included war, political purges, and the notorious 1984 famine. Mengistu was condemned by the international community for his inability or unwillingness to take action while approximately one million Ethiopians died of hunger. The former dictator, who himself was overthrown in 1991, currently lives in Zimbabwe and was tried in absentia by the Ethiopian government. The verdict comes as other African dictators find themselves facing justice too. Former Chadian dictator Hissene Habre is set to be brought to trial in Senegal, where he had been living in exile, and Liberia's warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor was arrested in March and sent to the Hague. His trial is tentatively scheduled to begin in April 2007. Taylor's US-born son was arrested in the United States last week and charged with torture. And on Dec. 13 the top prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague announced that he will bring charges by February against those suspected of masterminding atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region. "It is certainly uneven, and they are being dragged along kicking and screaming, but we are definitely seeing a trend in which people who commit mass murder are being brought to account," Brody was quoted as saying on Dec. 13 by Northern Ireland's Belfast Telegraph. "We would very much like to see [Mengistu] physically brought to justice–not justice in absentia," said Brody, who put the former Ethiopian leader in the same category as Saddam Hussein and Cambodia's Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. Not all observers agree with that characterization. "He was a quintessential dictator," said University of California-Los Angeles Professor Edmond Keller, who has written extensively on Ethiopia. "But the word genocide doesn't fit. Genocide is a situation where one group or one government tries to eliminate a particular targeted group in whole or in part. I don't think there's any group in Ethiopia that fits that description." In reading the verdict, however, the Ethiopian court's presiding judge said that Mengistu and his cohorts "conspired to destroy a political group and kill people with impunity." After seizing power, Mengistu, a communist, built an alliance with the Soviet Union and massacred political opponents in a two-year wave of killings that came to be known as the "Red Terror." "He was an idealist and he believed the military that seized power in 1974 could be the vanguard of a revolution," Keller said. "He went a very long way in creating an Afro-Marxist regime." Keller called the genocide conviction "a political move" designed to "further demonize the Workers Party of Ethiopia and bring a sense of closure to that whole period." Bringing that kind of closure could be difficult. Fifteen years after Mengistu's ouster, the average Ethiopian still subsists on about $100 a year and the country's elected government, once hailed as a model for democracy in Africa, has itself been accused of a litany of human rights abuses. "The government of Ethiopia continues to violate its citizens' most basic rights," Amnesty International's Lynn Fredrickson told a Congressional committee in November. "The government and ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front continue to deny leaders and members of political opposition parties, noted human rights defenders, journalists and others their rights of speech, press, assembly and association." A host of activists and intellectuals currently face prosecution in Ethiopia, Fredrickson said, including 14 journalists, a teachers union official, formerly US-based law professor and United Nations Rwanda prosecutor Dr. Yakob Hailemariam, and Mesfin Woldemariam, Ethiopia's most prominent human rights activist. "Torture by beating on the feet and electric shocks have reportedly been used against some political prisoners," Fredrickson added. According to Fredrickson, one engineer and supermarket owner "was repeatedly tortured in October to admit to publishing and distributing" an opposition calendar. She said he was "taken to court with visible injuries, which the judges did not investigate." Amnesty International is supporting a bill that would direct the US Secretary of State to fund local and national human rights groups in Ethiopia, provide legal support to political prisoners there and help increase the independence of the country's judiciary. It would also establish a program to strengthen private media and expand programming by the Voice of America in Ethiopia. The "Ethiopia Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights Advancement Act of 2006" was sponsored by Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) and has 29 co-sponsors from both sides of the political aisle. The bill would help ensure that members of Mengistu's regime currently residing in the United States could be identified and extradited to face charges related to gross violations of human rights committed during his reign. It would also establish a mechanism to help the United States "work with other governments to identify and extradite such persons, including Mengistu Haile Mariam." Mengistu could face the death penalty if forced to return to Ethiopia, though Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe has said he will not honor any extradition requests. Mengistu supported Mugabe's guerrilla forces in the 1970s when they fought to overthrow minority white rule in Zimbabwe.