ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (PANA0 – On Thursday, Ethiopia’s High Court will rule in a case in which opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa has been charged with treason, following the government’s decision to revive a 2005 treason case in which she was convicted and later jailed for life.

The opposition leader, who defied the authorities in early December 2008 after she was asked to disown a statement she made while on a tour of Europe – that her pardon about a year ago was a result of political negotiations and not a favour from government – will know her fate on Thursday.

Sources close to her political party, Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ), said that the former judge, who led a vibrant opposition alliance in the run up to the 2005 elections, would stand before a bench on Thursday for the ruling in her case on the revived treason charges.

She was accused of fomenting violence after Ethiopia’s 2005 general elections and sent to jail after the judges found her guilty of inciting the violence.

She and senior members of her party were however released in September 2007, after they reportedly signed a plea regretting the crime.

But Mideksa was re-arrested and sent to prison on 28 December 2008, after she failed to report to the Addis Ababa Police Commission to deny her reported slur on the conditions of her release.

The European Union Parliament and senior American Congressmen and Senators have recently written to the Ethiopian government to ask for her release.

Ethiopian Communications Affairs Minister Birket Simon said foreign governments must stop meddling in Ethiopia’s internal affairs, and rebuffed the claims that the government was using the case to mistreat opposition rivals.

By Barry Malone

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – A leading Ethiopian opposition politician was freed on bail on Wednesday after he was jailed last November after the government accused him of working with rebels, his party said.

Bekele Jirate, 54, a top official with the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM), was accused by the authorities of working “hand-in-glove” with insurgents like the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF).

“I am very happy because not only is he important for our party, he is innocent,” OFDM leader Bulcha Demeksa told Reuters. He said no date had been set for Bekele’s trial. The OFDM said another leading opposition politician remains in solitary confinement.

The OLF is one of several rebel groups in the Horn of Africa nation and has been fighting for independence for the southern Oromo region since 1993.

Opposition groups accuse Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s government of harassment, and the OFDM says the security forces have jailed hundreds of ethnic Oromos in recent months. The government denies it.

Bulcha called for the immediate release of Birtukan Mideksa, a former judge who heads the newly created Unity for Democracy and Justice party. She has been in solitary confinement since December and went on hunger strike for 13 days last month.

Regional analysts consider the 34-year-old to be the country’s foremost opposition figure.

“She has been jailed because she is a very strong and serious contender to Prime Minister Meles,” Bulcha said.

Birtukan was first jailed after elections in 2005 ended in street violence that killed 199 civilians. She was pardoned in 2007 after she agreed, along with other opposition leaders, to take responsibility for the unrest.

She was rearrested after refusing to retract a speech made in Sweden last year in which she denied she was involved in the talks that led to her release.

The OFDM accused the government of intimidation as voters went to the polls last April for the first time since the 2005 bloodshed. It said almost all its nominees for the local elections had been threatened and forced to pull out of the race. Ethiopia will hold parliamentary elections next year.

By Martin Fletcher | Times Online

HARARE, ZIMBABE – The former Ethiopian dictator who slaughtered opponents on an industrial scale in the so-called “Red Terror” is to face justice after 17 years being sheltered by Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe. [Why doesn’t Martin Fletcher describe Meles Zenawi in the same way? Meles has killed no less people in the past 17 years.]

With the country’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change due to enter a unity government with Zanu-PF next week, The Times has learnt that the extradition of Mengistu Haile Mariam is to be given priority. He faces the death penalty in his home country for his crimes.

Today, Nelson Chamisa, the MDC’s chief spokesman, told The Times that Mengistu’s case would be “high on the agenda” of the new administration. “Zimbabwe should not be a safe haven or resting place for serial human rights violators like Mr Mengistu. We can’t shelter purveyors of injustice,” he said.

Last year an Ethiopian kangaroo court sentenced the “Butcher of Addis” to be executed after convicting him of genocide in absentia, but Mr Mugabe flatly refused to extradite the man who helped to arm Zanu-PF’s guerrillas during Zimbabwe’s 1970s liberation war.

Instead, Mengistu continued to live in Zimbabwe as Mr Mugabe’s honored guest, dividing his time between a heavily guarded villa in a comfortable Harare suburb, a farm near the capital and a retreat on glorious Lake Kariba.

Suddenly, the future of one of Africa’s worst tyrants looks rather less assured. The MDC plans to use its Cabinet ministers, parliamentary majority and popular support to fight President Mugabe’s inevitable resistance. At stake was “the image and integrity of our country. We have to restore our glory and our dignity among the family of nations,” Mr Chamisa said. [Returning a political refugee to a regime that is accused of war crimes is not restoring one’s glory. MDC is proving to be nothing more than a puppet of the U.K. government and it’s double-tongued officials.]

Few Zimbabweans would shed tears if Mengistu, 71, was sent home to the gallows. Mr Mugabe has spent millions of dollars providing his fellow dictator with a government villa in a barricaded cul-de-sac in the suburb of Gun Hill, with round-the-clock protection by armed soldiers and any number of other benefits including the payment of substantial telephone bills — $15,000 in one instance.

