The Long Escape

Africa’s fugitive killers, the countries that shelter them, and why Ethiopia’s new generation of perpetrators is on course to walk free

By E. Frashie · The Ethiopian Tribune · 12 November 2026

Yesterday, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Britain fell silent. Across the country, people stood still for two minutes to remember those who died in its wars.

In eleven days’ time, on 23 November, Ethiopians will hold a remembrance of their own. Fifty-two years ago that morning, on what Ethiopians call Black Saturday (ጥቁሩ ቅዳሜ, 14 Hidar 1967 in the Ethiopian calendar), the new military junta, the Derg, executed 60 former officials of Emperor Haile Selassie’s government. Most were shot at Kerchele prison in Addis Ababa, known to its inmates as Alem Bekagn: “I’ve had enough of this world”.

The dead included two former prime ministers, Aklilu Habte-Wold and Endalkachew Makonnen, and the emperor’s grandson, Rear Admiral Iskinder Desta. Lieutenant General Aman Andom, the Derg’s own first chairman, who had opposed the executions, was killed in a shootout at his home. The Derg reportedly voted on its prisoners name by name. Its rising strongman was Major Mengistu Hailemariam.

There was no trial, and there has been no reckoning since. Mengistu went on to rule Ethiopia for 17 years and to preside over the Red Terror. Since 1991 he has lived in exile in Zimbabwe, reportedly behind high walls in Gunhill, one of Harare’s leafiest suburbs, under round-the-clock state protection.

“Britain remembers its dead with two minutes’ silence. Ethiopia’s dead have had fifty-two years of it.”

That silence runs through this story. It connects a prison yard in Addis Ababa in 1974 with an airport in Kigali this month, and with the villages of Tigray, Amhara and Oromia today.

A handshake in Kigali

On a Monday evening this month, a 55-year-old man stepped off a plane at Kigali International Airport. Rwandan officials shook his hand. Cameras clicked. Then he was arrested.

His name is Jean Léonard Teganya. In 1994 he was a medical student and intern at the university teaching hospital in Butare, in southern Rwanda. Prosecutors accuse him of taking part in killings at the hospital and a student dormitory during the genocide against the Tutsi.

The handshakes caused a stir online. They should not have. A formal handover between two governments is meant to be orderly, and Teganya has not yet been convicted of genocide. The courtesy protects the trial, not the man.

The real story is the clock. Teganya fled Rwanda in July 1994. He crossed Africa to India, sought asylum in Canada, was refused, and slipped into the United States in 2014. There he was convicted not of genocide but of lying to immigration officers, and served 97 months. Only then was he sent home. Thirty-two years, three countries and an immigration technicality: this is what justice looks like when it works.

“Thirty-two years, three countries and an immigration technicality: this is what justice looks like when it works.”

Most of the time it does not work at all. And no country should study that lesson more closely than Ethiopia.

The fugitives nobody counts

There is no single register of African atrocity suspects living abroad. Only Rwanda keeps serious numbers. Its prosecutors have sent 1,199 arrest warrants to other countries since setting up a dedicated fugitive-tracking unit in 2007. By June 2026, just 63 suspects had faced justice: 32 sent back to Rwanda and 31 tried where they were found.

That leaves more than 1,100 people wanted for genocide still at liberty, three decades on.

Most of them live in Africa. The last published breakdown, from 2021, placed 408 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 277 in Uganda. But the so-called free world is no clean refuge either. France was hosting 47 suspects, Belgium 40, the United States 23, the Netherlands 18 and Canada 14.

Britain is the starkest case. Five Rwandans accused of genocide were arrested there in 2006. British courts refused to extradite them on fair-trial grounds. Twenty years later, none has been tried in Britain either. They have simply grown old in the suburbs.

Where the tyrants sleep

The big names rarely end up in the West. Former heads of state go where friendly regimes will shield them.

Mengistu Hailemariam, who led the Derg through the Red Terror, has lived in Zimbabwe since 1991. Ethiopia’s courts sentenced him to death in absentia in 2008 for genocide and other crimes. Harare has never handed him over. In 2022 it hinted that it might, if asked; critics dismissed that as public relations. Neither government treats the matter as a priority.

Yahya Jammeh of The Gambia has lived in Equatorial Guinea since 2017. There is no extradition treaty between the two countries. The Gambia has said it will arrest him if he returns, and a special court backed by the West African bloc ECOWAS is being set up to try crimes committed under his rule.

The West, in other words, tends to catch the foot soldiers and middle managers of atrocity: the men who lied their way through asylum interviews. The generals and presidents are protected by politics.

What makes justice happen

Look across the continent and one pattern stands out. Suspects are caught when the country they fled keeps hunting them, and when survivors refuse to forget. Evidence alone is not enough.

Rwanda built a permanent unit to track fugitives and works closely with foreign prosecutors. It is slow, but it never stops.
The Gambia held a truth commission, then fed evidence to courts abroad. Jammeh-era officials have since been convicted in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, including former interior minister Ousman Sonko.
Liberia had almost no state effort for years, but civil society groups gathered evidence that convicted former fighters in Switzerland, France and the United States.
Ethiopia once charged 5,198 Derg-era officials and convicted 77 of the most senior in 2006. Then the drive faded. Mengistu was left alone, and the few Derg figures caught abroad, such as Kelbessa Negewo in the US and Eshetu Alemu in the Netherlands, were caught because foreign authorities and survivors acted.

