Two siblings of Mengistu Hailemariam, who ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991, said in a 2019 television interview that their family lived as ordinary Ethiopians, borkena reported.
Mengistu Hailemariam, chairman of the Derg military government, delivers a speech in 1979. (Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons, public domain) [file photo]
Yeshi Hailemariam, the youngest of his sisters, and a brother, Dereje Hailemariam, spoke to journalist Dereje Haile on the Amharic program Benegerachin Lay on Arts World TV, the news site said on Aug. 20, 2019. Mengistu has four brothers and two sisters, according to the report.
Dereje, a plumber in Addis Ababa, said he still had no permanent job and struggled to find work in a slow market, borkena reported.
Yeshi said the only financial help she could remember from her brother’s years in power came when she and two siblings asked him for money to buy clothes. He sent them to his wife, Wubanchi Bishaw, who gave them 150 birr, she said.
The siblings said neither Mengistu nor his children, who borkena said are medical doctors, were in touch with them.
borkena wrote that Mengistu, who was living in Zimbabwe at the time, has not been implicated in corruption. The site noted that his rule remains deeply contested: critics hold him responsible for the Red Terror killings of the late 1970s, while supporters describe that period as a response to armed opposition against the military government he led.
Mengistu went into exile in Zimbabwe in 1991, when a rebel coalition led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) took power. Ethiopia’s Federal High Court convicted him in absentia of genocide in December 2006 and sentenced him to life in prison in January 2007, ABC News reported, citing AFP.
On May 26, 2008, the Supreme Court overturned that sentence on appeal and sentenced Mengistu and senior aides of his government to death in absentia, the BBC reported. Zimbabwe had ruled out his extradition, according to ABC News.
Sources: borkena (Aug. 20, 2019), BBC News: “Court sentences Mengistu to death” (May 26, 2008), ABC News (Australia)/AFP (May 26, 2008)