Word: mengistu
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...Eritrean and Oromo rebels -- met with officials of the teetering central government for U.S.-brokered peace talks in London. The negotiations were made urgent by rebel pushes that put the Democratic Front just outside the capital and the Eritreans in command of all of Eritrea province. These advances prompted Mengistu to flee to Zimbabwe two weeks ago. After just a day, the parties were on the verge of agreeing to a cease-fire and a broadly based provisional government that would prepare the country for free elections...
...before the deal could be signed and implemented, the regime of Mengistu's handpicked successor, Tesfaye Gebre-Kidan, imploded. Government troops turned on one another. Soldiers wantonly looted state property. Desperate, Tesfaye summoned Robert Houdek, the U.S. charge d'affaires in Addis Ababa, to tell him he could no longer control the situation. The interim Ethiopian leader promised he would issue a unilateral cease-fire and tell the people of the capital to welcome the rebels into the city...
...policy statements of the Democratic Front, formed in 1988, still contain hints of old orthodoxy. Moreover, the moves the organization has made toward moderation are largely unknown to the citizens of Addis Ababa, who still tend to think of the Tigrean-led front as a group that out-Marxed Mengistu, whose own policies left the population impoverished...
...millenniums, going back to a time when the capital of ancient Ethiopia was Aksum, in the heart of Tigre country. When the Democratic Front arrived in Addis Ababa, hundreds of people flooded into the streets simply to stare in wonder at these strange Tigreans, these "bandits" and "barbarians" Mengistu had warned about for years...
...London that only those who committed "war crimes and things like that" would be punished and that they would be tried in the open, with international human rights groups invited to observe. Some excesses are nonetheless inevitable. According to diplomats, Tigrean soldiers have already summarily executed a few of Mengistu's aides...