Adding insult to injury: Renewed flirtations with a dictator.  

(A commentary on Mengistu Hailemariam’s interview with a weekly Amharic radio program in Washington DC.) 

A.G Medhin  

Eleven years have passed since former dictator Mengistu Hailemariam fled Ethiopia for Zimbabwe to save his neck. Unlike other former dictators no major coordinated effort has been made to bring this criminal to justice neither by the current Ethiopian government nor by the international community. However, the reverse seems to be true. There seems to be a coordinated effort to sanitize the brutal history of Mengistu. Yes, Mengistu, the one who gave us the Red- Terror butchered our teachers and students for almost two decades and succeeded in humiliating and isolating a proud nation from the civilized world, all in the name of Socialism still has his sympathizers, here in Washington, DC.  

It is not my purposes here to list the limitless crimes of Mengistu to Ethiopian readers. For there hardly is a family in Ethiopia that was not affected by the brutality of this thug. I leave to historians and writers the task of documenting that part of our history and passing it along to the next generation. As they say, “those who learn not from history are condemned to repeat it”.  

It is true that we Ethiopians have our share of delusional political revisionists who belong to the Flat Earth Society, and it may be naïve to assume that the criminality of Mengistu Hailemariam is universally understood needing no debate, especially among Ethiopians, but I still find it very difficult to comprehend why an Amharic radio program in Washington, DC has found it acceptable to give Mengistu a free ride on it’s radio show. Indeed, it is mind boggling to see a radio program that purports to be the voice of freedom and democracy for Ethiopia would go out of it’s way to accommodate a certified dictator. * 

Of course true to his nature, the despicable, Mengistu has used this opportunity to his advantage. If you are expecting remorse or even a regret here, let alone an apology, forget it. After eleven years in exile as a fugitive, it appears that this butcher has learnt nothing and has nothing new to give his friends at the radio station, except the usual diatribe expected of a dictator. With the typical array of lies and deceit, he takes no responsibility for the 17 years of terror he rained on Ethiopia. With no one to challenge him, Mengistu blames everything and everyone else but himself for the crimes and terror that gripped Ethiopia for the long years of his dictatorship.  

Who can blame him? The interview, if it can call it that, was intended to give Mengistu a forum. It was not designed to confront this pathological liar to face the facts. The interviewer seems like a teenager meeting his sport hero for the first time. Admiring, grateful and extremely respectful. Questions were predictable and non confrontational: a clear indication of nostalgic attachment to and a special fondness for the era of Mengistu Hailemariam.

It seems that the interviewer has forgotten that Mengistu is a criminal at large who if it weren’t for few apologists and the carelessness of the current undemocratic government of Ethiopia, would have been in jail rotting or dead and forgotten by now.  

Listening to the interview, one can’t help but question the motive of the radio program. It is not hard to conclude that the motive of the interview was to give the dictator some credibility; an opportunity to lie to Ethiopians, a sort of second chance to re write history and feign accountability. It is ironic that the weekly radio program has no problem claiming to stand for freedom and democracy etc. on one hand, and granting Mengistu an unchallenged medium to preach to Ethiopians on the other hand. It is a planned and conscious attempt to send a tacit message to listeners that may be, the discredited, bankrupt and corrupt Mengistu was not such a bad person after all. Listeners are told that the purpose of this interview was to give Mengistu a chance to rebut the misinformation that is being spread, by the current government in the form a book, against him. We are told that he has to set the record straight since he was “tricked” into giving an interview to the current government’s publishing company. Please! Didn’t this butcher explain himself clearly by turning Ethiopia to a blood river of its own children, for seventeen years in the form of torture, mass killings, etc.? What part of dictatorship, terror or death don’t these people understand? Have these people been in hibernation or were they part of Mengistu’s terror brigade? How dare they give Mengistu, the butcher, and the opportunity to spew his venom all over again and call themselves Ethiopians? What misunderstandings do they have to clear for him? How do the parents of victims of the Red Terror misunderstand Mengistu? Do the Jews misunderstand Hitler?  

May I remind the personalities of the radio program that freedom of speech goes with self-censorship? Those who are in the position of disseminating information through the mass media should take their responsibility very seriously and not become prey to the manipulation of a second-rate minds like Mengistu. By granting a known criminal an airtime, they are sending a clear message to the world that we Ethiopians have no respect for our own humanity, and we do not care about justice and democracy. After all how do we expect the world to side with us on anything when we do not even seem to agree on the one thing that is so crystal clear: the brutality of Mengistu and his regime.  

It is only the wish of some apologists and morally irresponsible individuals that the crimes against Ethiopians by Mengistu and his stooges remain unaccounted for. But as far as Ethiopians are concerned, make no mistake about it, the pain inflicted was real then, and it is real now. Those who mistake silence for forgetfulness are undermining humanity. Like all other wronged people in the world, Ethiopians also deserve to have a chance at bringing a closure to a sad history.  

When a patriotic and democratic government that recognizes the importance of the human dignity of Ethiopians comes to power, the healing process will start by exposing the harm done and those who did it. The people of Ethiopia shall have their day to tell their story and make sure the criminal Mengistu and his cadres get what they deserve. Until then Mengistu and his jingoistic apologists, like this radio program, will continue to disparage the pain as if it did not happen. Only until then… 

* Please click here to listen to the interview. http://www.netsanet.com/html1/page2.htm

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