Mengistu Haile Miriam
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USSR's Friend in Ethiopia Guilty of Genocide
The Supreme Court of Ethiopia found Mengistu Haile Miriam, the dictator who ruled the country from 1974 to 1991, guilty of genocide and other crimes against humanity yesterday. His trial lasted 12 years. Now, the main problem is to punish the bloody tyrant, who has been living peacefully in Zimbabwe since 1991. Forty people have been imprisoned in the last 12 years for the mass repressions in Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s. Another 12 suspects died in that time without being convicted. Twenty-seven associates of the dictator were also tried in absentia.
Yesterday's verdict was the result of the votes of two out of three jury members. Mengistu and 11 of his functionaries were found guilty of genocide, systematic violations of human rights and crimes against humanity. Those crimes carry the death penalty. Zimbabwean authorities have refused to extradite him, however, saying that he no longer plays any role in politics. It is rumored that he took a large amount of money and valuables with him when he fled Ethiopia on a Soviet military plane in 1991.
Mengistu came to power in 1974 in a military coup. He overthrew the elderly Emperor Haile Selassie I, who died a short time afterward while under house arrest. Mengistu immediately declared socialism in the country. He was convicted yesterday of personally ordering the deaths of 2000 people, including government officials and relatives of the emperor, and of the deaths of 2500 innocent people who died of torture. Tens of thousands of people died in bloody campaigns at the end of the 1970s that were dubbed Soviet-style “the red terror.” A famine in the country in 1984 and 1985 took the lives of almost a million more people. The world found out about the famine only several months after it had ended, however, due to the dictator's gag order.
Mengistu's bloody reign ended in 1991 when, after several years of civil war, rebels led by current prime minister of Ethiopia Meles Zenawi, seized the capital Addis Ababa.
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All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 13, 2006
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