At the request of the Special Prosecutor’s Office of Ethiopia, EAAF conducted missions between 1994 and 1997 to provide technical assistance in the investigation of massacres committed by the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam. Between 1974 and 1987, Mariam led the military junta that seized power in that country following the overthrow of Haile Selassie. He then presided over the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia from 1987 to 1991, until he was overthrown.
During its initial missions to Ethiopia, EAAF collaborated on exhumations at mass graves in Kotebe and Hawtin. Beginning in 1996, it worked in the towns of Butajira and Alaba Kulito in southern Ethiopia. In 2002, Dr. Clyde Snow, along with two members of EAAF, returned to Ethiopia to testify in the Kotebe case (in which 30 men disappeared after being detained). That trial was the first in which physical evidence from forensic anthropologists was presented in a local court.
