The following article has been published on The International Herald Tribune, pages 1 and 4, on Saturday, November 12, 1994.

Africa First: Ethiopia War-Crime Trial

By Donatella Lorch

New York Times Service

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Berhanu Meshesha is 71 now and frail, and the events he describes are nearly two decades past. But he remembers every moment clearly.

The 10 armed soldiers, he said, knocked on his door at 5:30 A.M. on April 22, 1976, pulled his four sons and two nephews out of bed and dragged them off, saying they were going to a police station. The boys, ages 12 to 18, were needed for questioning about a street demonstration, the soldiers said. They promised to bring them home.

After searching in police stations and hospitals throughout Addis Ababa, Mr. Meshesha found five corpses the next day in a hospital morgue. One nephew had escaped, but the others had been shot. The soldiers would not allow him to bury them.

Mr. Meshesha, a retired colonel who served in Emperor Haile Selassie's army, was neatly dressed in a frayed suit as he recalled that day 18 years ago.

He whispered that he did not even have time to say good-bye. All he has to help him remember his sons and nephew is a handful of faded photos.

But now, like tens of thousands of Ethiopians who were tortured or who lost loved ones under the 17-year socialist dictatorship of Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, he hopes that justice finally will come. In a political experiment unprecedented in Africa, Ethiopia is about to begin trials of at least 1,300 people on charges of crimes against humanity.

The trials will be watched as a possible model for similar tribunals for the massacres in Rwanda. Although the Ethiopians have received financial and legal help from the West, these public trials will be conducted in Ethiopia by Ethiopians.

"I cannot forget for one moment," Mr. Meshesha said. "Twenty years make no difference. I know exactly who the people are who dragged my sons away. I am so pleased now. Finally, after so many years, there will be justice."

The government has spent two years preparing for the trials, documenting a horrifying chapter in the country's history in the process.

From 40,000 to 100,000 Ethiopians were killed, with the greatest concentration during the Red Terror from 1976 to 1978, a period of organized killing of anyone thought to oppose Colonel Mengistu. In Addis Ababa, corpses littered the streets every morning, most of them of youths.

The new government, run by rebels who overthrew Colonel Mengistu in 1991, has set up a special prosecutor's office and appointed 40 prosecutors to handle these trials. They have arrested 1,300 people and implicated 3,500 others, many of whom are out of the country.

The Mengistu regime was highly bureaucratized and documented its cruelties in detail.

So far, 309,215 pages of written documents have been compiled, said Abraham Tsegaye, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office.

The documents range from death warrants to calculations of the cost of executions. Torture sessions and bombings were filmed.

The Ethiopians have brought in Argentine forensic specialists, who have helped uncover mass graves.

Two sites in particular have been studied. One is the market town of Hausien in Tigre Province, the heart of the rebel movement. It was bombed on June 22, 1988, by the Ethiopian Air Force. While MiG jets dropped bombs, two helicopter gunships blocked escape routes. About 1,800 civilians were killed.

The second is a military compound on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, where the forensic team unearthed 30 bodies with ropes around their necks.

The Ethiopians will be tried under a penal code that dates from the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie.

It provides for capital punishment by hanging and includes provisions for war crimes because the emperor had hoped to bring Italians to trial for actions committed during the Fascist Italian occupation of Ethiopia in the 1930s and 1940s.

Colonel Mengistu, who lives in exile in Zimbabwe, and 21 others will be tried in absentia among the first group of 66 people to go on trial starting on Dec. 13.

Zimbabwe has not responded to a request for Colonel Mengistu's extradition.

Many other officials who have been implicated are in exile abroad, and Ethiopia has extradition treaties only with Sudan and Djibouti. Three former Ethiopian officials who have been charged have been living in the Italian Embassy in Addis Ababa since 1991.

But many moral and legal questions remain unresolved. Some have questioned whether a court influenced by the party in power can be fair. Other critics have objected because many of those facing trial have been in prison for years without formal charges having been filed.

Yet many Ethiopians say that the trials are necessary to assuage their anger and to create a warning for any future government.