Ethiopian war criminals can leave the Italian embassy after almost 30 years

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Berhanu Bayeh and Addis Tedla, two senior officials of the former Mengistu military regime in Ethiopia who were sentenced to death for war crimes, were given probation by an Ethiopian federal court, according to a diplomatic source aware of the situation.
They were sentenced to death in absentia in 2008, along with former Soviet Union-backed Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, for participating in the torture and execution of thousands of people, which amounted to genocide.
Ethiopia’s President Sahle-Work Zewde commuted their death sentences to life imprisonment on December 19. The federal court voted two to one for release on Christmas Eve, after Ethiopian Attorney General Gedion Timothewos sought clemency because of their old age.

The two men are now awaiting the official transmission of the verdict from the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry, after which they will leave.

Italian Deputy Foreign Minister Emanuela Claudia Del Re thanked Ethiopia for granting the probationary period.

“An old page in history has definitely turned,” she said in a tweet on Monday. “Italy and Ethiopia share a long and prosperous future together.”

“Life is a human right – the decision to grant probation to former government officials is consistent with human rights obligations and commitments,” said Daniel Bekele, the chief commissioner of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, who describes himself as an “independent citizen. “. institution. “It is also a symbolic indicator of Ethiopia’s commitment to turn a page in one of the saddest chapters in its recent history.”

Mengistu was chairman of the Derg, a communist party that came to power in Ethiopia after a coup in 1974. Bayeh was for a time Secretary of State of the Derg and Tedla was Chief of Staff of Defense.

In 1977 and 1978, the Derg committed numerous human rights violations during what was known as the Red Terror. According to Amnesty International, thousands of people – mostly school and university students and young intellectuals suspected of being against the Derg – were murdered on the streets and in prisons in Addis Ababa and other cities in the middle of the country.

The same regime was in control during a drought and famine in the 1980s that claimed an estimated 800,000 lives.

When the regime fell in 1991 and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front moved into the capital, Bayeh, now in his seventies, and Tedla, in his early eighties, took refuge at the Italian embassy in Addis Ababa. They have been locked inside the compound’s walls since May 26, 1991, the source told CNN.

Their 29-year diplomatic asylum residence is considered the longest, lasting 22 years longer than Julian Assange’s much-discussed stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

At least 600 civilians were killed in the massacre in Northern Ethiopia, the rights committee said
They never had a lawyer but applied for asylum within the embassy, ​​which was never granted. However, the Italian Embassy accepted the two men because of the country’s opposition to the death penalty.

They have spent their days cut off from the outside world walking the compound’s small grounds and watching television, the diplomatic source said.

Two other men, Tesfay Gebre Kidan and Hailu Yimenu, also took refuge at the embassy in 1991. Yimenu committed suicide a few years later, while Kidan died in an accident in 2004. The source told CNN that further details about Kidan’s death could not be released to the press, but said it was neither Bayeh nor Tedla.

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