Nation’s Accommodation of Ethiopian Despot Stirs Furor

Leaders of the ruling African National Congress have a tradition of standing by their friends from the struggle against apartheid--no matter how unpopular those friendships may be elsewhere.

Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi received a hero’s welcome when he attended President Thabo Mbeki’s inauguration in June. The state-owned media openly gushed when President Fidel Castro of Cuba paid a recent visit. Some ANC officials even argued for leniency in the prosecution of anti-apartheid activist Allan Boesak, convicted of embezzling international donations, because of his credentials in the struggle.

But human rights activists say the ANC’s choice of strange bedfellows has gone too far in the case of former Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mengistu, who lives in exile in Zimbabwe, is wanted in Ethiopia for crimes against humanity committed during his 17-year rule, which ended with his overthrow in 1991.

Mengistu spent most of the past month in a Johannesburg hospital for treatment of stomach ulcers, an arrangement authorized by Mbeki’s office on “medical and humanitarian grounds,” according to a presidential spokesman. When it comes to old friends, government officials have said, the door to South Africa is open.

“We cannot forget our history,” Joel Netshitenzhe, head of government communications, told reporters recently.

The erstwhile Marxist dictator quietly slipped out of South Africa last week after Ethiopian authorities demanded his extradition and human rights activists here and abroad called for his arrest.

Few doubt that Mengistu was encouraged to leave by the South African government. Officials here apparently had no intention of honoring the extradition and arrest requests, but the image of Africa’s most heralded democracy harboring an alleged murderous despot was becoming an international embarrassment.

Mengistu is gone, but the decision to not detain him--at least until the legal basis for his prosecution could be investigated--has set off a more fundamental debate about South Africa’s commitment to human rights.

Mbeki has asserted this nation’s leadership by calling for an African renaissance grounded in a respect for human rights and democracy. The ANC has long argued that South Africa has special moral authority in promoting such a renewal because it has risen above its own violent and abusive past.

But Venitia Govender, national director of the Human Rights Committee of South Africa, said the ANC has risked the country’s progress by putting an old friendship ahead of the common good.

“The ANC can have their own ideas about Mengistu, but as a government we need to have a policy that does not have different criteria applying to different people,” Govender said. “When you let a culture of impunity develop, you have to put up with the grave consequences. We have seen that happen in this country.”

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said Mengistu is the chief accused in ongoing Ethiopian trials of 2,000 former officials on charges of genocide and war crimes. He also is being tried separately by Ethiopia in absentia. Watchdog groups say as many as 100,000 people died as a result of forced relocations ordered by Mengistu’s regime in the late 1970s.

“The South Africans had a mass murderer on their hands, and they let him go,” said Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch, which appealed to Mbeki’s government two weeks ago to bring Mengistu to justice under South African law. “It sets a horrible precedent for the continent and the world.”

In radio interviews from his home in Zimbabwe, Mengistu said the South Africans had assured him that he would not be detained. He also suggested that he may return for additional treatment. He credited his long relationship with the ANC, whose underground members received guerrilla training in Ethiopia during his rule.

“Many [South African] government ministers are my friends,” Mengistu said. “We were comrades in arms during the revolution.”