An Ethiopian dictator known as "the butcher of Addis Ababa" was convicted Tuesday of genocide in a rare case of an African strongman being held to account by his own country.Not a bad precedent, though...
Mengistu Haile Mariam, who has been living in exile in Zimbabwe since 1992,
| and whose kids and hangers-on have been emailing me since 2002, |
Birds of a feather, flocking together...
The trial focused on Mengistu's alleged involvement in the killing of nearly 2,000 people during a 1977-78 campaign known as the Red Terror that targeted supposed enemies of his Soviet-backed regime.
2000? That's it? I suspect that's an indication of poor corpse counting, rather than the actual total.
A panel of judges, sitting before a packed courtroom, convicted him of instigating genocide, committing genocide, illegal imprisonment and abuse of power.
Wonder what Omar thinks of all this, in Sudan?
Mengistu ruled from 1974 to 1991 after his military junta ended Emperor Haile Selassie's reign in a bloody coup. Some experts say 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed in a nationwide purge by Mengistu's Marxist regime, though no one knows for sure.
That's more the figure I heard than that piddlin' 2000 they actually tried him for...
When deposed in 1991 by rebels led by Meles Zenawi, now Ethiopia's prime minister, Mengistu fled to Mugabe's authoritarian regime in Zimbabwe, where his army had helped train guerrillas in their struggle for independence from white rule. The asylum was brokered by the United States and Canada to end the Ethiopian civil war as quickly as possible. Mengistu has been seen in public in Zimbabwe only twice since 1992, once in a restaurant and then browsing in a bookshop. In 1998, he told The Associated Press over the telephone in a rare interview that he was a "political refugee" who spent most of his time "staying at home and reading and writing something about my country."