Addis Ababa
Nine years into the genocide trial of former Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, the defense this week spoke for the first time. Mengistu and 69 top officials in his former Marxist regime are on trial for the Red Terror, the purges of the 1970s in which some 150,000 intellectuals and political activists were killed. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe in 1991, when he was overthrown by rebels led by current Prime Minister Meles Zelawi, and he is being tried in absentia. But the Ethiopian court has been so slow and inefficient that the defense hasn’t had a chance to call its first witness until now. “The trials have not really helped heal the wounds,” said prosecution witness Ermias Woldeamlack, whose three brothers were killed in the purge. “By dragging on for so long, they have lost their value.”
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