Mengistu haile mariam biography sample

1937—

Dictator

Haile Mariam Mengistu was a popular army officer who was installed as ruler of Ethiopia following the country's 1974 revolution.

He remained in power for the next seventeen years, and his attempt to mold the country into a Soviet-style socialist paradise plunged it into a brutal reign of terror instead.

Mengistu haile mariam biography sample

Ethiopia's government-sanctioned campaign of political repression resulted in an estimated 150,000 deaths, and Mengistu became known as "the Butcher of Addis Ababa" for it. Fifteen years after his 1991 flight into exile, he was tried in absentia and found guilty of genocide.

He remains in Zimbabwe, in a walled compound, but the legacy of his long and bloody rule was to destabilize the Horn of Africa and reshape the borders of its countries through the armed rebel groups that worked to unseat him.

Mengistu's background and childhood have been the topic of rumor and even myths connecting him to Ethiopia's royal bloodline, but actual inform