Mengistu Lives

While perusing some history on Wikipedia for my recent Nepal post I found a biography of Mengistu, the military dictator of Ethiopia who ruled during the late 1970s and 1980s.

Mengistu’s horrendous seventeen year rule was described in painful detail in Robert D. Kaplan’s Surrender or Starve. In 1974, the Derg military junta deposed and eventually assassinated King Haile Sailasse. In 1977 the Derge elected Mengistu ruler after the two previous heads of state were assassinated. Tens of thousands of “counterrevolutionaries” were murdered during the Red Terror that followed, and Mengistu persued a Stalinist-Maoist collectivization of the country that contributed to a famine in 1984-5 that left millions dead. The undisciplined army and secret police, which had unchecked power to arrest, detain, and torture suspected “enemies of the revolution,” murdered civilians, raped women and children, destroyed villages, and made life in Ethiopia so bad that refugees fled to the Sudan of all places (you know things are bad when people are leaving for the Sudan). Only when the army lost to a coalition of rebel forces in 1991 was the Derg deposed.

Mengistu is one of those nasty SOBs who, if there was any justice in the universe, would have died a violent, painful death long ago. But it turns out the 78-year old Maoist revolutionary is alive and well, living in comfort in the same country that granted him asylum in 1991, and he defends his rule to anyone who cares to listen. Can anyone guess which country granted him asylum? (Hint: it’s not the United States.)

Everyone’s favorite Sub-Saharan country: Zimbabwe!