



I first met Kelbessa last December, a few days before Christmas, in a fluorescent-lighted room inside the Atlanta City Detention Center, a 14-story municipal jail where the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement leases space. He shuffled in, led by a beefy prison guard, his legs shackled, his arms cuffed before him and affixed to a chain around his waist. He was wearing a bright orange prison uniform. His hair was thin, and his mustache was flecked with gray. Though only 55, he looked very frail. Kelbessa contorted his wrists within the cuffs in order to offer a handshake. Then he sat down on a hard wooden bench.

"I didn't expect from America this kind of stuff, because this is a very highly civilized country," he told me. "I was trying to improve myself. I bought a house. I was working hard. And all of a sudden, they accused me, the government accused me." Kelbessa lowered his voice for emphasis and said, "I am not a torturer."

Kelbessa will be kept in detention for as long as his deportation case is pending, which is mandated by law, because his 2002 conviction in Ethiopia means that he is classified as a violent felon. "Because he's facing life when he returns to Ethiopia, he's also considered a very high flight risk," Schroeder says. Kelbessa says that that sentence was a product of a "sham trial." The damning memos that prosecutors uncovered have been taken out of context, he claims. When I asked him what he meant when he wrote his superiors about "weeding out" resistance fighters, he laughed. "That is revolutionary language," he said.

Kelbessa is terrified of what will happen to him if he is deported. He has seen the inside of an Ethiopian prison before. In 1979, as the Red Terror was winding down, the forces of the revolution turned against him, and he was purged. Kelbessa was jailed, and only released when the military regime pardoned him several years later. Eventually it granted Kelbessa permission to emigrate to the United States, where he claimed asylum, saying, truthfully, that he had been a prisoner. "I was tortured for five years," Kelbessa said. He claimed he had never lied to immigration officials and said he believed that the United States had merely been duped by his home country's present government, which is led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, a former anti-Mengistu rebel. "I am just a victim," Kelbessa said. "I am a victim of the Ethiopian government. Before, I was a victim of the Derg military government. I can't tolerate torture now. I am old now for torture."

Kelbessa's fears may not be entirely unfounded. Prime Minister Meles's regime has gone to great pains to give the perpetrators of the Red Terror fair trials. It's a poor country, however, and the special tribunals have had to deal with more than 2,000 defendants. Human rights groups have documented numerous irregularities. "Ethiopia has violated the rights of the defendants in its pursuit of justice," concluded a law review article by one American lawyer who consulted the tribunal. Prison conditions are uniformly awful. In the last year, Kelbessa is quick to note, Ethiopia's political situation has taken a drastic turn for the worse, as Meles has jailed journalists and opposition politicians. Human Rights Watch says political prisoners are sometimes abused.

Since the United States enacted its new, tough law aimed at immigrants with a history of committing atrocities, some have questioned it, wondering whether the United States should be sending anyone, however loathsome, to places where their own rights might in turn be violated. "There has been a great deal of debate within the human rights community about the immigration option," says William Aceves, a law professor and the principal author of a 2002 Amnesty International report titled "United States of America: A Safe Haven for Torturers," which highlighted Kelbessa's case. "It's frustrating, because the human rights community is in favor of accountability, but we want to make sure that it's legitimate accountability." Aceves and others point out that the United States has a federal torture statute, passed in 1994, which applies to acts committed anywhere in the world. But no one has ever been charged under the law. For now, the United States government is putting its energies into deportation cases instead. In less than two years, the immigration bureau has prosecuted or investigated more than 1,000 cases related to human rights abuses. Legal advocates for immigrants, however, caution that many of those caught thus far appear to be marginal figures, not masterminds.

Deportation cases are handled in a special nationwide system of immigration courts. As a result of the federal government's new vigilance about human rights abusers, these courts are increasingly playing a new role, as a way station between exile and, presumably, a trial back home. Even the best-run court system, however, would struggle with such distant events as the crimes of the Red Terror, with their complex political and ethnic overtones, and human rights advocates question whether the immigration court system, which is overburdened, underfinanced and opaque, is up to the task. "It's a really shocking system," says Carolyn Patty Blum, a Columbia University law professor who specializes in asylum and human rights cases. The standard of proof for deportation is lower than it is for criminal trials. There are usually few witnesses called. The proceedings are often closed to the public. There is no public defender.