Simon Sebag Montefiore on Mengistu Haile Mariam

“Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam helped overthrow Emperor Haile Selassie, seized power in Ethiopia; murdered his own ministers with a machine-gun, imposed a brutal Leninist tyranny and repressive police-state, ordered the murder of millions of his countrymen and created, by policy and blunder, a famine that killed millions more. He ranks as one of Africa’s most disastrous monsters.”

“Until its overthrow in 1991, Mengistu and the Dergue was responsible for the deaths of millions of Ethiopians. In an echo of Pol Pot’s brief regime in Cambodia in the later 1970s, hundreds of intellectuals, particularly those with any association with the old regime, were rounded up and shot in order to purify the country in the name of revolution. The rival Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party suffered particularly over the following years — membership was enough to secure abduction and near certain death. The Dergue governed by cultivating an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. Local committees, called ‘Kebeles’, were set up across Ethiopia, with the power to monitor and name potential ‘enemies of the revolution’. The names of suspects were then filed by the central administration and soon rounded up by militiamen in the pay of the regime. Many bodies turned up the following day, or weeks later; others were never found. In the event that the bodies were returned for burial, the Kebeles demanded that the victim’s family pay for the cost of the bullets used to kill their loved one.”

“By 1977 Mengistu, with ruthless efficiency, had established himself as the leading force in the army, and in the Dergue. As Ethiopia adopted an aggressive approach to neighbouring Eritrea, Mengistu shot a fellow Dergue member who had argued for a more cautious foreign policy. He personally purged the Dergue by executing rivals and opponents with a machine-gun. He also ordered the assassination of any other former comrades who stood in his way, and in 1987 declared himself president for life. As president, the first changes that Mengistu implemented made some progress in dismantling Ethiopia's archaic, almost feudal land system. But the mass forced relocations of people to new collective agricultural settlements proved disastrous, and caused further tragedy. Mengistu not only killed his own people but fought a long and bloody war with his rival leftist dictator Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia. Hundreds of thousands died.”

“The suffering of the Ethiopian people was to some extent ameliorated by support from the Soviet Union, to whom Mengistu had offered up his country as a satellite state, although much of the Soviet aid was spent on military expenditure. When the Soviet Union began to flounder in the mid-1980s, the withdrawal of aid meant that Mengistu’s response to the devastating famine of 1984-5 was entirely ineffectual. When news of the famine first broke, the regime condemned it as enemy propaganda; but it was only international aid that prevented the death toll rising beyond the already shocking figure of 1 million. In 1991 Mengistu was finally deposed by the Ethiopian Revolutionary Democratic Front, a military coalition of opposition groups, as well as Eritreans and Tigrayans. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe. In December 2006, after a 12-year trial, an Ethiopian court convicted Mengistu in absentia of genocide — the death of untold millions — and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Meanwhile, the former dictator continues to live in comfort in Zimbabwe, on a large ranch.”