In return Mengistu has advised the President on security issues and was allegedly the mastermind of Operation Murambatsvina in 2006 when security forces and Zanu-PF thugs razed the homes of 700,000 slum-dwellers regarded as MDC supporters.

Mengistu has plenty of experience in that field. He seized power after a military coup in 1974 that ended Emperor Haile Selassie’s 44-year rule and ushered in one of the bloodiest regimes Africa has known. In 1976 he mounted the “Red Terror” campaign against opponents of his Derg regime by standing in the centre of Addis Ababa, shouting: “Death to the counter-revolutionaries”, and smashing bottles filled with pigs’ blood to demonstrate the fate that awaited them.

Over the next few years more than half a million people are thought to have been killed in what Human Rights Watch called “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder ever witnessed in Africa”. Hit squads carried out summary executions. Militias strung opponents up from lampposts. Relatives had to pay a tax called “the wasted bullet” to retrieve the bodies of the dead. The victims included the former Emperor and numerous members of the Royal Family and Mengistu is said to have executed some of them himself.

He turned Ethiopia into a Marxist state, backed by the Soviet Union, and earned the sobriquet the “Black Stalin”. He created giant collective farms that had the same ruinous effect on agricultural production as Mr Mugabe’s land seizures in Zimbabwe and that helped to cause terrible famine.

His Soviet-armed military sought to crush an independence war in Eritrea and an uprising in Tigray province, but when the Soviet Union collapsed Mengistu lost his sponsors. In 1991 he fled to Zimbabwe as the Tigre People’s Liberation Front and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front surrounded Addis.

Washington asked Mr Mugabe to accept him to end the bloodshed.

In 1995 Mengistu narrowly survived an assassination attempt by two Eritreans as he took an afternoon stroll with his wife near Garvin Close, his Harare home. In court the men showed the scars of their torture by Mengistu’s henchmen, but both were imprisoned.

Otherwise Mengistu has maintained a low profile. Early on he was occasionally spotted in a shopping centre or restaurant, surrounded by guards and armed with a pistol. In 1998 he told a reporter who reached him by telephone that he was a “political refugee” who spent his time reading, writing and watching television.

In 1999, using a Zimbabwean diplomatic passport, he flew to Johannesburg for medical treatment and gave a rare interview to a South African newspaper in which he claimed that his socialist revolution had been necessary to remove Selassie’s “backward, archaic and feudalist system” and that millions of peasants had benefitted. More recently he has vanished from sight.

Mengistu’s armed guards were nowhere to be seen in Garvin Close today and The Times was able to drive past the barrier and right up the cul-de-sac before the soldiers suddenly appeared from behind a wall and ordered the intruder to leave. The half-dozen villas all looked abandoned.

As Mr Mugabe’s popularity has plunged in recent years, Mengistu was rumoured to have made contingency plans to move to North Korea. Now might be the time to dust them off — if he has not done so already.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Meles Zenawi is a prime minister, so his wife cannot be ‘first lady.’ Only the wife of the ‘head of state’ (President Girma Woldegiorgis), and not the head of government (prime minister) can be ‘first lady.’ She is unconstitutionally attributing the name ‘first lady’ to herself. Regarding her reported role in the fight against HIV, she and her blood thirsty husband are the cause of more death and suffering in Ethiopia than any other disease.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Afrique en ligne) — Ethiopia’s First Lady Azeb Mesfin called for greater political power for women to prop their influence in the war against the triple threat of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis on the continent.

In her inaugural address as the newly-elected president of the Organisation of African First Ladies against HIV/AIDS (OAFLA), Mesfin said here that marginalisation of women in mainstream politics denied them the clout they needed to influence important decisions on social and economic development of African women.

“Women must have access to power. If we want to win the war against the poverty, we must empower them also to fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic,” she said.

The Ethiopian first Lady takes over from Mrs Maureen Mwanawasa, wife of the late former Zambia President Levy Mwanawasa, who collapsed during the last African Union’s summit in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, and died in a French hospital two months later.

“African women must be free to make choices to reduce HIV/AIDS. We deserve to be in a world free of violence, where safety is real and where opportunities are boundless,” she said, in reference to rising incidence of sexual violence against women, including rape.

At a time when global economy is in recession, she said, the role of the African First Ladies had become more critical in championing the rights and privileges of their gender.

“OAFLA’s role becomes more urgent in the face of global recession because women are the most vulnerable segment of society. OAFLA therefore wants to play a greater role in the fight against HIV/AIDS inn Africa,” she said.

The conference was also addressed by Dr Meskerem Gunitzy Bekele, UNAIDS Ethiopia country director.

Dr Meskerem painted a gloomy outlook of the pandemic’s spread on the continent, saying 60 per cent of the infected and affected are women and children.

Although the epi-centre of the disease is sub-Saharan Africa, she put the number of patients who had access to anti-retroviral drugs at two million, calling the number ‘paltry’ considering that Africa’s population of people living with HIV is about 40 million.

“As high profile advocates, OAFLA must contribute to effective response to the pandemic,” she said.