Zimbabwe will not extradite Mengistu

 Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe in 1991 following an armed uprising against his rule and was granted political asylum by his old friend, President Robert Mugabe. Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said Mengistu would remain under the protection of the government, pointing out that the former dictator gave valuable support to nationalists fighting for Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain. We granted him asylum and why should we extradite him to Ethiopia? Chinamasa questioned. Remember that he assisted this country during the liberation struggle and we have no reason to send him back to Ethiopia. Chinamasa revealed that Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawe unsuccessfully tried five years ago to convince Zimbabwe to extradite Mengistu. Our position is clear, Mangistu is the guest of the Zimbabwe government and will not be extradited, the Zimbabwe justice minister added. Mengistu, a former army colonel who ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991 with an iron fist, was on Monday sentenced to death alongside 18 of his former senior officials. The Ethiopian Supreme Court quashed a life sentence imposed on Mengistu by a lower court last year saying the sentence was not commensurate to the gravity of the crimes committed by the former dictator and his cohorts. Mengistu, a self-styled Marxist driven from power by Zenawe’s armed rebels, has ever since his overthrow spent his time in the lap of luxury in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. The 18 officials, who ruled with Mengistu and were sentenced to death Monday, are all in Ethiopian custody. Some experts say 150 000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed in a nationwide purge by Mengistu’s regime, though no one knows for sure how many suspected opponents were killed. Human Rights Watch has described the 1977-78 campaign known as the Red Terror as “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa.” Mengistu, who now reportedly works as a security consultant to Mugabe, is said to have advised the Zimbabwean leader to pre-empt a possible mass revolt by depopulating opposition-supporting urban areas through the controversial slum-clearing exercise in 2005. The slum demolition exercise, condemned by the United Nations as a violation of poor people’s rights, left at least 700 000 Zimbabweans without home or food while another 2.4 million people were also indirectly affected by the clean