| | Mengistu Haile Mariam, the deposed leader of Ethiopia who is currently in hiding in Zimbabwe, was found guilty of genocide this week at the end of a 12 year trial by an Ethiopian court.
The Derg government, led by Mengistu, committed to a campaign known as "Red Terror" between 1977 and 1978 which purged tens of thousands of suspected dissidents, including high school students, 5,000 of which are said to have been killed in a single week.
"Members of the Derg who are present in court today and those who are being tried in absentia," Judge Medhen Kiros told the court, "conspired to destroy a political group and kill people with impunity."
Victims were executed by garrotting or shooting, their bodies tossed to the streets.
Mengistu was tried along with 71 other defendants, 25 of them absent. Fourteen were found guilty posthumously, having passed away in the years since the trial began.
The verdict, which carries a death sentence, was passed by two votes to one on the three-judge panel. Of the 72 defendants only one, Corporal Gashaw Gurmesa, was found not guilty.
Mengistu has been an official guest of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe for the past 15 years, and the Zimbabwean government have stated that they have no plans of releasing him to Ethiopia.
"Mengistu applied for asylum and we granted [it to] him," acting information and publicity minister, Paul Mangwana said. "We have no control over the judiciary process in other countries, but we are also a sovereign state and as I am talking now, that position we made has not changed."
However, Mengistu is reported to have recently moved from the capital of Harare to a location much closer to the Zimbabwean border.
He has previously refused to recognise the trial as legal.
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| | Posted 12/13/2006 2:28 PM - 108 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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