Dutch appeals court convicts Ethiopian of war 1970s crimes

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A Dutch appeals court has upheld the conviction and life sentence handed to a 67-year-old Ethiopian-Dutch man who was found guilty in 2017 of war crimes committed under a brutal Marxist regime that ruled Ethiopia in the 1970s. Eshetu Alemu, who was too ill to attend appeal hearings, had sought to have the convictions quashed. But the international crimes section of the Hague Court of Appeal convicted him for his part in a 1977-78 purge by the Dergue regime of former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, known as the Red Terror. Some experts say 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed in what Human Rights Watch described as “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa.”