Trial for the men now at World's End prison begins

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Alem Bekayne, the prison at World's End, is much more comfortable than the quarters in which the Nazi leaders waited to be judged for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials 50 years ago. For the past five years it has been home to 420 leaders of the former Communist dictatorship in Ethiopia, but probably not for much longer. Their trials finally got underway on April 4, and they all face death by hanging.

They have lived very well in the blockhouse at Alem Bekayne: a shaded courtyard with balconies overlooking it, clean clothes, running water, plenty of books and games. The vast majority of their 55 million fellow countrymen, who endure desperate poverty and occasional famines, would envy them all that -- but now it's time for them to face the music.

The trials are being held in stages, with the most senior political decision-makers going first. Each weekday for the next few months, 46 members of the Dergue ('committee' in Amharic, Ethiopia's dominant language) who ruled the East African country during 17 years of massacre and civil war will leave the prison in the heart of Addis Ababa to face a court where the charges against them fill 296 pages.

"Myself, I hope no good comes to them," said prison administrator Theodore Makonnen. "They have destroyed a country. They destroyed the lives of millions of people. And they do not feel sadness. They feel as if they were right."

Former Marxist tyrants usually feel they were right, because their doctrine justifies any brutality committed in the service of the Revolution. In the case of Ethiopia, that included the torture and murder of at least 54,000 known victims in the capital (but probably three times that number in reality) whose crime was suspected opposition to the regime.

They committed other crimes too, like bombing and shelling thousands of villages that defied their authority, and manipulating famine aid to ensure that rebellious regions starved. But the Ethiopians want the trials to be legally impeccable, so they are basing the charge of genocide against the Dergue on specific written orders for the murder of thousands of individuals.

Since it was a Marxist regime, the evidence is precise and voluminous. "The Red Terror was organized in a very systematic and bureaucratic manner," explained Girman Wakjira, the special prosecutor. "Records were meticulously kept and every last bullet used for executions accounted for."

It may seem surprising that men planning to commit unspeakable crimes would leave what amount to written confessions lying in the state archives, but that is the nature of genocide. The Nazis did the same, and so did Stalin's executioners. The reason seems to be that such deeds are only possible if you wrap them in the routine of bureaucratic formality.

We have minutes of meetings in which it is stated. "We hereby agree that revolutionary measures (i.e. execution) be taken against A, B, and C," explained Abraham Tsegaye of the Prosecutor's Office.

"These documents specify where the executions should occur, whether in a marketplace before the public or in prison or at the victim's home...And we have documents in which it is reported back, things like 'I hereby confirm that your order for the execution of A, B, and C was carried out in the presence of comrade so-and-so and comrade so-and-so.'"

Forty-six members of the Dergue are being tried in person. Twenty others, including ex-dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, are being tried in absentia. (Mengistu is under virtual house arrest in Zimbabwe, in Harare's wealthy suburb of Gun Hill, where he annoys his protector, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, by running up bills of $5,000 a month on long-distance calls to anybody who will listen to his protestations of innocence).

Further trials will deal with other senior officials of the regime; then some 800 policemen, soldiers and administrators who supervised the day-to-day management of the Red Terror; and finally about 900 men who carried out the actual shootings, stabbings, and stranglings. A total of 1,900 people will be tried in person, another thousand in absentia -- and there are 309,215 pages of evidence.

The trials in Ethiopia will bring nobody back to life, but they may help to bind the wounds of a nation still coming to terms with the savagery of the Mengistu regime five years after he was driven from power. And of all the foreign assistance that helped the poverty-stricken Ethiopian government to prepare the trials, the most poignant was the team of forensic scientists from Argentina who identified the bodies dug up from the mass graves.

There were no comparable trials in Argentina, where the generals who committed similar crimes live at peace, shielded by the amnesty that the government had to concede to a still powerful army. Old men who murdered millions in Stalin's Russia live in peace too, as do other mass murderers from Chile to Angola to Cambodia. But it is getting better.

In Bosnia, NATO troops are reluctantly giving protection to the investigators who are excavating the mass graves of up to 8,000 Moslems murdered after the fall of Srebrenica last year. The Cameroon government has just arrested a dozen men sought by the Rwanda war crimes tribunal on suspicion of organizing the genocide there. And in New York, work proceeds at the United Nations on creating a permanent international criminal court.

In just two years, the International Law Commission has completed a draft statute for an international court to deal with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in cases where national courts cannot reach the perpetrators. There are many hurdles yet before such a court can become a reality, but the wind has definitely shifted in its favor.