Dutch court hears appeal of Ethiopian refugee convicted of war crimes

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CN) — A 67-year-old refugee from Ethiopia is asking a court in the Netherlands to overturn his conviction for war crimes while prosecutors say he should remain in jail for life. 

During two weeks of hearings before The Hague Court of Appeals that wrapped up Wednesday, Eshetu Alemu argued a lower Dutch court refused to consider exculpatory evidence during his 2017 trial for torturing and murdering civilians, including children, during political violence in the late 1970s in Ethiopia and what is now Eritrea. 

Alemu, who has been in custody since he was arrested in 2015, was one of the 120 original members of the Derg, the military junta that ruled Ethiopia and present-day Eritrea from 1974 until 1991. The communist regime overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in a coup and set out to eliminate political rivals, leaving around 500,000 people dead, according to estimates by Amnesty International. 

The military campaign – known as Qey Shibir, or the Red Terror – began when the movement’s leader, former army officer Mengistu Haile Mariam, gave a speech in the capital of Addis Ababa, shouting, "Death to counterrevolutionaries!” and smashing bottles of what appeared to be blood on the ground. A video of the speech was played during the appeals hearing. 

During Alemu's 10-day trial in 2017, prosecutors presented evidence that he oversaw the execution of 75 people who were detained in a church and whose bodies were dumped in a mass grave. He was also responsible for detention centers where prisoners were kept in filthy conditions and tortured.

“The fact that the majority of victims were children younger than 18 makes the crimes all the more cruel,” Presiding Judge Mariette Renckens said when reading the conviction. Prosecutors identified 321 victims in four war crimes charges. 

Alemu denies all of the charges against him.

“I was not there. I did not do it. I was not at that prison and I was not at that church,” he said during his trial.

According to his lawyers, he is in ill health and part of his appeal had to be heard in the prison where he is incarcerated because he was too sick to travel to the courtroom. 

“It is so important for the victims to know that the perpetrators will not get away with this. They must be accountable for the innocent people they dumped in mass graves,” an eyewitness, who didn’t want their name to be published, told the court on Wednesday. The victim was imprisoned for three years under the Derg regime and traveled from abroad to participate in the proceedings. 

Now a Dutch citizen, Alemu sought asylum in the Netherlands in the early 1990s after the political winds in his country shifted. The country’s leader, Mariam, fled to neighboring Zimbabwe after a series of coup attempts. Alemu was sentenced to death in 2006 in Ethiopia for genocide and crimes against humanity, one of 58 Derg officials convicted for crimes committed under the former regime, but the Netherlands will not extradite anyone facing the death penalty. 

Following Alemu's 2015 arrest, Dutch investigators interviewed 15 witnesses who are now living in the United States and Canada. After Alemu’s 2018 appeal request, officials interviewed even more eyewitnesses, traveling to Ethiopia to take statements. 

Following the publication of an article entitled “War crimes: Ethiopian executioner is in hiding in the Netherlands” in the weekly Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland in 1998, Dutch authorities began looking into Alemu. Under a legal principle known as universal jurisdiction, countries can prosecute offenders of very serious crimes even if they did not occur within their territory. 

The Netherlands is home to the International Criminal Court, the world’s only permanent court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but The Hague District Court  – where Alemu was prosecuted – has been called “the busiest ICC in town.” Over the past 20 years, it has heard cases from Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia, Ukraine, Syria and more. Last week, the same court sentenced a former Afghanistan prison chief to 12 years in jail for overseeing torture and murder in Kabul during the country’s civil war. 

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