Trevor Royle on the proper prosecution of war criminals(Photo: OromiaTimes collection)
Africa has been the scene of so much blood-letting and unforced human tragedy that it’s difficult not to disagree with the director of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) who once told me that it might be better to pull everyone out of the continent’s many disaster areas and return in a 100 years to see what happened. Like many others of her breed she experienced the occasional overwhelming sadness that all her agency’s work was in vain because of the African predilection for violence, and that there was no remedy for epicentres of butchery like Darfur. In her moments of deepest despair, Africa was indeed the heart of darkness.
Of course, it’s not always like that. Africa is home to many success stories where people have worked long and hard to produce a better life, but for every Julius Nyrere, who transformed Tanzania, there is a monster like Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam who marked his arrival in power in Ethiopia in 1974 by sending the existing government to the firing squad. Worse followed. In order to rid the country of assorted imperialists and counter- revolutionaries, Mengistu instituted the “Red Terror”, a savage programme of extermination of anyone who opposed his administration, known as the “Dergue” or “Committee”.
Thousands of people were eliminated, and throughout the 1970s the streets of the capital, Addis Ababa, were regularly cluttered with dead bodies as Mengistu’s hitmen went about their bloody work. Famine in the north of the country in the following decade simply exacerbated the suffering as Mengistu ordered a mass relocation programme which turned out to be a cover for a policy of genocide. During his time in power, more than a half a million Ethiopians are thought to have died.
The outside world did not intervene. On the contrary, due to cold war rivalries, the Soviet Union provided Mengistu with arms the better to kill his people. It was not until 1991 that the Dergue was brought down by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front and Mengistu fled the country just before the fall of Addis Ababa. By any standards he should have faced up to the consequences of his actions, but by evil chance Mengistu chose another mad dictator as his saviour – Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. For the past 15 years, Mengistu has lived high on the hog in Harare and that means he won’t be present when he is sentenced this week in Addis Ababa for the war crimes he committed all those years ago.
In fact, the whole prosecution of the Dergue regime has been tardy and badly managed. When the new government came to power in 1992, it established a special prosecutor’s office to investigate suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Mengistu period. But it proved to be a slow and wearisome business.
By 1997, 5198 suspects had been charged but of that number 2952 were charged in absentia and the rest were detained in conditions which alarmed organisations such as the Human Rights Watch. There have also been concerns about the judicial process, with complaints about unnecessary delays, obfuscation of evidence and an unwillingness to let suspects have access to legal representation. Another concern is Ethiopia’s retention of the death penalty for crimes involving murder.
As it happens, Mengistu is unlikely to be troubled by the verdict when it is handed down to him. The Zimbabwe government has made it clear that it has no intention of extraditing him and previous Ethiopian attempts to assassinate him have failed dismally. If ever there was a need to get an international standard for the prosecution of suspected war criminals and bringers of genocide, Mengistu provides it.
21 May 2006
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