“Suspects are caught when the country they fled keeps hunting them, and when survivors refuse to forget.”

Ethiopia’s new crime scene

That history matters because Ethiopia is now producing a new generation of alleged perpetrators, on a scale that dwarfs anything since the Derg.

During the 2020–2022 war in Tigray, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 400 people. They concluded that Amhara regional officials and forces, with the complicity of federal troops, carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayans in Western Tigray, amounting to crimes against humanity. All sides committed abuses. Tigrayan civilians suffered the most.

The killing did not stop with the Pretoria peace deal. In Amhara, a war between the federal army and Fano militias has run since 2023; Human Rights Watch says all sides committed war crimes in 2025. By January this year, the monitoring group ACLED had counted at least 669 people killed in more than 70 drone strikes in the region. In Oromia, the conflict with the Oromo Liberation Army has intensified, with reports of forced conscription and executions.

And on 1 August 2026, fighting between federal and Tigrayan forces resumed, with near-daily drone strikes reported since.

Meanwhile, the tools that might one day hold anyone to account have been taken apart. The UN’s panel of experts on Ethiopia was allowed to expire in 2023. The government’s transitional justice policy ignored survivors’ calls for international judges. Human Rights Watch now says the process has effectively stalled. Amnesty International puts it more bluntly: the mandates expired, accountability was abandoned, and the atrocities came back.

“The mandates expired, accountability was abandoned, and the atrocities came back.”

Why they will walk free

Put the pieces together and the outlook is grim. Six things stand between Ethiopia’s victims and justice.

The prosecutor is the suspect. Rwanda hunts people from a regime it defeated. Many of Ethiopia’s alleged perpetrators serve the current government or its allies. No state chases its own commanders across borders.
Foreign forces are left out. The transitional justice plan deals with Eritrean troops by hoping for extradition. Ethiopia and Eritrea have since cut diplomatic ties.
Western courts will not send suspects to Ethiopia. If Britain would not return Rwandans over fair-trial worries, it will not return anyone to a country with the death penalty and a record of political trials. Only trials abroad remain.
Asylum can launder a past. One Red Terror official reached the US as a refugee under a false name in 2004, decades after his crimes. When today’s order cracks, some of its enforcers will arrive in Western capitals claiming persecution.
Evidence fades in the dark. Investigators cannot reach Amhara or Western Tigray. Journalists are still working out the locations of massacres from leaked photographs.
The world’s attention is short. Ethiopia’s crimes are spread across several wars and several armed groups. That makes them easy to ignore.

Critics will say universal jurisdiction, the principle that lets any country try the gravest crimes, is aimed mostly at Africans. They have a point: between 1961 and 2017, nearly half of such trials involved African defendants. But the cure for selective justice is fairer justice, not none at all. Addis Ababa will use the argument to shield itself. Its critics should be ready to answer it.

What must be done, and by whom

Ethiopia has not joined the International Criminal Court, and a UN Security Council referral is out of reach. If justice comes, it will come from outside the state, and the groundwork must be laid now, years before any courtroom.

Ethiopian civil society and the diaspora should build secure evidence archives now: testimony, verified video, and lists of which units served where, kept to the standard a court will accept.
Survivor groups should file cases in countries that allow universal jurisdiction, such as Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium, and alert immigration authorities when suspects arrive. A complaint against Ethiopian and Eritrean officials has already been lodged in Germany.
International rights groups should press the UN Human Rights Council for an independent body to gather and preserve evidence, as was done for Syria and Myanmar.
Host countries should screen asylum claims for links to atrocities, fund specialist war crimes units, and prosecute suspects themselves rather than wait for extradition requests that will never come.
Donors should tie non-humanitarian aid and security cooperation to real progress on accountability, as a coalition of civil society groups demanded in September, and use targeted sanctions against named commanders.
The African Union should offer a hybrid court with international judges, the model ECOWAS is building for The Gambia and the model Ethiopia’s survivors asked for.
The press should keep a public record of alleged perpetrators and the units involved. Impunity depends on forgetting.

The evidence is still warm

Teganya’s handover took 32 years. Rwanda made it happen because it never let go. Ethiopia’s victims have no such champion in government, so they must become their own.

The first months of any new cycle of atrocity decide what can be proven twenty years later. Ethiopia’s latest cycle began on 1 August. Every April, the world says “never again” at Rwanda’s memorials. It should be saying it now about Mekelle, Gondar and Wollega, while the evidence is still warm.

Britain fell silent yesterday. On 23 November, Ethiopians will fall silent too. Silence honours the dead. Only justice protects the living.

Editor’s note: Figures on where Rwanda’s fugitives live date from 2021, the latest published breakdown. Drone-strike figures are from ACLED as reported by AFP in January 2026. No individual is named in this article as a perpetrator of crimes in the current conflicts.