Zimbabwe: Where mass murderers retire

By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun

May 26, 2006

Mengistu has been in comfortable exile in Zimbabwe -- where we used to be near neighbours in one of Harare's leafy suburbs -- since fleeing Ethiopia in 1991 just ahead of the storming of the capital Addis Ababa by a rebel army.

And for the past 12 years Mengistu has been on trial in absentia in Ethiopia for the crimes of his 17-year regime, especially the 1977-78 "Red Terror" when tens of thousands of people whose loyalty was suspect were slaughtered.

There's also the matter of whether Mengistu ordered the murder of Emperor Haile Selassie, whom he deposed in a 1974 coup.

Mengistu's 1984 blocking of international relief aid to famine-stricken northern rebel regions where at least one million people died can only be called genocide.

On Tuesday, presiding Judge Medhin Kiros heard the last of the evidence against Mengistu and 61 members of his junta, 26 of them also being tried in absentia.

Judge Medhin said there is so much evidence to be considered that it will not be possible to deliver a judgment before the end of next January.

Not that any of this matters to Mengistu, who is an honoured guest of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and who has been given Zimbabwean residency and a diplomatic passport for his flying medical visits to South Africa.

Mugabe has also rejected numerous requests by the new government of Ethiopia to extradite Mengistu to face the charges against him.

Mugabe's reluctance to hand over his guest is quite understandable. The Zimbabwean dictator does not want the idea of butchers paying for their crimes to catch on.

There's already far too much evidence around of the minority Ndebele villages wiped out in the early 1980s by Mugabe's North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade in the Gukurahundi (The Wind that Cleanses) campaign.

Mugabe doesn't want to end his days in a courtroom and is therefore a soft touch for former dictators facing similar predicaments. Many members of the family of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor are, reportedly, living in Harare, making it a preferred retirement destination for mass murderers.

Mugabe feels some debt of gratitude towards Mengistu because of the aid the Ethiopian gave Zimbabwe's so-called liberation forces in the 1970s.

But in the early years of Mengistu's exile, Mugabe seemed wary of his guest. Mengistu was under virtual house arrest, his villa surrounded by armed Zimbabwean police and his movements restricted to one visit a week to a nearby tennis court.

I got a first-hand account of Mengistu's daily life in 1992. I had a call one morning from a friend at the Canadian International Development Agency, whose offices backed on to Mengistu's villa.

The CIDA staff had come to work that morning to discover Mengistu's two Ethiopian bodyguards hiding in the garden and pleading for Canadian political asylum.